The Closer (5 page)

G
ETTING TO THE
N
EW
World isn’t easy. My fellow prospect Luis Parra is my traveling companion. We have to change planes in Miami. That means navigating the Miami airport, finding a new gate, and getting there before the plane leaves. Luis is as clueless as I am. It feels as if we’ve been dropped in the middle of a big city in a foreign country, because we have. People are racing around with manic looks on their faces. Babies are wailing. Announcements are blaring. I’ve never seen so many people or heard such chaos.

Fortunately, there are enough Spanish-speaking people that, after asking about ten of them for help, we manage to get to the gate for the short hop to Tampa. The flight is memorable only because I discover, two trips into my flying career, that I am terrified being off the ground. I will fly millions of miles in the next twenty-plus years. It never gets better.

We get off the plane and start walking down the concourse of the Tampa airport. It is less hectic but still bewildering. I see all these signs in English that I don’t understand.

Bagel? French fries? Home of the Whopper?

What do these things mean?

Baggage claim? Lost and found? Ground transportation?

Can somebody please explain?

Parra and I keep walking. We have one objective: Find a guy in a Yankee hat and Yankee jacket. This is all they tell us: Look for a guy named Chris wearing Yankee stuff. He’s sort of a roly-poly guy in his late thirties. You can’t miss him.

Actually, we could miss him, very easily. If anybody else is wearing a Yankee hat and jacket, we’re in big trouble. They probably wouldn’t leave No. 1 draft choices who don’t speak English on their own in a strange airport, but we are obscure Panamanian kids who sign for roughly the equivalent of a pound of shrimp. So, no, we aren’t going to get the royal treatment.

We’re going to get Chris and his Yankee outfit.

Down the escalator we go, near the baggage carousel. Wait.

Look, there’s a guy in a Yankee jacket. Maybe that’s him, I tell Parra. He looks as if he’s waiting for somebody.

We walk over.

Chris? I say.

He extends his hand.

That’s me. Welcome to Tampa. You must be Mariano Rivera and Luis Parra. C’mon, we’ll get your bags and head over to the complex.

Neither of us has any idea what he is saying. English isn’t even our second language. It’s not our language at all. Our blank faces tell him as much.

The short trip from the airport to Yankee headquarters blows my mind. The roads are so big… and so paved. The office buildings and stores are all huge and new and look so impressive. The layout of everything is dazzling in size and scope, and then we pull into the Yankee complex and get out of the car, and my awe takes off like a speedboat in the Canal.

I look one way and see the most beautifully manicured ball field I have ever laid eyes on. I look the other way and see another field, just as perfect, and then see two more beyond that, and wonder
how it is that baseball fields could look like this (I am guessing the grass is not cut by a kid with a machete).

I am not in El Tamarindo anymore. I am in Hardball Heaven.

There are spotless offices and a spacious clubhouse. There are batting cages and training rooms and more bats and balls and helmets than I knew existed. Chris, who is a clubhouse guy when he isn’t an airport driver, hands us our practice gear and uniforms. I also get a glove and a set of spikes, so I can retire the pair with the hole. It’s like Christmas in April. We head over to the Bay Harbor Inn, the nearby hotel that belongs to Yankees owner George Steinbrenner; it is where we will be living for the season. I have stayed in a few roadside motels that cost ten or twelve bucks a night traveling around Panama, but those are places where you are lucky if you get a bed. Here, Parra and I have a television and our own bathroom. We have a stockpile of towels and soaps and shampoos. There is room service, too.

What’s room service? Parra asks me.

I have no idea.

Luis and I don’t venture far from the hotel very often, mostly because of the language barrier. When we go out to eat, if we don’t have a Latin server, we point to the photo on the menu that looks good. Iguana dishes are strangely absent.

When we get on the field and start the workouts, I am struck right away by the size of the players, the pitchers especially. They are all big and a bunch of them are thick-bodied. Our top pitcher, a left-handed kid from Duke University named Tim Rumer, is six foot three and over 200 pounds. Russ Springer, from Louisiana State University, is six foot four and about 200 pounds, and even a six-foot right-hander from Clemson, Brian Faw, outweighs me by 30 pounds or so. I watch these guys throw and I figure the radar gun is about to break, they are throwing so hard. Rumer has a curveball that breaks about two feet.

But the more I am out on the field with the Gulf Coast Yankees, the more I know I can compete with them. When we run and field and do drills, I am right there with everybody. And when I am on the mound I discover that, as skinny as I am, and as underwhelming as my 86- or 87-mile-per-hour fastball is, I can do one thing better than just about anybody else:

Put the ball exactly where I want.

With most pitchers in rookie ball, the coaches tell them to just throw strikes, even if they are over the middle of the plate. Once you can do that, you can expand the strike zone and work on fine-tuning your command. But I am not like that. The Lord has blessed me with the gift of control. If I want to throw the ball knee-high on the black, I do it. If I want to paint the black on the other side, I can do that, too. I still have my one-pitch repertoire—fastball—with a pretty lame slider and a mediocre changeup mixed in. I will work on the changeup for years, and it never gets any better. The rookie hitters watch me warm up and probably think,
This is going to be easy.

Tim Cooper, our third baseman, sometimes catches me in the bullpen. Coop, as we all call him, studied Spanish in high school and becomes my language instructor. I throw my fastball and he smiles, shakes his head, and says, How are guys not whacking these pitches out of the park every time?

My manager is Glenn Sherlock, and my pitching coach is Hoyt Wilhelm, the old knuckleballer. They are both good guys, though I understand little of what they say. They put me in the bullpen to start the year. Wilhelm is doing what he can to help, but basically I know nothing about the nuances of pitching. All around me are guys who have been groomed to do this for a decade or more, and here I am, a guy who got here because one Sunday afternoon the Panama Oeste Cowboys needed somebody to finish a game.

But when I get in the game, I am usually ahead of the hitter,
1–2 or 0–2, by the time the announcer finishes saying my name. It goes that way pretty much the whole year. I pitch a total of 52 innings and give up 17 hits and one earned run. I strike out 58 and walk 7 and have an ERA of 0.17. Tim Rumer is the club’s pitching star, one of the best guys in the Gulf Coast League, but with my very average fastball I have quite a run of success.

This doesn’t surprise me.

It shocks me.

All around I see guys who are stronger than me and throw harder than me, and I am outperforming nearly all of them. It is almost an out-of-body experience. I get guy after guy out and think the same thing every time:

How on earth am I doing this?

The way everything is falling together is almost incomprehensible. First, I am supposed to be in the Dominican Republic, not Tampa, but the Yankees decided to bring me to extended spring training because I am already twenty. Now, in the first few weeks, they see how raw I am as a pitcher and start talking again about moving me to the Dominican Republic to get in extra work, but Herb intervenes.

Yes, he’s raw, but look at the command he has, Herb tells his scouting bosses. Let’s let him pitch in games and see what we’ve got.

It has to be the work of the Lord. I am getting results that are way beyond my physical abilities. I don’t fully understand what is going on, but it feels much bigger than me.

Rookie ball is unlike any other level of pro baseball, because it is all so new and different for everybody. For foreign guys like me and American guys who bypass college, it’s not just our first time away from home, it’s our first time playing this many games—more than sixty—in a season. There is so much to get accustomed to, and performance can be totally skewed. The top pick in the entire big
league draft in 1990, Chipper Jones, is in our league. He plays for the Gulf Coast Braves. He hits .229 that year. The premier pitching prospect in the league, Jose Martinez of the Mets, winds up appearing in a total of four big league games. The top reliever, Anthony Bouton of the Gulf Coast Rangers, piles up seventeen saves and two years later is out of baseball altogether. Tim Rumer never pitches in the big leagues. I am the twenty-sixth-rated pitcher in the Gulf Coast League. I do not make the All-Star team. I am as anonymous as you can get. I take home $310 every two weeks, after taxes, and save it to give to my parents when I get back to Panama.

Tim Cooper and I get closer and closer as the season goes on. I even let him cut my hair. He does a good job, and instructs me on ballplayer humor, too. I can’t do anything about your face, he says. We travel the Gulf Coast by bus, to Dunedin and Clearwater and Bradenton, and we make up a rule: Coop is only allowed to speak Spanish, and I am only allowed to speak English. Some people go with Berlitz to learn a language. Others go with Rosetta Stone. I go with Tim Cooper, of Chico, California. I start to pick up some words, even some sentences, and I pick up even more when we go out to play pool after dinner. We bet $1 a game, and I take a lot of Coop’s money. (I got pretty good at pool hanging out in the clubs in Chorrera.) I learn how to say, This is like taking candy from a baby.

We also go fishing a lot. Behind the Bay Harbor, there’s a wooden pier, and we buy some fishing poles and put the lines in the water. If the fish aren’t biting off the pier, we’ll wade into the Gulf. Mostly we reel in catfish, and then we release them and catch some more. I can’t get away from fish no matter where I go.

On a bus trip to Sarasota one day, Coop decides to raise the bar on my English.

Okay, we’re going to do a little role play right now, Coop says. You just won Game 7 of the World Series, and Tim McCarver
wants to talk to you. You can’t call in a translator. That’ll kill the moment. You have to be able to speak English, so you might as well start learning now.

Ready?

And Coop channels his best Tim McCarver:

Mariano, could you ever have imagined this when you were growing up in Panama—pitching in the World Series for the Yankees?

Not really. It’s amazing. Thanks to the Lord, I was able to get those last outs.

You had to face three strong hitters at the end. What was your approach?

I just want to make good pitches and get ahead.

You used to work on your father’s fishing boat, and now you are a world champion. What have you learned along the way?

I think if you have the help of the Lord, you can do anything. You can dream big things.

Coop ends the interview there.

Muy bueno, he says.

Thank you, I say.

The Gulf Coast Yankees are barely a .500 team, but I keep getting people out. With one day left in the season, I have pitched a total of 45 innings—5 innings short of qualifying for the league ERA title. Sherlock consults with Yankee player-development people and asks them if I can start against the Pirates so I can get the innings I need, even though I had pitched a couple of innings the day before. The Yankees okay it. I haven’t gone five innings the whole season, but I figure I can do it if I am economical.

It is August 31, 1990, a Friday. The game is at home, in Tampa. I cruise through three scoreless innings, then a fourth. We take a
3–0 lead. I have not given up a hit as I take the mound in the top of the fifth. A Pirate hitter rips a ball toward third base. Coop makes a diving grab on the backhand side, and fires to first to get him. Minutes later in the outfield, Carl Everett, the Yankees’ No. 1 draft choice that year, runs down a ball in the gap.

Going into the seventh, the Pirates are still without a hit. They have had one base runner; he got on when our second baseman booted a grounder. I get the first two outs in the seventh and have only one out to go (we’re playing a doubleheader; in the minors, that means that the games are shortened to seven innings). All I am thinking about is hitting the glove of my catcher, Mike Figga, and making a good pitch. I don’t let my mind go anywhere else. I get the guy on a fastball on the corner and an instant later I am engulfed by teammates.

There may be fifty people in the stands, but this moment—and sharing it with my teammates—is one of the best feelings I’ve ever had on a ball field. It’s the first no-hitter I’ve ever thrown. By the terms of my contract, it is also supposed to earn me $500 and a watch from the Yankees, but I’m not sure if those bonuses are in play for a seven-inning game.

So I call the head of the whole player-development operation for the Yankees, Mark Newman, who is traveling in Washington, and make my case in my best broken English.

You’ve had a great season, Mariano. We’ll give you your bonuses, happily.

In the clubhouse after the game, the Yankees reward our rousing finish by ordering in wings from Hooters. Speaking in Spanish, Coop says: I think you owe me a cut of the bonus for saving your no-hitter.

Speaking in English, I reply: I no understand.

I fly back to Panama the next day with a profoundly different outlook than I had only five months earlier. I am a pitcher now. A
pitcher who wants to compete at the highest level I can. A door has opened to a world of larger possibilities than I have ever imagined. I am not a wannabe mechanic anymore. I am definitely not a fisherman anymore.

I am a professional baseball player.

For the whole off-season, I train with Chico Heron at a gym in Panama City. I get up at 5:00 a.m. and take the same two buses I took to the Yankee tryouts at Juan Demóstenes Arosemena, spending the same 45 cents and 65 cents on fare, only now I don’t have to ask for credit. I do this five days a week. I lift and run and go through exercise regimens to build up my strength and overall fitness. I throw to build up my arm strength. I’ve seen the competition now, and I’ve seen how long the odds are for a player to get out of rookie ball. We had thirty-three guys on that Gulf Coast Yankee team. Only seven would make it to the majors, and only five would have careers of any substance: Shane Spencer, Carl Everett, Ricky Ledee, Russ Springer, and me.