Inside Baseball: The Best of Tom Verducci (30 page)

Rickey knows that he can still play baseball. He can still lay off pitches dangerously close to the strike zone, he can still make a pitcher perspire just by taking that cocksure lead off first base, he can still fly close to the ground, jetlike, into second base, and he can still give value to a paying customer.

Newark isn’t Utopia. But it is baseball. And, on balance, he is paying to play it. He took the job for $3,000 a month and rented an apartment in Manhattan for $4,000 a month. He travels with a longtime friend to every home and away game (except those in Nashua, N.H., where he stays at the team hotel) by commuting, like some Pony League player, from Manhattan. Sometimes his ride home takes two hours. At week’s end the Bears’ leadoff man was hitting .352 with a .477 on-base percentage.

“If I feel I don’t have the skills, I’d be happy to hang up my shoes and go be with my kids,” he says. “But I know I have the skill. The speed guys who can score runs? I think I’m better than the guys in the major leagues. Will I get the chance?”

Henderson sits on a gray folding metal chair in front of his locker in the Bears’ clubhouse. These are gym lockers—red metal lockers with doors and vents—not the cherrywood stalls you find in plush big league clubhouses. Strips of adhesive tape serve as name tags for the has-beens, never-weres and hardball lifers of the independent team, including one for the impossibly named Damon Ponce DeLeon, a pitcher.

One of the two overhead television sets carries the news that David Cone, four years younger than Henderson, has retired, this time for good. It was Jim Bouton who wrote that a ballplayer dies twice—once like everybody else, but first, when his career ends. Cone has found his baseball mortality. Then Henderson is told that the Athletics have cut Gant. His eyes moisten on that news. He cannot help but think that was his roster spot, his shot.

“I’m trying to figure what’s the problem,” he says. “Why I can’t get a chance. Who did I step on? Who did I do something bad to? If [that’s it], I apologize, because I’m not that kind of person.”

Rickey needs a Day. He needs the microphone, the gifts, the goodbyes, the proper eulogy for a Hall of Fame career. “If I was still playing baseball and went off that way, it would be fine,” he says. “If I’m not playing baseball, I don’t feel that is the way I’d want to go. Why bring me back [only] for a Day when I can play the game?”

Boston gave him a Day last year, though it was more an appreciation than a send-off.

And that was the time….

One of the team’s owners, Tom Werner, asked Rickey what might be a good idea for a gift from the team.

“I always wanted a mobile home,” Rickey said.

Werner, staggered, said, “A mobile phone?”

“No,” Rickey said, “a mobile
home
.”

Werner asked Rickey for another suggestion. He asked for “John Henry’s Mercedes,” referring to the vehicle of another of the team’s owners. Werner explained the club might have difficulty finding and taking delivery of the same make and model on short notice.

“No, I mean
John Henry
’s Mercedes,” Rickey said.

Henry wasn’t about to hand over his car. On Rickey’s Day, a new car was being delivered to Fenway Park just as Henderson arrived. It was a shiny red Thunderbird.

“Whose ugly car is that?” Henderson said.

That was the car the Red Sox purchased for him as a gift. “It’s an old man’s car, and I’m not an old man,” Henderson said. He told the club it would have to pay to have the car shipped to his home in Arizona. He gave the car to Angela.

Yes, he needs one last Day in a big league park if only to give him an ending that isn’t so messy. And so people can get together and tell their favorite Rickey stories.

Like the time….

Rickey was pulled over by a police officer after a night game in San Diego for speeding with his lights off. As the officer approached the car, Rickey, without saying a word, lowered his window only about an inch, just far enough to stick out two fingers holding a $100 bill. (The officer let him and his money go.)

Or the time….

Rickey was asked if he owned the Garth Brooks album that has the song
Friends in Low Places
. “Rickey doesn’t have albums,” he answered. “Rickey has CDs.”

Or the time someone asked him what he thought about speculation that as many as 50% of big leaguers used steroids. “Well, I’m not,” he said. “So that’s 49 [percent] right there.”

Or the time he developed frostbite in August. The Blue Jays used a newfangled ice treatment on his ankle. “What is Rickey, a guinea pig?” he asked.

Or the time he bragged that his Manhattan apartment had such a great view he could see “the Entire State Building.”

Or the time he settled a feud with Yankees manager Lou Piniella, saying, “Let bye-byes be bye-byes.”

Until that Day he waits and wonders. He thinks about winter ball after this and maybe Japan if the majors still haven’t called. He is one of the treasures of the game, and he is left behind in its basement—Sinatra playing the Catskills, Olivier doing summer stock, Toscanini at the Elks band shell.

“If they say your skill’s gone and you can’t do nothing, then I can see it’s time, but I ain’t had a club yet that says that,” Henderson says. “And that’s the shame. As long as I’ve been playing the game, what I accomplished … for me to be in this situation, really, it’s a shame to major league baseball.

“But that’s life. And I digest it. Because I believe the Good Lord has put me here for something. And He never tells me that road I’m going to put you on is always going to be gravy.”

A road without gravy is no sort of place for this kind of story to end. And so, at 44, ever independent, the legend goes on.

Postscript: Rickey played another season in Newark and one more year of independent ball, in San Diego, in 2005 before finally retiring from baseball. It is hard to find anyone who loves playing the game and loves life more than he does. When we were done talking in that spartan Newark Bears clubhouse, Rickey surprised me with something no player ever did before or since: He gave me a big hug.

JUNE 7, 2004

Even great hitters aren’t immune to horrific slumps. How does
a player like Derek Jeter suddenly lose his way at the plate—
and how does he find his way back?

A
BATTING SLUMP IS BASEBALL’S VERSION OF THE
common cold. Sooner or later every hitter gets one, it can keep him up at night, and there is no known cure, though that does not prevent everyone and his doorman from passing on homemade remedies and get-well wishes. Derek Jeter of the Yankees came down with a whopper of a case in April—he was 0 for 32 at its head-throbbing worst—that was so bad that he couldn’t leave his Manhattan apartment without being reminded of it.

“The doorman would tell me, ‘Tonight’s the night! I’ve got a feeling this is it!’” Jeter says. “You’re trying not to think about it, yet everywhere you go, you’re constantly reminded of it. It wasn’t so much people giving me advice as it was people saying, ‘We’re pulling for you.’ It’s everywhere you turn—people on the street, the questions from the media every day.”

This season has produced even more proof that no one is immune. Career .300 hitters Jeter, Chipper Jones of the Braves and Jose Vidro of the Expos—who ranked seventh, 12th and 18th, respectively, in career batting average among active players entering this season—all were hitting worse than .250 at week’s end. Fellow perennial All-Stars Carlos Delgado of the Blue Jays (.227), Bret Boone of the Mariners (.231) and Shawn Green of the Dodgers (.229) were similarly stricken. Welcome to the cold-and-flew-out-weakly-to-leftfield season.

“These guys are all proven hitters, and they’re not old, either,” Brewers general manager Doug Melvin says. “I think [at the end of the season] the numbers will be there. But some are digging such a big hole that they won’t be able to put up the big numbers they have in the past.”

Jones, for instance, had only two doubles and 13 RBIs at week’s end, jeopardizing his streaks of five years with 30 doubles and eight years with 100 RBIs. Delgado had eight homers and 32 RBIs, and was facing an uphill climb to continue his streak of six consecutive seasons with at least 33 homers and 102 RBIs.

For young hitters, a slump can infect an entire year, which is what happened last season to the Phillies’ Pat Burrell (.209), the Reds’ Adam Dunn (.215) and the White Sox’ Paul Konerko (.234). Jeter, however, showed last week how stars with long track records of success can get well soon. Entering the Yankees’ May 26 game against the Orioles, Jeter, who hit .324 in 2003, was batting .189 after 190 at bats. Suddenly, facing the Orioles and the Devil Rays, he pounded out 11 hits in his next 24 at bats, raising his average 31 points in five days, to .220. To hit .300 for the season—assuming he maintained his rate of at bats—Jeter would need to hit .335 the rest of the way, not an unreasonable task for a career .317 hitter.

“I didn’t see how people could be writing my obituary after one month,” Jeter said last Saturday before hitting safely in his sixth straight game. “I knew all along there was a lot of the season left to play, so I wasn’t concerned. It’s frustrating when you’re not getting your hits. I’m not going to lie to you about that. But you don’t spend time thinking about what’s already happened. You can’t change it. You just look forward to the next game, especially when you know there are about 120 left.”

Not coincidentally, the Yankees also began to look more like themselves last week, putting together their highest-scoring (61 runs) six-game winning streak in 46 years. “We feed off his energy, without a doubt,” Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez says of Jeter. “He’s a hitting machine. A lot of good things happen when he gets going. He’s the heartbeat of this team.”

The slump—or at least its derivation in the English language—traces from the appropriately cold climes of Scandinavia and the Norwegian verb
slumpa
(“to fall”). In America a
slumpa
can take on many forms, though none as vivid as the one that falls at the beginning or end of a season and strikes a star player. Combine those elements, and you get historic droughts at the plate, such as the 0 for 21 suffered in the 1952 World Series by the Dodgers’ Gil Hodges, whose slump the following season prompted Brooklyn priests to entreat their parishioners to pray for him; the 5-for-25 performance by the Red Sox’ Ted Williams in the 1946 World Series, which turned out to be his only postseason appearance; and Jeter’s 0-for-32 run, which drew much more attention than the virtually simultaneous 0-for-37 skid by the Devil Rays’ José Cruz Jr., a lifetime .251 hitter.

Bob Uecker, the former backup catcher, once said, “I had slumps that lasted into the winter.” But with players such as Uecker, a career .200 hitter, it’s hard to tell when a slump begins and ends. Likewise, pitcher Bob Buhl owns the worst 0-fer in major league history—0 for 88 over two seasons—but he was a career .089 hitter.

Dodgers infielder Robin Ventura went 0 for 41 as a rookie with the White Sox in 1990. Hall of Fame shortstop Luis Aparicio once endured an 0-for-44 slump. For position players, however, the sultan of slump is Bill Bergen, a Brooklyn catcher who went 0 for 46 in 1909 on his way to becoming the worst hitter of all time (minimum 1,000 at bats), with a .170 batting average over 11 seasons. That an accomplished hitter such as Jeter could look like Bergen is testament to the humbling nature of baseball.

“Slumps are powerful things,” says Rodriguez, who endured an 0-for-21 stretch with the Rangers in 2002. “Sometimes players are going so badly that, if they hit a pop-up near the third base stands, they root for the ball to stay in play so the third baseman can catch it, just so they don’t strike out again. I’ve heard of guys telling the catcher, ‘Just tell me what pitch is coming because there’s no way I’m getting a hit right now and I don’t want to punch out again. Just let me put one ball in play.’”

Says Yankees DH Jason Giambi, “There are times you’re going so bad you swing at the first pitch just so you don’t get to another two-strike count, because you know you’ll strike out. So you’ll take your ground ball to second base and get out of there thinking, O.K., at least I made contact. That’s
something
.”