The Phenomenon

INTRODUCTION   

I have two sons. They give me a chance to be good. To be present. To be better.

Their names are Declan and Ryker. They fish with me, like I fished with my father. He was a great fisherman, near as I remember. Probably still is.

They like baseball enough. I loved baseball for a while, then wasn't so sure, then loved it again. Baseball was who I was for a very long time, for better or worse. I'd still recommend it to them, if they were to ask, and it seems they're getting old enough to start asking. They're free to decide for themselves. In the meantime, I'll throw them all the batting practice they want, as long as they promise to be patient and wear a helmet.

They are so young, at ages I barely remember. They're good boys. They generally mind their mother—my wife, Lory—who occasionally must believe she has three boys instead of two. There might be something to that, me taking a do-over on the childhood thing. Part of me wants a second one that I'll recall with more clarity and warmth.

I think all the time about raising two boys, about being good at something as important as being a father. I think about it when they're laughing at the same goofy joke that makes me laugh, and when they cry on a day when I'm sad too, and when we're just driving down the road in my pickup truck singing along to Luke Bryan.

Maybe they're missing a tooth that day, their hair's all crazy, and they've half a chocolate doughnut stuck to their faces, and it makes me wonder how they ever got so perfect. It makes me wonder if I was ever one of those kids in that rearview mirror, strapped into their seats, so sure that today will be great, that tomorrow will be too, that Mom and Dad will be together forever, and that I'll be there for them forever too.

Declan is five. He likes math, and he sometimes kills time by practicing his ABCs, humming the alphabet song while he's turning Lego blocks into cars and houses and things only he recognizes. He watches American Ninja Warrior on television. He looks like me. We have the same eyes, my grandfather's eyes. When he was born, the nurse bundled him in a blue blanket and set him in my arms, and he was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. He blinked up at me, his father, the man who would, I promised, be kind to him forever, and teach him to be kind to others, and love him and try never to disappoint him. I would not call him names. I would not abuse his mother. I would stand behind him when he needed a push, before him when he needed a shield, beside him when he did not. He was the next generation, different than the last. Better, I promised, for Declan, my first. He bats and throws left-handed, like me.

Ryker is four. He already understands that as the youngest and smallest in the house, he has to be tougher, feistier, and a little more clever than his brother. He is my firecracker. On first reference lately he'll answer to "Hot Sauce." He also likes whatever Declan likes that day, which seems to be his strategy to get under Declan's skin. Ryker is a right-hander. He also came in a blue blanket, and with the same promises.

We watch baseball when it's on at night.

"Who are we rooting for, Papa?" Declan asks.

Well, I say, Papa played with him, and he's nice, so we'll root for them tonight. Or, Papa hit a few homers and won some games for that team once, the one wearing red, so we'll hope they win tonight. In the meantime, I'll put Cardinals hats on them and tell them why later. For a few hours we'll talk about the game and the men who play it, why they play it, and how they got there. We'll high-five the good stuff and try to ignore the losses and make plans to be back on the couch tomorrow night, maybe for more living-room Wiffle Ball. Anything off the chandelier is a home run. Their curiosity about baseball has drawn me back in. Not that I didn't like it. But there was always something else to do—a tiny car to race around the carpet, dinner to eat and baths to take and teeth to brush and a book to read aloud before their breaths would become long and steady and perfect. There were road trips and new teams in new cities and short conversations on the phone when I told them I loved them and would see them soon—"Home in two sleeps," I'd say—and, yeah, I'd try to hit them a home run tonight. Now we do baseball together, and it's uncomplicated.

Some evenings we'll gather up the fishing gear and carry it to the dock off the backyard. There are snapper and catfish and snook hiding in those depths. The sun's setting and the air's cooler and whatever's left over from dinner might be on our hooks. You'd be amazed at what a hunk of chicken nugget will bring. In a half whisper, I'll tell them what my father told me about how smart those fish are, and what they're hungry for, and when. How they seem to know what's coming. The boys are sometimes more interested in the bait bucket, where sardines or greenies or goggle-eyes or mullets await their turn on the hook, just as I was at their age. I find myself hoping they love this, the hunt, the wins and losses, the beauty of it all, because I love it so much, and because a father and his boys ought to be able to do this together forever.

Some nights, when the water is calm and the lines are taut, they look at me in a way I've never looked at myself. Maybe I'm imagining that. But I like the way it feels. I like what it has taught me about selflessness and accountability. About showing up. I like what it has taught me about myself and what I need to be today and every day after that.

See, there is the life you want. There is the life you get. There is what you do with that.

Simple, only not.

I had what they called a generational left arm, and I knew it from the time I was barely older than Declan. There are plenty of good arms in baseball. There are great arms. There are a few—very few—special arms. I had one of those. The scouts said so. The batters said so. Everyone said so. I couldn't help but believe them. I wanted to be special.

That was the life I had, the one I'd live through that special arm. Until it wasn't. Mine is the story of what I did with that.

It is the story of a childhood that could not be trusted because of a father who could not be trusted, and the story of the arm that carried me away from years of snarling abuse. I was in the major leagues barely two years out of high school, a big leaguer and celebrated phenomenon—that word—at twenty, and at twenty-one the starting pitcher in the biggest game of the only life I ever wanted.

It is the story of what happened after that. For on that very day, when I asked my arm to be more special than ever, it deserted me. Maybe I deserted it. For the next five years, I chased the life I wanted, the one I believed I owed to myself, the one I probably believed the world owed to me. To the gift that was my left arm. To the work I'd done to help make it special. To the life I thought I deserved.

My father watched from prison. I was glad for that. I was especially glad for my mother.

It is the story of my fight to return to the pitcher I was, a fight mounted on a psyche—a will—formed as protection against my own father. There were small victories. There were far more failures. Those pushed me deeper into my own mind, into the dark fight-or-flight corners where the costs in happiness and emotional stability were severe. The fights of my childhood against a drunken, raging father had tracked me into manhood, and now the villain was within me, restless and relentless and just out of reach. For the life I wanted, I thrashed savagely and bled freely. There is a saying that goes loosely like this: Don't fight the man who does not mind what he looks like when the fight is over. There is no winning that fight. That fight never ends. I stood in for five years, then fought some more. I wish I could have said at the end, "Yeah, but you should've seen the other guy." But when I got done fighting, he looked fine. He wasn't even breathing hard.

It is the story of some triumph. Maybe I would not be a pitcher, and certainly I would not be the pitcher who had walked to the mound one afternoon in St. Louis a long time before and staggered off. Instead, I would be a ballplayer.

I would start again in my midtwenties, ancient for the lower minor leagues, and I would return to the major leagues on a midsummer night in 2007 as an outfielder—an unfathomable journey even for me, the guy who'd trudged every inch of it—and I would play the game against the backdrop of the life I'd always wanted while living the life I got.

They called me "the Natural." It never felt that easy. It never felt that pretty. But I loved the story. If there was a comparison to be drawn, I guess I'd be closer to the Roy Hobbs in the book, the one Bernard Malamud wrote, a grittier version of the Roy Hobbs that showed up thirty-two years later in movie theaters. I had a past I didn't quite know how to explain, and had no desire to. It was too dark in there. It was too personal. Nobody needed to know but me, and I'd already spent too many nights trying to forget.

When the time came, be it on the pitcher's mound or in the batter's box, I would face the game alone. Just me and the demons. They'd threatened to wreck my career, as they had the careers of plenty before me. And every day I returned to test the demons again. I'd take one more breath, throw one more pitch, leave it behind, and try again. When there were no more pitches in me, so little hope left in me, I changed my spikes, picked up a bat, took one more breath, took one more swing, and tried again. Mine is the story of the making of a big leaguer, which isn't so unusual. Except I did it twice. It is the story of the making of the man, the best I could make him. Once.

It is the story of relationships. A boy and his volatile father. A boy and his abused mother. A boy and the game that summoned him. A young man and his conscience. And then a man lost, and those who would help him win back the life he wanted or make do with the life he got.

It is about the relationship between a boy and the game that freed him, and then turned on him, and why.

And it is a story about how a brain can take the simplest task—pick up that baseball and throw it there—and make it near impossible. How men like me, big, strong men—major-league pitchers and catchers, NBA shooters, NFL quarterbacks, pro golfers—can be reduced to somber, anxiety-ridden casualties of the mind. In the grasp of my monster, I would wake nightly soaked in sweat and terror. And then I would begin the slow daily preparation to return to a baseball clubhouse, where I would change into a uniform, snatch a glove from the bottom of my locker, and wonder if today—finally today—would be the day I would be me again.

For the longest time, I didn't much care why it was that I was the one who had been flattened, that there were a million pitchers out there and I had to be the one who was the sweaty, lost, breathless mess. Would it have changed anything to know why? Would it have made me a better pitcher? Would it have gotten me back my life?

If a tire goes flat, does the reason change anything? You go to the trunk, drag out the spare, jack up the car, and keep going. The road is still there. The clock is still ticking. The destination remains. A hundred cars pass in the meantime, and the people inside think the same thing: "Better him than me." They think, "Poor guy. Now, do I take this left or the next one?" They think, "Looks cold out there."

I didn't need them. I could change my own tire. I could fill it with air and go as long as I could and fill it again and keep going and fill it again and make it another mile.

Then, years later, with all that road behind me, two separate baseball careers behind me, I did begin to wonder what that was all about. My sons would want to know. The next generation of ballplayers, who would stop along their roads for them? Who would stand before them, arms crossed, squinting into the sun, and say, "Welp, looks like you picked up a nail. Happened to me once too."

I could help, maybe. I could care, for sure. They would know they were not alone, and even if that tire wouldn't ever be quite right again, and it probably wouldn't, at least somebody who'd been right there before had stopped. I was finally ready to know more, to ask around, to hear their stories, to learn what had happened to me. The symptoms I knew. The cause, though? I wanted to ask, not in a pained, pathetic way but in a clinical way: Why me? And, then, who's next? What's next?

My story is a trip back along that road, only this time with my head up, curious, honest, looking back over the lives that I wanted and got, and the time I shared a brain with a monster. It's still in there somewhere. We learned to live with each other. Perhaps we could ally against the monsters in other people's heads. In that, I wanted to look ahead too. I wanted to travel that road with Lory at my side and my sons strapped into the backseat. I would be present. I would be better.

On the very first day, standing on a pitcher's mound in St. Louis, I could hear the blood draining from my head. On many in between, I cursed it, medicated it, drank with it, and pleaded with it. On the very last day, I surrendered to it, stepped around it, and chose to live with it. For that, I would win, dammit, I would win, and so years later, maybe my sons would too. We get what we get sometimes, and it's still worth a fight. Every bit of it.

I want them to know my story when they are old enough and curious enough, which is what this book is for. I didn't want to leave anything out because some of it was great, everything I'd ever wanted, and some of it was not, and they should know that. It's their road too. Maybe I could clear some of the nails.

See, there's only so much you can remember over a fishing hole. There's only so much worth remembering.