Imperfect: An Improbable Life (34 page)

I was summoned to the trainer’s room to take a call from St. Louis. On the line was Dave Righetti, whose San Francisco Giants were finishing a series against the Cardinals. A decade before, he’d no-hit the Boston Red Sox as a Yankee and in this ballpark, the first Yankee to throw a no-hitter since Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series, and the last until the afternoon before.

Frank Albohn, the groundskeeper, asked if I had a moment, and in a side room he and his crew presented me with the pitching rubber. They’d spent the night before exhuming it from the mound, then had it signed by my teammates and the plate umpire, Ted Hendry. The groundskeepers signed the rubber as well. I was struck by their generosity, and then by the amount of work it must have taken.

Albohn was built low and wiry, like a middle infielder or a center fielder. The old-timers around the team, the ones from the neighborhood who raked the infield or mowed the grass or knocked mud from our spikes, would say that Frank indeed had been a ballplayer. He’d been fast and sure-handed, enough so that the New York Giants had had him in for a tryout. When they didn’t have him back, Albohn went to work at a machine shop near Yankee Stadium. There, he’d had an accident. Years later, when he was grooming the area around
home plate or meticulously laying the foul lines before a game or hustling across the field when the rains came, you’d have to look closely to see that one of those machine blades from the shop had fired unexpectedly, taking off most of Albohn’s left hand.

Gradually, the clubhouse cleared, and soon there was another game. I sat on the bench with hardly a care, staring out to the field, still amazed at what had happened there just yesterday. Baseball rarely stops to consider the game before, but on that Sunday morning there was a pause, at least for me, before starting up again. We won and moved into first place, tied with the Blue Jays, for the last time that season.

Six days later, in Kansas City, I pitched again. The first batter of the bottom of the first inning, Greg Gagne, got just enough of a cutter to push it over Mattingly’s head and down the right-field line. It was a decent pitch. I watched the ball roll untouched and Gagne run hard into second base, and I turned to Nokes and thought again about the game, how it honors itself in its relentlessness.

Behind the mound, I waited, my glove on my left hand. I wanted the ball. I wanted to pitch.

CHAPTER 19

M
y parents believed my missing hand was a responsibility to be lived up to.

I didn’t always get it.

How do you honor something that doesn’t exist? I searched the length of my right arm and saw emptiness.

They saw potential.

I suspected limitation.

They saw an opportunity for resiliency, of body and spirit. They saw hope for me, and then for others.

There is a white box in Tim Mead’s office at Angel Stadium that once had been emptied of ten reams of copier paper. Over two decades, Mead carted it around, lugged it into new offices, cleared space for it in new closets, slid it across new carpeting and old linoleum, and nudged it into corners with his foot.

The box had grown out of a single red folder in Mead’s right-hand desk drawer—a tab, center-right, labeled it
ABBOTT, JIM
—to what it is today, a dozen 8 ½-by-14 red folders, some yawning with crispy newspaper clippings, lustrous magazine pages, and forgotten game programs.

In those files, however, there are mostly children, boys and girls who innocently reached out and touched my hand, and who smiled, and who—I hope—dreamed. Their every new level, like mine, would be a gift.

They begin,

“Dear Mr. Abbott, I have a son who is five …”

“Dear Mr. Abbott, I’m writing this letter for the son of a very dear friend …”

“Dear Mr. Abbott, I have a daughter …”

“Dear Mr. Abbott, I know you’re busy with baseball …”

And there are stories, heartbreaking stories of cerebral palsy, and accidents, and birth defects, and amputations, and a little girl who opened a toothpaste tube that had been rigged with an explosive and lost her hand.

And there are words difficult to find, because the pain is real and the fight doesn’t get easier when the bandages come off and the consequences are lifelong. I couldn’t make it go away in four paragraphs. I hadn’t made it go away for thirty years.

I write,

“Dear Brendon … don’t hesitate to challenge yourself.”

“Dear David … physical handicaps have little or no control over our mental abilities.”

“Dear Josh … your story is so special.…”

“Dear Jason … you and I both know that handicaps are only setbacks in the eyes of others.”

They came to the ballparks, mostly. They stood with their parents, or just behind them. I remember their faces. I remember their hurt and their hope. I remember thinking there were so many of them, these beautiful children who’d grown scared and timid and already were tired of having to be so strong. Sometimes, I was tired, too.

Over forty years, a good part of them spent in and around the game, all of them alongside a disability I hoped was not defining me, the children were the inspirations. Those mid-afternoon taps on the shoulder from Tim, me leaving behind the comfort of the clubhouse to sit in the dugout with the young Brendons and Davids and Joshes and Jasons, the children gave me hope. They were in Anaheim and Baltimore and New York, in Chicago and Kansas City. They were poor and rich and middle-class and they were every color.

They came with stories and a little sadness, but with a preternatural capacity to endure and to fight.

A long time ago, I sat with many of them and walked with others. Some, I played catch with, and they’d maneuver their glove just the way they’d practiced in their bedrooms, in their mirrors and away from all the other kids, like I had.

Most important, we talked. I rewarmed the encouragement my parents had offered once upon a time and I repeated their stories. Mom and Dad had searched for people who rose above hardships in their lives to make extraordinary contributions. Years later I told the children about those people. And I shared with their parents the
example of
my
parents, their “why not” attitude, the way they made me feel up to every challenge, as though I was not just capable in spite of being different but special for being different. Their message to me was powerful when I was young, and it became powerful in me. They believed there were many ways to navigate our worlds, and that because my way was different didn’t mean it wasn’t as efficient.

There I was, trying to be the kind of person my parents might have been on the lookout for, and because of that I would nod at Tim and excuse myself from the card table or remove my headphones and close my book. Honestly, there were times—many times—I’d have preferred to hunker down in the clubhouse. But I trailed Tim to the dugout, I guess because I couldn’t disappoint them, and because I needed to tell them they didn’t have to fall in with what people thought they could do or would become.

Indeed, what drove me were the low expectations people had for me, especially in new situations. I insisted on showing them what I could do. I could play Little League. I could play for the high school. I could go to college and win an Olympic medal and pitch in the big leagues. I might not win, but I could fight. As I continued to wage my own battles, I tried to offer more promise to the children in theirs as well, encouraging them to rise above what other people thought was possible for them. Once I saw the look in their eyes, and their parents’ eyes, it would be very hard to say no anyway. How could I not make the time?

Ultimately, I think my playing was of more consequence than my words. I hated being labeled—one-armed, one-handed, disabled, whatever—and I understood how we all wanted to move beyond those kinds of perceptions, but I felt the sting of those throwaway words every day. It would take success on a major-league field to clear the path, to make even one of those kids believe. It wouldn’t be
enough to get by, to show up. I needed to accomplish something more tangible than participation. We all did, I thought. If I didn’t last, didn’t perform and produce, even my baseball would have seemed based on me being different. That’s what set my jaw so tight when a couple runs scored and what cut me loose in the weight room when I lost. It’s what helped bring me back when my fastball was surely gone. I adored the game first, but I owed everybody around it second.

Some of my closest friends and people I admired most in the game believed my pitching suffered because of the time I spent trying to further a cause—often one child at a time—that was so personal to me. Those in that camp—and my friends weren’t the only ones—believed I carried a torch that became burdensome, both in body and mind.

After I was 11-14 with a 4.37 ERA and the Yankees missed the playoffs in my first season in New York, George Steinbrenner announced the following spring that Jim Abbott would be better off giving “100 percent of his attention to baseball.”

“His agent,” Steinbrenner snapped, “has to lay off for a while. So do other people to allow him to reach what he knows he can do.” He later added, “I must demand total dedication to the task.”

The back pages of the tabloids gave that big play, of course. Fortunately for me, the tone of the news stories and columns was, “Boss Rips Abbott for Being a Decent Human Being.” As Brian Cashman, who would become general manager of the Yankees four years later, wryly observed, “If you’re going to get ripped for something, you want to get ripped for that, I guess.”

I would have loved to use that as an excuse. It seemed to me a few minutes on a day I wasn’t pitching had little bearing on the fastball that stayed up in the zone two days later. I never felt encumbered by
the meetings with families. There were days and situations when I wished I could blend in a little more, maybe not walk away from the guys in the clubhouse, or get through a hotel lobby to my room without stopping. But it never affected the way the ball came out of my hand. In fact it may have helped it, providing a drive and inspiration, a need to seize this opportunity that may not have been there otherwise.

Years after we were both retired, Doug Rader would say, “From the time Jimmy was up in the morning, he was carrying the banner for somebody—all day long, every game he pitched, every pitch he made, the whole time he was in the big leagues, and well before that. This was something he’s been burdened with, and truly it is a burden. Anytime you have that much of an obligation and you have so many people pulling for you so hard and you represent a group to that extent, it has got to be very, very difficult. And I understood what Jimmy was going through. Every time he failed, he failed for everyone.”

He was wrong. I did it for myself. I was driven only to be the best pitcher I could be. If there was something to be gained from that by others, then that was a fortunate—yet accidental—consequence of my efforts, which were minimal beside theirs. I did come to see there were peripheral benefits to what I tried to do, but they never drove me, and never impaired me, either. Instead, what I learned was that there will be another like me, another like them. And they won’t owe themselves to anyone for it, either. They will advance in their lives unencumbered by responsibility to anything but their own inspiration. They, too, will achieve for the love of the achievement, and let the cause come along for the ride.

Those children were not burdens. Besides, what difference would it make? Would I have changed anything? Could I have? The baseball
was temporary. And I raged against its impermanence. When it left me, I feared that which would remain. Just me. Imperfect me. My career would be done, but not my life. Not my hand. And not those children’s lives.

I still think of Cormac McCarthy’s words,

Those that have endured some misfortune will always be set apart but that it is just that misfortune which is their gift and which is their strength and they must make their way back into the common enterprise of man for without they do so it cannot go forward and they will wither in bitterness
.

There was, if I’d chosen to shrink away, a very good chance of “withering in bitterness.” I could not hide from it, hard as I might have tried.

I do not know if I ever came to be a person of value, but ultimately hope that I held up reasonably well in times where I was tested. I wasn’t a great major-league pitcher. I experienced moments I considered great. I had a few seasons that were satisfying, and many more that were not. But, in some ways, the struggle was more important to my understanding of my hand and who I was than had I had a career with fewer obstacles. Baseball—and success in it—was so important it brought upon me a distorted view of winning and losing. The games’ outcomes became personal. The perception of myself rode with the outcomes. And it wasn’t until I struggled that I came to understand its destructiveness.