Ball Four (RosettaBooks Sports Classics) (64 page)

Those early days were horrendous. I didn’t know I could feel such pain—an aching, empty agony. And I couldn’t escape it. Sleep was no help because waking only brought the awful news again, as if for the first time. An early-morning sucker punch to a defenseless heart; my God, that’s right, it really
did
happen.

It was too big a blow. I couldn’t absorb it. I had to take it in smaller pieces. Spend some time in denial. Force myself to look away, try to occupy my mind, throw myself into some project.

Like my stonework.

It was a hobby I had stumbled into about seven years ago, when Paula and I were still living in New Jersey. An old wooden fence in our yard had fallen down and I decided to replace it with a stone wall that I’d build myself. I’d never built a stone wall before, but I always liked the way they looked. How hard could it be?

I searched the yellow pages, found a local stone yard, and went down to check it out. They had acres of stones, all different kinds, stacked on pallets held together with chicken wire. I liked what they called “mountain fieldstone” because it looked the most natural—irregular shapes and sizes with a nice mix of colors. I tagged three pallets with my name and walked into the office. “You ever build a stone wall before?” asked the guy behind the counter. I told him no. “Good luck,” he said, as he ran my credit card through the machine.

I decided to build a freestanding, dry-laid (no cement) wall about four feet high, two feet wide, and sixty feet, six inches long because the distance felt familiar. A book I got from the library said dry-laid was harder to build because the stones had to fit snugly to keep it from falling down. On the other hand, it wouldn’t crack when the ground heaved because it was flexible. I bought some work gloves and a mason’s hammer to chip any stones that might not fit.

After a boom truck deposited the pallets in front of our house, I unloaded the stones and spread them out on the lawn so I could see what I was working with. This took me half a day. “How long are those stones going to be out there?” asked Paula. “Just a few weeks, Babe,” I said. “As soon as I’m finished with the wall.”

I learned a lot about stones that first day. The next morning I bought a weight belt, steel-toed boots, goggles, and some aspirin.

It certainly was a challenge. The trick was choosing the right stone the first time so you didn’t have to pick up a stone more than once. Or twice. Or six, or a dozen times, when it looked like the damn thing ought to fit somewhere, but never did. Some of the stones weighed more than a hundred pounds. And they didn’t have handles. I soon wore large holes in my work gloves and had to buy more. Three pallets became fifteen. A few weeks turned into six months.

But to my surprise, I discovered it was tremendously satisfying. Big rocks sliding into place with the thud of a bank vault door. A giant jigsaw puzzle without a picture on the box. And I was the artist. The work was Zen-like. I’d fall into a trance, looking for a certain stone to fill a particular space, only to spot another stone for a different space I’d been looking to fill earlier. After about a month, I could carry a dozen configurations in my head as I wandered my field of stones.

To give the wall a starting point, I began by building a large pillar, which looked pretty decent until I got going on the wall itself. Then as the wall proceeded, my skills improved and now the pillar didn’t look as good as the wall. In fact, the wall looked fantastic and the pillar didn’t seem to go with it anymore. Of course, I did the only thing I could do. I tore the pillar down. “What are you doing!?” Paula inquired from an upstairs window. “Don’t worry, Babe,” I said. “I’ll have it rebuilt in a week.”

Paula called a lot from the upstairs window that summer. Her favorite was “Do you know what
time
it is?” Not wearing a watch, I’d squint up at the sun if it wasn’t raining. But before I could answer, she’d say, “It’s three o’clock in the afternoon; you haven’t even had lunch yet!” If it was raining, she’d say, “Do you know that it’s raining?” If it was nine o’clock at night, she’d say, “It’s too dark to work out there!” Paula is a master of the understatement.

I became a nut about it. Not content with just fitting the stones, I had to make designs. I’d stand flat stones on edge to make feathers if the preceding stone looked like a bird. I built Indian totems and other symbols into that wall. There’s a fish in there somewhere if you know where to look. Of course, I don’t see the wall that often, since we moved. I only drop by once in a while for a visit just to make sure it’s still there. It always is.

Leaving my wall behind wasn’t easy. I had seriously considered numbering each stone and reassembling the whole thing at the new home we were building in Massachusetts, but cooler heads prevailed. Instead, I elevated my game. Using cement this time, I built a stone veneer foundation, a stone front entrance, and a stone facing on the back of the house. That took four summers. I also built a stone retaining wall and matching pillars at the bottom of the driveway. I have to say it all looks pretty good. The stones fit so tightly you can’t see the cement. As the building inspector, Dante Testa, said to me, “You should have been Italian.”

It was during the time I was finishing the back of the house that Laurie died.

A few weeks after the funeral, I had placed a large stone in a small grove of trees behind our house, in memory of Laurie. This would be a place I could go to be with her, since her grave in New Jersey was so far away. I remember looking out the window at Laurie’s stone, and noticing the debris of my uncompleted work near the house: all the stones spread around, the blue plastic tarp that covered the cement bags, my wheelbarrow, the tree loader I used to cart the bigger stones, the bucket of trowels, my hammers, the metal wall-ties, the sand pile, the scaffolding, and I wondered how I could ever clean up that mess in the state I was in.

It wasn’t any better inside the house. The death of a child puts tremendous stress on a marriage. The frequency of divorce is well documented, but it’s no help to even be aware of that because fear of the statistic simply adds to the woe. And in a mixed family like ours, it’s even worse. I was the father and no suffering could match mine. But in many ways it was harder for Paula. She had to postpone her own grieving to take care of me. And as wonderful a mother as Paula always tried to be for Laurie, she was still just the stepmother. Well-meaning people would stop her on the street and ask, “How’s Jim?” as if her pain didn’t count.

The house was filled with jagged edges. We grieved at different times, in different ways, and it was hard to be together. When I was crying I wanted Paula to hold me; when I could push it down I wanted to be left alone. When Paula cried, I sometimes saw her as if she was at the end of a long tunnel. “Why can’t you hold me when I’m crying?” she once asked. “I have nothing left to give,” I said. My heart had ceased to function. We walked a tightrope of emotions, and the slightest breeze would topple us into the abyss, where nothing mattered anymore.

It was during this nowhere time that I decided that rather than clean up the mess outside, I would just finish the job. It was a tricky section that remained, with lots of windows to work around, lots of chipping and fitting. I roamed the yard, measuring the stones through my tears, and talked to Laurie. It was stone therapy, and Paula was glad to have the help. I think it saved us.

Life will never be the same without Laurie, but we do everything we can to keep her close. We have her pictures around and try to find opportunities to talk about her. She always makes an entrance in some hilarious anecdote whenever we have a party. We believe her spirit hovers near. We call on her at important times. “C’mon, Laurie help us out here,” we sometimes ask. We give her partial credit for special achievements, and full credit for good weather. And just as the loss of Laurie brings me down, her memory lifts me up. Whenever I get depressed, I hear her voice. “Now, don’t you be
sittin
’ all day in that chair, Dad.”

Back in 1994, when Mickey Mantle’s son Billy died, I had sent Mickey a brief note saying how bad I felt for him. I said I had a nice memory of Billy, a polite little boy, running around the Yankee clubhouse during spring training. I also said I hoped Mickey was feeling better about
Ball Four
, that I had never intended to hurt him, and that I looked back on my Yankee years as a great time in my life.

I never expected to hear back from Mickey; I just wanted him to have the note. But about two weeks later I walked into my office and my secretary was standing by the answering machine with an enigmatic smile on her face. She said there was a message I should play for myself. I punched the button.

“Jim, this is Mickey,” said that familiar Oklahoma voice. “I just got your letter about… you know, saying you’re sorry about Billy, and I appreciate it. And I never was really hurt by your book. I think that’s been exaggerated a lot… and I sure in the hell never did tell the Yankees that if you came to an Old-Timers’ game, or something, I wasn’t going to come; I heard that was out. Anyway, thanks for the letter, and everything’s fine with me. Thanks a lot, Bud.”

Of course, I saved the tape. I’ll leave it for my grandchildren.

It was only after Laurie died that I fully understood why Mickey had called. It was because of the condolence note I had sent about Billy. When Laurie died, I remember how close I felt to anyone who called, or dropped a note, or stopped me on the street to express their sympathy. Especially if they had a particular memory of Laurie, a brief encounter, a story we hadn’t heard that would add something to our experience of her, and make her come alive again, if only for a moment. I was deeply grateful for any kind word or gesture.

The death of a child changes you in profound ways. It suddenly moves you to a new level of tolerance and empathy. I take nothing for granted today. I’m no longer so quick to judge a sour face, an angry tone of voice, a slumped demeanor. Who knows what that person’s story might be? Maybe it’s worse than mine. They say it can make you a better person, but I don’t know about that. I only know if I could just have Laurie back, I’d happily return to my former, rotten self.

In 1995, Mickey Mantle himself passed away. Nobody had been surprised to learn it was liver cancer. The surprise was that he lived as long as he did. His famous line, “If I knew I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself,” took on added poignancy. His sense of humor was there to the end, but it was his message to kids that lifted The Mick to new heights. “I’m not a role model,” he cautioned at a press conference. “Don’t do what I did.” Then Mickey endorsed the organ donor movement, thereby saving uncounted future lives thanks to the body parts that would be donated by his many fans. Talk about giving something back.

As I watched Mickey shrivel away, twenty-six years after
Ball Four
talked about his drinking, I couldn’t help wondering this: If the baseball people who had called the book lies had instead tried to help Mickey, might he still be alive?

Mickey joins Roger Maris, Elston Howard, Steve Hamilton and Dale Long among my Yankee teammates who have passed away. I don’t know if it’s just me or the fact that I’m getting older, but as time goes by I feel closer to them now than I did back then. My perspective has changed.

I was actually ambivalent in 1998 when Mark McGuire and Sammy Sosa were dueling to break Roger Maris’ home run record—his sixty-one homers in ’61 had broken Babe Ruth’s record. It was not the angry Roger of
Ball Four
that I was pulling for, but the small-town kid from Fargo, North Dakota who had signed out of high school, and never had help dealing with the big city media.

Today I see Elston Howard, not as the less-than-militant fellow portrayed in the book, but as a black man who survived growing up in the ’40s and worked his way to the top of what was once a white man’s game. I think of Elston behind the plate in his catcher’s gear, hunching his big body forward and squatting low to give me a target at the knees. He’s a teammate to me now, not a token.

So much has changed. I marvel now at our lack of sophistication back then, how naive we were, how unprepared we were for life in the big leagues. Except for the occasional college guy, invariably nicknamed “The Professor,” or in the case of Mike Marshall, “Brains,” most players had only high school educations, if that. We were raw, rough, unfinished. Sometimes it could be a problem, but mostly it was fun. When you had a teammate from Alabama or Brooklyn, for example, you got
Alabama
—and
Brooklyn
.

With college baseball replacing the lower minor leagues as a training ground, today’s players are more homogenized, more polished. The common experience of having attended college with the mere exposure to education, if not actual learning, has rounded off the corners, blurred regional differences. Players are more savvy about how the world works. They understand that they’re more than just athletes—they’re entertainers, spokesmen, profit centers. The more successful ones are small industries unto themselves with lawyers, and agents, and accountants.

People are always asking me about baseball today, starting with the money. “Isn’t it outrageous,” they say, “how much money these players are making?” I tell them the money we made was outrageous; that players are finally getting their share of the revenue, most of which comes from television.

“They’re making so much money they don’t care anymore,” say people who have no clue what it takes to get to the big leagues. The most competitive players in the world—the only ones who make it—are not likely to change their natures because of money. Nobody accuses millionaire businessmen of slacking off.

What people don’t understand is that sports is a zero-sum game. A player only does well at another player’s expense. No matter how hard they try and no matter how much you pay them, at any given time one-third of the players will be having a good year, one-third will be having an average year, and one-third will be having a bad year. It’s like putting 800 Nobel-Prize-winning nuclear physicists in a science class and grading them on a curve.