Inside Baseball: The Best of Tom Verducci (39 page)

Then a single, tremendous crack of thunder fills the air. It sends all of us running through the rain like little boys to the safety of indoors.

In that little treehouselike meeting in the rain, and in the clubhouse over the days to come, I gain a better understanding of the power of camaraderie in baseball. As in the Army, you are thrown together with people of various backgrounds. You might not even like some of them if you met under different circumstances, but wearing the same uniform, sharing the same locker room and shower room and nakedness and fruit bowl, spending so much time together in a confined space—the long, narrow Mattick clubhouse makes me think of a submarine—bonds you to them almost against your will. There is a strange sanctity about a place where guys can pass wind freely without apology.

I am reminded of this unwritten code when I ask lefthander Ted Lilly, who lockers next to me, about Jose Canseco and his steroid tell-all book,
Juiced
. Lilly, who played with Canseco on the 2000 Yankees, has the soft, expressive eyes of a giraffe and such a perpetually concerned look upon his face that pitcher Justin Miller calls him “Eeyore.” But Lilly’s mien becomes even more somber when I mention Canseco.

“I don’t understand it,” he says. “You become so close with people as teammates. You share things with them all the time, and then one person violates that trust for what, money? I don’t understand how you can do that to teammates, to friends.”

Lilly uses the words as synonyms. In the way of the clubhouse, to become a teammate is to become a friend. “I don’t doubt that some things he said in general may have some truth,” Lilly says. “I know I’ve been tempted [to use steroids]. You think, What can I do to get to that level? But I have always been very concerned about the health impact.”

“I’m sure you’ve seen guys make money off it,” I tell him.

“And there are guys who lost money,” he says, “because their bodies broke down. And who knows what problems they still face.”

NOW I FEEL like a big leaguer. I have discovered the miracle of freshly laundered clothes waiting for me in my locker. One day you take off the sweaty stuff and chuck it into a large bin, and the next morning it’s all there hanging neatly. My spikes are out-of-the-box spotless. For this I can thank clubhouse manager Kevin Malloy and his crew.

Batista’s locker is the talk of the clubhouse. Nothing is on hangers. Everything is folded crisply into neat piles. Finally, Batista walks in and explains: “That’s so I’m ready when I’m traded. I’ve got everything packed up. I just throw it into a bag, and I’m gone. Because you never know when it’s going to happen to you in this game.”

Everybody laughs, knowing, of course, that he speaks the truth.

At 8 a.m. we are back in the classroom—Wells, with a fresh apple, in the same seat—this time for the annual umpires’ presentation, delivered by umpire supervisor Rich Garcia. Garcia notes that the average time of game increased by one minute last year, to 2:51, and players need to be aware of pace-of-game guidelines. He also says more strikes on the upper and lower edges of the strike zone will be called this year—too many were called balls last year, according to the laser-guided QuesTec umpire information system.

Johnson asks Garcia if it is true that QuesTec allows a two-inch buffer zone on each side of the plate when grading umpires. Garcia acknowledges that it’s true, and adds that if you include the three-inch width of the baseball, the 17-inch plate actually becomes a 27-inch plate to QuesTec.

There are grumbles in the back of the room.

“Schilling gets more.”

“Pedro gets more.”

Garcia moves on to beanballs. The quick warnings issued by umpires are designed to cut down on brawls. “And they have,” he says. “We had only three last year. Myth: Once a warning is issued, my guy can’t pitch inside. Fact: 75 percent of hit batters following a warning did not result in an ejection. So it’s working.”

“I thoroughly disagree!”

It is Batista, raising a loud objection.

“Last year I was given a warning for throwing a changeup in the dirt,” he says angrily. “A
changeup
!”

Garcia admits umpires can make mistakes but reiterates that brawls are terrible for the game’s image and the umpires will act aggressively to prevent them.

Today, under a clear sky, the time has come for live batting practice. Wells, Johnson, Catalanotto and I will hit against Francisco Rosario, a 24-year-old righthander whose 94-mph fastball and sharp slider have him on the cusp of making the club.

The outfielders swing rarely and only sometimes make solid contact. Now it is my turn. I decide to look at the first pitch, a fastball. It seems to hurry at the end, like a car shifting into a higher gear.

O.K., I’m ready. Rosario shows me the palm of his glove, indicating that a changeup is coming. I get a good look at it. It is knee high. As I swing, it disappears, swallowed up by one of those manholes, right under my bat.

The next pitch is a slider off the plate. I let it go. Rosario throws another slider, this time getting more plate than he prefers. I swing and experience that unmistakable feeling of solid contact on my hands, like a hammer delivering the final, perfect blow to a nail. There is no resistance. What looks to the rest of the world like a routine fly ball to rightfield is pure bliss to me.

Jesse Carlson, a nonroster lefthander with a slingshot delivery, is next to pitch.

“V-Dub, should I hit off this guy?” asks Catalanotto, a lefthanded batter.

Just then Carlson throws his first warmup pitch, a searing fastball in the vicinity of where a lefthanded hitter’s head would be.

“Forget it,” Catalanotto says. “Tom, get in there.”

I swing at three of Carlson’s pitches and make contact each time, fouling a fastball into the batting cage, hitting another fastball with some authority off the protective screen in front of Carlson and bouncing a curveball in the hole between third base and shortstop. And my bat still is in one piece.

My scariest moment actually occurs when hitting against Double A coach John Valentin. Players don’t wear batting helmets for dead-arm BP because the coaches simply groove pitches over the plate. But Valentin lets go of one that is headed straight for my head. It’s the last place I’m expecting it, so I freeze for a moment, then finally duck and cover. The ball whacks off the back of my left shoulder. Valentin later apologizes profusely.

“Don’t worry,” I tell him. “Better you hit me than Halladay or Batista.”

Butterfield gives us another baserunning clinic, in which he slips in a mention of an “orange gopher.” We all exchange glances, perplexed.

“What’s an orange gopher?” Menechino asks.

“’Bout 15 cents a slice,” Butterfield replies in his best deadpan.

After practice most everyone hits the weight room for conditioning and strength training. Zaun is twisting his hands in a bucket of uncooked rice to make them stronger without the stress of weights. I am running on a treadmill. The smell of meat loaf is wafting into the room from the players’ lounge down the hall, part of the daily breakfast and lunch service that is known simply and affectionately around baseball as the Spread.

“I’m not even sure if it’s real ground beef,” a player behind me says.

“I like it,” replies another. “If it’s free, it’s me.”

I take inventory of the room. There is golf on TV, men reading
Maxim
while riding exercise bikes, Skid Row blasting out of a killer sound system and the aroma of free meat loaf calling the hungry to their caloric satisfaction. The testosterone factor is off the charts.

THE NOTE in a corner of the clubhouse whiteboard reads:
CHAPEL
. 8:05. I am one of six players to attend, all of us in uniform. The service is led by Gabe Gross, a strapping, fuzzy-cheeked 25-year-old outfielder with a swing as pretty as Easter morning. He is, as if straight out of Central Casting, the Southern ideal of the born
ath-a-lete
, the can’t-miss kid who can play every sport, praise God and date the captain of the cheerleading squad with perfect equanimity. The son of an NFL player, Gross played football, basketball and baseball in high school and football and baseball at Auburn. He started six games as a freshman quarterback at Auburn in 1998 after being recruited by Terry Bowden.

“My dad told me, ‘Son, once you play quarterback for Auburn, your life is forever changed,’” Gross says. “He was right. To this day, no matter what I do in baseball, people in Auburn know me as the guy who played quarterback at Auburn. And always will.”

After Tommy Tuberville replaced Bowden, Gross dropped to third on the depth chart in his sophomore season. Two games after losing his starting job and with fall baseball practice about to begin, he quit the football team. Twenty-one months later the Blue Jays selected him in the first round of the 2001 draft. He made his big league debut last year and is likely to begin this year getting more seasoning in Triple A, though he has the tools to be a star any day now.

Gross reads a few passages from his Bible and relates them to himself and baseball. “I know sometimes I worry so much about baseball, worry about going 4 for 4 that night,” he says. “And I know if I put my trust in God, that’s really what matters most. And those are the times when I seem to play better too.”

The service ends with the players offering special intentions for prayer. Most of them involve immediate family members, left behind but never far from their thoughts in this relentless, isolated pursuit called baseball.

Rain pounds Dunedin again. We repeat our Day 1 schedule: soft toss, tracking pitches from the pitchers, dead-arm BP. I’m amazed at the consistent dead-solid contact that players make in BP. Everyone looks like a star, including 24-year-old Alex Rios, a 6′5″ outfielder and 1999 first-round pick who mysteriously hit only one home run in 426 at bats last year for the Jays. He added 15 pounds over the winter, though, and the ball is jumping off his bat.

“He’s going to have a big year,” Rettenmund says of a guy who is so quiet that I don’t think I hear him say more than two words in five days.

I ask Rettenmund to tell me the difference between a decent hitter and a great one.

“Effort,” he says. “The great ones do it easily. There’s less movement, better balance. Look at Vernon.”

Wells appears to swing casually, but the ball rockets off his bat. He is a fully formed version of Gross: the son of a football player (CFL), he played multiple sports in high school (baseball and football) and was drafted in the first round (1997). He has decided this year, in keeping with Toronto’s newfound aggressive approach to baserunning, that he will be a 30-30 player, though his career high in steals is nine. He says it the way you would tick off items on a shopping list. Consider it done.

“Vernon’s amazing,” Catalanotto says. “Twenty minutes before a game, you start feeling a little nervousness, the butterflies. It’s normal. But Vernon will be there not even in his spikes yet, just kicking back. It’s like he’s going to play a game in the backyard. He makes it look so easy.”

I, on the other hand, am one of those hitters whose effort is too visible. I am working at hitting the ball because I lack that sweet, professional flow that actually takes thousands upon thousands of swings to groove. I stick around for extra hitting against a modern pitching machine that delivers the ball out of a video screen so that it appears to be thrown by a two-dimensional life-sized pitcher.

When I am done I tell the machine’s operator, “I saw this machine in Winter Haven two years ago.”

“Oh, you used to be with the Indians?” he asks.

“Uh, no. S
PORTS
I
LLUSTRATED
.”

THE COUNCIL of elders convenes. Wells, Hudson and Catalanotto huddle in front of their lockers to review three applications for preferential locker location. They will pick two from among shortstop Russ Adams, infielder John McDonald and Johnson.

“The Pound?” Hudson says acidly of Adams’s answer to the name-the-neighborhood portion of the application. “That’s not very original.”

“He’s just trying to suck up to you,” Catalanotto says to Hudson, who is known as O-Dog.

“Bad for you,” Hudson replies to the player called Cat. “A cat in a pound is a bad idea.”

Nicknames are the pledge pins of the baseball fraternity. Earn one and you know you’re in. In addition to O-Dog, Cat and V-Dub, Johnson is Reeder, Halladay is Doc, Hinske is Ske or Hendu, Zaun is Zaunie, journeyman catcher Greg Myers is Crash, Rios is Lexi and so on. Smooth-pated third baseman Corey Koskie, signed as a free agent, has not officially been dubbed, though Malloy delivered his spring training allowance in an envelope marked COMMANDANT KLINK KOSKIE.

Players with nicknames are rarely called by their given name. Indeed, when a bat company representative calls Zaun “Gregg” while taking his order, Catalanotto interjects, “
Gregg
? How weird does that sound? I didn’t know who he was talking about.”

Menechino points to me and tells the rep, “Make sure you get his order.”

The bat rep is speechless, trying to figure out who this player is.

“Here’s what I need,” I tell him. “Ticonderoga. Number 2s.”

Wells, Hudson and Catalanotto will later confer briefly with Halladay, also one of the elders, on the clubhouse matter. But I am learning why pitchers cannot fully be team leaders. Pitchers do their own thing. They locker separately, train separately, stretch separately. Pitchers and position players are zebras and wildebeests grazing the same range. They have little in common, but nature has assigned them to the same habitat.

Just before stretching begins on Field 2, Gibbons calls out, “I need everybody here for a minute. These guys have something to say.”

The team gathers around Hudson, Wells and Catalanotto. Halladay, the zebra, stands off to the side.

Hudson says, “I’d like to announce that we have a name for our corner of the clubhouse: Oreo Row at Web Gem Way. And we’ve chosen two people to join us. V-Dub?”