Long Shot (18 page)

But as much as Campy helped me with mechanics, his most indelible
lesson was even more fundamental. “Just play baseball,” he would say, urging me to block out any and all of the peripheral things that made a hard profession so much harder. “Just keep it a game.” Roy encouraged me to handle a nineties sport with a fifties mentality, and I wished like hell that I could. I wished I could deal with everything
his
way.

For starters, Roy Campanella wouldn’t have been the least bit bothered by what Jim Hill said and plenty of others were thinking. He’d been in professional ball for a decade before Jackie Robinson broke the color line, and the slights and hardships that Campy endured were immeasurably more severe than the comparatively trivial stuff I encountered—the doubts of a couple of minor-league managers and the skepticism of the major-league media. But I hadn’t acquired tolerance in the doses that Roy had, nor any semblance of his serenity. At the age of twenty-four, those things consumed me. Only the people closest to me would have known it—Karros, my family, Greg Hansell, Danny Lozano—but I seethed over Hill’s insulting question and the disrespect it represented on a much wider scope. The fire had been flickering inside me since Vero Beach, if not before, and this was the sort of thing that made it rage.

Hell, yes, I earned the position legitimately. I had been the organization’s Minor League Player of the Year. I’d played practically around the calendar for five years in a row. For the second straight season, I’d put together an outstanding spring training; led the team in hitting this time. I was throwing so well that Mark Cresse said I had the best arm of any Dodger catcher since Steve Yeager (which, truth be known, was only about eight years). Most important, nobody questioned that I’d outperformed my competitors—Carlos Hernandez, who was the primary challenger; Lance Parrish, an eight-time all-star whom they’d brought in for insurance in case I proved to be not ready; and Don Wakamatsu, a proficient knuckleball catcher who could handle Tom Candiotti if need be. As it turned out, I handled Candiotti just fine, for the most part, and the other starting pitchers—Hershiser, Kevin Gross, Pedro Astacio, and Ramon Martinez—as well.

Still, I knew that my
defense
hadn’t won me the job. In a backward, ironic sort of way, the uncertainty about my catching skills might have actually worked in my favor; may have been one of the reasons the Dodgers didn’t bring back Scioscia for a fourteenth season. They wanted me in the lineup, and they didn’t want their pitchers complaining that they’d rather throw to Scioscia. It was a show of faith on the organization’s part—possibly the very first I’d received, of any consequence.

I’d begun to carve out a little reputation as a hitter. Not a
big
one, mind
you—certainly not to any celebrity kind of degree. Los Angeles is, of course, a city of stars, and I wasn’t one. It seemed like nobody in L.A. even knew how to pronounce my last name until Vin Scully, the Dodgers’ famous announcer, started saying it with the proper Italian inflection—Pea-OT-za. In one of my first games at Dodger Stadium, they showed an interview with me on the JumboTron and identified it as Eric Karros. (Some people thought we
did
resemble each other. Tommy used to look at me, then look at Eric, then look back at me and say, “Where was Vince Piazza in 1967?”) But I was gaining some traction within the organization. During that spring training of 1993, teammates would gather around the cage to watch me take batting practice. It was good for my ego.

When the team plane left Florida, I was on it. Nevertheless, I wasn’t about to take anything for granted. I knew damn well that I wouldn’t have the job for very long if I drove in forty runs a year, like Scioscia did. No long-term leases for me; I’d seen enough guys yo-yoing between L.A. and Triple-A to know better than that. Rather than rent an apartment I might have to vacate, I decided to just move back in with the Hansells (even though Greg was in Albuquerque).

We actually opened the regular season on the road—straight back to Florida—but first, there was the annual end-of-spring, home-and-home series with the California Angels. I homered off Mark Langston at Dodger Stadium, and the swell of the crowd just surged through me. That was the start of a special relationship I would enjoy, for quite a while, with the fans of Los Angeles. I still refused to romanticize the game; but at times like that, I couldn’t help but love it. The fact is that, in spite of my attitude, I never lost my infatuation with the sport itself, at the organic level. My beef was with the petty, stupid stuff that mucks it up in the organized version.

From Miami we flew to Atlanta, where I got into a little home-run battle in batting practice with Darryl Strawberry, who was one of the players I held in awe when I was younger, and Eric Davis, a teammate I really enjoyed. In spring training, when Eric commented on the way I was mashing in BP, my response had been, “Yeah, I’m dropping some skull on the ball.” I’d picked up that expression in the minor leagues from Brian Traxler, who’d always say, “Come on, man, drop some skull. Drop some head.” You know, the
bat
head. Eric Davis liked that and nicknamed me Skull: “What’s up, Skull?”

I was launching the ball into the seats before the first Atlanta game, trying to outmuscle Davis and Strawberry, getting a little carried away, and on one swing I felt a tweak in my oblique. I told Eric, “Man, I think I pulled something.”

He said, “Where is it?”

I showed him, and he goes, “Oh, man. Go get checked out by the trainer.”

First, I hit a few more bombs, which only verified that my side felt a little weird. Eric said, “Hey, man, if your shit ain’t right, don’t play. Go in there and get some treatment.”

I finally went to the training room and got some ice, and the trainer asked me if I was going to play. I said I didn’t think so, but first I’d talk to Tommy. So I walked into his office and said, “Tommy, I don’t know, I tweaked something in batting practice.”

In a calm, reassuring voice, Tommy told me, “Now, Mike, it’s okay. Let me know if you feel like you need a rest. It’s not a big deal. It’s early in the season, and we’re going to need you for the long haul, so you do what you feel like you need to do. Just play it day by day.”

I appreciated his compassion. “Well,” I said, “I really don’t think I can play tonight.”

“Jesus Christ! You don’t think you can play?!
What the fuck?
”

I held the ice in place and went back to the trainer, who suggested I get a shot of novocaine and Xylocaine, with some cortisone in there. They called in the doctor, a surgeon from Atlanta who was the nicest guy in the world, and he pulled out this long needle, loaded it up with cortisone and Xylocaine, asked me where it hurt, and said, “I don’t know what’s going to happen, but whatever.” I missed two games—Tom Glavine and Pete Smith—but was good to go after that. The doc hit the spot.

At any rate, I learned my lesson about trying to power up in batting practice, and another about being a piece of meat. But in the greater scheme of baseball, the strategy worked. I got off to a good start with the bat and even shot down eleven of the first sixteen runners who tried to steal on me. Of course, as soon as I cooled off in the throwing department, there was talk about moving me to third base.

Our first home stand began with three games, all losses, against the Cardinals. For the finale, Tommy moved me up from seventh in the batting order to third, which felt good. I came up in the first inning against Rene Arocha, a right-hander from Cuba, and got a pitch I could handle.

I’ll never forget his first home run in 1993. Mike hit a ball no more than ten feet off the ground, a line shot to right field, way over the fence at Dodger Stadium. We’re all watching, and Tommy’s telling me, “Jesus Christ, that’s how you drive that outside pitch!” And I’m
thinking, you know, that didn’t really look like an outside pitch. So I go into the video room and pull it up and I’ll be darned if that pitch wasn’t six inches off the
inside
part of the plate. It was incredible. That was the sort of stuff that separated Mike as a hitter. There were three things I’ve seen him do as well as anybody. One, hit a golf ball. Two, throw a football. And three, hit with power to right field as a right-handed hitter.

Mike subscribed to that Ted Williams hitting philosophy. But I read that book a thousand times, too, and it didn’t do for me what it did for him. Mike worked his ass off. He was passionate about hitting. He knew his swing and he knew what he needed to do to fix his swing, as well. For him, a lot of it had to do with his ability to keep his hands inside of a baseball. He kept his hands close to his body, didn’t let them get away from him. Barry Bonds is probably the best I’ve ever seen at that. The closer you stay, the stronger you are; but it’s very difficult to do. What was really weird was that I used to hit behind Mike a lot, and I swear that guy would get more broken-bat flares over the second baseman’s head. The first couple months I’m watching this shit, I’m thinking, this guy’s the luckiest motherfucker I’ve ever seen. But after watching it for a year or two, I realized it had nothing to do with luck at all. It was his ability to fight off pitches that got everybody else out. I think I marveled more at those kinds of at-bats than how hard he hit the ball, or how far he hit it.

—Eric Karros, teammate

The promotion in the batting order afforded me a better sense of security. I was flattered to hit between Davis and Strawberry. When we swept the Pittsburgh Pirates in the next series, I felt the situation had stabilized enough that I could move out of the Hansells’ house and into Karros’s condo in Manhattan Beach.

• • •

Eric had been National League Rookie of the Year in 1992, and he’d taken me under his wing when I was called up in September. His place was on Eleventh Street, in the front unit of a duplex, about a mile from the beach. One of his roommates had just moved out, and another took care of the money matters, so I was just assigned a bedroom and a cut of the rent; let the good times roll.

With the way I was playing and the response from the fans and now my connection to the larger world through Eric, I began to see it all as my
window of opportunity. Socially, I mean. Not that I had ambitions to be another Wilt Chamberlain in that respect. It wasn’t about conquest or even promiscuity. I just wanted to be
that guy.
I wanted to date Michelle Pfeiffer, and if not her, whoever was the hot star at the moment. I guess it was the last vestige of my romanticism with baseball, the image in my head of life in the big leagues.

When I moved in with Eric, I was introduced to the fruits of the game. Not that he was a bad boy, because he wasn’t; but I started to comprehend what was available for a guy in my position. Then I made adjustments, like a batter does when he gets a better look at what the pitcher has. Since this was happening in Los Angeles, I’d been thinking Hollywood. But Eric set me straight on that. His advice, in a paraphrase, was “What do you want to run around in Hollywood for? Why would you go fishing in those waters when everything’s right here in front of you?”

Manhattan Beach was more like a college town—young, casual, and ready to party, with a lot of hockey players, Los Angeles Raiders, and really tan women. Eric and I weren’t beach bums, but on the off days we’d go down and watch volleyball and try to look good. About three or four times a week, we’d eat lunch at a restaurant called Houston’s, where I’d order orange roughy. I didn’t mind the steak, either, but I was hitting the ball well, so I got a little superstitious about orange roughy. Our routine also included driving home slowly from the ballpark in Eric’s BMW, which had a pretty good stock sound system, and cranking up some Dr. Dre—his debut album,
The Chronic.
“One, two, three and to the four./ Snoop Doggy Dogg and Dr. Dre is at the door.” We played that gangsta rap a lot. Eric also loved a band called Live.

After the games, we liked to unwind at Harry O’s on Highland, which was like our second home. It was an easy, breezy, T-shirt and flip-flops kind of place, and we had the run of it. If there was a band that night, I’d occasionally sit in as the drummer for a few songs. The proprietor, Dougie, would let us bartend whenever we wanted. I was into Rolling Rock beer, old 33, made in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, “from the mountain springs to you,” so I asked Dougie if he could stock some Rolling Rock. He said, “How the fuck am I gonna get Rolling Rock in here?” But he got it, and I drank it, and then I’m looking around seeing all these other guys in there drinking it. Dougie saw it, too. After a while he said to me, “Fuck that Rolling Rock. I need you to start drinking some Bud Light. I got cases of Bud Light back there, and nobody’s drinking it.” Eric and I sold a lot of Bud Light for Harry O’s, and we never paid for a single beer. Three years straight. I think it was a record.

Harry O’s had a back room, and sometimes we’d duck back there to keep from being mobbed. I know, it sounds crazy. But it
was
. Mostly, it was people—men and women both—just talking about the game. The majority of them were from around the area, and as a rule they weren’t the type to fuss over anybody, but
some
did. There were also the women who had followed us home from Dodger Stadium. That happened every single night we played at home. One night, Eric looked back and counted six cars following us from the ballpark, all the way down the 110 to the 405 and then on to Manhattan Beach. “Look at this shit,” he said. “It’s like a fucking parade.” When we walked out of the stadium to the parking lot, there would be people ten deep yelling, cheering, clamoring for autographs. It was like U2 coming out of the Hollywood Bowl.

Honestly, there were times that year when I felt like Elvis Presley. Girls were flashing us, throwing their bras at us. When they followed us home, we’d try to shake them on the freeway. Once, Eric pulled over to see what was going on and three or four girls came up to the car. A really cute one started stroking my arm, but if she was eighteen I would have been surprised. I told Eric, “Dude, we’d better get the hell out of here.” People would knock on our door and say their cars broke down. It was usually a girl, but now and then there’d be a guy with a pack of baseball cards in his backseat. “Oh, we didn’t know it was you. Would you mind signing these cards?”