Long Shot (10 page)

My nerves settled down when I stepped into the park and saw that Mark Cresse would be throwing to me. It was like the Miami tryout all over again—same place, same pitcher. And I expected the same result. I was more than confident; I was
pumped
. Meanwhile, Tommy was wandering around the outfield, trying not to get in the way, and Ben Wade was eyeballing me skeptically alongside a couple scouts he had brought in, Gib Bodet and Bobby Darwin. Tommy has said that Gib Bodet was the only scout he knew who actually
liked
me back then.

With Cresse serving up cookies to my sweet spots, I don’t know how many balls I blasted into the stands. Twenty? Some of them came down in the top rows of the stadium.

There’s a special feeling, a surge of satisfaction, that goes along with crushing a ball that hard. At that moment, though, it couldn’t match the rush I got from taking the bull by the horns and slamming it to the turf. I knew I had done it. As the balls rattled around the cheap seats and I saw the astonishment on the faces of the Dodger guys, my fading dream sprang back to life. I began to think of myself as a professional baseball player.

Ben Wade, in particular, was beside himself. He didn’t know what to do.

Fortunately, Tommy did.

When we took a break, I walked over and said to Ben, “What do you think?”

He said, “Get me his schedule. I want to go back and see him play.”

I said, “Wait a minute, hold it. You’re telling me you’re going to go three thousand miles to see a guy play who you drafted in the sixty-second round? Come on, Ben, you’re talking to
me
. Let me ask you a question. How about if I brought a shortstop in here and he hit the ball the way that boy just hit the ball? Would you want to go see him play or would you sign him?”

He said, “I’d sign him.”

I said, “Okay, how about if I brought a catcher in here and he hit the way that boy just did. Would you want to go see him play or would you sign him?”

He said, “I’d want to sign him.”

I said, “Okay then, sign him.”

He said, “But he’s a first baseman.”

I said, “He’s a catcher now. Sign him.”

—Tom Lasorda, manager, Los Angeles Dodgers

After he talked with Tommy, Wade asked me, “You’re going to be a catcher?” When I said yeah, he told me to throw a little bit. I threw so hard my arm
still
hurts. Darwin and Bodet were looking at each other like, “How the hell did everybody miss this guy?”

Then we all went inside and Wade slipped away to call my dad. In one quick conversation, they worked out a tentative deal ensuring that the Dodgers would pay for my education if I didn’t stick.

“We’ve decided we want to sign you,” he said when he returned. “We’re willing to give you a fifteen-thousand-dollar bonus and we don’t want you to play this year. We’re going to send you to the Instructional League in the fall and we’re going to try to make you a catcher.”

Before he even said “fifteen,” I was like, “Okay, I’ll sign!” He could have said fifteen bucks or fifteen tacos. Fifteen thousand dollars sounded to me like a pretty sweet bonus for a guy drafted in the sixty-second round as a favor.

But even then, in spite of the agreement and the game plan and the baseballs rattling around in the seats of Dodger Stadium, there was no contract presented. Nothing to actually put the pen to and make the whole thing official and get me into a damn uniform.

I flew back home, more time passed, and, once again, with my career in a holding pattern, my dad called Tommy. And Tommy called Ben Wade. And Ben Wade called my dad. It was the same old circle.

“Gee, Vince, I’m sorry,” Ben said. “We’re signing our first-round pick [a pitcher, Bill Bene, who never made it to the big leagues] and I couldn’t get back to you. I’ll send Dick Teed to see you.”

Dick Teed was an area scout who was on his way to Montreal. He called and told my dad he’d meet us in the Philadelphia airport. Dad didn’t care for that. “Dick,” he said, “you know, we’d like to have you at the house—get a picture and all that.
Something
.”

“Well, I’ve got to sign this kid in Montreal,” Teed told him. “He’s quite a player.” He was talking about an outfielder named Marc Griffin, going on and on about him.

“All right, we’ll see you down to the airport.”

When we got there, Teed was still jabbering on about Marc Griffin, telling us that it was going to take about a hundred thousand and a quarter to
get him signed. My dad said, “Dick, do yourself a favor. Forget that kid and give
this
kid the money. You’ll be better off.”

“Like shit we will.”

In three years, Marc Griffin was out of the organization. In five, he was out of the game. Never made it past Double-A.

Of course, I had the advantage of signing in an airport. It’s a motivational edge.

• • •

The deal was Instructional League, and the drill was to learn how to catch. My instructors were Kevin Kennedy, who had been a minor-league catcher (and would later manage in the big leagues) and Johnny Roseboro, who had caught Koufax and Don Drysdale on some of the greatest teams the Dodgers ever had. It was like the first day of school.

Kennedy was all about mechanics and intensity. Roseboro was just the opposite. He’d mostly sit around smoking a cigarette and talking about Koufax and Drysdale, which had its benefits. With Johnny, there was always a lesson-of-the-day. I still remember a few of them:

“Hey, babe, fifty thousand people in the stands. [Drag on the cigarette.] Don’t let them see you throw it into center field.”

“Move your feet, babe! Cha, cha, cha! Cha, cha, cha! Move those feet!”

“Hey, babe, sometimes you gotta go out there [to the mound] and let the wind blow a little bit.”

“Gotta be a speed cop. [Drag on the cigarette.] Roy Campanella used to say, ‘Go ahead and steal. The speed cop’ll catch ya!’ ”

“Hey, babe, you grab that ball, and if someone comes to take you out, you freakin’ put that ball right in their chops. [Drag on the cigarette.] I remember one time Frank Robinson was coming around third, and I had the ball in plenty of time and I’m thinkin’, he’s my homeboy, he’s my brother, he ain’t gonna do nothin’ to me.” At that point, Roseboro pulled up the pants of his uniform and showed me a three-inch gash on his leg. “That motherfucker almost
filleted
my ass!”

We were divided into a blue group and a white group, and the catchers would do our early work on the little half field at HoHoKam Park, where the Cubs trained (Instructional League involved multiple teams in one place)—blue group one day, white the next. I thought, why can’t I go to
both
sessions? I mean, I had a lot of ground to make up as a catcher. So the second day, when it was supposed to be a day off for our group, I showed up. Kevin Kennedy was like “What are
you
doing here?”

I said, “Can’t I work out today?”

He paused for a moment, nodded his head, and said, “I fuckin’ like that! Yeah, sure.” Of course, a couple of the other catchers heard about it and called me a kiss-ass.

One of the catchers I didn’t get along with particularly well was Eric Ganino, the Dodgers’ twenty-eighth-round draft choice that year from California, who seemed to me like something of a wiseass. We weren’t really enemies, but there was some bickering and jockeying going on between us. One day, during an intrasquad game, I was having a tough time catching and Eric was letting me know about it from the dugout. Being real clever like I am, I yelled back, “Fuck you!” This other catcher, D. J. Floyd, thought I was yelling at
him
, and suddenly charged me from the bench. It was on. We ended up having a full-scale, intrasquad brawl right there on the field. D. J. Floyd fell down at one point and I yelled at him, “Go fuck yourself, D.J.! I could punch you in the face right now!” At the various fields around the complex, the other teams were staring at us and wondering, What the hell is wrong with the
Dodgers
?

I did have a
few
friends. We were scheduled to stay in Phoenix at the Maricopa Inn, and my roommate was a left-handed pitcher named Jim Poole. He suggested we get a couple more roommates and an apartment, so we rented one along with another pitcher, Jeff Hartsock, and a first baseman named Brian Traxler. I remember two things about living with those guys. One was going out with them to a bar, getting drunk, and dancing to the Romantics song “What I Like About You,” which was not a proud moment in my life. The other was watching the World Series with them when Kirk Gibson hit that incredible home run. It was one of those “where were you when” moments.

Instructional League was also my introduction to Eric Karros, who would become my best friend in baseball. Eric was one of numerous players there who brought in big credentials from big colleges—he was the sixth-round selection that year out of UCLA—and here I was, a courtesy pick in the sixty-second round from a junior college where I was hurt half the season, trying to cope with a new position and some of the best breaking pitches I’d ever seen. A lot of my teammates wondered what I was doing there, and at times
I
did, too. I wasn’t getting a lot of positive reinforcement in those days. So it made an impression when Karros walked up to me one morning after I’d taken a round of batting practice and said, “Man, you’ve got a lot of power.”

• • •

The most important thing the Instructional League taught me about catching was that I needed to do a whole lot more of it. That spurred my dad and Tommy into action again.

This time, Tommy’s idea was a novel one. For their young Latin American prospects, the Dodgers operated a winter camp in the southeastern countryside of the Dominican Republic. It had been built in a sugarcane field about forty miles from Santo Domingo and was run by Ralph Avila, the Latin American scout who had talked to my dad about me playing for his son, Al, at St. Thomas University. All parties agreed that a little basic training at a Dominican boot camp would be a hell of a way for me to spend the next three months.

That list of parties, however, didn’t include anyone in the Dodgers’ front office, notably Charlie Blaney, who had just taken over as the club’s minor-league director. When Blaney found out I was down there, he put in a call to my dad and played dumb. Asked him where I was. My dad played dumber and said he didn’t know. Blaney said yes you do. My dad said, well then, talk to Tommy about it, which Blaney did. I don’t know if Tommy and Blaney ever actually came to an agreement on the subject, but the bottom line was that I stayed on as the first American player ever to enlist at Campo Las Palmas.

There were fifty or so prospects in camp, and we slept in a rustic dormitory that was favored by tarantulas. Needless to say, I chose a top bunk. The Latin guys didn’t seem to find the tarantulas particularly creepy; they actually
played
with them. I tried to fit in with the culture the best I could, but that was one line I didn’t cross. In fact, I never quite came to terms with the whole relationship between Dominicans and nature. There were chickens on the grounds, laying eggs that would be hard-boiled for our breakfast—some of the chickens themselves might have been dinner—and the night watchman’s job was to keep the stray dogs away. He was an old guy with a little red hat and a shotgun, and every other night or so he’d shoot down a couple of dogs. I’d be listening to my heavy metal and suddenly hear
Boom! Boom!
Everybody’d go running out to see. One night I watched him blow away a big Labrador retriever. It bled to death right in front of me.

I was happy to find a little gym on the premises, with some old dumbbells, barbells, and benches. I’d go in there and lift after dinner, which upset one of the motherly ladies who worked in the cafeteria. She scolded me: “You’re going to get sick doing that!” I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I was getting sick, all right, but not from the lifting. Actually, the food was a little skimpy by American standards but not worth complaining about. For most of the Dominican players—there were also a few from Honduras and Nicaragua, among other places—our little dining hall might have seemed like the Four Seasons. Still, whether it was from the lunch meat, the water,
the sugarcane juice, or just the cultural adjustment, there were plenty of times when my stomach had me on the run. I told my mom that I needed some familiar food. When my dad came to visit, he smuggled in a bunch of peanut butter and Carnation Instant Breakfast. Tommy made the trip with him, and I was sitting outside eating my lunch—a bowl of soup and a slim sandwich of mystery meat—when they walked up. Tommy took one look and said, “Jesus Christ! How do you eat this shit?”

My dad also treated me to a few weekends at the Jaragua Hotel in Santo Domingo, where Joe Ferguson stayed while he managed the organization’s Licey team in the Dominican Winter League. When I was there, I partook liberally of the pasta, the Friday night meringue music, and the big bottles of Coke you could buy for a dime, although you had to put the bottle back in the rack when you were finished. Periodically, other players would come to town, and we’d hit the disco and drink Presidente beer. Santo Domingo became pretty familiar to me; often, after a long day at the camp, Ralph would drive me down to catch bullpens for the Licey pitchers.

I was grateful for the special privileges I was being afforded, and if my camp mates understandably resented me a little bit, they at least appreciated the effort I gave it. And my struggling attempts at Spanish. Some of the instructors—Ralph Avila, Leo Posada, Chico Fernandez—and the visiting coaches, like Johnny Roseboro, spoke English; but for the most part, I felt like the Latin players must feel when they come to play in the States. When we were riding our short bus to play the Astros or Cardinals and the other guys were telling jokes in their impossibly fast, slang-heavy Dominican Spanish, my couple of classes of foreign language at Phoenixville High gave me no chance whatsoever. I often wondered if the joke they were laughing at was on
me.
Manny Acta, who manages the Cleveland Indians, was an infielder for the Astros—it’s hard to imagine now, with his bald head, but at the time he had big, fluffy hair—and years later he told me, “Yeah, I remember you down there. We were all talking about, ‘Who’s this gringo coming down here to play with us?’ ”