Beyond Belief (28 page)
I got chills as I read the letter. I handed it to Katie, and she teared up as she read it. We looked at each other with the exact same look we had shared the night we drove out of the parking lot after talking to that boy. She just smiled and shook her head. We didn’t have to say a word, but we were thinking the exact same thing:
This is about so much more than baseball.
THE ALL-STAR GAME is always a major production, baseball’s midseason showcase, but the 2008 All-Star Game at Yankee Stadium was intended to make all others shrink in comparison. Everything that happens in New York is bigger than life, but an All-Star Game in the final season of historic Yankee Stadium? It didn’t need exaggeration.
About three weeks before the game, I got a call from a representative for Major League Baseball, asking me if I would participate in the Home Run Derby the day before the game. I asked no questions and didn’t hesitate. “You bet I will,” I said.
I thought back to the dream I had at the Winning Inning, when I was competing in the Home Run Derby and telling a female reporter — and, by extension, the world — how the Lord saved my life and brought me to this moment.
One of the first calls I made was to Clay Council, the old coach from Cary American Legion. I had a promise to keep.
“Hey, Clay, what are you doing right now?”
“I’m fixing to head down to Athens Drive High to throw to some boys,” he said.
“Well, how would you like to throw to me in the Home Run Derby, in front of fifty-five thousand people at Yankee Stadium?”
“I think I’d like that,” he said.
“Now, tell me — you’re not going to tighten up on me, are you?”
“No,” he said, seeming to think about it some. “I won’t tighten up, but I might have a heart attack.”
Clay was seventy-one years old, but I knew he could still throw. I hit off him maybe fifteen times before, but one of those came during the past off-season. He was as good as anybody who threw in the big leagues.
Still, this was different. This was a bigger stage than either of us had ever experienced.
Before I hung up, I told Clay, “Don’t worry about it; it’ll be fun.”
Major League Baseball paid for Clay’s flight to New York, and he took the same flight as Katie and the girls. They needed to make a uniform for him, and when they asked me to spell his name I thought I knew. I told them, “C-O-U-N-S-I- L.” Spelling was never my best subject, and I guess I should have asked.
And that’s why Clay wore a jersey with his name misspelled during his big moment at the Home Run Derby.
In the moments leading up to the derby, Clay and I went into the tunnel leading from the clubhouse to the home dugout. We could hear the rumble of the crowd rattling above us. We bowed our heads and prayed.
I said, “Lord, thank you for the opportunity and the platform to spread Your word and glorify You.”
I was the last hitter of the first round, and the crowd was loud from the second I stepped into the batter’s box. After my second homer was announced at 502 feet, my teammate Ian Kinsler came over to wipe my face with a towel as the roar from the crowd swelled. I said, “That’s only two,” and held up two fingers, but it didn’t matter. It seemed as if everybody sensed something special was going to happen even before it did.
The noise was ridiculous. It felt like I was standing in a bowl and the roar of the crowd was coming down on me like thunder. I’d never heard anything like it. As I stepped in after my second homer, I looked at the catcher and said, “Man, this is awesome.”
Once I got into a rhythm, once the shots started carrying higher and farther, it felt unreal. Clay was hitting the right spots and I was connecting with the fat part of the bat on every swing. I squared up one after another — 12, 13, 14, 15.
My teammates said it was no real surprise to them. When Michael Young was interviewed during my round, he said he’d been watching the same thing through the entire first half of the season.
I took a deep breath. I turned and looked into the stands to find my family. Katie was there, more than seven months pregnant. Sierra and Julia were there. My parents were there, as were Katie’s parents. I invited Granny, but at seventy-eight years old, the idea of fighting New York City and Yankee Stadium was a little too much for her. Besides, she felt she could see better if she stayed home and watched it on television. “That way I can see your face,” she told me.
What did I see when I looked up into the stands? My dad’s smile was like a row of lights coming at me. Katie was just laughing her head off — no tears, just pure happiness. This had a different feel to it. Unlike my first Opening Day or so many other moments during my rookie season, this moment didn’t carry any of the emotion from the past.
This was a celebration of right now, about what I had become and not what I had been. It felt good.
And the guys on the field, from both the American and National leagues, were reacting like they’d never seen anything like it.
The hardest part about this was keeping calm and composed under the circumstances. I told myself it wasn’t any different from what I’d been doing my entire life, from hitting with my older brother’s Legion team to hitting with Jose Canseco the day I signed, to hitting at the Winning Inning with Katie watching for the first time.
But it was different. This was the most bloated, exaggerated version of batting practice anybody could ever imagine. Instead of a few people showing up to watch, there were fifty-five thousand. Instead of an opposing team sneaking looks during stretching and talking under their breath, there were two All-Star teams — the best players on the planet — sitting there expecting a show, watching and responding openly to every pitch. Not to mention the millions of people watching on television.
There was a little bit of pressure.
I had looked at the field earlier that day and saw a small section where the upper deck gives way to the bleachers in right center, and I told some reporters I thought there was a chance I could hit one in that little sliver and it would carry all the way out of the stadium and into the New York night.
I don’t think they believed me, but when I hit one 504 feet into the third deck in right field, just a few feet away from finding that spot, they might have reconsidered.
At one point I hit thirteen straight pitches over the fence. I finished with 28 homers in the first round, beating Bobby Abreu’s old single-round record by four. Nobody else hit more than 8. After homer number 28, Milton Bradley ran over to me, put his arm around me, and raised his cell phone to take a picture of the two of us. At some point, probably around homer number 15, I became aware of a chant rolling through the stands.
“ Ham-il-ton. Ham-il-ton. Ham-il-ton.”
Oh, man, I thought, this is getting crazy. The fans in Yankee Stadium are chanting my name? This didn’t even happen in my dream.
Rewind to two weeks previous, when we were in New York to play the Yankees. I was standing in center field when a chant broke out in the outfield bleachers:
“Josh smokes crack.”
“Josh smokes crack.”
Over and over, droning on and on.
Josh. Smokes. Crack.
Josh. Smokes. Crack.
In a way, their chants were a pretty good summary of how far I had traveled.
Let the Yankee Stadium crowd tell the story:
From “Josh smokes crack” to “Ham-il-ton.”
In my dream, I finished hitting and spoke to a female reporter. In reality, on July 14, 2008, in Yankee Stadium, I finished hitting and was met by Erin Andrews of ESPN.
Have I mentioned I don’t believe in coincidence?
She talked to me about the dream and asked me if the dream could compare to the reality. I told her, “Well, in the dream I didn’t know how many I hit.”
She asked Clay to describe his feelings, and he pointed to me and said, “I made the All- Star team and got only one vote — his.”
Clay and I were both a little worn out from the first round. He threw fifty-four pitches, and I put everything I had into those swings. As Erin Andrews was walking away, the microphones caught Clay asking me, “You mean we got to go again?”
I went up against Justin Morneau in the finals, and he beat me, 5–3. It didn’t matter that I hit more in the competition than he did, and it really didn’t matter to me that I didn’t win. Once again, I went back to the dream I had at the Winning Inning: The reason I didn’t know how many homers I hit in the dream was that God didn’t care. I was able to use the platform to glorify Him and spread my story.
You can’t put a score on that.
Katie woke up the next morning in our hotel room and asked, “Did I dream that, or did it really happen?” I turned on the television and flipped to ESPN, where they were showing a replay.
“Nope, looks real,” I said.
Later that morning I was reminded that my life hadn’t changed completely. There was a knock on the door of my hotel room, and standing there was a pee tester with his briefcase-sized kit in his hand.
He identified himself and came in. It sounds kind of corny, but I was watching
The Natural
on television when he showed up. It was almost over, so I asked him if I could wait until it ended to take care of business.
He said he didn’t mind, so we sat there on the edge of the bed, me and the pee-test guy, watching
The Natural.
The attention that came my way after the All-Star Game was heartwarming, and a little intimidating. It was the highest-rated Home Run Derby ever, and everyone who watched heard my story over and over. (Not all of what was reported on television was accurate, however; for one thing, I never once used heroin, let alone became a heroin addict.)
Katie and the girls flew back to Raleigh with Clay, and when they walked through the airport people recognized Clay and started asking for his autograph. He didn’t expect that, and he didn’t expect to get the official All-Star ring — the same ones they give the players — that I bought him to thank him for helping me out.
The irony wasn’t lost on me. Here I was buying someone a ring as a memento of a good time; before, I was selling or bartering rings to get drugs.
Our second series after the break was in Chicago, and when the bus pulled up outside the Westin on North Michigan Avenue on Sunday evening, at least one hundred people stood outside the doors calling out to me.
That night, I went to a movie. I stood in line to buy popcorn and ended up posing for pictures for more than ten minutes.
And before the first game of that series, I had a man come up to me while I was signing autographs and say, “Josh, I brought my sister here to see you.”
The woman, probably in her thirties, stood there smiling but not looking happy.
“My sister can’t get off drugs,” the man said. “She’s tried everything.”
The woman said, “I want to stop, but I just can’t.”
Think about this for a moment. This man brought his sister to a Major League Baseball game on a Monday night to seek help for her drug habit from a ballplayer neither of them had ever met. She had come willingly, setting aside any shame she might have felt in being identified as a drug user in a public setting. They had no guarantee that I would even see them at the game, much less be in a position where I could speak to them. But here we were, in a crowd of people jostling for position to talk about the Home Run Derby and get my autograph, having a deep discussion about life and death.
“When you really want to change your life, you will,” I told her. “Something is going to have to happen in your life for you to get better. You’re going to hit bottom — maybe get arrested, maybe OD. But when you go to meetings, the first thing they talk about is a higher power. They talk about God, and the only way I was able to get better is through Jesus Christ.”
They nodded and thanked me. I signed a ball for her and wrote “James 4:7” under my signature. I wished her luck and said a prayer in my mind for her. There are so many people out there searching. So many people who struggle and want to do better but can’t find the strength. So many confused, sad, desperate people who need the right kind of guidance to change their lives.
People just like me.
JOSH HAMILTON is an All-Star outfielder for the Texas Rangers. A native of Raleigh, North Carolina, he lives in Apex, North Carolina, with his wife, Katie, and their three daughters.
TIM KEOWN is a senior writer for
ESPN The Magazine.
He is the author of
Skyline: One Season, One Team, One City,
and the coauthor of
Bad As I Wanna Be
(with Dennis Rodman) and
Hunting the Jackal
(with Billy Waugh). He lives in Northern California with his wife, Miriam, and their four sons.