Beyond Belief (3 page)

I felt terrible. This was the last thing I wanted to do, and maybe I tried so hard not to do it that I guaranteed that I would. I don’t know, but if you thought he was crying before he got into the box, you can’t imagine what he was doing now.

He was lying there perfectly still and screaming at the top of his lungs. “He hit me! He hit me!” It was like the ball stunned him or something, hit him right in the spine. The coaches and the umpire ran out to him, trying to convince him to get up and take his base, and he kept screaming: “I can’t move! I can’t move!” The only body part undamaged, it seemed, was his mouth.

In the course of all this screaming and crying, someone decided it would be a good idea to call an ambulance. I stayed on the mound, flipping the ball to myself repeatedly. It was a habit I had, part of my inability to be still, and also something I did when I was nervous or embarrassed. I didn’t go down to the plate and get involved with the kid, though, because I was always taught to just throw the ball and not worry about hitting someone. I felt bad for him, but at the same time, it was his job to get out of the way of a bad pitch.

He stayed on the ground for what seemed like forever, long enough for the ambulance to arrive and the paramedics to get out to the batter’s box. When they lifted up his shirt they saw the stitch marks from the baseball on his back. Eventually the paramedics and coaches convinced him that he could stand up and go on living, that he had indeed survived his encounter with this left-handed freak of nature and his wild fastball.

Years later, when I had been out of baseball and somewhat forgotten, my daddy was on a jobsite and he got to talking with some of the men there about baseball. He mentioned that he coached in West Raleigh, and this one guy said, “Do you remember that kid named Josh Hamilton who threw the ball a hundred miles an hour when he was eleven?”

My daddy said, “Yes, I do.”

“Is that guy still around?”

“Yeah, he’s still around. Somewhere.”

“Well, one time I was playing against him and I didn’t want to bat but they made me anyway, and he hit me right in the back. That hurt worse than anything in the world. I’ll never forget that.”

“Nope,” my daddy said. “Neither will I.”

“What do you mean? You were there?”

“Josh is my son.”

The guy started laughing and shaking his head.

“You tell your son I never played past Little League after he hit me. That boy scared me to death.”

There was a game in my last year in the Tar Heel League, when I was twelve years old, that I came to the plate five times and hit five home runs. I think after the third one the coaches and pitchers for the other team kept pitching to me just to see what would happen.

People saw me as different, something special, but they wanted me to succeed. I was always encouraged by other parents and coaches, and I attribute this to the way my parents taught us to behave. I never pimped a home run, not then or now, and I always went out of my way to praise my teammates for their achievements. I understood my talent for what it was — the ability to excel on the baseball field. It didn’t deserve special treatment or a different set of rules.

During that summer, when I was twelve, I made my parents a promise. I said, “If I get drafted and get some money, I want you guys to retire. We’ll use the money to pay off all your bills and you guys can come with me.”

At twelve years old, I was good enough to dream. I could look around at the kids I was playing against and see that it wasn’t a ridiculous leap to think that I could someday make money playing this game. My idea — to free my parents from all their hard work and repay them for their devotion — was a fantasy life as expressed by a twelve-year-old. Playing baseball for a living was the greatest thing I could ever imagine. My parents were always happiest when they were watching me play ball, so this seemed like the perfect solution for all three of us.

My parents tried to dismiss my comment.

“That sure is a nice thought, Josh,” my momma said. “We’ll see about that when the time comes.”

I played basketball, too, and some soccer. When I was twelve, I played on a basketball team with Johnny Narron Jr., whose father was a major-league scout and a former minor-league ballplayer. Johnny Narron Sr.’s brother, Jerry, was a former big-league backup catcher who played eight seasons for the Yankees, Mariners, and Angels. At the time I started playing basketball with his nephew, Jerry was the third-base coach for the Texas Rangers.

The Narrons were a famous baseball family from Goldsboro, North Carolina, not far from Raleigh. Jerry and Johnny had an uncle named Sam who played in the major leagues for only twenty-four games — four in 1935 and ten each in 1942 and 1943. One of their cousins, also named Sam, pitched in one game for the Rangers in 2004. There were Narrons all over baseball.

The first time Johnny came to watch me play basketball with his son, he told someone in the stands he couldn’t believe what a good athlete I was. As someone who was trained to evaluate athletic ability, his eye was drawn to me immediately.

“Those boys better be ready when he throws them a pass,” Johnny said to some of the other parents. “I’ve never seen a twelve-year-old with that kind of strength.”

One of the other dads told Johnny, “Well, if you think he’s good at basketball, you ought to see him play baseball. He just plays this sport for fun. He plays baseball for
keeps.
”

The parents proceeded to tell Johnny the stories about the Tar Heel League putting me on a majors team when I was six years old. They told him about my no- hitters on the mound and my four- and five-homer games at the plate. As a professional, he was used to hearing exaggerated stories from parents and friends, but these people had no reason to make bloated claims. He didn’t let on that he was an associate scout for the Atlanta Braves at the time, but he filed it away and made a note to take the time to watch this Josh Hamilton kid play baseball before everybody knew who he was.

I played football my freshman year in high school, but after that my parents and I made the decision to concentrate on baseball. I was becoming strong, and the skills I picked up playing soccer (footwork) and running track (speed) would serve me well on the baseball field. My daddy started working with me on strength, buying a ten-pound medicine ball and giving me exercises to beef up my wrists and forearms to increase my bat speed.

Jason was out of the house by now, off at UNC Greensboro going to college and playing baseball. Jason was a power-hitting catcher who was a heck of a ballplayer — and a tough high school quarterback — but never quite good enough to be considered a pro prospect.

With Jason out of the house, my parents were free to direct all their attention toward me and my baseball career. I played varsity as a freshman at Athens Drive High School, and during that summer I started using a wood bat along with the standard aluminum high school bats. Without saying it, my daddy and I were pretty sure I was going to have the opportunity to play professional baseball directly following high school — that was the goal, anyway — and anything that helped me get there faster was worth the effort. And since professional scouts said their toughest job was projecting how well an amateur player could make the transition from metal to wood bats, we decided we would remove the mystery as best we could.

We thought of everything, or at least tried to. And if it sounds like pressure, it really wasn’t. We were preparing for pro ball by the time I was fifteen, but the only pressure I felt was the pressure I put on myself. Baseball is a game of failure. You can’t expect to succeed every time you go to the plate, or strike out every hitter, or throw out every baserunner. Accepting failure was the toughest lesson I had to learn. I was so hard on myself I had to fight the urge to expect perfection.

Johnny Narron returned to my life when I was fifteen years old. He asked me to play for a fall prospect team he was coaching. Johnny, who was still scouting for the Braves at the time, hand-picked the team based on ability. Johnny’s son was on the team, and so was Matt Robertson, whose father, Jax, is an assistant general manager with the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Johnny couldn’t wait for his brother Jerry to come home after the big-league season so he could watch me play. He told Jerry, “You’ve got to come see this kid; you’re not going to believe him.” I was playing anywhere — pitcher, first base, outfield, catcher, shortstop. I didn’t care, as long as I was in the lineup and having fun. I loved to catch. Johnny would tell me, “You know, Josh, there aren’t any left-handed catchers,” and I would say, “I don’t care, it’s a lot of fun.”

I don’t know whether Jerry Narron got sick of hearing about this fifteen-year-old kid in Raleigh, but Johnny didn’t get sick of telling him about me. The big-league season ended, and Johnny got right back to telling Jerry that he needed to come see me play.

“I’m coming out to see your son Johnny play,” Jerry insisted.

“Oh, yeah, come see Johnny play,” Big Johnny said. “But you’ve got to see this kid Josh Hamilton.”

Johnny tells stories about what I did when I played on that team. Once we were running first-and-third plays in practice while I was catching and Matt Robertson was playing shortstop. I came up and threw the ball to Matt, who was cutting the ball off behind the mound, and it got on him so fast he either never saw it or couldn’t react in time. It hit him right in the neck, and he went down like he might never get back up.

Another time I threw a ball from first to the shortstop to start a double play during infield practice and the ball tailed off just as it reached Johnny Narron. I threw it hard — probably too hard — and he couldn’t stay with it. It caught him square in the ankle, and he walked with a limp for about a week.

This was a fifteen-year-old prospect team, and everybody on the team was identified as a potential star player in high school. I was part of the first wave of the specialized baseball teams — the travel teams, prospect teams, AAU teams — that are now a huge part of youth baseball. There weren’t many rules; coaches or local scouts put together teams and then tried to find similar teams in the area to build a schedule. I probably could have been playing with the eighteen-year-old prospect team, but I was with my friends and besides, it was another example of people not wanting to set a precedent by advancing a player beyond his age group.

As Johnny Narron Sr., said, “A lot of times you see a twelve-year-old who is physically advanced, and eventually the other kids catch up to them. The strong kid matures earlier and is stronger, but he tops out. Things even out by the time he reaches high school. But in Josh’s case, nobody ever caught up with him.”

Ever since I was twelve, when I dreamed out loud about signing for enough money to pay off my parents’ debts and bring them to the pros with me, I had my sights set on being a professional baseball player. I wanted to make sure I took care of the details, and decisions such as hitting with a wood bat were calculated to maximize my chances.

This was a family thing. Everything I did was a family thing, baseball foremost among them. My daddy was part of the decisions I made, from using a wood bat to choosing the right summer team. But what some people perceived as pushing was simply supporting. The issue of hard- driving parents pushing their kids to earn a scholarship or get a contract is a serious one, but that wasn’t what Tony and Linda Hamilton were all about.

Yes, we were preparing for the day when I could reach the level I wanted to reach. And yes, they were part of it. But they weren’t stage parents, or helicopter parents, or whatever other negative descriptions you want to use. My parents never berated a coach or forced me to do anything I didn’t want to do. I honestly think I could have decided to quit baseball and they would have been fine with it. They would have been disappointed, and they would have reminded me that I was wasting my God-given talent, but in the end they would have said, “Well, if that’s what you want to do,” and that would have been it.

That wasn’t a factor, though, since my whole life revolved around the game. I developed routines the way big-leaguers did. I would park my ’89 Camaro in the tree-lined parking lot behind the baseball field at Athens Drive and get dressed out of the trunk. I always blasted the same two songs: “Double Trouble” by Lynyrd Skynyrd and “Brand New Key” by Melanie. They were my baseball songs, and I never got sick of them. And I continued to kiss my momma and my granny before every game.

My daddy stopped coaching me before high school, and I brought the values he instilled in me to high school baseball. I always made sure to be respectful to the other team and the umpires. I always made sure to clean up the dugout after the game.

There were a lot of people who helped me improve, by giving me either instruction or opportunity. One of the men I always admired was Clay Council, who helped run the American Legion program in Cary. My brother played Cary Legion, and Coach Council was an assistant coach on that team. Whenever I didn’t have practice or a game, I would go to Jason’s practices and shag balls and hope to get in a few swings at the end of practice. That’s how I met Clay — he would always have time to throw a few to the thirteen-year-old who was hanging around with his older brother. And he’d always smile and talk to me at the games when I was chasing down foul balls so I could get the free hot dog that came with every ball you returned to the concession stand.

Coach Council was a quiet, friendly man with a deep North Carolina drawl. He was about sixty years old when I met him, and he had already devoted a good part of his life to helping local teenagers become better ballplayers. He was a great batting-practice pitcher, and it seemed he could throw for hours and hours. As long as someone wanted to hit, Coach Council was there to throw.

He became part of the landscape of amateur baseball around Raleigh, and even though I played on the Fuquay-Varina Legion team, I would occasionally see Coach Council at the various high school fields, always throwing to whoever wanted to hit. Because my daddy was someone who volunteered his time to coach youth baseball, I was always aware of the sacrifices other coaches were making for me and my teammates. I noticed that ballplayers didn’t always thank him for his time, and it made me more conscious of thanking him or any other coach.