Long Shot (24 page)

The thumb was placed in a cast, and as soon as it was removed, Screnar got me working with putty and rubber bands to build the strength back. After about a week of that, I tried to hit off a tee. On the first swing, I took a big rip and the bat went flying out of my hands. I actually did scream that time—it was okay because it wasn’t a game—and hopped around and undoubtedly swore a good bit. Pat said, “What are you doing? Take it easy.”

Late in May, the club left for a ten-game road trip and I worked out at the stadium with Mike Scioscia. It felt downright eerie to be in there
when the place was so empty and quiet, with the grass uncut. But it was a good working environment, and when I got to the point at which I could at least hold on to the bat—around the time the team was returning to Los Angeles—I suggested to Fred Claire that I go down to Albuquerque for some rehab. He said, “That won’t be necessary.” So Pat designed a support system with tape, strips, disposable wrap, and more tape. He did a good job.

I didn’t argue with Fred, because I desperately wanted to be back in the lineup. Of course, Tommy was all for it, as well. We were 8-14 while I was on the DL (9-17 counting the games I’d missed earlier with the hamstring problem), and Tommy, on general principle, didn’t care to see me sitting. He had a favorite expression he’d recycle every time the subject of me taking a day off came up. He’d say, “I don’t have a bat long enough for you to hit from the bench.” I couldn’t complain. I was young, I liked being in the lineup, and I especially didn’t want to miss the day games after the night games, which is when catchers and old guys usually rest. Dodger Stadium was a pitcher-friendly park, but the ball carried better in the daytime and I wasn’t interested in wasting that good, warm air making small talk in the shade of the dugout. It was, in fact, a day game when I came off the disabled list—Sunday, June 4, against the Mets. The crowd was humming and my adrenaline was revved up. I homered against Pete Harnisch and caught Candiotti without a passed ball, which was probably a bigger accomplishment.

The home run was a little misleading, as it turned out. It took a few more weeks for my power to make it all the way back. In spite of how I felt about it at the time, I had probably come off the DL too early. But by June 26, I was strong enough to hit a ball clean out of Dodger Stadium in batting practice. That didn’t happen often. We were playing the Padres that night, and a few hours later, with the score tied in the ninth inning, I was due up third against Trevor Hoffman, who proceeded to hit Delino DeShields and walk Jose Offerman. He probably wasn’t too worried, considering that he had gotten the better of me all three times we’d previously met, with two strikeouts. Before I stepped to the plate, I told Karros, “Just kill me if I get cheated up there.” I lived. Hit the first pitch on a line and over the right-field fence to end the game.

The next day, Tony Gwynn and some other Padres started talking about me being the MVP, which seemed a little premature considering how many games I’d missed. But I appreciated it. Nobody on the
Dodgers
was saying that, with the exception of Joey Amalfitano, our third-base coach.

That was around the time we were jockeying with the Rockies for first place. On June 29, Nomo shut them out, 1–0, to put us up by half a game.
Colorado loaded the bases in the eighth inning, with one out, and Nomo threw a splitter that Andres Galarraga nubbed back to the mound. Hideo brought it home and I threw a rocket to Karros at first base to complete the double play. Tommy went nuts: “Jesus Christ, you threw the shit out of that ball!” That was fun, and so was catching the Tornado. He was sensational that year—led the league in strikeouts, shutouts (tied with Greg Maddux), and fewest hits per nine innings.

Part of Nomo’s success stemmed from the fact that, unlike a lot of modern pitchers, he wasn’t afraid to keep the batter off the plate. A couple of years later, after Scott Rolen of the Phillies had touched him up for a couple home runs, Hideo hit him three times. After the third time, Rolen—a big guy whom I’d definitely put in a category with Brooks Robinson and Mike Schmidt as the greatest defensive third basemen I’ve seen—showed up at our clubhouse door looking for him. Nothing came of it, but it was clear that Nomo had made his reputation. With
us
, though, he already had one. When Nomo pitched, it was
his
game. We had a left-handed reliever named Mark Guthrie, whom I really enjoyed because he was hilarious and a huge hard-rock guy and shared my affinity for cigars, and Gut would walk into the clubhouse on a day when it was Nomo’s turn and go, “Why am I here? It’s Tornado night. I don’t think I’m even gonna get dressed.”

Obviously, there was a language barrier between Nomo and me. But as a catcher for the Dodgers, there was almost always a language issue with the starting pitcher. Over the next couple years, Chan Ho Park (Korea) would complete our United Nations rotation, which already included Nomo (Japan), Ramon Martinez and Pedro Astacio (Dominican Republic), Ismael Valdez (Mexico), and Tom Candiotti, who spoke knuckleball. It was so confusing that I once walked out to the mound to talk to Nomo and started jabbering in Spanish.

Hideo and I, however, understood each other in the ways that counted. After his games, when he would retreat to a separate locker room at Dodger Stadium (where I used to dress as a batboy) and answer questions for the hordes of Japanese reporters that followed the team all year, he was always very gracious about shooting credit in my direction. His generous words had an unexpected benefit. Nomo’s agent, Don Nomura, was friendly with Danny Lozano, and they landed me a three-year endorsement deal with Komatsu, a Japanese heavy-equipment company. I also did a Japanese underwear commercial for Gunze that showed me sliding into home with my feet in flames, then reclining on the plate in nothing but my briefs. I was the Jim Palmer of Japan.

Martinez was also an ace for us that year, and on July 14, at Dodger Stadium against the Marlins, he happened to get plenty of latitude from Eric Gregg, the home plate umpire. Gregg’s strike zone was so generous that, after the third inning, I called for nothing but fastballs, which Ramon was spotting crisply off both corners. He sliced through the Florida lineup in twenty-eight batters, without giving up a hit.

I took some special pride in catching that game, in light of the fact that, in other ways, Ramon and I had trouble finding a comfort level with each other. Among the many examples was a game the year before in which Ramon had covered first base against the Giants and bobbled the toss from Karros. That prompted our former teammate Darryl Strawberry, who had been on second base, to round third and barrel toward home. I didn’t block the plate, because that’s a bad idea when the runner’s legs are eight feet long and you don’t know where the throw is going to be. Strawberry came in standing up, and was pretty much past me by the time the ball arrived. Afterward, Ramon got all over me: “Why didn’t you block the plate?” I said, “Why didn’t you catch the ball?” Ramon also grumbled sometimes about the way I called games, but there was none of that on the night of his no-hitter.

Two weeks later, Ramon beat the Reds, 4–2, to keep us within range of the Rockies, who had been threatening to pull away with the NL West. But the memorable aspect of that game had to do with Cincinnati’s final relief pitcher. Rick Reed had been a replacement player, and we all knew it. A bunch of us—admittedly, I was front and center—crowded the railing of the dugout and yelled, “Scab!” I’d like to say it wasn’t with malice, that we were just trying to start a rally in a close and important game, but it was a volatile time.

Tommy had that game in mind when, a month down the road, he tried, unsuccessfully, to talk the front office out of calling up a big first baseman named Mike Busch. Busch had been a tight end at Iowa State and was a pretty good power prospect. For most of us, though, the operative fact was that he had crossed the line in spring training. He had a wife and a baby and a ranch in Missouri and had given us the whole I-have-to-cross-because-I’ve-got-a-farm-payment-to-make-and-my-mother-is-elderly thing.
Our
thing was not only did
we
have bills to pay, too, but there were a lot of minor-league lifers with wives and kids of their own who had honored the strike. When Busch came up, Brett Butler, whom we had just picked up in a trade with the Mets, made some remarks to the press about him being a scab. I went on a radio show and was asked about having Busch as a teammate. I said I didn’t respect his decision but what am I going to do, not throw him the ball?

It turned ugly. The
Los Angeles Times
dredged up some of our quotes about Busch from spring training. Then the fans started booing Brett Butler. The Dodgers even held a press conference to handle the situation. At that point, I said it shouldn’t have become a public matter, that it was our dirty laundry and wasn’t for the media to wave around. That was not well received. The whole thing was a spectacle.

Personally, I didn’t think a distraction like that was going to do us any favors in a pennant race, and I sure didn’t want anything messing with my focus and timing. Two nights before Busch’s debut, in a getaway game at Philadelphia, in front of my family and no doubt some friends, I’d gone four for four with two doubles, two home runs, and seven RBIs. My man Delino DeShields told the
Times
, “He hit the ball tonight as hard as I’ve ever seen in my entire life. Did you see those balls he hit? Damn, that’s crazy right there.” Until that night, I didn’t have enough plate appearances to qualify for the batting title. Suddenly, at .367, I popped right into the lead, with Gwynn—who’d already won it five times—trailing by ten percentage points. No catcher had won a batting title since Ernie Lombardi in 1942, and he caught only eighty-five games.

Of course, I knew damn well that Tony Gwynn was not the guy you wanted to challenge in a batting race. He was the greatest high-average hitter of my generation, by far—the greatest since Ted Williams, for that matter—and dedicated himself to being just that. It seemed to me that Gwynn could have hit with more power if he’d wanted to, but that wasn’t his game of choice. He was all about spoiling pitches and finding holes. There was a general belief among pitchers, catchers, managers, and scouts that the better the pitches you made to Gwynn, the more he’d hurt you. Many times I stretched my mitt far to my left to catch a ball below and beyond the strike zone, and before it got to me, Gwynn had simply served it into left field, nice as you please. Now and then we’d run out of ideas for him and say, what the hell, let’s just throw it in there and see what happens. He was so geared to handling supposedly unhittable pitches that it sometimes seemed as though he didn’t know what to do with a ball right down the middle. He’d pop it up. As a rule, though, you weren’t going to prevent Tony Gwynn from getting his hits.

Two weeks after I jumped into the batting lead, I was down under .360, Gwynn was up over .360, and I was smacked on the wrist by a pitch from Mark Leiter of the Giants, who called the next day to apologize. I left that game but didn’t miss any others. We were going stride for stride with the Rockies, and Tommy’s no-bat-long-enough principle was in full effect.
When the Giants left town, San Diego assumed their place. All things considered, I thought I was well within my rights to take a personal moment when Gwynn dug in to hit in the first inning. I told him it was time he stepped aside. He cracked up and had to walk out of the batter’s box.

We played two series with the Padres in the final week and a half, separated by only three critical games at home against Colorado. The Rockies came to Chavez Ravine a half game ahead of us, but we were playing well, having won three in a row. In the series opener, we were down 3–2 in the sixth when I reached on an error and Karros slammed a huge two-run homer that won the game and gave Martinez his seventeenth victory. We split the next two and jogged down the road to San Diego with a half-game lead. Thousands of Dodger fans came with us, and we wanted nothing more than to clinch the division in front of them.

By that time, Gwynn—whose brother, Chris, played for us that year—had easily wrapped up the batting title, but I was more than happy with the trade-off: we beat the Padres the last two games of the season to wrap up the NL West by a single game over the Rockies, who also won their last two. I homered in the Saturday game—my thirty-second of the year—and in the finale, Mike Busch, of all people, struck the big blow with a tiebreaking three-run blast in the seventh.

Although he had batted only seventeen times on the season, Busch was a hero to Dodger fans. The players, meanwhile, acknowledged his role in helping us to the title; but that didn’t matter much when we held our meeting to divvy up the playoff shares. We were a strong union team and felt like we needed to make a statement. We voted him nothing, not even a partial share. The way we saw it, that was money that the union had negotiated, and Busch was a scab. He had acted
against
the union, not with it. So now we’re going to vote him a share? Nope. Can’t have it both ways, pal. Fred Claire thought we were wrong in what we did, and he called in Eric and me to ask us to reconsider. “I just think it’s bad,” he told us.

I said, “Well, then,
you
give him a fucking share.” Then we walked out. For what it’s worth, Busch was not on the postseason roster.

In the meantime, we partied at Prego in San Diego. The star of the evening was Tim Wallach, who hadn’t made it to the postseason since 1981 in Montreal. Wallach got so drunk that four guys had to carry him to his car. The whole time, his wife is going, “Oh God, Timmy.”

The division series pitted us against the Reds, led that year by Barry Larkin, who had always been a great shortstop, and Pete Schourek, who had never been a great pitcher. In his prior years with the Mets, Schourek,
a left-hander, was the kind of guy who was actually fun to hit against. He gave up some of the longest bombs of anybody in the league. Then he went to Cincinnati in 1995 and all of a sudden you couldn’t touch him. He never pitched that way again.