Wherever I Wind Up (31 page)

Guess who gets elected to provide it?

I can’t fathom it after the way I pitched in June and the run of success I had, but I am back in the minor leagues. I am a member of the Rochester Red Wings, one of the few minor-league teams I haven’t played for, or so it feels. I go into the rotation and I get spanked around. I do not get a September call-up. It’s my own doing, I know that, but it still feels as though the knuckleball naysayers out there—no small club—are much quicker to bury a knuckleballer compared with a regular pitcher. It’s the same old refrain: How can you trust that pitch, or the people who throw it? It’s too flaky, too flighty.

Too unreliable.

Am I making excuses? Am I ever going to get there?

Am I deluding myself?

I am so much more self-aware, so much healthier, than I’ve ever been before, with the work I’ve done on myself. Am I not seeing something here? Is this a great big blind spot I have, a mental blot as big as the mound itself? Am I in denial, like a drunk whose life is being ruined by alcohol but who insists the problem is everything
but
alcohol?

No, I do not think I am in denial. In my heart and soul, I believe I am getting progressively better as a knuckleball pitcher. I believe I can be a positive, contributing member of a big-league pitching staff. If you want to look at my history and argue otherwise, that’s your prerogative. Go ahead. But I know my pitch and I know myself and I know I am getting better.

I just need one more chance. Will any team give me a chance?

My agent’s phone rings. The caller is Omar Minaya from New York.

We’re interested in talking to you about R. A. Dickey, Omar says.

SEPTEMBER 17, 2011

atlanta, georgia

Surrounded by crumpled water cups, wads of sunflower seeds, and jubilant Atlanta Braves, I sit in the dugout of Turner Field with one question: Why is this game so freakin’ painful? It seems ludicrous that a simple game can make you hurt so much. It’s not a hurt that comes from throwing 115 pitches, but the kind that comes when you pour your heart into a piece of work and then watch somebody come along and spray-paint it.

The Braves just beat me, 1–0, and are hugging and high-fiving everywhere I look. Soon the Braves will be gone and Styx will arrive for a postgame concert. The way I feel, I may stay in the dugout for the whole show, catatonic. I have just pitched three-hit ball and shut out the Braves into the eighth.

It earns me a pat on the backside from my manager and my thirteenth loss of the year. My ERA is 3.35.

I lose the game on a bouncing RBI single up the middle by the great Chipper Jones. I almost caught it. That makes the hurt even worse, and so does the fact that twice I failed to get a bunt down in key at-bats, a screwup that could’ve cost us the game. (I’m proud of being a competitive hitter and a dependable bunter. This failure is deeply frustrating.) But maybe the most irksome thing is that I missed on a 3–2 pitch and walked Martin Prado just ahead of Chipper. You can’t walk a guy there. You just can’t.

And I did, because I threw him a full-count knuckleball that stayed up.

There’s an old baseball adage that you can’t let yourself get beaten by anything but your best pitch—that you have to dance with the girl you bring. I bring Ms. Knuckleball to every party. Today she is a thing of beauty, dancing and sliding and flowing, the Brave men wanting her but not being able to catch her. Today she is also fickle. Earlier in my career I wouldn’t have trusted my knuckleball in a 3–2 count and I would’ve thrown Prado a sinker, a much easier pitch to control. I can’t do that now. I have to go at them with my best stuff or why even be out there at all? Maybe 90 percent of the time throwing the game I did will get you a win. Tonight it doesn’t, because Tim Hudson was just a little better than me.

So I sit in the dugout with the cups and seeds and my regrets, thinking about my feeble bunts and my three strikeouts—the first time I have struck out three times in a game since eighth grade. I think about the strike I couldn’t throw to Prado, and the strikes I couldn’t throw to Jason Heyward, a .220 hitter, to lead off the same inning.

I am deep into this unhappy recap, watching workers set things up for Styx, when I look up to see Phil Niekro walking toward me. I haven’t seen Phil since the offseason after 2008, when I went down to Atlanta to work with him. He was incredibly kind and helpful to me, and wouldn’t accept a penny for his time. Just one knuckleballer helping another, big time.

I get up and shake his hand.

You had a great one today, Phil says. I’m sorry for you that it ended the way it did.

Thanks, Phil. There was a lot of you in that pitcher you saw out there today.

We talk for a few minutes about the day, the knuckleball, the Braves. He is so affirming it can’t help but take the edge off my ache. I begin to feel lighter, gladdened by the opportunities I’ve been given, the people like Phil and Charlie Hough who have invested in me, and the grace of God that has brought me to this place—a place where I can hold the disappointment of a moment along with the blessing of another chance.

Phil smiles as he turns to leave.

You need to come back down to see me so I can help you with your bunting, he says.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CITI DWELLER

T
he Dickey Baseball Tour Across America arrives at its latest destination—Buffalo, New York—in April 2010. I don’t want to count my number of stops, but I do know they’ve included the Dust Belt (Oklahoma City), the Coffee Belt (Seattle), and now the Snow Belt (Buffalo). And that’s not even counting the Shuffleboard Belt (Port Charlotte, Florida). I find a two-bedroom apartment over a garage, a short ways out of town. I set up a card table for our kitchen table and go to Wal-Mart for our bedding—three inflatable mattresses that will be distributed thusly: a double for Anne and me, another double for our girls, Gabriel and Lila, and a single raft for Eli.

I have no idea how long we will be sleeping on these mattresses; I just blow them up and hope for the best.

I want to believe this is going to lead somewhere, but my new team—the New York Mets—is not making it easy. I signed with the Mets over the winter, mostly because I know Omar Minaya from our days in Texas and I felt his interest was sincere. He’s tried to sign me for the past two years, so that has to mean something. Omar tells me the fib that every team tells its free-agent pitchers—“You’re going to have a chance to make the rotation”—but that doesn’t do much to allay my anxiety when I get to camp and see all the pitchers, squadrons of them, trying to make the team. Well, it seems like squadrons of them; maybe two dozen. It’s hard not to be insecure about your chances of beating out everyone when you’ve bounced around to as many Belts as I have. I am trying to forget the body count and working on throwing the best knuckleball I can throw when Dan Warthen, the pitching coach, stops by my locker and, yes, taps me on the shoulder, a month into camp. I, of course, know instantly that there are two scenarios that can play out here.

This could be a good, Gardenhire shoulder tap. Or it could be a bad, John McLaren shoulder tap. I am rooting for the former.

Jerry wants to see you in his office, Dan tells me. Jerry is Jerry Manuel, the Mets manager—the same Jerry Manuel who basically called me the twelfth best pitcher on a twelve-man staff when I came on in relief against his White Sox in 2001.

It is March 15. I’ve unpacked my bags in Port St. Lucie, but the spring still has a while to run. Jerry doesn’t waste any time, or emotion.

We’re sending you out to the minor-league side, he says. Go down there and get your work in. We know you will be a professional.

I am the first player cut that spring. Not the second, or the third.

The first.

I console myself at the end of the day by filling up a little goody bag from the ready supply of snacks and beverages that are in the big-league clubhouse, heading home with pouches of trail mix and a few bottles of chocolate milk and Gatorade. I may not be a major-league pitcher in the Mets’ eyes, but I am making sure I eat like one.

When I report to the minor-league complex, Terry Collins, who is running that department at the time, gives me more bad news.

There’s a rule for all minor leaguers in the organization that no beards are allowed, Terry says.

I have had my beard for six years. I am fond of my beard. I’m not going to let it interfere with my livelihood, but the rule seems inane.

Are you serious? I ask.

Yes, I am.

There’s no exemption for a thirty-five-year-old man with a wife and three kids?

No, I’m sorry, R.A. There’s not.

So I gather Gabriel, Lila, and Eli around, and we go on the porch of my Port St. Lucie rental house, and we make a family project out of shaving Daddy’s beard. Everybody gets a turn with the clippers and gets to take a whack out of my lovely, luxurious growth. I’m fit to be a Met organizational player now, but as I rub my bare chin for the first time since 2004, I am wondering anew what the heck I am doing and where this is all going. How long am I going to keep dragging Anne and the kids around the country so I can chase this increasingly far-fetched dream? I know I’ve asked this question before. More than once. But really, where does it stop? No horn is going to sound, and no clock is going to tick down to zero. It’s on me to decide, and I just don’t have any clarity about it.

Is it fair to keep doing this? Is it financially foolish? Perseverance is fine and all, but isn’t there a time when you have to stop messing around with your grip and be a grown-up?

Yes there is. One morning, I find myself making a call to Lipscomb University and get a nice admissions officer on the phone.

I tell her my name is R. A. Dickey and I am hoping she can answer a few questions for me. I tell her I attended the University of Tennessee some years ago and left school about a year short of getting my degree in English literature. My GPA was over 3.0, so I don’t think that’s going to be an issue. I think I may want to transfer to Lipscomb so I can finish my studies. I ask her how we can set this in motion.

It’s really quite a simple process, the admissions officer says. We just need to get a copy of your transcript from Tennessee and, assuming all the credits are transferrable, we can see where you stand and then get things moving. Depending on departmental requirements, you may not even need a full year of credits.

I thank her for her time and make a note to call Tennessee to get my transcript. My emergent plan is to be an English teacher, but obviously I am not getting hired without a college degree, at least. I remember what a positive impact Miss Brewer at MBA had on me. It’s exciting to imagine myself in a high school classroom, teaching English. With a beard.

I think about what it would be like to be an undergraduate again, fourteen years after I stopped my studies to be a pro ballplayer. I wonder what it will be like to be buying books by Tolstoy instead of throwing knuckleballs by Tulowitzki.

I love literature. But it’s hard to even comprehend.

So the classroom is not for now—not yet. The mound is still my office, and I know how the business in the office is conducted. If I get my work done and done well in Buffalo, maybe I’ll get a shot at working at company headquarters in New York City. But will I? Will I really get a fair shot if I do well? From what I hear, Omar and Jerry need the club to have a strong showing to keep their jobs; are they going to entrust their futures to a geriatric knuckleballer who has twenty-two career victories and seems to have been knocking around baseball since the Eisenhower administration?