Long Shot (14 page)

There were just a few things Mike really cared about. First was his family, then music, then cars, then food. He stuck to himself pretty much. I didn’t realize the kind of background he came from until we went down to the dealership in Torrance one day and they hooked him up with a brand-new Acura. I said, “Wow, your dad must have some good friends there.”

He said, “Well, he owns the dealership.”

He didn’t advertise that part of his life. In fact, Mike wasn’t a real social guy. He worked out and listened to his music and that was about it. When he listened to music, he was doing one of two things. Either he was playing the air drums or he was squeezing his hand grippers. He had those grippers in his hands all the time. The
steel ones. He worked at it nonstop. Once, he squeezed one of them so hard he broke it, and he was really upset about that. I remember him saying, “Man, those things cost me fifteen bucks.” I was in awe because I could barely squeeze it with both hands. He’d leave them on the coffee table in our apartment and people would pick them up and try to squeeze them and they wouldn’t budge. They thought it was a practical joke.

—Greg Hansell

Meanwhile, as we proceeded to clinch our division, Hansell’s streak of no-decisions continued all the way to five and the end of the regular season. He never got off of fourteen wins. And my home runs kept coming. The last one was my twenty-ninth, making me the insufferable winner of the bet, which, although I don’t recall exactly, was probably for a lunch at Olive Garden. We used to tear that place up for the free salad and bread sticks.

My home run total was two short of Jay Gainer for the California League title, but the fourth highest in all the minors. I made the all-star team again and led the league in slugging percentage. In short, I had accomplished what I profoundly needed to—put up numbers that the Dodgers couldn’t help but notice. I know for a fact that my season got the attention of Fred Claire, the Dodgers’ general manager. In his words, I was now, for the first time, “a legitimate prospect.”

I was pleasantly surprised to find out, also, that the Dodgers weren’t the only ones who had made a note of my breakout. Around the time I was overtaking Hansell in our little wager, I started hearing from agents suddenly interested in representing me. Among them was Hansell’s guy, Dan Lozano. One day, Greg was meeting Lozano for lunch at Marie Callender’s and asked me to come with him. Danny still rags me about showing up with “the best bed-head ever.” But he obviously had no bias against bad hair. We got along. He didn’t pressure me. He didn’t even try to recruit me.

For the league playoffs, Beyers wanted me to shuffle over to first base because our regular guy, Rex Peters, was hurt. That was fine. I knew it was a tough situation for Beyers because a lot of people were in his ear about me catching. It undermined his authority and probably offended him, to some degree. To his credit, Beyers never took it out on me. But he did bring it up in a way that was probably for my own benefit. He said something like, “Geez, Mike, I just don’t understand the way Tommy interferes in your career . . .”

Whether the chirping came from Tommy or my dad, it wasn’t going to
stop until I was either out of the game or catching on a regular basis. My dad, especially, would see to that. As the playoffs moved along, Ed Lund may have gotten nicked or something, I don’t recall, but I was behind the plate one night against High Desert and happened to throw out a bunch of guys—I think it was four in a row—trying to steal. They were probably running because it was me back there, but I
did
have an arm. Sometimes I’d hurry and lose my mechanics, but I definitely had enough on the ball to throw people out. This time, my father was there to see it, sitting with Johnny Roseboro, who, like everybody else, knew how frustrated he was about the organization’s reluctance to leave me behind the plate. My dad recalls Roseboro grabbing his arm afterward and saying, “Goddamn, what a game he caught!”

“Don’t tell
me
,” my dad replied. “Tell
them
son of a bitches.”

But he wasn’t finished. At the hotel that night, one of our roving instructors approached my father and remarked that my throwing performance had been embarrassing for the people who didn’t want me catching. Dad’s response: “Look, if you guys aren’t going to catch him, why don’t you release him?”

The instructor said, “If we catch him a hundred games next year, will you leave us alone?”

“Hey, you got a deal. That’s all I want.”

If my dad was making a nuisance of himself with the Dodger people—and there’s no doubt that he was—he had his reasons. He knew full well that my only chance to make it to the big leagues would be as a catcher. And he also knew that it wouldn’t happen,
couldn’t
happen, until I got a lot more games under my belt. At one point, he asked Joe Ferguson how many games he thought it took for a young catcher to ready himself for the major leagues. Fergy’s answer was five hundred.

“Five hundred games!” my father blurted out. “He can’t get fifty a year! This kid’ll be thirty years old before he catches five hundred games!”

• • •

When we were eliminated, the Dodgers asked me to fly to Florida along with a couple of pitchers—Jody Treadwell and Gordon Tipton—to help Vero Beach in the playoffs. There was no issue to consider between me and Joe Alvarez, because the organization had let him go after my season there. Charlie Blaney later told the
Los Angeles Times
that the situation with me played a part in that decision. At any rate, it was common for the Dodgers to shuffle players around to make the strongest possible playoff rosters. They placed an unusual emphasis on winning minor-league championships. The rule was that you couldn’t move
down
a level to play with another team in
the postseason, but since Bakersfield and Vero Beach were both in Class A ball, Blaney figured it was okay. As it turned out, I wasn’t allowed to play. The Dodgers were one of the first organizations to get flagged for doing that.

I wasn’t finished for the year, however. Raul Cano, the general manager of the Mexicali Aguilas (Eagles) of the Mexican Winter League, had come to scout us during the California League playoffs because the Dodgers had just entered into an agreement with Mexicali to provide some players. Cano watched one game and decided that I would be provided.

I signed for eleven hundred dollars a month and played with guys making three to five times as much. Most of them were higher-level minor leaguers. Some were washed-up major leaguers whose wives followed them around, pulling U-Hauls, with two kids in the backseat. It made me think, man, I never want to be that guy. That was something I actually feared. I was dead set on being established financially before I started on a family.

For that reason, I welcomed the advice given me by Warren (“the Deacon”) Newson, an outfielder who joined us from the White Sox. He said, “You owe it to yourself, if you ever get to the big leagues, to be single for at least one year while you’re up there.” (In fact, that ranked with the wisdom conferred upon me later by Lenny Harris, the great pinch hitter and very funny man. Lenny told me, “When I was younger, you didn’t worry about nothing. Now you gotta wrap that thing up. You go out tonight, something can jump into your system and kill your ass.”) I acknowledged the Deacon’s counsel in spades, and only wished that he had shared it with the very nice Mexican girl who followed me home one night, then another, and wrote me—in English—the most heartfelt love letters I’ve ever read. That girl was
serious.

Mexicali is tucked right against California, and three of us—Jim Tatum and Jason Brosnan were my roommates—rented an apartment across the border in El Centro, California. Right off, we had a scrimmage against a semipro team called Joe’s Car Wash, I think it was—
somebody’s
car wash, or maybe it was a diner—from the border town of Calexico, California, which sort of bleeds together with Mexicali. Joe’s Car Wash had this little pitcher throwing from all different angles; slider, slider, slider, then an eighty-mile-an-hour fastball, up and in, that blew right past me. I couldn’t believe I’d struck out on an eighty-mile-an-hour fastball. The guy embarrassed the hell out of me. But that’s what playing in Mexico was all about: deception, finesse, speed changes, arm slots, whatever. We used to say that a Mexican pitcher will shoot the ball out of his ass if he thinks he can sneak it by you.

The Aguilas had two capable catchers and a good first baseman from Mexicali named Guillermo Velazquez, whose nickname was Memo. Later in
the season, I filled in for Memo when he was hurt. Early on, though, before we hit the road for the first time, the manager, Frank Estrada—everybody called him Paquin—said to me, “I need you to play right field.”

I said, “Right field? I haven’t played right field since ninth grade.”

He said, “Well, that’s all I can do right now. You can either play right field or I’m gonna have to put you on the bench. I have no choice. I have two good catchers.”

I said, “Well, I’m not playing right field.”

So we get on the bus, and I see there are nine bunks in addition to the straight-back seats. And the shortest trip we had in that league was about eight hours. I looked at the bunks and I looked at the bus driver and I looked around at my teammates and I said, “What’s the deal with the bunks?”

Somebody said, “If you’re starting the game, you get a bunk. If not, you get a seat.”

With that, I walked right up to Paquin and said, “Here’s your right fielder, right here. No problem.” Suddenly, I’m a team guy.

Opening night, I’m out in right field, runner on third, I get a fly ball, come up throwing, and damn near gun the guy out at the plate. He thought he was going to cruise in, and it was a bang-bang play. So I get back to the dugout and everybody’s like, whoa, where’d that come from? I mean, I wasn’t Vladimir Guerrero, but I could throw a little. Around that time, I’m thinking, hmm, this might not be so bad. Then they started hitting long flies over my head, and the truth came out. I couldn’t go back on a ball. And if the play happened to be out there along the wall, forget it. Those suckers were concrete and steel, no padding, and I didn’t think it was in my best interest to break my wrist or neck in the Mexican Winter League.

As you might imagine, conditions in general were interesting down there, and so was the way the Mexican players dealt with them. The bus, for example. There was one very long trip, in particular, for which Cano told us we’d bus to Hermosillo, leaving around midnight, and then fly to Mazatlán. I was a little skeptical about the flying part, and sure enough, when we arrived at the airport in Hermosillo the next morning, there was no flight for us. As soon as we found out we’d be driving the rest of the way, which would add up to about a twenty-six-hour bus ride, one of the Mexican guys said, “Let’s go to the store.” I figured I’d pick up some chips and maybe a big bag of M&M’s. What they had in mind was a few cases of Modelo, Tecate, and Dos Equis, which they wheeled to the bus in a hand truck. We drank the whole way down there. I have to say, the Mexican players could drink and smoke at a high level, and then go out and play a damn good game of baseball.

There was another American on our team, a left-handed pitcher from Louisiana named Dave Lynch, who was pretty entertaining, and both of us were amazed at the changes in temperature that could clobber you in just one December bus ride. From Hermosillo to Mazatlán, driving through the desert, I went from being the coldest I’d ever felt to the hottest. There was no heat or air-conditioning on that bus. The windows were open as the sun went down, and an hour later my teeth were chattering. After a while, I either fell asleep or passed out, not sure which, and around the time we got to the Los Mochis area, I woke up drenched in sweat. Lynch had finagled a bottom bunk because the guy who had it was off somewhere playing cards, and just as I leaned over to talk to him, he rolled out and said, “Dude, I’m fucking boiling!” The next day it rained, so they poured gas on the field and burned it dry. That might have been the game we won in some controversial manner and the locals—I mean,
lots
of them—ran after us throwing mud balls at our bus as we pulled away.

In one particular respect, however, the experience closely resembled the minor leagues: I didn’t catch much. To be honest, that probably bothered my dad a little more than it did me. He urged me to talk to Paquin about it. A little reluctantly, I did. I explained that if I wasn’t going to catch, I preferred to move on. Paquin told me that, since he already had two good catchers and would have to let one of them go to accommodate me, I should give him some time to think about it. A few days later, he came to me with his answer: he was going to release the backup, who was the younger of the two. I happened to know that the kid’s wife had just had a baby, so I said, thanks, but no, I can’t take that guy’s job; he needs the money. Paquin was only about five foot eight, at the most, but he had been an excellent catcher who played one game for the Mets in 1971. He could throw out anybody at second base. The ball would just parachute down there, but he’d get rid of it so quickly, and his arm was so accurate—kind of like Bob Boone—that nobody would run on him. Knowing that, I pondered the situation for a minute and asked him, “How about this? If you’ll work with me before and after the games on my catching, I’ll stick around and try to help you win.” Paquin was happy to do it, and he taught me a lot.

In the end, going to Mexico was absolutely the best thing I could have done that winter. It was the time of my life. But more important, it was when I started to become a polished hitter.

In fact, I can almost pin it down to a moment. I struggled badly for a while, barely hitting .100, and one day some veteran reliever was working me over pretty good. It was three and two and I fouled off about six pitches.
Then something clicked and I got hold of a slider for a home run that won the game. It just seemed like I’d finally figured it out. I ended up with about sixteen homers—had a great season—and in the process kept my end of the bargain with Paquin: we made the playoffs. Meanwhile, I came away
knowing
that I could hit in the big leagues; knowing, in fact, that I
would
. I felt like I’d seen everything a pitcher could throw or do, and there wasn’t much I couldn’t handle. Bring it on.