Follow the Sharks (4 page)

He called me collect later that night. “I’m all fucked up, man. I don’t know where the fuck it’s going. Oh, man, am I fucked up.”

“You been drinking, Eddie?”

“Damn straight I’ve been drinking, man. Oh, shit, I can’t do nothin’ any more.”

“It was just one of those things. You’ll be fine. Forget it.”

“Just one of those things,” he sang. “Yeah. Ha, ha. Forget it, he says. Listen, lawmaster, you ever try to talk and nothing but gobbledygook come out of your mouth? Huh? That ever happen to you, you gonna talk to the jury, be all eloquent and do your lawyer thing, and nothing but noises come out? You ever talk to a judge and hear yourself barkin’ like a dog? Huh?”

“Jesus, Eddie. It must be frustrating.”

“Frustrating! Ha! Know what they call it? Oh, big joke. It used to be a big joke. Something that happened to other guys. The Steve Blass disease. Remember Steve Blass? It means you’re a big league pitcher who wakes up one day and finds out that he doesn’t know where the fuck the ball is going to go when he lets go of it. Well, man, I got it. I got it bad. A bad case of Steve Blass. Terminal case. Eddie Donagan’s sick, and all the guys, they stay away from me now. They think it’s contagious. Don’t go near Eddie Donagan. He’s got the Big C. Cancer of the head. Even the coaches, they don’t look at me when they see me. All of a sudden they don’t wanna come near me. They think if they try to help me somebody’ll blame them for what happened. Ah, shit, man, am I ever fucked up.”

“How’s the arm? Is your arm okay?”

“Oh, man, the arm is beautiful. Still got the gas. I can throw the ball nine hundred miles an hour. I can still bend off a yakker that’ll come right back to me. Shit, after I came out of the game I snuck out to the bullpen. Know what? They could’ve propped the glove up on a stick and I would’ve hit the pocket every time. Shit. Perfect. I was fuckin’ perfect.”

“Well, then, it sounds like you’re fine. You’ll get over it. Just one of those things.”

“Naw. I was doin’ that before the game, too. Warming up I was great. Perfect. My head is messed up. Soon as the game starts I’m thinkin’ about my stride, and bending my back, and the hips and the shoulders and cocking the elbow and man it won’t go where I’m aimin’ it at all. I got bit by the Steve Blass bug and there ain’t no cure.”

His next start Eddie threw the first pitch over the middle of the plate, then nine consecutive balls not even close, and Kasko took him out. He didn’t pitch for eleven days. He worked out every day with the bullpen catcher. He threw the ball perfectly. When he next pitched he came into the sixth inning of a game the Red Sox were losing by five runs. He walked a batter and threw the next pitch shoulder high and out over the plate. It disappeared over the center field fence. For a major league pitcher, I knew, that home run pitch was just as wild as any of those that hadn’t been strikes.

Eddie spent the rest of the season back in Pawtucket. The Sox sent Stump Kelly down to work with him. They were even talking about trying a hypnotist. I talked to Eddie on the phone now and then. He said he was throwing the ball as well as ever—except in games. In games he had no control.

While Eddie was in Pawtucket Jan remained in Winchester with Sam and Josie. It was only an hour and a half drive from Pawtucket, but Eddie never made it. Jan said she understood. Eddie needed to work things out. Baseball was his profession. Right now, baseball came first. Eddie didn’t call her, either. Once in a while she phoned him. She told me Eddie was distant and even surly with her.

“He’s drinking a lot, I think,” she confided to me one day. “I think he’s got a real problem, Brady. He doesn’t want to see me. They won’t let him pitch. He just gets dressed every day and throws on the sidelines and takes a shower and goes to that room he’s living in and drinks. Will he get better, do you think?”

“I don’t honestly know. He’s got lots of people rooting for him. He’s young. His arm is still good.”

“But that’s not what I mean,” said Jan, snapping her head to toss her hair away from her face. “I mean, if he can’t pitch anymore will he get better?”

I touched her hand. “I don’t know.”

T
HE RED SOX ADVISED
Eddie to take the winter off, stay completely away from baseball. That seemed to suit him fine. He hung around the house, made a few appearances, and after Christmas he and Jan went to Bermuda for two weeks.

“I’ve got this thing licked,” he told me the February morning he left for spring training. I was there to see him off. He had a new station wagon loaded with duffel bags and suitcases. He and Jan had decided that she’d fly down to join him after a few weeks so that Eddie could concentrate on baseball. He was scheduled to begin working out with the minor leaguers, but he professed not to mind. He stood there in Sam’s driveway, one arm thrown carelessly around Jan’s shoulders, grinning that big hillbilly grin of his, and said, “I can feel it, man. The old feeling, it’s there. You’ll see. All of them, sayin’ Eddie Donagan’s washed up. Just wait.”

Jan looked up at him, and I read more fear than love in the smile she offered him. He squeezed her shoulder, kissed the top of her head, then thrust his hand at me. “See ya, old buddy. You get a bunch of them contracts ready. People gonna be wantin’ Eddie Donagan’s John Hancock.”

We shook hands. “You just work on your pitching. I’ll take care of business.”

“And take care of my little girl, here, too,” he said, giving Jan another squeeze. He raised his hand in a kind of salute. “Well, people, I’m gone.”

He climbed into his car. Jan and I stood in the driveway and watched him back out and pull away. She found my hand with hers and gripped it hard. “I think he’s going to do it this time,” she said. “He’s so confident. I think he’s going to be okay.”

I nodded. “I think so, too,” I said, with more conviction than I felt.

The pitchers and catchers were expected to arrive in Winter Haven on Saturday. The following Monday morning I received a phone call in my office from Farley Vaughn.

“Where’s Donagan?” he said.

“And a cheery good morning to you, too,” I said. Vaughn was the guy with whom I had negotiated Eddie’s Red Sox contract. In the couple years since Eddie had signed with the Sox I had consumed at least a gallon of Jack Daniels with Vaughn, and he twice that amount of various fruit and vegetable juices, while we debated semicolons and subordinate clauses. He was a straight shooter, an old-fashioned baseball man who had once been a class D infielder who couldn’t hit the curve and had sense enough to get himself an MBA from the Tuck School at Dartmouth. Farley Vaughn was smart and tough and fair, and I liked doing business with him.

“Your boy’s late, Coyne. He’s accumulating a pretty good-sized fine. It’s all there in his contract.”

“I’m familiar with the contract,” I said. “He didn’t show up? That’s funny. He left a week ago. Hm. He probably got thrown into the can for speeding in Virginia. They do that down there. Didn’t he call you?”

“No one’s heard word one.”

“Me neither. Let me call Jan. I’ll get back to you.”

All I accomplished in calling Jan was upsetting her. She had heard nothing from Eddie. I called Vaughn back and told him.

“Five hundred bucks a day it’s costing him. Figure he’s shacked up with some tootsie in South Carolina? Gonna be a pretty damn expensive toss in the hay.”

“I don’t know. He was rarin’ to go when he left here. Maybe he had an accident. There has to be an explanation. I’m sure he’ll turn up.”

“He can’t afford this. Professionally, I mean.”

“I know, Farley,” I said. “He knows it, too.”

The Red Sox contacted the State Police all along Eddie’s probable route from Winchester to Florida. He hadn’t been arrested, or injured in an accident, or admitted to a hospital. He hadn’t even gotten a speeding ticket. His absence from training camp was, they concluded, voluntary.

Three weeks passed with no word from Eddie, at the end of which Vaughn informed me he was invoking Section IX, paragraph C of Eddie’s contract which, in effect, voided the agreement and put Eddie into the category of suspended without pay.

“You know damn well there are extenuating circumstances,” I told him. “We’ll have to litigate this when Eddie comes back.”

“And you know that if Eddie comes back we’ll work something out. We want him to pitch for the Red Sox. Right now, though, we’ve got no choice. You know, we’ve got a couple of Latin American players who have trouble every year with their visas. And there’s always somebody whose wife’s about to have a baby. We’re not unreasonable. But we’ve got to draw the line. Look. Get Eddie down to Winter Haven. We’ll work it out.”

Eddie called me at my office—collect—two days later. After I told the operator I’d accept the charges, I said, “Eddie, where the hell are you?”

“I’m okay, old lawmaster. Tell Jan I’m okay. That’s the message.”

“I talked to Farley Vaughn. He says—”

“Don’t hassle me, man.” And he hung up.

I became adept at saying “no comment” to the inquiries of the Boston sportswriters. Jan stopped taking phone calls. Even so, the papers ran speculative stories about the mysterious disappearance of Eddie Donagan, which they spiced with indiscreet quotes from Eddie’s teammates and coaches.

The snow melted, March became April, and the baseball season arrived. The Red Sox flew to the West Coast to open with the Angels. The minor leaguers dispersed to Pawtucket and Bristol and Winston-Salem and Elmira. Eddie Donagan accompanied none of them.

On the morning after Patriot’s Day I was sitting at my desk cradling a mug of coffee and wishing I was fishing when the phone rang. It was Eddie.

“I’m back,” he said.

“Where’s ‘back’?”

“Here. Home. Jan said I should call you.”

“Are you all right?”

“Sure. Of course.”

“Oh. We were kinda wondering.”

“I’m fine.”

“Well, I hope you won’t think I’m getting too personal if I ask you where the hell you’ve been for the past couple of months. You know, several people were mildly curious. Like your family. And your employer. Not to mention your attorney.”

“I’ve been around. Thinking.”

“Oh, good.”

“Yes. I decided to quit.”

“I think you’ve already been fired.” I paused to light a cigarette and recover my composure. “Look. Why don’t you meet me at my office tomorrow. I’m pretty sure we can work something out with the team.”

“You weren’t listenin’ to me, lawmaster. I quit. I’m done with baseball. There’s nothing to work out with the team. I got no uniform to turn in or anything.”

“Eddie, what the hell…?”

“The Steve Blass disease, man. It got me. I just ran out of control. Used it all up. Like a car out of gas. I’m out of control. None left. That’s all.”

“You’re out of control, all right. That why you had to disappear for two months?”

“Don’t crowd me, man. I’m back. Okay?”

“How do you know you can’t pitch if you never went to spring training?”

“I know.”

I sighed. “Sure. Okay. Meet me tomorrow, anyway. We’ve got some things to do.”

“Okay,” he said cheerfully. “I’ll be there.”

Eddie was immovable in his decision. We met with Farley Vaughn and arranged for a press conference.

The three television stations who attended had cameras in the Red Sox conference room. About a dozen reporters were there, armed with pencils and notebooks and tape recorders. Eddie wore blue jeans and a plaid shirt and scuffed cowboy boots. He sat between Vaughn and me at the table, his arm hooked casually around the back of his chair. He smiled and nodded at the sportswriters. A cluster of microphones crouched on the table in front of him.

Vaughn stood up and said to the reporters, “You boys all set?”

Murmurs of assent came from the double row of reporters sitting in the folding chairs.

“Okay. Eddie has a statement for you.”

Eddie leaned forward onto his forearms to get his mouth close to the microphones. He read from the paper we had prepared for him.

“This morning I informed the Boston Red Sox Baseball Club that I have voluntarily retired from professional baseball. I have done this for personal reasons. I have always been treated well by the Red Sox, and I regret any inconvenience I may have caused them.” Eddie looked up from the paper. “That’s it, guys. No questions.”

Eddie and I left Farley Vaughn in the room to deal with the chaos of questions from the reporters. When the door shut behind us I said to Eddie, “I still think you owed it to those guys to stay and face them. You should have answered their questions.”

“Ah, the hell with them. Goddam vultures. Love you when you’re going good. But they like it better when you’re down. Screw ’em.”

For a couple of months Eddie Donagan was a big story in Boston. One of the local talk shows invited a panel of psychiatrists to speculate on the psychopathology of the Steve Blass disease, Eddie Donagan, of course, being Exhibit A. They invited Eddie to participate. He refused. A book publisher approached me with a contract worth twenty-five grand for a ghost writer to put together a quickie paperback about Eddie. They thought they’d call it
The Eddie Donagan Story: A Tragedy in One Act.
They were “ninety percent certain” they’d be able to sell the rights for a made-for-television movie. I advised Eddie to turn it down.

The
Globe
did run a three-part story a couple of weeks after Eddie quit. It was written by one of the staff sports writers, who based the piece mainly on interviews with baseball people. All of them had a story to tell about a kid they’d once known—the shortstop who mysteriously began to imitate a croquet wicket when a ground ball came his way, the third baseman who compulsively heaved baseballs into the stands in back of first, the catcher who refused to give the sign for the curveball, the outfielder who could not persuade his body to slide into a base, and many, many pitchers who, like Eddie, “ran out of control.” All gifted athletes whose careers collapsed into neurosis. Eddie laughed when he read the article.

“They think I’m upset about this,” he said. “Shit. I’m the happiest guy in the world. I know that I’m gonna wake up tomorrow morning and I won’t hafta throw a baseball. I can play golf, and if I start hooking no one’s gonna start asking, ‘What’s the matter with Eddie Donagan?’ And when I go fishin’ and don’t catch nothin’, nobody’s gonna say, ‘Oh, oh. Looks like Donagan’s lost it again.’ I can do anything, and nobody expects nothin’, and I don’t hafta play baseball. What more could a guy want?”