Wherever I Wind Up: My Quest for Truth, Authenticity and the Perfect Knuckleball Read online

  WHEREVER

  I WIND UP

  BLUE RIDER PRESS

  a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  New York

  WHEREVER

  I WIND UP

  MY QUEST FOR TRUTH,

  AUTHENTICITY, AND

  THE PERFECT KNUCKLEBALL

  R. A. DICKEY

  with

  WAYNE COFFEY

  BLUE RIDER PRESS

  a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  New York

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York

  10014, USA •Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) •Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England •Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) •Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) •Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India •Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) •Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue,

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  Copyright © 2012 by R. A. Dickey

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in

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  Purchase only authorized editions.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  ISBN: 978-1-101-56114-0

  Printed in the United States of America

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  BOOK DESIGN BY NICOLE LAROCHE

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  assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication.

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  however, the story, the experiences, and the words

  are the author’s alone.

  ALWAYS LEARNING

  PEARSON

  For Anne and the kids

  —R.A.D.

  For Denise, Alexandra, Sean, and Samantha

  —W.C.

  Dum spiro, spero.

  —Latin proverb

  (Translation: While I breathe, I hope.)

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE: THE WORST NIGHT I EVER HAD

  CHAPTER ONE: PLASTIC SPOON

  CHAPTER TWO: SUMMER OF ’83

  CHAPTER THREE: FAITH ON WALNUT

  CHAPTER FOUR: THE WOLF OF GREEN HILLS

  CHAPTER FIVE: VOLUNTEERING FOR DUTY

  CHAPTER SIX: COVER STORY

  CHAPTER SEVEN: THE LONE RANGER

  CHAPTER EIGHT: MINOR ACHIEVEMENT

  CHAPTER NINE: SHOWTIME

  CHAPTER TEN: REQUIEM FOR MY FASTBALL

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: REDHAWK REDUX

  CHAPTER TWELVE: THE WORLD ACCORDING TO CHARLIE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: KNUCKLEBALLER NON GRATA

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: THE BOTTOM

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: INTO THE MISSOURI

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN: SOUNDS OF THE MOMENT

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: RULE FIVE SURPRISE

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: GETTING MY PHIL

  CHAPTER NINETEEN: CITI DWELLER

  CHAPTER TWENTY: FINGERNAILS IN FLUSHING

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: UNBROKEN MOMENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  PROLOGUE

  THE WORST NIGHT I EVER HAD

  I remember details. I’ve always been able to remember details. I will never be a Hall of Famer and will never lead the league in strikeouts, and am in no imminent danger of joining the 300 Victory Club. But my memory—that I will put up against anybody’s.

  I can tell you about the little wagon wheels on my red comforter when I was four years old, my phone number and address—247 Timmons Avenue—when I was in kindergarten, and the smoky haze that hung in my mother’s beat-up Impala when I was six, a sorry heap with a gas gauge that was habitually on “E.” I can give you a foot-by-foot description of my boyhood bedroom, highlighted by the Larry Bird photo I tore out of Sports Illustrated and taped on the wall—I loved Larry Bird—and can still see my first glove, a brown synthetic $12 model from Kmart. It was called the Mag. I have no idea why. Maybe it was short for “Magician,” or “Magnificent,” or “Magadan,” as in Dave. I used the Mag when I played shortstop for Coach Teeter, my first Little League coach, who gave us yellow iron-on stars after we did something positive or had a good game.

  I got my share of yellow stars, but they never made it onto my uniform. My mom had a lot going on.

  I can give you every detail you want, and plenty you don’t want: about the dark times in my life, about the saloons I went to with my mom, and the empty houses I slept in as a teenager, a wayward kid in search of soulless shelter, and about the most traumatic summer of my life. It came when I was eight and it included a new babysitter, and a game with a tennis ball out in the country, on the roof of a garage. Then things happened—horrible things. I remember the smells and colors and feelings, and the pile of the carpeting. I remember it all.

  I wish I didn’t.

  When I think of that summer, and so many dysfunctional seasons that followed, the details threaten to go on forever. The inner warfare that gripped me the day I went from baseball bonus baby to baseball freak—the Pitcher Without an Ulnar Collateral Ligament—and lost almost three-quarters of a million dollars in the process. The blue flip-flops I wore when I tried to swim across the Missouri River, one in a long line of unfathomably stupid risks I’ve taken. The orange-red hues of the autumn of 2006, when, eleven years into my professional baseball career, I thought about taking my life because of the mess I had made of it.

  I remember the tiniest nuances from events, big and small, through the thirty-seven years of my life. That’s why it’s strange that I don’t have even a vague recollection of the time when I stopped being a phenom.

  The word “phenom” has been in the baseball lexicon forever, or at least since 1881, when it was used to describe a pitcher for the Boston Red Stockings named James Evans “Grasshopper Jim” Whitney. Grasshopper Jim was twenty-three years old and went 31–33 and threw 552 innings and 57 complete games that year (this was the pre–La Russa era), his performance undeniably phenomenal. Soon the “-enal” was left off the end, and Grasshopper Jim simply became a phenom—a word that anoints you as the embodiment of hope, someone whose youthful gifts are going to bring joy and victories for years to come.

  A word that means you are special.

  It is during my seventh-grade year at Montgomery Bell Academy, in Nashville, that people first notice me. I strike out twelve in six innings and pitch our team, the Big Red, to a league championship, and a year later I make the varsity, and before lo
ng people start making a fuss over how I throw. By the time I’m a sophomore, big-league scouts begin to come to my games, and they seem to talk not only about my arm but about my makeup, how I’m a kid who knows how to compete, who you want to have on the mound in a big game. As much as I love throwing the ball and hearing it smack into the leather of the catcher’s glove, I love the pure competition of pitching more than anything, bringing a street fighter’s sensibility to the mound with me, treating every at-bat as a duel at sixty feet six inches.

  You may hit me. You may knock me around and knock balls out of the park.

  But I am always going to get back up and keep coming at you.

  The scouts keep coming too. I am the Tennessee state player of the year as a senior in 1993 and an All-American at the University of Tennessee and a starter for Team USA in the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. The Texas Rangers select me with their number one pick in the June free-agent draft. Everything is falling into place, my map to the majors laid out before me, as precise as anything a cartographer could draw.

  And then it all goes haywire. Five years pass before I make the big leagues, a cup of coffee so brief I don’t even have time to add cream and sugar. I spend seven years—seven!—as a member of the Triple-A Oklahoma City RedHawks, and some people in town are seriously suggesting I run for mayor. I tell them I don’t want to be a mayor, I want to be in the majors. But I am going in the wrong direction. I start losing velocity, and don’t get nearly enough people out. I give up conventional pitching at the urging of Buck Showalter and Orel Hershiser, my manager and pitching coach at the time, and become a full-time knuckleball pitcher. We live in thirty-one different places over a ten-year span. My wife, Anne, who graduated at the top of her class at the University of Tennessee, takes on a series of jobs she is way overqualified for, just to help us make ends meet and support my dream. She teaches aerobics to senior citizens. She works as a salesperson at The Limited in a mall in Port Charlotte, Florida.

  During one of our years in Oklahoma City, she gets a clerking job at a big-chain bookstore. I visit her one day and, after sifting through the Stars Wars section (I am a total Tatooine geek) and the Tolkien shelf, I meander over to sports and see what new baseball books are out. I peruse the classics—The Natural and The Long Season and The Boys of Summer— and leaf through Ball Four and The Glory of Their Times. I keep walking and come upon one of those preseason prospectus books.

  This should be interesting. I wonder who they’re predicting big things from.

  I look up the Texas Rangers section. Why not start with my own organization? The authors roll out half a thesaurus to praise the Rangers’ power-laden lineup, Alex Rodriguez and Juan Gonzalez and the rest. They talk about Pudge Rodríguez being the best catcher in the game and rave about a kid named Michael Young. I keep reading. They don’t do nearly as much raving about the Rangers’ pitchers or their pitching prospects. I scan farther down, seeing if I am in there at all.

  Finally, I find my name at the bottom. It is in bold type, like the other names. I can’t tell you I remember the exact text a decade later, but this is within a few words of verbatim:

  In the farm system, the Rangers’ alleged prospects include former first-round draft pick, R.A. Dickey, a marginal right-hander who has given no indication that he’s ever going to amount to anything.

  I consider throwing the book, but don’t. I close it and put it back on the shelf.

  Marginal. This is what I have been reduced to, at least in the estimation of the authors. A marginal right-hander. It’s a hard word to read. A brutal word to read. But are they wrong?

  You tell me.

  When you spend seven seasons in the same minor-league location, when you log almost fourteen years and three hundred games in the minors overall, you’re not on what you’d call the fast track. You are not on any track at all.

  You may get called “has-been” or “never-was” but you can be fairly certain that you are not anybody’s idea of a phenom anymore.

  Doing all that minor-league meandering tends to leave you in one of two camps. You either resign yourself to never getting out, to just playing out the string until your skills erode or you’ve had it with the back roads and bus rides. Or you go the other way and convince yourself that you absolutely still have a chance to make the big leagues, even if all available evidence suggests otherwise. You keep finding a way to hold on to hope, keep waiting for the Call, and if and when it comes, you make darn sure that you don’t give the club any reason ever to send you back down.

  I am in Camp Number Two. And hanging on by a fingernail of hope is exactly where I find my non-phenom self in the early spring of 2006, when the Texas Rangers hand me number 45. It is the fourth day of the season. We are playing the Detroit Tigers at home, at the Ballpark in Arlington, as it was then called. Against considerable odds, I have made the Rangers’ starting rotation out of spring training and am beginning my first full season as a knuckleball pitcher. The pitch is still a work in progress, some days good, more days not so good, but if Buck Showalter thinks I’m ready, what am I supposed to do, decline?

  Say, “Thanks, Skip, but I think some of the kids are more deserving”?

  No. I wasn’t going to do that.

  I am thirty-one years old and darn tired of being mediocre. Anne and I have two young daughters and a baby boy on the way. I am living in a Hyatt and getting around on a borrowed bicycle because I don’t want to spend money on a rental car. One part retread, one part restoration project, I am a decade removed from my years studying English lit at Tennessee, forgetting a lot of Faulkner and firing a lot of fastballs. I have become the quintessential “4A” pitcher—baseball code for a player who is too good for Triple-A but not good enough to stick in the majors. I had already spent two full, extremely undistinguished years in the big leagues. I know that I cannot reasonably expect to get another shot if this doesn’t work out.

  You want to know how desperate I am? I have turned myself into the baseball equivalent of a carnival act—maybe not a two-headed turtle or a bearded lady, but close. I am trying to make a living throwing the ugly stepchild of pitches, a pitch few in the game appreciate and even fewer understand. Almost nobody starts out planning to be a knuckleball pitcher. When was the last time you heard a twelve-year-old Little Leaguer say, “I want to be Hoyt Wilhelm when I grow up”? You become a knuckleball pitcher when you hit a dead end, when your arm gets hurt or your hard stuff isn’t getting the job done. Tim Wakefield was a minor-league first baseman with a lot of power and a bad batting average; that’s when he made the switch. I made mine when the Rangers told me, in the middle of 2005, that I was going nowhere with my regular stuff—an assessment that I could hardly argue with.

  I’d been going nowhere for a long time, after all.

  AT 3:45 P.M. on Thursday, April 6, I walk out of the Hyatt, hop on the bike, and pedal to the Ballpark for the most important start of my baseball life. I cannot view it any other way. I roll up to the park after a ten-minute ride. It’s time for my far-flung odyssey to stop, for some measure of stability to start.

  I know the only way that’s going to happen is by getting big-league hitters out.

  After eating a turkey sandwich in the players’ lounge, I head for the video room to watch a tape of Wakefield pitching against the Tigers the year before. I’m not looking for specific strategies on how to attack Pudge Rodríguez (he left the Rangers via free agency after the 2004 season) or Magglio Ordóñez so much as reassurance that major-league hitters can be retired with the pitch. It’s a positive-imaging exercise for me, balm for an insecure soul. I have zero confidence in myself, and in the consistency of my knuckleball. I don’t really want to send R. A. Dickey out there against the Tigers. I want to send out Tim Wakefield, the most successful knuckleball pitcher of the 1990s and 2000s.

  If it works for him, maybe it will work for me.

  Ninety minutes before game time I take a shower, spending most of it visualizing myself going after every Tiger batter.
When I am finished, I say a prayer out loud. I put on my uniform and go out to the outfield with the bullpen catcher, Josh Frasier. I start throwing and I feel good. I have a pretty good knuckler on flat ground. After a few minutes we move onto the bullpen mound, and I am throwing it even better, the ball fluttering, my confidence building to unaccustomed levels. When you throw a knuckleball, you want to have the same release point every pitch. You want your arm and your elbow at the exact right angle, and you want your nails biting into the horsehide the same way. The ball is moving well and I have good control over it. I am locked in.

  The PA man announces the lineups. It’s almost time.

  I walk in from the bullpen and sit on the bench. I run a towel over my face and take a swig of water. I wonder how Nate Robertson, the Tigers starter, is feeling at this very moment. As I prepare to go out to the mound, I pray for confidence, for good health, for the courage to get after them.

  “Be glorified, Lord,” I say.

  I remind myself to stay positive. It all feels good.

  The Tigers’ leadoff hitter is Brandon Inge, their third baseman. Inge is not a typical leadoff guy; he strikes out often and is not inclined to be patient, but he does have a lot of pop in his bat. I throw him a knuckleball for a strike to start the game. I wind and deliver the 0–1 pitch, a knuckler that tumbles slowly toward the inner part of the plate. It feels okay coming out of my hand, but it has too much rotation. Rotation is the mortal enemy of knuckleballers, the thing we spend years working to eliminate. When knuckleballs rotate, they don’t move. They sit up and often disappear. As the ball nears the plate, I can actually see Inge’s eyes grow wide.

  He swings and puts serious wood on it, driving the ball deep to left. I follow the flight of the ball, and watch it go over the fence.