Imperfect: An Improbable Life (4 page)

CHAPTER 2

M
y first pitch skittered to the backstop.

Just took my four-seam grip, went into my windup in front of all those people, let go of the baseball and yanked it past Matt Nokes on the glove side. It hit the backstop on two hops, which wasn’t so bad; the wall is back there a good ways and to reach it I knew I must have my decent fastball.

One pitch in, I’d cleared out the catcher and the umpire, scared the bat boy off his stool, and drawn a light groan from fans still stuffing their ticket stubs into their pockets. Or maybe that was just Showalter, as he was still stuffing the lineup card into his pocket. Maybe he was thinking it wouldn’t be long before I was running through the streets of the Bronx—this time with his permission.

In that last start against the Indians, I’d left, oh, a pitch or two over the plate. Maybe this was my body’s unconscious effort to correct that. You know, aim for the inanimate objects—pine tar rags, helmet racks, backstop padding, whatever—and reduce the professional risk.

Kenny Lofton was the batter and in 11 at-bats against me he’d
had seven hits. I did the smart thing and walked him on five pitches, which wasn’t so smart because he also led the league in steals. When you walked Lofton it was like throwing a double, because sooner or later you knew he’d be standing right behind you, calling for time and brushing the dirt out of his sliding shorts. All you could do is get the ball back from one of your middle infielders and wait for him to tidy up so he could steal third.

Six days before in Cleveland, in part because I’d walked four Indians in 3 2/3 innings and in part because of the 10 hits that came with the walks, I’d allowed seven runs, as many runs as I’d given up in a start all season. We’d won only because we scored 11 runs after I’d left.

The baseball back in my hand, I needed to get my legs under me again. I needed to pitch away from my last start, almost as much as pitching into this one. I needed to get back to throwing strikes and to work to the extremes of the Indians’ bats. After ball one to the next hitter—Felix Fermin—I did gradually find the strike zone, and my legs. I broke Fermin’s bat with a cut fastball near his hands and the weak grounder that spun off his bat became a double play, expertly turned, Wade Boggs to Mike Gallego to Don Mattingly. Carlos Baerga, a switch-hitter who batted left-handed against me to keep the cutters off the neck of his bat, flew to left-center field on the third pitch, a nice cutter down and away he hit off the end of his bat.

It was good—really good—to have the first inning behind me. I’d been banged around in the media for close to a week, after being banged around by the Indians for better than an hour, after being banged around by the American League for about a month. Every inning, every out, every pitch mattered, even more than usual. It’s not a great way to survive, living on every pitch, but it’s what I had at the moment.

So, it was with some sense of achievement that I left the mound after what most would consider a fairly routine 11 pitches. In the best of circumstances, an uneventful first inning is nothing more than that, but I arrived in the first-base dugout feeling, I guess, buoyant. In any situation, but mine in particular, I felt like I’d broken the ice, getting through that first inning, getting past that last start, getting through part of the order, throwing a few pitches, getting a feel for Nokesy again. The momentum gathers, confidence starts to build. You know, the first inning is really one of the toughest for a starting pitcher. To get through that without giving up a couple hits or a run, I wasn’t thinking I had it made by any stretch, but there is a bit of settling in, physically and emotionally.

I took my usual route from the mound to the dugout, took my usual seat (often, for no real reason, near the medical kit), placed my glove beside my left thigh, zipped my jacket to my throat. I checked my shoes, again for no reason. I got new ones all the time. But, the routine of cleaning my shoes with a tongue depressor—come to think of it, maybe this explains my persistent proximity to the medical kit—was my way of letting go of the last inning, good or bad, of clearing my head, a kind of psychological cleansing.

Funny how the week had gone, all the chatter about whether my pitching had become a hindrance to the Yankees, and whether I might not be better suited for the bullpen, which would have been nothing more than a plan to get me out of the way. As uncomfortable a time as it was, I’d reached a significant place in my life. Since I could remember, I had ached to be just another something. In a sandbox, I wished I could be just another kid on the playground. At a desk, just another kindergartner drawing the alphabet. In a gym, just another point guard learning to dribble with either hand.

But I wasn’t, and couldn’t ever be. So, I handled the pail and
shovel the best I could, and tried not to tear that flimsy grayish paper with the hook at the end of my right arm, and tried to go to my right on the basketball court, and left every situation as the little boy who did very well, you know, considering.

When I was pretty good on a baseball field—any field, actually—it was thought to be remarkable because, well, look at what the one-handed kid did. As the years and seasons passed, “One-handed-pitcher” might as well have been my first name, as it always preceded “Jim.” So, I came to believe all but one pitcher in the game were judged by the usual standards of stuff and ERA and wins and value to the club, while I was judged on a scale that modified those measurable qualities with the leniency of, “Hey, look at what the one-handed guy did.”

Now, toward the end of my fifth big-league season, after trying so hard to be great—and therefore a pitcher without modifiers—I’d discovered equality in failure. Oh, the irony. Buck Showalter, the Yankees, the press, New York—they wouldn’t have cared if I spit the ball out of my mouth—so long as I could keep Carlos Baerga in the yard. And, in the speculation as to whether I would continue in the rotation, the question was whether I could get hitters out or not. There was simplicity in that, in a backward kind of way. I’d have preferred a win and I’d have chewed the knob off a bat for a few more miles per hour on my fastball. But it struck me that, going on twenty-six years old, I’d back-doored into exactly what I’d desired my whole life.

CHAPTER 3

T
he journey from Flint to the Detroit suburbs, diagonally across much of the thumb of the Michigan mitt, is fifty miles of Interstate 75, the landscape leafy, flat, and unremarkable. Run it often enough and the neighborhoods lapping against the highway become too familiar to be anything but a couple two-story rectangles in another grove of trees, the occasional child swinging, pumping his legs against gravity in a backyard edged in chain-link. Southbound, the drive bends east through the outskirts of Grand Blanc, Waterford, and Auburn Hills, sags due south past Pontiac to Bloomfield Township, and darts east and then south again to Troy, Birmingham, and Royal Oak, maybe an hour from end to end.

If, say, one were headed to a hospital in nearby Southfield, Interstate 696 curls west toward Lansing just as you’d start looking for the high-rises in downtown Detroit.

On a Tuesday afternoon in mid-September 1967, Mike Abbott drove this route as fast as his borrowed silver Chevrolet Impala would take him. His girlfriend, Kathy Adams, lay in the backseat, trying not to be frightened, her eyes urging Mike to please go faster. They’d
spent the day in Flint, where she had picked out a wedding dress—a silver-hued shift that cascaded over her belly to her knees. They were eighteen. Kathy was in labor. They’d left the dress behind.

He was three months out of St. Matthew High School in Flint, six months removed from scoring seven points in St. Matt’s Class D state championship basketball game at the end of a 23-0 season. The year before, she’d graduated salutatorian at St. Agnes High School in Flint. She was pretty and smart, a cheerleader and a member of the Future Teachers of America and Future Nurses of America clubs. He was a strapping football and basketball star, a halfback and a small forward whose teams hadn’t lost a game in either sport all year. She was studying to become a teacher, over on Kearsley Street at UM-Flint, rather than at Nazareth College all the way out in Kalamazoo, where she had a scholarship but wouldn’t have seen Mike often enough. Farther down Kearsley Street, he was roofing the new GM plant, laying large tiles, then paper and hot tar, through a thankfully cool summer, putting money away for Kathy and the baby, then saying good-bye to friends and teammates who went off to play college ball on scholarships he might have had, too. She was two semesters toward a teaching degree, three trimesters into motherhood. They were preparing for a life together, one that had sneaked up on them and which they dealt with out of love and naivety.

Mike gripped the steering wheel and blew down I-75. He was about to be a father. He would have been a husband, too, in just a couple days, had the baby not come so soon, two weeks early. So he raced into adulthood at eighty miles per hour on the back of that Chevy small-block V-8, counting the mileposts between contractions, Kathy’s moans cutting across the clatter of air that forced its way over the windows.

This is it, he thought, and clutched the wheel tighter, keeping his
hands from trembling. He’d only had a father himself for seven years, and then Joe Abbott had died of a heart attack. Six months before that Mike had a brother, Jim, die in Greece while in the Navy. Everyone who knew Joe was sure it wasn’t the weak heart that killed him, but the grief of losing his eldest son.

Joe and Frances Abbott had raised their seven children in a three-story Tudor house on East Fourth Street near downtown Flint, a couple hundred feet from one of the three Abbott family-owned meat and grocery stores. Joe was company president. Frances volunteered for many of the charities in town, and doted on her children, and proudly held herself as Mrs. Joe Abbott. The day Joe died, a little boy from down the block rang the doorbell and waited on the porch. When the door opened, he held out a bag of candy for Mike, hoping it would make him feel better.

They’d never buried Jim. He’d joined the Navy, been stationed on a battleship in the Mediterranean Sea, and disappeared in 1957 while on furlough in Greece. The Navy told Joe and Frances Abbott their son had drowned off the island of Rhodes. Jim’s body, however, was not found, nor were his clothing or belongings. At Frances’s urging, Joe hired a private investigator, who reported that Jim had met a girl while on leave in Rhodes. Accompanied by the woman at the end of his leave, Jim was late to the dock, missing the boat that would ferry him to his ship. Local police said a woman had come to them, frantic about an American sailor she’d left down by the water. She told them he was agitated and threatening to swim for his ship. When the woman returned to the dock with the policemen, the sailor—Jim Abbott—was gone. After a short search, the police—and eventually the Navy—presumed him drowned.

Frances didn’t believe it. For years she would tell Mike, “Your
brother is going to walk in the door someday.” For a while, Mike believed her, too.

First Jim and then Joe, and the house was impenetrably sad. Three of the older children were married and no longer living at home. The rest—Tom, Betty, and Mike, the baby—were sent away: Tom to a military school in Wisconsin, Mike to a military school in Kalamazoo, and Betty to a boarding school run by nuns.

The name, Jim, like the memory of him, stayed with Mike. Indeed, had his brother walked in the door one day, like his mom promised, maybe none of it would have happened. Maybe his dad doesn’t die from heartache and his mom doesn’t wither away, and the family stays together in one house and none of it gets so hard. At Barbour Hall Junior Military Academy, Mike figured he spent almost as much time in the brig as he did the classroom and, when Frances consented to bring him home after a year, it seemed to Mike that the officers there were as happy to be done with him as he was with them.

K
ATHY
’
S MOTHER, ALSO
named Frances, sat in the backseat of the Impala with Kathy, stroking her hair. Frances Adams knew the drill; she’d had six children herself. Mike caught glimpses of them in the rearview mirror, reflexively looking up when a new contraction seized Kathy, then back down the highway that didn’t seem to ever end. He met Kathy’s eyes and wondered where the damn exit was.