Wherever I Wind Up (12 page)

It would be awesome to wear red cleats, I think. I look up at the empty seats and take in the size of the place and imagine what it will be like to pitch in a park this big. I am in a place of immense gratitude and I say it out loud, on the balcony:

Thank you, Lord, for all your blessings and for helping me get this far.

My prayer is still in the air when I see Mark walking toward me. His face is whiter than home plate.

You need to come in to Doug’s office, he says.

I have no idea what’s happening other than that it’s not good.

We sit down. Doug is a Canadian with a thick mustache and a solid middle-aged body, like a guy who might be a Mountie if he weren’t running a baseball team. He has a stern, distant look on his face.

We are going to retract our offer, he tells me. We think there’s something wrong with your elbow and we want to have further testing done.

Melvin’s face is stoical. No emotion whatsoever.

This is business. All business.

I sit there and try to take in those words for a second or two:
We are going to retract our offer.

I take them in again:

We are going to retract our offer.

I don’t feel devastation, or even anger. I feel rage. Complete rage. It feels as if it starts in my toes and blasts upward through my body, like a tsunami, into my guts and right up through the top of my head.

I have an urge as primal as anything I have ever felt.

I want to reach across this desk and strangle this man who, very quietly, very dispassionately, has just taken everything I’ve worked for, taken my whole life’s dream, and crushed it as if it were a bug on the pavement. I want to cuss and tell this man exactly who he is stomping on. Part of me wants to tell him about all the ways my life is screwed up and how this is the one thing, the one thing above all else, that I can do right and that makes me somebody.

I can pitch. I can compete as hard as anybody you’ve ever seen. That’s why you made me the eighteenth pick in the whole stinkin’ draft. Don’t you remember that? Don’t you know how much more important what I have inside me is than a little laxity in the elbow?

I want to make sure he knows how it feels to be me right now, after he’s matter-of-factly dropped this atomic bomb on my baseball career. On my life.

But first I want to get on his side of the desk and let him know how it feels to be pummeled worse than he’s ever been pummeled in his life.

But I do not lift a finger. I do not leave my chair. It’s as if there’s a strong hand on my shoulder holding me back, giving me pause. In that instant I have a self-control that wasn’t there a moment earlier.

I hear a voice:

Relax, I’ve got you. Relax, R.A. It’s okay. It’s going to be okay. I’ve got you.

The voice is the Holy Spirit. The restraint is the Holy Spirit. I was just talking to God in prayer on the balcony and now He is talking back, bestowing on me a composure that could not have come from anywhere else.

I’ve got you.

The tsunami passes. I am crushed by Doug Melvin’s words but I am not going to do anything stupid. I am not going to lose control.

I’ve got you.

I get up slowly. I don’t say a word. I walk out with Mark and pass the balcony and don’t stop to look at the field or Roger Pavlik or his red shoes. I’m in a complete daze, almost as though I don’t know who I am or where I am or what just happened, as if my whole life’s hard drive has been wiped out.

Mark drives me to the airport. He tries to boost my spirits but it’s not going anywhere and we both know it. We pass through security and pass all these people and they’re all going places and living their lives and none of them knows or cares what just happened to me, a little laxity leaving me as shattered as Skip Bertman’s crystal baseball. I go to the gate, get on my plane, the rage dissipating, replaced by a terrible loneliness. A loneliness that feels terminal. I left Nashville that morning, full of excitement. I come back that afternoon, full of this total, solitary despair.

We are going to retract our offer.

Melvin’s words keep running through my head. I look out the window at thirty thousand feet. I search for comfort, any comfort at all, and find it, not in Doug Melvin’s seven words, but in the Holy Spirit’s three:
I’ve got you.

The plane lands. I am home. I am going to be all right.

SATURDAY, MARCH 12, 2011 EN ROUTE TO ORLANDO

We’re on the bus to Walt Disney World, where we’ll see Mickey, Donald, and Chipper. Well, Chipper (Jones), at least. We’re playing the Braves in my third start of the spring, and I find myself thinking about how much I love spring training. I love it because it comes bundled with hope. Indeed, it is all about hope. This isn’t the most original thought I’ve ever had, I know, but still, optimism abounds when your record is 0–0 and you are starting anew. You see the upside, not the downside. You see possibility, not impossibility. Nobody has yet written what a joke your club is. Sports talk radio has yet to heat up. Nobody has booed or belittled you. In the spring, hope is as palpable as the palm trees, even for clubs coming off a bad year the way we are. Hope is a nice thing to have, however long it lasts.

For me, this spring has another quality for me to savor. For the first time in my life, I have a guaranteed job. I have a two-year deal and I know where I’m going to be pitching. All that does is change everything. I can focus on getting into shape and working on my craft, and not worry about impressing somebody so I can stick around for another week.

Last year, my first with the Mets, I was the first guy cut. The first. I said hello and good-bye in the same sentence.

Against the Braves, I wind up having an ugly line, giving up five runs and four walks in five innings, but I am not concerned at all. The Braves hit only one ball hard. I had a good feel for my knuckleball, and when it missed the zone, it wasn’t by much. I thought a bunch of the pitches that were called balls were actually strikes. The plate umpire—a minor leaguer—told me afterward, a bit sheepishly, that he’d never called a game pitched by a knuckleballer before. Honestly, it showed, because he missed a lot of pitches, but I appreciated his candor. Even in spring training, it’s the kind of admission you rarely hear from an umpire, and it shows me a whole lot. No names here, because it will seem like I’m trying to work Mr. X for future advantage and I’m not.

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE LONE RANGER

I
almost forget about the other words Doug Melvin said, about getting additional testing on my elbow done. The Rangers want me to go see Dr. James Andrews in Birmingham, Alabama.

Fine with me. Maybe there’s still hope.

The next day, my father (who hasn’t been a big part of this whole draft process) decides to come with Anne and me to Birmingham. We ride in my father’s maroon Chevy Cavalier, a straight two-hundred-mile shot down Interstate 65. I am sitting in the front passenger seat, still exhausted from the day before. When I am awake, I am praying pretty much nonstop. After we pull into Dr. Andrews’s parking lot, my dad turns off the car and the three of us say another prayer.

Please give me the strength to deal with whatever happens today. Please see me through this, God. Please be there for me and make this nightmare go away.

Andrews’s office is like a mall on Christmas Eve: crazy busy, people coming and going everywhere. The walls are covered with photos of big-name pitchers he has operated on, from Roger Clemens to John Smoltz. When it’s my turn he starts examining me, doing many of the same tests as Conway.

I don’t see any real problems with your elbow, Andrews says. The attrition in it is a little worse than most guys your age, but that’s understandable because you’ve thrown a lot more than most guys. Let’s go ahead and take an MRI while you’re here and make sure we’re all good and then we’ll be done with you.

I like this doctor. I like him a lot. From what Andrews is telling me, he’ll report to Conway that everything checks out and my offer should be back on the table.

I go downstairs and put on a hospital gown. They inject my arm with a dye and I get inside the MRI tube, and the jackhammering sounds begin, harsh and loud and metallic. I have headphones on but they barely help. Finally after forty-five minutes the jackhammering stops. I get changed and go back upstairs. That takes some time. I get off the elevator and turn a corner. The first person I see is Anne.

She is walking toward me. She has tears in her eyes. She hugs me.

I hope the Rangers believe in miracles, she says.

Beyond her, in an alcove at the end of the hallway, I see a cluster of doctors in white jackets in front of an MRI screen, looking at my elbow. There seems to be animated discussion and debate, and lots of pointing at the screen. I walk up to see what’s going on.

Andrews gets to me first. We step into his office.

I can’t find the existence of an ulnar collateral ligament in your elbow, Andrew says. I’ve looked at thousands of these. I’ve seen torn UCLs and frayed UCLs. I’ve done a million Tommy John surgeries to repair UCLs. I’ve never in my life seen an elbow with no UCL at all where the patient is completely asymptomatic.

So much for hope. So much for all my prayers. I’m a clinical marvel to Dr. James Andrews, an orthopedic oddity for the ages, a physiological freak. Check it out, check it out . . . See the pitcher with no UCL. I can join the circus, but I can’t get my offer back from the Texas Rangers.

Andrews theorizes that I could’ve been born without the UCL in my right elbow, though he thinks it’s more likely that I injured it when I was young and it just withered up and died at some point. He can’t believe that I am not in extreme discomfort. Nor can he believe that I can throw the ball pretty much where I want. The UCL—a thick, triangular band of tissue—is the main stabilizing ligament in the elbow. Without it, the infrastructure of the elbow should be about as stable as a car without a steering wheel.

It should hurt you to turn a doorknob, to shake hands, to do the most routine of tasks, he says.

Dr. Andrews’s disbelief about what he sees only makes me feel worse. He is so confounded, in fact, that he wants to do another MRI.

I go back downstairs, get back in the gown, back in the tube. I am beside myself. When the jackhammering starts again, I feel as though I might have a full-blown anxiety attack. I distract myself by trying to think of arguments to make to Doug Melvin.

Because I don’t have a UCL, that means it can never get torn or hurt. Think of the reassurance that comes with that. Maybe I should be worth even more money!

I’m not so naïve to think the argument will fly. I get through MRI number two and go back upstairs. The new picture shows nothing different. I am still a pitcher without the one indispensable stabilizing ligament that you need to throw a baseball.

After I leave, Andrews calls Conway and tells him the shocking news and of course recommends that the Rangers not sign me.

I am, after all, not whole. Not what I seemed to be. I am damaged goods.

The dream crushing is now complete. It is so unfair; that’s the feeling I have above all others. It’s just so unfair for this to happen, and in this way. Can you imagine a worse scenario, getting drafted on the first round and offered all this money and then have it yanked away because of a one-in-a-billion medical condition?

I pray to God for understanding, for a way to get through this, but the truth is I have very little understanding. I am angry at God, angry at the Rangers, angry at the world. The whole thing taps into all my old wounds about being different from every other kid, being damaged in a deep way even if the world can’t see it. This just confirms it. I am different. I am damaged.

I am the Pitcher Without an Ulnar Collateral Ligament.