Wherever I Wind Up (26 page)

I have to get back there,
I tell myself.
I know I have the ability. I just have to make them take notice.
Hearing the sounds of the game I love, standing alone in the darkness, close enough almost to touch the action but still so far away, feels like an out-of-body experience.

The series wraps up on Sunday. Gord never calls. The Cardinals take their third in a row. My weekend in St. Louis consists of a lot of quality room service … and three days of crushed hopes. What a colossal waste. I never get inside Busch Stadium. I miss a start for the Sounds. I pack up and head back to Nashville.

The three-hundred-mile drive home is long and lonely.
Just keep doing what you are doing. Keep making good starts. That’s the only thing you can control,
I tell myself.

But would that be enough? What if I keep it up and nobody notices or cares? Then what? I’ve been sent back to the minors four times now. Whenever this happens—I don’t care who you are—you fear disappearing forever. You fear that once you are out of sight, you will be completely out of mind. I’ve seen it happen so often. People think that big-league ballplayers are at an entirely different level from Triple-A players. Some of them are, but the truth is that in many cases the line of demarcation is no bigger than the splinter of a bat. Joe Dillon is a Sounds teammate, a corner infielder with big muscles and a lunch-pail work ethic. Joe is a positive guy, a team-first fellow to the core. He hits .317 with 20 home runs and 75 RBIs in two-thirds of a season in 2007, following up other Triple-A years in which he hit .360 with 34 homers and .329 with 39 homers and 117 RBIs.

Joe Dillon’s big-league career consisted of 246 big-league at-bats with three different clubs—or about 200 more at-bats than Chris Barnwell got, even though Chris had a tremendous glove and could play anywhere and would do all the little things it takes to win games. Chris and Joe got typecast as journeymen who were good but not good enough. The label stuck.

All it did was cost them big-league careers, which I don’t doubt either one of them would’ve had.

I have a journeyman label of my own, and I hate it. I finish the year 13–6 and am voted the Pacific Coast League pitcher of the year, and still, the Brewers do not call me up to join the big club in September.

What more do they want me to do? How else can I prove my worth to them, beyond winning ten of my last eleven and being named the best pitcher in the league?

The Brewers say that they don’t have a roster spot for me but tell me to stay ready in case they need me for the pennant race in September. They are fighting for a divisional title and I am their top minor-league pitcher and they don’t want me. You try not to take it personally, but how can you not?

Is it age discrimination? Knuckleball discrimination? I don’t know. I don’t think it’s fair. I am sick about it.

So I stay home in Nashville but, for a switch, I let myself have my lousy feelings. All of them. Anne is one of the first to see the difference. She tells me about an upcoming dinner party, one that I am not at all keen on attending. Here’s how I would’ve reacted, pre–Stephen James:

I’m sick and tired of you roping me into these stupid outings with your friends when you know darn well I don’t want any part of going and having all these people I don’t know asking me a million questions about my baseball career. When are you going to stop trying to run my life?

Then I exit, slamming the door after me.

Here’s how I react this time:

I’m having a lot of anger about not being called up. It’s not about you, it’s about me. I don’t want to take it out on you, so forgive me if I’m short- or ill-tempered. I just really don’t feel like going to this party. I know it means a lot to you and that you just want to have fun. I’m just not into it.

“The unexamined life is not worth living,” Socrates said. I’m not that much into ancient Greek philosophy, but I do know I’m a heck of a lot better human being for my ongoing self-examination. I’m baby stepping, but I am getting places.

Every day of my life, I repeat the mantra I’ve picked up from my work with Stephen: Don’t repress your feelings. Be honest with your feelings. If you are present with them now, they aren’t going to come back later in much more pernicious form.

It’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. I’ve spent years locking sadness and anger away, toughing it out alone, taking flight from fear and frustration and everything. I never wanted to look inside me because I was afraid of what I’d find. Then, inevitably, the pent-up emotions come up in an unhealthy and inappropriate way, like being impatient with the kids or verbally brutalizing Anne.

I don’t want to be that person anymore. I don’t want to hurt the people who I love the most anymore.

And I don’t want to take flight anymore. I want to start taking risks, letting people know how I feel.

Being authentic.

I’ve learned that when I hide or brood and play the role of victim, the first victim is always me.

The Brewers finish in second place, behind the Cardinals. I tell Anne: As angry as I am about not getting back to the big leagues this year—as much as I don’t think it’s fair—I am not going to let somebody else define who I am as a pitcher or what I’m capable of as a pitcher. I didn’t let it define me when I found out I had no ulnar collateral ligament. I didn’t let it define me when I gave up the six home runs.

Why start now?

After a short break, I go right back to Uncle Ricky’s gym wall and, for added convenience, to the walls at Lipscomb University, near our home in Nashville. I get my five-gallon pail and fill it up with baseballs and throw knuckleballs by the thousands, from my meticulously manicured nails into a long white wall of cement. I am a thirty-three-year-old free agent and I know more than ever that God has a plan for me. I am not worried about being an underdog. I love
Rocky
and
Rudy
and
The Rookie
and every overcoming-the-odds movie ever made.

Wouldn’t it be nice to join
that
club?

It doesn’t take long to get over the Brewers’ snub. Day after day I throw my knuckleballs, full of faith that something will open up; full of optimism that my success with the Nashville Sounds was not a fluke; full of conviction that my misadventure in the Missouri River has changed the narrative of my life.

I entered the Missouri with a 3–4 record and a 5.87 ERA. I came out of it with a 10–2 record and a 2.42 ERA. The Missouri may not be holy water and people may not go there to be baptized and seek absolution of their sins, but nobody can tell me that God didn’t use it to humble me and help me and recharge my faith and reset my focus. I jumped in to prove my worth and failed spectacularly, but wound up with one of the greatest gifts of my life. What a deal. What a day—the day God’s grace showed me how to stop clinging . . . and start living.

BEFORE I CAN
get any clarity on where I’ll be playing ball in 2008, I need to get more clarity about myself. I need it in the worst way. I have been holding back from Stephen James. I am hanging on, desperately, to my last secret, the most painful boxed-away item of all. We are out in the country at the Bartholomews’ family farm, a half hour outside of Nashville, sitting in the living room of a rustic farmhouse, rich with wooden beams and plank floors and the comforting smell of God’s earth.

We came here for an intensive day of therapy—to get to the bottom of the story. But I’m still unsure if I’m ready to tell all. It’s a brisk autumn day, and the house is quiet and warm and safe. We set up in the living room. Baseball and my future are the furthest thing from my mind.

I look into Stephen’s eyes, and think:
Do I tell him? Am I ready to tell him? Is he ready to hear it? What if what I need to say is as repulsive to him as it is to me? What if he decides he’s finally had it with me and all my crap and just bolts out the door and runs back to Nashville? What if he hates my story as much as I do?

That could happen, couldn’t it?

I am terribly afraid. I thought I was beyond this point. Stephen knows everything else about me, knows every failing and sinful thought and act and source of shame. If your secret is safe with anyone in this world, it is Stephen James.

I am quivering and sweating, much worse than I did at that first Fellowship of Christian Athletes meeting all those years ago. Finally, I begin to talk.

Stephen, I need to share something with you. I haven’t been completely forthright with you. I am so afraid to tell you this, but I know that I need to.

Remember the babysitter and the sexual-abuse stuff?

Of course I do, he says.

The babysitter was not the only one.

I didn’t think so. I’m glad you want to talk about it, Stephen says.

And so I begin. I tell him about the tennis ball and the garage and the teenage creep who forced himself on me and violated me, with power and with hate. I give him all the hideous details, moment by moment, feeling by feeling, violation by violation. Deeper and deeper into the story we go.

I tell him that even though the babysitter’s abuse was repeated, this secret felt darker, more shameful, more damaging.

You sound angry. Hateful, Stephen says.

Yes, I’m angry.

With whom? The guy who abused you?

Yes.

Who else?

God. I am furious at God. I hate Him too.

What are you angry with God about? Stephen asks.

How could a loving God let this happen to me? How? Can you tell me that? I was only eight! Why didn’t He do something? Why? I am shouting, and starting to cry.

The wound is raw and new again. I want to run. I want to die, but I know no matter what I do and how fast I run, I cannot escape. This kind of shame and pain no one can out run. It hunts you like a wolf. It’s unrelenting. I have nothing left to do but walk into the pain, take it on.

Who else did you hate? Stephen asks.

I hated everything. Myself, my life. Everything. I start to weep, and I cannot stop. I weep so hard I can barely get air and can’t stop shaking. I weep more than I have in the last twenty years combined—no lie.

Stephen does the best thing he can do for me:

He lets me grieve.

He reminds me that I’m not alone.

You know, R.A., your God might just be big enough, loving enough, to take your hate, Stephen says. He pauses. That’s yours to risk. That’s faith: stepping past what you know, the shame and hurt, and into the mystery that love might be there for you. You are giving yourself and your children the greatest gift you could ever give them, because letting yourself face your story and feel all the pain you’ve run from is the only way you are going to be the free man you want to be, with the life you want to live.

After three of the most wrenching and wonderful hours of my life, we drive back to Nashville, the waning sunlight shining on the russet-colored hills. The seasons are changing.
I
am changing. The last secret is out.

MONDAY, AUGUST 15, 2011

SAN DIEGO

I walk back to the hotel after our 5–4 victory over the Padres tonight, a game that followed a yearlong pattern in which I pitch pretty well but not well enough to get the victory. I also continue my propensity to give up late home runs, in this case a two-run job to Will Venable in the seventh inning. I have eight starts left and my record is 5–11, my ERA 3.77. I aim to improve both before the year’s out.

My story line is hardly the point tonight, though. Jason Isringhausen picks up his 300th career save and I am so thankful to be a part of it in a small way. For weeks I’ve been telling him that I would get the win the night he got his landmark save, because the old guys have to stick together. He went ahead and did it without me, and that leaves me with a feeling that’s just a little bittersweet.

A part of me expects to come in tomorrow and see Izzy’s locker empty. He has been grinding through injuries for a while—“a while” is baseballese for years and years—and has continually joked that when he gets 300 saves, he’s out. However, the game holds a strange power over him, as it does for all of us. We think we can use it to an end of some sort and then walk away in peace. Baseball laughs at that notion, because it knows how hard it is to walk away from something you do well—knows how much we need the game, the lessons it teaches, the relationships it uncovers, and the truth it tells. Baseball also needs us, in a way, to pour into its history and its pedigree and to help create its lore, whether the names behind it are Ruth or Mays or Mantle or Koufax or … Isringhausen. Izzy would wince if he knew I was putting him in that sentence, but his legacy is special in its own right, for it’s a legacy of enduring pursuit of consistent contribution through a labyrinth of adversity. It has been fun to be his teammate and watch him interact with a game, watch him playfully dog all of us and wait for us to dog him back. When I walk to Petco Park tomorrow, I hope I’ll see Izzy in his familiar place on the training table, getting his big, old, falling-apart body worked on, headphones on, iPad in hand. Either way, I know the game is better off having had him, and he is better off having had the game. And that is exactly the way it should be.