They Call Me Baba Booey (31 page)

It would all be better once I had those practice pitches, I told myself. And then they canceled the practice pitches. It had rained the night before. The field was still a little wet and the grounds crew was working on it. Hein could see my body slump when they gave us the news.

We took our seats for the game and I was anxious to see the first pitch. If someone else went out there and flubbed it or bounced, I’d relax a little. The guy who got the call that day had caught Gary Sheffield’s five hundredth home run. He sauntered out to the field in his jersey and his hat and I thought to myself,
Okay, this is just some Joe Blow, he won’t be any good
. Then he went into a full windup, as if he were facing a real batter. In that moment I was thinking,
What a freaking tool, this is going to be great
.

He threw a perfect strike.
Fuck me!

I went home that afternoon and threw ten pitches with Jackson and Lucas. Five were right on target. And five looked like a guy throwing back a grenade that just landed at his feet.

With less than a week to go it was time for the heavy guns. First I spoke with a sports psychologist. Seriously. He asked me what my fears were. When I told him I didn’t want to embarrass
myself he said, “Okay. You are a husband and you are a father and a good brother to your brother who passed away. Look at why you are at this event. You’re doing it for charity. Who cares what happens. It will be just one small part of your life.” I thought that was a good philosophy. I felt a little better.

Next, I planned one more warm-up with Mitch at the Bobby V. academy the Friday before the game. I happened to have been in Toronto that Thursday night to see Springsteen and, after an early morning flight, I’m pretty sure I was still hungover when I went to practice with Mitch. But I threw okay. And he repeated the mantra to me: “Calm yourself down, you can do this, don’t be crazy, don’t psych yourself out.”

I was starting to believe. But, just to be safe, I wanted to throw from an actual mound at least once before the game. That afternoon Jackson and I went to the local high school. We couldn’t get on the field because there was a game. But Bobby Bonilla, who had played for the Mets, was there because his kid was on the high school team. We talked about the pitch for a few minutes and seeing a former Met felt like good luck.

But I knew it would take more than luck to get the ball across the plate. We were scheduled to leave for the game at eleven. I made Jackson go out to the front lawn one more time. He squatted down, I wound up … and threw a perfect strike. My son gave me a huge thumbs-up.

“We are done,” I said.

“Just one?” Jackson asked. “No more?”

“Why mess with it?”

We went home and piled the whole tribe into the car: Mary, Jackson, Jackson’s friends, Lucas, and Lucas’s friends. Jon Hein bought tickets to the game; he was going to meet us there. I was ready.

We walked into the press room and who was there, waiting
to support me? Artie. He was not being a dick, but his mere presence was unnerving. The guy who had been my biggest detractor, the ultimate Yankee fan, was going to be sitting in a front-row seat. I seriously started to freak out. And no one was all that interested in calming my nerves.

Next to Artie was John Franco, the former Mets reliever, the quintessential Italian ballbuster. He could tell I was losing it and left the press room with me for the walk through the tunnel toward the field. He draped his arm around my shoulders and whispered in my ear, “Don’t fuck this up. You can’t fuck this up.” Then he stood behind me and pretended to massage the knots out of my shoulders, “Release the tension. And don’t fuck this up,” he said. He was killing me.

When we got on the field it was just a pig fuck. José Reyes, the Mets shortstop, was in center field, and David Wright, the third baseman, was near second as they played a long-distance game of catch. Sebastian Bach of the ’80s hair band Skid Row was walking around getting ready to sing the national anthem. Rob Smigel, the guy who voices Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, was there because he has a kid with autism. And fucking Artie was just walking around home plate. Triumph, Sebastian Bach, Artie, John Franco, all my kids’ friends. It was like a goddamn Fellini movie. The whole thing was swirling around me and I could feel myself starting to hyperventilate. I was desperate for a paper bag to breathe into.

One of the Mets reps handed me a ball and told me to go stand by the Mets dugout. But all the action was by the visitors’ dugout. That’s where everyone was hanging out. It was much worse being alone, with nothing to concentrate on but me and the pitch. This was where it got really bad. When I get nervous, I dry heave. Standing there by myself, I started to retch. If you didn’t know any better, it looked like I was coughing. But Hein, who was in the stands nearby, knew
what was happening. By the time they called my name to go to the mound my body was like rubber and I was so nervous my legs were shaking. I asked myself,
For what?

I stood there as they announced the cause I was pitching for and then I lifted my arm into the air, showing everyone the ball. I always thought the first pitch happened fifteen or twenty minutes before the game. But the game was about to start. Players were running out to their positions. John Maine, who was pitching for the Mets that day, was behind me, getting ready. I had become friendly with him because he is a fan of the show, but his head was so into the game he didn’t even acknowledge me.

I wound up and I swear to God when I threw the ball I couldn’t feel my body. Using a contorted half pitch, half push, I just closed my eyes and hoped it would go somewhere near the plate. When I opened them I realized it didn’t get anywhere close. In fact, it was so far to the left of the catcher that the umpire, who was standing four feet away and putting his mask on, had to put his hands in front of his belly to protect himself. It was a knuckler. The ball bounced off his fingers to the ground. The crowd went, “Ohhhhhhhhhh.”

I turned my back to home plate, bent over with my hands on my knees like I was sick to my stomach, and then walked off the mound and gave a thumbs-up. The first thing I saw when I was able to focus again was Artie, doubled over in laughter.
Ahhh, fuck
, I thought. Mary greeted me right away and said, “Don’t worry. Are you bummed?”

“I am so bummed you can’t even believe how bummed I am.” Then I had to look at Jackson. “Are you just embarrassed?”

“You really psyched yourself out, Dad,” he said. I later worked up the courage to watch the video Jackson shot of the pitch. I could hear Jackson saying, “Come on, Dad, you can do
it, you can do this.” Right after the pitch, all you hear is: “Ugggghhhhhh.”

Many people have tried to evaluate what went wrong. But Howard’s father pinpointed the problem: I started to pitch it and then, mid-motion, I decided to lob it.

I had thrown a bad pitch. I assumed the worst would be that I would get grief for it on Monday and that would be that. That changed before I even walked off the field. While heading up to the suite we had for the game I saw a kid I used to coach in youth football. “Mr. D., did you throw out the first pitch?” he said.

“Yeah, I did.”

“Wow,” he said. “You can’t throw.”

Kevin Burkhardt, roving reporter for the SNY sports television channel, interviewed me later that day during the game broadcast. I thought he’d want to talk about the Autism Society, but after one question he said to me, “You threw out some first pitch.” Then he showed it on the screen for all to see again. “What are you thinking right now?”

All I could say was “I was really hoping that would not end up on television.”

After the game Hein came up to me and was being so kind. Too kind. I needed a drink. We went to a barbecue in Connecticut after the game. Everyone asked me how it went and when I said bad and they asked how bad and I said
so
bad, someone poured me a scotch. I was feeling a little bit better. The moment had been left behind at Citi Field in Queens. Until 6:25. My cellphone pinged and it was a text from my buddy Booker at K-Rock. “Dude,” he said. “They just showed your first pitch on TV.”

“What channel?” I asked.

“The local news on CBS.”

Oh motherfucker! Are you kidding me? Okay, I said to myself, at least it is contained to the tri-state area.

That night Howard and his wife saw the pitch on the highlights. Beth said, “He throws like a girl. I guarantee I could throw better than that. I’ve never seen a pitch like that.”

Howard called me when I was already two scotches in. I sounded so bad he couldn’t even give me shit. He decided to save it for Monday morning.

The next day was Mother’s Day. I was just moping around. “What is your problem?” Mary asked me.

“Did you see what happened yesterday?” I asked.

“So what,” she said. “It was an honor. No one else was asked to throw it.”

It didn’t matter. All day I was trying to assess the damage. In the afternoon I turned on the Mets game. I wanted to watch the pregame show to see if they mentioned it. If they didn’t, it was probably over. And, much to my relief, no one said a word. Then the game started. And before the opening pitch the announcers said, “We have to show you what happened yesterday.”

They saved my pitch for the actual broadcast! It was too good for the pregame show. I lost my shit. And so did Mary.

“Are you going to ruin my whole Mother’s Day?” she said.

“Yes, well, my whole life is ruined,” I said as reasonably as I could.

“We are talking about a pitch!” she said, and then she walked out of the room.

I had to face everyone at work the next day. As soon as I walked in I saw Will sitting at his computer. He is a big sports fan. I knew, in the split second that I saw him, that his reaction
would be a good gauge of how bad things were going to go. And it was bad. He looked at me as if my parents had been killed in a car accident. His eyes showed nothing but sadness for me. I would have rather been teased.

When the show started, Howard, who doesn’t care about sports, recounted a conversation he had had with his father the day before. It began harmlessly, with his dad saying he was just watching the Mets game. Then it quickly led into the pitch. Howard said how his dad told him that I had thrown “the worst pitch ever. I never saw a pitch like this in my life.”

“Wow,” Howard told his dad. “This is Gary’s worst nightmare. I’m thrilled because we just found the first two hours of Monday’s show. It’s the single most embarrassing moment in the history of first pitches.”

Then he just handed the show over to Artie. He was brutal. “I just saw Lance Bass throw out the first pitch,” he said. “Gary was so nice. He was doing this for Autism Day and threw it like he was autistic.”

Artie’s a great storyteller and he told a doozy about an older guy who was an usher at Citi Field. I knew this usher from Shea. He’s a great guy and he happened to be on the field for the pitch. I noticed him talking to Artie and, afterward, the expression on his face was as if he had just watched the Zapruder film. During the show Artie added the dialogue that I missed while I was walking off the mound:

Artie: “Man that pitch was so gay.”

Usher: “That pitch was gayer than a guy sucking another guy’s dick. And I should know—I was a cop for years and saw a lot of guys sucking dick.”

That hurt. A lot. I always liked that guy and I couldn’t believe he would take a shot at me like that.

I was down, and Artie was pummeling me. I worried about my kids going to school and being made fun of. Even though
they told me everything was fine and no one made a big deal about it, Artie said, “They’re lying. They are miserable.”

It’s still a sore spot for me. But, on the air at least, I really had no choice but to take it. We’ve mocked so many people. When Chris Rock threw out the first pitch at a game once and it was less than stellar I destroyed him.

Over the next three weeks, the video went viral. It wasn’t just that I looked so bad and it was embarrassing. It hurt my credibility. I’m the guy on the show who knows sports. I love sports. People assumed because I couldn’t throw a pitch, I couldn’t have a discussion about sports anymore.

The world was divided into two types of people: the ones who were nice and tried to make me feel better (but only made it worse), and the guys who laughed at me and thought I was a fucking tool. Mary was in her own get-the-fuck-over-it category. The Thursday after the pitch I had to coach one of Jackson’s baseball games and I was afraid to warm up with the kids. I wondered if everyone was going to be looking at me funny. My saving grace was that a prominent married guy in town had just been busted for trolling for hookers online and was on the front page of the
New York Post
.

For a month I was in a funk. The turning point came on Memorial Day. I was at a neighbor’s barbecue. Another neighbor whom I respect a lot and coached with was there, too. He is levelheaded and empathetic. He told me that he felt for me. He said he watched me out there every day working with Jackson in the front yard. Then he told me that he’d played soccer in college. He was a goalie at a small school that had made it to the title game. Late in the game he lost his concentration for less than a minute, a few seconds tops, but it happened to be the exact moment when someone took a shot. It went right by him. “I was the villain on campus for a few weeks,” he said.

He was the first person after the pitch who didn’t mock me or try to tell me it wasn’t a big deal or pretend to be nice. He just had a conversation with me about it. And he told me that one day I would feel better. He was right. Pretty soon I stopped thinking about it every minute of every day.

And then, a few months after the pitch, I found out that the famous usher whom Artie quoted had actually never said anything. I was doing a Gadget Gary segment for the CW11 TV station in New York, and the usher’s son worked there. He came up to me and said, “My father never said that stuff. He wanted to call the show but decided not to because he didn’t want to draw attention to it.” Later that summer, when I was back at Citi Field for a game, the usher apologized and told me how bad he felt because he had never said anything.