Imperfect: An Improbable Life Read online

  Copyright © 2012 by Jim Abbott

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Abbott, Jim

  Imperfect : an improbable life / Jim Abbott and Tim Brown.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-345-52327-3

  1. Abbott, Jim. 2. Baseball players—United States—Biography.

  3. Pitchers (Baseball)—United States—Biography. 4. Athletes with

  Disabilities—United States—Biography. I. Brown, Tim. II. Title.

  GV865.A26A3 2012

  796.357092—dc23 [B] 2012001917

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  Jacket design: David Stevenson

  Jacket photograph: © Richard Harbus, NY Daily News

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Photo Insert

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  “So, what are you going to do about it?”

  — HARVEY DORFMAN

  Introduction

  Ella is my youngest.

  She has my hair and eyes and her mother’s smile. The timing is distinctly hers. She was five when she asked, quite publicly, “Dad, do you like your little hand?”

  My what? Do I like it?

  I had come to her preschool’s Career Day bearing baseball cards for her classmates. In the morning rush getting the girls through the front door and into the car, I’d packed into a gym bag a couple familiar baseball caps, an Olympic gold medal, and a baseball glove.

  I had come first as a dad, and then as a former baseball player. I’d pitched for the local team, the California Angels, and for the team everybody had heard of, the New York Yankees. I had come because I wasn’t pitching anymore, and because Ella’s mother, my wife, Dana, wryly pointed out that preschool Career Day wasn’t really for fathers who no longer had careers. The query, posted on the door of Ella’s classroom weeks before, read: “Do any of the dads have an interesting job they could come and speak to the children about?” When I arrived one afternoon to collect Ella, the answer beside her name on the door, in Dana’s handwriting, read, “No.” Calling her on the playful taunt, I’d scratched out “No” and written “Yes—baseball”—presumably precisely as she had intended.

  Ella had been excited. The classroom had hummed, curiosity over the stranger in the room sparring with the early-morning Cap’n Crunch joggling.

  I’d seen hundreds of similarly occupied, similarly distracted schoolrooms, and every one of them put me back at my own tiny desk in my own childhood in Flint, Michigan.

  At any age, I was the kid with the deformity. At Ella’s age, I was the kid with the shiny and clunky metal hook where his right hand should have been.

  Thirty-five years later, classrooms remained among the few places where I was conscious of my stunted right hand. I would enter and later find I had slipped it into my front pants pocket, tethered against unconscious gesturing, signaling to the room that the details of its story would come at my choosing, if at all.

  In this particular room, its walls lined with finger-paint art and construction paper trimmed by tiny round-tipped scissors, I was introduced first as Ella’s dad and second as a guy who once pitched in the major leagues. Every eye in the room went to the place where my hand should have been. They always did, no matter the demographic.

  I started, slowly.

  Who knows their Angels? The Yankees? Who’s your favorite? Does anyone play baseball?

  I was getting to the subject of my hand, building toward it, the courteously unasked question even among preschoolers. The baseball glove was on the desk before me, awaiting the demonstration, how I threw it, caught it, threw it again. I scanned the room for a kid who looked athletic enough for an easy game of catch, so that Career Day didn’t end in a broken nose and Emergency Room Day.

  A five-year-old hand went up. “My brother plays baseball.”

  Another. “Do you have a dog?”

  A third. Ella’s.

  Do I like it?

  I had never thought of my birth defect in terms of liking it. I’d disliked it some, found it a nuisance at times, hardly thought about it at others. I didn’t remember it being called a “little hand,” and certainly not by Ella.

  We never called it that at home. We never called it anything.

  Mostly, my relationship with my hand and its various consequences was blurred, and often complicated. Its permanence bobbed in a current of all it might have taken from me and all that it offered. It carried me where it would, to frustration and reluctance, and to fear, but also to the resolve to thrash against its pull. From the moment I could understand I’d been so cast, my parents had championed my opportunity to thrash. Special people, they said, endured against the disability, the child born imperfectly. As significant, special people endured against what the disability incessantly drew: the self-pity, the ignorance, the rationalizations of a life less fully spent. I didn’t know about special, but I knew I wanted to endure, and I knew it pleased them—and me—when I did, when I was up to the fight.

  I’ve wondered from time to time if I was carrying it, or it me. Mostly, I think, I did the heavy lifting. My parents—Kathy, my mother, returned to school and became an attorney when I was in my teens, and Mike, my father, was a sales manager for Anheuser-Busch—generally declined to stand as shields. As far as I know, they weren’t at my schools asking for favors, or whispering to the youth-league baseball coach to keep me out of the infield, or standing in an upstairs bedroom window, making sure the kids in the yard played nice. I really sort of found my own way through.

  Baseball helped. It leveled the playing field, then placed me above it—ten and a half inches above it, on the pitcher’s mound. The rest was about results, and not about who learned to tie his shoes first or who could button his shirt fastest or who looked like what. I remember once feeling dissatisfied with a professional career in which I lost more than I won, and that ended sooner—and with far more heartache—than I hoped it would. My mother reminded me of the journey I had taken, how at every step I had longed for the next one, and only the next one. In the Flint youth leagues, I had simply wanted to be good enough to play with the next age group. Soon, I aspired to be good enough to pitch at the big public high school. Then in college, the Olympics, professional baseball, the big leagues. Every level, she said, was, in its moment, a gift, every experience grander and more rewarding than the last. There was no rehearsed progression. It just happened. I think that’s the way my parents thought of it, too. And I liked it just fine.

  Did I like this hand, though? Could it be as simple as a child’s curiosity, all black and white and no gray? I wondered if that really was what she was asking.

  Do I like what I have been? How I have been looked at? The battles I chose? The ones that chose me?
Those I evaded? What I became?

  Do I like who I am?

  It was a lot to consider standing in front of a dozen five-year-olds, the morning frivolity undone by my desire to be truthful, and then to reexamine a life spent at the blunt end of inspection, followed inevitably by introspection. The teacher, Ms. Roberts, white-haired and not typically indulgent, held her gaze from the rear of the room. This, she could be reasonably sure, was going to be more interesting than last week’s stockbroker.

  What I honestly felt was that my hand had put me here, with my daughter and her friends, in a place where I could touch my own childhood: my mother’s hand on my cheek, other boys’ taunts on my shoulders. My little hand was my motivation. It was my pride and my insecurity, my antagonism and my empathy.

  I looked at Ella. I would not go back to that age again. A new school, a new classroom, had always meant new kids with the same questions. I cringe still. I’d look forward to recess back then, an hour to show them I could do what they could.

  “Do you know your hand looks like a foot?”

  “Why do you have only one finger?”

  “Can you move it?”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “Did you know you are giving everyone ‘the finger’?”

  And me, longing to fit in, going along, answering as if it were the first time the subject had ever come up, then going home to the brick wall on the side of the house. I was always comfortable being by myself, even if I didn’t prefer it.

  There, I’d throw a rubber-coated baseball at a strike zone outlined in chalk. I would imagine myself a major-league pitcher, and I’d throw the ball and catch it and throw it again, often for hours. I’d switch the baseball glove—a Dusty Baker model my father had bought at the corner drugstore—back and forth so that I hardly thought about it anymore.

  Just like any other kid, I thought.

  Like Ella.

  Do I like my little hand?

  I rolled her question in my head for a second time and nearly laughed at its genuineness, its path from the clear blue.

  “I do, honey,” I said. “I like my little hand. I haven’t always liked it. And it hasn’t always been easy. But it has taught me an important lesson: that life isn’t easy and it isn’t always fair. But if we can make the most out of what we’ve been given, and find our own way of doing things, you wouldn’t believe what can happen.”

  So this is the story of me and my little hand. And of a life in baseball. But, first, of a life.

  CHAPTER 1

  I spent two baseball seasons in New York and enjoyed them most on Saturday mornings, when the city composed itself with a long, slow breath.

  Maybe it was a sigh.

  Either way, on this particular Saturday the sidewalks twenty-seven floors below the apartment window were less cluttered, the taxi hailers appeared in a hurry but not altogether panic-stricken, the dog walkers smiled and nodded at passersby as their little city pooches, pleased not to be rushed, did their morning business. Across 90th Street, a broad patch of emerald green—conspicuously so against the old brick and brownstone and grit—hosted a game of soccer, filling the neighborhood with cries of encouragement, whoops, and applause.

  The sky was gray, a leaden touch to a yawn-and-stretch morning on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The idle observations from the uniformed lobby doorman and the waitress four blocks away at Gracie’s Corner, where the wait was manageable and the pancakes were reliably fluffy, were about afternoon rain, the prospect of which further softened the jostle of the expired workweek.

  I liked it there.

  Dana and I had carved something like a routine from our first year east. What began as an exercise in survival became almost comfortable. We’d rented a one-bedroom apartment with a sofa, a coffee table, and a couple chairs, bought a few things for the kitchen, and mostly ate out. We were in our mid-twenties, a good time for exploration and discovery and a semi-furnished life. At first we walked the neighborhood within a few blocks of 90th and York Avenue, browsing the shops and studying the menus taped to the windows before widening the radius to include Central Park and the museums that run practically side-by-side along Fifth Avenue.

  We began to smile at familiar and friendly faces: the people with whom we regularly rode the elevator, the guy behind the deli counter a couple doors down, the woman who pushed quarters across the top of a stack of tabloids, change for our newspaper. Amid its swirling rhythms and every-man-for-himself pretenses, New York was becoming a good place for us. We were learning about each other, fending for ourselves, accumulating the scrapes and bruises that come with the outsiders’ clumsy entrance.

  I’m not sure the transplants among the city’s millions ever believe that life there can be done quite right. There’s simply too much one can’t know, there being so many wonderful layers of people and cultures, so many siren blips and impulses. And yet, many find their spots. There is a life to be had in the spaces of stillness amid the commotion, and that’s where we generally succeeded in hosting it.

  The job wasn’t going as well.

  I walked with Dana that morning with The New York Times under my arm and work on my mind. A man pushed buckets of fresh flowers to the sidewalk, far enough to be tempting to passersby, not so far as to be out of sight. The paper carried the story of the Yankees’ loss last night at The Stadium, a Cleveland Indians rookie named Manny Ramirez—raised in New York’s own Washington Heights—hitting his first big-league home run in front of scores of friends and relatives down the left-field line, and, two innings later, his second. The Mets had lost in Chicago. The Angels game had gone too late to make the early edition. There may have been a mention of me somewhere within those pages, which I’d chosen not to read.

  It was early September and beginning to feel like it. The weather was turning and the Yankees were in the race, in second place, a couple games behind the Toronto Blue Jays in the American League East. Life and baseball were moving fast, each jostling the other to take the lead as Dana and I stuck to our recent game-day habits: me feeling the anxiety and freshness of a new five-day cycle, eager for the ball and another shot, her fretting that I’d lose again and we’d have to relive the previous four days.

  As we walked, we spoke of that afternoon’s start against the Indians, what it might bring, then left the conversation as a pile of half-finished thoughts. We ate breakfast, the two of us crammed in the way people so frequently are in that massive city, shoulder to shoulder with strangers, yet feeling mostly alone. Dana, I could tell from her clipped sentences, felt the gravity of the day keenly even as she stirred her coffee. What we didn’t talk about I felt in my stomach: the ballgame—my ballgame—hours away, too near to allow me to ponder anything else, too far off to do anything about. We returned to the apartment and I left Dana there. “Good luck,” she said with a hug. “Thanks,” I said. “We’ll see what happens,” thinking, Sorry to have dragged you into this. I gathered my pre-packed duffel bag, and returned to the streets to summon a metered ride to Yankee Stadium.

  Even at mid-morning on a Saturday, the mere four miles from the Upper East Side to the Bronx—York Avenue to FDR Drive to the Major Deegan Expressway and up to 161st Street—seemed long. I wanted to be there, into my routine, burying myself in a pile of scouting reports, awaiting game time, a clock that wouldn’t start until the heavy metal door to the clubhouse swung open. Taped to the other side of that door would be the lineup, me on the bottom, pitching against a team that, five days before, had hit almost everything I’d thrown, and hit it hard.

  I stared from the rear passenger window across the East River, made dreary by the skies, and considered exactly where it was I was going.

  What would come that afternoon, I did not know. But I sensed that something would, something well within the boundaries of glory and ignominy, those sorts of extremes, but something important to me. I’d come from the Angels nine months before to lead the Yankees’ pitching staff, or so the papers said. I’d cost the Yankees three players ev
eryone thought were pretty good, the thinking being that given a little Yankee-like run support and granted Yankee Stadium’s expansive center and left-center fields, I could be the ace they’d needed since, I don’t know … Ron Guidry?

  I won the home opener that year, 1993, going nine innings and beating the Kansas City Royals and David Cone, 4–1, in front of almost 57,000 people. It was an incredible experience on a fantastic stage, a great rush. I was sure I’d found a new home, and surmised I was okay with leaving behind the big contract offer from the Angels and life in Orange County, which included Dana’s family.

  The Angels had raised me in the ways of professional baseball, straight out of the University of Michigan, straight from the draft, straight from the Olympics, and straight into their starting rotation. Four years later, after I’d had the best ERA of my career (as it turned out) but 15 losses in 1992, they traded me. Maybe these are the rhythms of Major League Baseball, but they weren’t my rhythms, not at all. Suddenly I’d been transplanted from an ocean view in Newport Beach to a city view on the Upper East Side, from the mom-and-pop Angels to the pinstriped, corporate George Steinbrenner Yankees.

  There was more, of course. There was always more.

  I’d gone without a right hand for nearly twenty-six years. The doctors said it was a birth defect, which, in my case, was what they called something that was less an issue at birth than in life. The birth actually went fine; the complications came long after. The best I can say is I managed them. When I was young my father put a baseball in my hand, and it made sense, and eventually it put me in a place where, maybe, I was a little less different.

  Baseball, to me, was validation. And sometimes leaning on baseball like that was a good thing.

  The cab bounced north. I held the approximate fare plus a couple dollars in my hand to avoid any holdups at the ballpark. Best to just slam the door and be off, over the slate-gray cobblestones, past the grinning, blue-coated security, down the curling flight of stairs.

  Other cars accompanied my cab. They were driven by strangers with their jaws set, starched shirtsleeves buttoned at their wrists, people working on a Saturday morning just as I was. I loved my job mostly, but sometimes got to wondering why it didn’t always love me back. Often on these drives, or on bus rides through unfamiliar cities, I’d look at people in their cars, people in the streets, and mentally frisk them for the symptoms of their lives. What would they give to be in my place, to be a big-league ballplayer, traveling the country, making millions, regular paychecks on the first and fifteenth, win or lose?