Beyond Belief (7 page)

I looked at the television and stopped cold. A buzz ran right up my back to the base of my skull. On the television I saw a white-and-gray cloud formation, similar to what I saw in the evening sky. Inside those clouds I saw a profile of what I believed was Jesus, reaching out his arms to me. He was superimposed on the television screen the same way the demon thrust himself through the clouds.

Obviously, these events were connected. There was a message being sent. It was my job to figure out what it was.

I went to bed that night thinking about my relationship with Jesus. I believed in God, but our family was not especially religious. We believed in God and treated others with respect and dignity. But I was clearly being asked to do more. I was being shown signs, and I needed to answer with a more devoted commitment.

So, with the events of that night providing the push, I lay in bed in a West Virginia motel room and thought seriously about the role of Jesus Christ in my life, and how I was supposed to respond to His message.

Vince Naimoli, the owner of the Devil Rays, flew into Princeton on August 16 to watch us play before the season ended. This seemed kind of different — why would he want to be in West Virginia in August? — but what did we know? We were first-year ballplayers just out of high school or college or just off the island. We weren’t exactly experts on the behavior of big-league owners.

By the time we got to the park, word had circulated that Naimoli was there to watch me play. I had lived up to the lofty expectations so far, hitting well over .300 with power. That night, with less than two weeks left in Princeton’s season, I hit for the cycle for the first time as a professional.

After the game, I was called into Ramos’s office.

“Congratulations, Josh,” he said. “You’re going to Hudson Valley in the morning.”

I really didn’t believe it. I certainly didn’t expect it. I figured I would at least finish out the year in Princeton and then either move up or go home. I was hitting .344, so a promotion wasn’t completely out of the question, but the timing was unusual. Apparently the purpose of Naimoli’s visit was to take a look at me and make the decision on elevating me to the next level.

After he assured me he was serious, Ramos reached under his desk and pulled out a box of brand-new Appalachian League baseballs. He pushed them across the desk and asked me to sign them.

I was three months into this new life, and I didn’t think it was strange that a grown man — a former big-league ballplayer — was asking me to sign baseballs for him. I had signed autographs in high school, but the onslaught of attention after I was the number-one pick was crazy.

Stuff with my name on it got stolen all the time. People sent me cards from all over the country. Some of them were baseball cards printed after the draft, but other people just sent blank stuff — index cards or pieces of paper — for me to sign and send back. My momma took care of all that, and she decided I wouldn’t sign anything except baseball cards. If I signed a blank card or piece of paper, how would I know where it might end up? Someone might use it in the wrong way, or to suggest I was endorsing something I wasn’t. I didn’t want to have to think about all this stuff, and I realized right away that some of this stuff was never going to make sense.

But I sat there and signed all twelve baseballs for Bobby Ramos. When I was finished, I shook his hand, thanked him for all he’d done for me, and walked out the door, into the next phase of my life.

The Hudson Valley Renegades were in the late stages of a pennant race when I showed up the next day. The New York–Penn League was also short-season A ball, but the level of play was much higher than Rookie League. Most of the guys were older, many of them drafted out of college and some of them in their second or third year of pro ball. I had been playing with boys, but as I looked around the clubhouse before my first game, I saw a room full of men.

Hudson Valley was where I found out definitively that the Devil Rays had some issues with my parents’ following me through the minors. Before they told me I had been promoted, they set me up with a host family in Hudson Valley. Instead of renting out floors in a motel, as was the norm in rookie ball, New York–Penn League teams housed their players with booster families. The Stewarts were retired schoolteachers who lived in Poughkeepsie in a two-story house with a hot tub. They already had two players from the Renegades living at their house, outfielder Matt Diaz and pitcher Derek Anderson.

The Devil Rays called them before I arrived to see if they could find room for another player for the remainder of the season. They agreed, and when the team announced the promotion they told me about my new living arrangement.

My parents didn’t seem to have a negative impact on my play on the field — I hit .347 with 10 homers and 48 RBIs in those 56 games. I did everything the coaches asked of me, but there were grumblings in the organization about whether my parents were suffocating me. Some people felt I needed to grow, and my parents were seen as an obstacle to that growth.

This is what got lost in the concern over my parents: They never meddled. They didn’t do anything but support me, whether that meant cooking for me or hanging out with me or making sure I had everything I needed. I was eighteen, just weeks past high school graduation, and I wasn’t ready to go out on my own. Every person in the stands and every person in the towns we visited knew I was “The $4 Million Man.” My teammates routinely joked with me about the size of my signing bonus. It wasn’t mean, and it wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle, but it showed how people looked at me now.

Weeks earlier I was a high school kid hanging out at practice with my friends. Now I had a job, and all this money hanging over my head. With all that going on, it felt good to look up into the stands and see two familiar faces. I didn’t want to think about jumping into this world with a bunch of money in my pocket and no experience, managing a complicated life. It seemed like a stupid idea.

My parents attended every game, but they sat high up in the stands, away from the scouts and the coaches. They continued to arrive every afternoon or morning for batting practice, and they continued to mind their own business.

They were just there, supporting me and making sure I wasn’t overwhelmed by the experience of being the number-one pick and starting my professional career. It was all happening exactly the way I wanted it.

The team, however, thought it was a better idea for me to live with strangers.

Everyone on the Hudson Valley team lived with a host family, so maybe the Devil Rays didn’t want to set a precedent or give the impression that I had my own set of rules. Usually the families are members of the teams’ booster clubs, and they house two or three players for the summer.

This was a very strange experience for me; my parents were living in a motel nearby and traveling to all the away games, and I was living with these people I had never met. It almost felt like being adopted by strangers, with my parents watching. Very strange.

They were an older couple whose children were grown, and they looked forward to the baseball season every year. The host-family program was a cool thing for them. My room was a foldout couch in the basement. I have to admit, I didn’t spend much time there. I was in Hudson Valley for sixteen games, and half the time we were on the road. I probably slept at the Stewarts’ house at most eight times. The other nights I stayed with my parents.

There was another reason I didn’t understand the fuss about my parents: I didn’t spend that much time with them, either. On a typical day, I would get to the ballpark around noon, work out in the afternoon, and play a game at night. I’d get back to the host family’s house around 11:00 p.m. and then start all over the next day. There wasn’t much time for anything but baseball and sleep.

My parents traveled with us on the road, though, and stayed in the team hotel. My time away from the ballpark on the road was spent with them. We would eat breakfast and lunch together, and they would obviously attend every game, and we might grab a bite to eat afterward. I was nineteen years old, and this felt perfectly normal to me.

Hudson Valley was a fun stop. I was dropped into the middle of a tight pennant race, and after a slow start with the bat I became a major contributor to a team that eventually won the New York–Penn League championship. The season ended with us dogpiling near the mound, happy as can be. If you ignored the small stadium and the uniforms and the peach-fuzzed faces of the ballplayers in question, you could have fooled yourself into believing we had just won the World Series.

However, the living arrangement issue created some friction. Years later, the Stewarts were interviewed by Dave Sheinin of the
Washington Post
, and Al Stewart said of my parents, “We disagreed with how they went about it, but it wasn’t our place to say anything. We both thought one of these days he was going to break out. We didn’t think it was going to be anything like this, but we knew there was going to be a backlash.”

I guess everyone is an expert after the fact. However, I find it funny that people who knew me for maybe two weeks — tops — could make such sweeping proclamations about me, my parents, and my character.

Spending time with my teammates away from the ballpark was never a priority for me. My parents discouraged me from going out with teammates after games, mostly because most of the postgame activities — drinking, hanging out at bars, staying up too late — were not positive. It’s a fact that baseball players do things after games that aren’t productive. For years managers have been saying nothing good happens after midnight. I was serious about my job, and my job was to be ready to play every day to the best of my abilities.

I didn’t know why I should be judged by what I did away from the field. I had great relationships with teammates at the ballpark, and I was never accused of setting myself above my teammates. They had their lives, I had mine.

Why was it better for me to live with strangers rather than my parents? I never got a satisfactory answer to that question.

In the spring of 2000, I was invited to big-league camp for spring training. This was more of a courtesy than anything else, a chance for the Devil Rays to see their number-one pick from the year before compete and associate with big-league ballplayers. Obviously, after one year in the low minors, I had no delusions of grandeur. I knew I was ticketed for another year in the low minors.

And so it was no surprise that I was assigned to the Class A Charleston RiverDogs of the South Atlantic League. The Sally League, as it’s called, is a higher level than the short- season leagues I had played in during my first year, and many of the players had been in pro ball for three or four years.

My parents and I went to Charleston to look for a place to live — we were on our own this time — and we met a man named Richard Davis. He was a Charleston guy who loved baseball and helped us find a condominium to rent. Richard became a good friend of ours, and we spent a lot of time with him in Charleston.

My parents’ routine didn’t change. They continued to arrive at the ballpark early to watch batting practice. They traveled to all the road games and stayed in the team hotel in each city. To them, it was like being a fan of a team and having the means and the opportunity to follow it around for an entire season. Again, to me, it was no big deal.

I don’t want this to be misconstrued as bragging, but I have always loved to listen and watch people’s reaction when I’m taking batting practice. With the RiverDogs, my teammates looked forward to watching me hit every day. The opposing team would look up from their stretching to see how far I hit the ball. The fans in Charleston and the other South Atlantic League towns got to the park early so they could watch.

It was the first time I became aware of being good for business.

The best feeling in the world is to be standing in the batting cage hitting bombs and hearing people oohing and aahing as they watch the flight of the ball. It’s even better when it’s coming from players — guys who are pretty good themselves and not always free and easy with the compliments. I came to believe the four greatest words in the English language were “Did you see
that
?”

I was selected to play in the Futures All-Star Game, which was held July 9, the day before the major league All-Star Game at Turner Field in Atlanta. I played right field for the United States team against the World team. I went 3 for 4 in that game and we won, 3–2.

The game served as an exhibition, a chance for baseball to showcase its best young talent and get some of our names and faces into the minds of the fans. The big news — if there was big news to come out of a minor-league all-star game — came during batting practice, when Beckett and I met for the first time while standing in the outfield shagging baseballs.

The two Joshes, subject of so much speculation before the 1999 draft, were right where everyone expected them to be — on the fast track to the big leagues. We spoke briefly in the outfield, and he lent me his sunglasses when I realized how much trouble I was going to have with the late-afternoon sun in right field. I had forgotten mine.

In all, my second season in pro ball went according to the script I had written in my head. I hit .302 with 13 homers and 61 RBIs, and after the season I was named the South Atlantic League Most Valuable Player. I was named the Player of the Year in Class A baseball, and the Devil Rays awarded me the Minor League Player of the Year for the organization.

Everything was falling into place. I started to think about accelerating my stated three-year timetable and making a run at a major-league roster spot for the 2001 season. The Devil Rays’ big-league team completed another last-place finish, and the team seemed intent on going with younger players after a few failed seasons with a roster of veterans. The Jose Canseco–Greg Vaughn era didn’t work, so I was hoping they’d try out a Hamilton-Crawford era.

I was getting stronger, becoming more of a man and less of a boy, and I vowed to use the off-season to increase my strength.