Molina Read online

  “Bend!” Pai said. “Get in front of it!”

  When the sun dropped below the tops of the tamarind trees, he called us in. Five-year-old Cheo began loading the balls and bats into Pai’s bag. I didn’t move from my spot at shortstop.

  “A few more,” I said. In the pink-gray light, I had to squint to see Pai at the plate.

  He hit me a grounder. Then another. Ten. Twenty. Thirty. I missed about half. With each flub, my frustration grew. I could feel the sting of pent-up tears in my nose and eyes. Pai kept hitting and I kept fielding until it was too dark to see.

  On the way home, I hunched in the front seat next to Pai.

  “You have to get in front of the ball,” Pai said. “Stay with it. You have good hands.”

  I made a show of pounding my glove and bending the fingers toward the palm. “Glove’s too small,” I said.

  “Glove’s fine.”

  In the backseat, Cheo was picking a knot from his wet shoelace.

  “The field was really muddy,” I said.

  “Field was fine.”

  I turned away, arms crossed. In the window, I could see my face twisted up like an old sock. Pai wasn’t trying to make me feel better. Whose side was he on?

  “Mi hijo,” he said, “listen to me.”

  I turned back.

  “You play with what you’ve got,” Pai said. “You figure out how to make it enough.”

  In Mesa, among the stars and studs in the Angels’ rookie camp, my ripped catcher’s mitt would have to be enough. When we got back to the hotel late that afternoon, I walked to 7-Eleven and bought Krazy Glue.

  ERIC DELIVERED AN envelope to me in the clubhouse. It was a $770 check from the Angels. I knocked on Bill Lachemann’s door and asked him about the rest of my $25,000 signing bonus.

  “All I know is that’s what you got,” he said. “I’m sorry if you were told different.”

  “Georgie knows the American scout said $25,000!” Pai said over the phone, his voice rising. “If the Angels send you home, Georgie better watch out!”

  Pai knew, as I did, that the less money a team invested in you, the less committed it was to your success. A team will give up on a $1,000 player more quickly than a $25,000 player—or a $300,000 player. My roommate, a seventeen-year-old Puerto Rican pitcher named José, was a $300,000 player. He looked like Dwight Gooden and threw a 95-mph fastball. He’d have to screw up royally for the Angels to give up on him. I could be cut without a second thought.

  I heard Pai take a take deep breath.

  “Listen,” he said. “Forget about it. It’s done. Nothing you can do. Focus on baseball.”

  I wired $700 to a Western Union office in Yuma. My wife would drive over from Mexico, where she was staying with her parents, to pick it up. Part of the money would pay back her father for loaning us money for her plane ticket from Puerto Rico to Arizona. I was making just $333 a month as a minor leaguer, but it was enough for my wife and me. I spent almost nothing on food. I ate as much as I could in the clubhouse and at a cafeteria at the mall, where the Angels paid for a second meal every day. I’d stuff what I could in my baseball bag for later.

  Two weeks after I signed with the Angels, Cheo was drafted in the fourteenth round by the Cubs and signed for $31,000.

  Unlike me, he had an agent, who made sure he received exactly what was promised. He bought a Mitsubishi Mirage and surprised Mai by putting a $13,000 down payment on the house next door to their rental in Kuilan. It was a little bigger, and Mai had always admired it. For the first time, Mai and Pai would pay a mortgage instead of rent.

  Like the Angels, the Cubs trained in Mesa, so Cheo and I would be close to each other. I knew his experience at rookie camp would be different than mine. One, he knew how to play his position. And two, his agent would get him free equipment, as all agents did. He wouldn’t be begging the clubbies for discards and hand-me-downs.

  With Cheo and me in the States, only Yadier was waiting for Pai when he came home from work. Actually, Yadier probably was already at the field. He was too restless to sit on the floor like Cheo and I did, waiting for Pai to finish watching El Chavo.

  A month into the rookie-league season, I was still catching the ball with my thumb down. Sure enough, just as Mercado has warned me, a foul tip sprained my thumb and I couldn’t catch for the last six weeks of camp. I DHed the rest of the way.

  At the end of rookie camp, Lachemann gathered us in the clubhouse. He told us to work hard, to keep learning, to realize we’d have our ups and downs. Then he said something I never forgot.

  “Of everyone in this room, maybe three of you will make it to the Majors. Those are the numbers. So you can’t let up for a second.”

  Three?

  I looked around me. There was the guy with the million-dollar signing bonus. The guy over there already had earned all-star honors in the minor leagues. José, my talented roommate, was a sure thing.

  That was three right there.

  A select few of the top prospects—including my roommate, the hotshot pitcher—went on to play in the Arizona Fall League. The rest of us were on our own from September until spring training began in February.

  I joined my wife in Mexico and worked with my father-in-law in the citrus groves in Yuma, digging irrigation ditches and laying pipe. And I played ball in San Luis, Mexico. My mitt, a disfigured mess of Krazy Glue scars, finally fell apart. The San Luis manager gave me an old one of his. It was a no-name brand but real leather. I had no agent to get me a glove and no extra money to spend. Even if I did have money, it was hard to find a decent glove in Mexico.

  In February, I returned to Mesa for spring training with the Angels.

  “What’s this?” I asked José, my roommate, the hotshot young pitcher. “You’re drinking now?” There was a six-pack of beer in the mini-fridge. He had begun staying out late with the other big-money players, the guys with the Mustangs and the pickup trucks with monster wheels.

  “I don’t get drunk. It’s fine. No big deal,” he said.

  I looked at him as if he were a dense child. “Do you see the competition here?”

  There were about two hundred players from every level of the Angels’ minor-league system. Locker assignments reflected the hierarchy. Triple A players occupied the first two rows in the clubhouse, then the Double A players, then all Single A guys, and in the last rows, the rookies. Walking past the rows of lockers every morning was a reminder of the mountain I was climbing to reach the Major Leagues. I’d have to beat out every catcher in every row.

  One night I returned to the hotel to find my roommate and another player smoking weed. I exploded. What if a coach found me with them? There’d be no reason to keep around a marginal player like me if they thought I might be a troublemaker.

  “I only have one shot!” I yelled at them. “This is it for me. I’m not going to let you screw it up. Don’t ever bring that in here again.”

  José stomped out of the room, insisting I was overreacting. He moved out a week later, into a room with another partying player. He was a good kid. I had met his parents. When I tried talking with him, he’d say he knew he had to work hard and be serious. Then after dinner, when I headed to my room, I’d see him peel out of the hotel parking lot with the other fools.

  I didn’t have money to go out. And I didn’t drink. Plus, at the end of the day, my legs ached from crouching, my head hurt from so much new information, and my arm hurt from throwing. I’d see other catchers pace themselves, but I didn’t know any way to throw to second except 100 percent. Rookies weren’t supposed to seek treatment from the trainer. People might think you’re soft. So you didn’t let on how much you were hurting. At night at the hotel, I retrieved ice from the machine down the hall and scooped handfuls into a towel and wrapped it around my throwing arm. I rubbed lotion into my muscles to keep the arm loose.

  When the ice melted, I’d squat in front of the TV and work on my transfer—switching the ball from my mitt to my throwing hand. You’re not supposed t
o reach over and pluck the ball from the mitt. You’re supposed to move the mitt to your throwing hand. I’d toss a ball in the air, catch it, and transfer. Toss, catch, transfer. I’d do it a hundred, two hundred times a night as I watched sports on television. I’d give myself pep talks: You don’t know your position yet, but you know baseball. No player in camp knows the game better than you. No one else had Pai as his coach.

  At practice, I studied the more experienced players as if they were textbooks. I wrung everything I could out of my bullpen sessions. I scared a pitcher one day when I caught a pitch, popped to my feet, and cocked my arm as if I were going to fire it past his head to an imaginary second base. I didn’t throw it, of course; I was just working on my moves, trying to make myself quicker. The startled pitcher threw his arms in front of his face.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Sorry,” I said. But I wasn’t. How else was I going to get better at throwing to second when, as the lowest of the lowest catchers in camp, I had so few chances to play in real games?

  Spring training was almost over when my wife drove the three hours from her parents’ home in Mexico to Mesa to spend the weekend with me. She had news: She was two months pregnant. I’d be twenty when the baby was born. I was thrilled and crazy nervous. It wasn’t just about the pressure to make enough money for everything a kid needs. Pai was twenty-four when I was born. Was I mature enough to do this? Could I sacrifice the way he did for my brothers and me?

  “Congratulations,” Pai said when I called home. “Now you’ll see what life is about. It’s family. When you have a baby, you find out that it’s all about family. Nothing else matters.”

  On the last day of spring training, the Angels gave us our team assignments—Triple A, Double A, High A, Low A, or the lowest of the low, extended spring training. That’s what I got. I drew the “Do Not Pass Go” card. I’d be back where I had been the previous year, with the new signees, the injured, the discards, and the not-ready-for-anything-else.

  Midway through extended spring training, the Angels promoted me to the Low A team in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. They needed a bullpen catcher. But once I got there, the manager, Tom Lawless, began putting me into games as a DH and then gave me some starts behind the plate. One day I went 4-for-5 and coaxed a young pitcher through a shaky inning. Lawless called me into his office.

  “Don’t let anyone tell you you can’t play this game.”

  He made me the regular starter.

  My body wasn’t prepared for what that meant. I was about to find out that being a catcher was as much about stamina and pain tolerance as about skill and strategy.

  I squatted 120 to 170 times a game. I took dozens of pitches every day to my hands, toes, fingers, legs, arms, neck, head. I ran up the line on every grounder to back up first base. I leaped from my crouch to field bunts and to throw out runners trying to steal. Late in a game one night, a runner barreled toward me, trying to score from second on a base hit to right. The throw home came in high. I stretched. I figured the runner would slide. He didn’t. Just as the ball hit my glove, he leveled me, his shoulder spearing my ribs. Somehow the ball stayed in the glove. My body felt as if it had been cracked in two. But I stayed in the game. That’s what you do. Afterward, I submerged myself in an ice-water bath in the trainer’s room. It was supposed to ease the pain and reduce swelling. But afterward I could barely walk to my friend’s car. The next morning, I couldn’t move enough body parts to get out of bed. The trainer didn’t let me back on the field for two weeks.

  Even in that short season, my catching hand became swollen and discolored. (I had learned to keep my bare hand behind my glove when I caught. Always.) My arms and legs bore ripe-banana bruises in shades of yellow, black, and purple. The pitches hurt and left marks despite the chest protector, mask, and pads. Catchers, I quickly learned, don’t complain. And they don’t wear their beatings like badges of courage, either. You don’t expect a parade for doing what you’re supposed to do.

  Cheo was playing for the Cubs’ Low A team in Des Moines, which was in the same Midwest League as the Angels’. Cedar Rapids had already played Cheo’s team by the time I joined, but we ended up facing them in the first round of the playoffs. It was weird. We had always been each other’s biggest cheerleaders, and now we were in opposing dugouts.

  “Please,” I told Cheo before the game, “try to get me out. Because I’m going to try to get you out.”

  We had to be professionals on the field. We owed it to our teams, and we owed it to ourselves. Those games ended up being tough for Cheo. Des Moines was up one game to nothing in the best-of-three playoff. We won the next game in the ninth inning on a wild pitch that got past Cheo. In the third game, we took the lead in the top of the ninth on yet another wild pitch that skipped past Cheo. Cheo’s team had a chance to tie it in the bottom of the ninth with two outs, two strikes, and a runner on third. Our closer bounced a split-finger fastball. I blocked it with my chest then inadvertently kicked it up the third-base line. I scrambled after it, turned the wrong way around the ball, slipped, picked the ball up as I fell, and from flat on my back flung it to first base. Somehow it beat the runner, and we won.

  As we celebrated, I saw Cheo walk off the field with his head down. I felt horrible for him. He and his teammates boarded their bus quickly after the game, so I didn’t get a chance to tell him to forget the loss. No one could have caught those wild pitches.

  Our Cedar Rapids club went on to win the league championship. We would each receive a championship ring with our names on it. All I thought about was showing it to Pai. When I received mine the following year and brought it to Puerto Rico with me, Pai said simply, “Great accomplishment.” He was pleased, but didn’t want to make a fuss: My success had come at the expense of Cheo’s.

  PAI INSISTED I take his car.

  “No, you need it for work. I’ll get myself there.”

  After the season in Cedar Rapids, my pregnant wife and I had moved in with Mai and Pai. They were living in the three-bedroom house that Cheo had helped buy. We were in one bedroom, Mai and Pai were in another, and Cheo and Yadier shared the third. Cheo had landed a winter-league spot with the San Juan Senadores. The park was only twenty minutes away, and he had his new Mitsubishi.

  I was with the Indios de Mayaguez, the Mayaguez Indians, as a bullpen catcher. I was an inactive player, meaning I wouldn’t play in any games. I wouldn’t get to hit. But I’d make six hundred dollars a month, and I’d catch a million pitches. I was happy. I needed to accelerate my learning curve by catching as much as possible. I had to close the gap between me and the guys who had been catching all their lives.

  But Mayaguez was across the island, a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Dorado. I didn’t have a car.

  “Take the Nova,” Pai said. The Toyota had finally died, and he’d been driving an old Nova for the last few years. He said he’d go with his coworker Lee Perez, who lived a minute away in Fortuna. Or, he said, he’d catch a ride on La Número Dos. The factory in Toa Baja was a twenty-minute ride. I argued, but there was no changing his mind.

  The morning of my first game, I rose when I heard Pai in the kitchen around five.

  “What are you doing up so early, mi hijo?”

  “Driving you to work.”

  The darkness was starting to dissolve when we turned onto La Número Dos. The Nova chugged and shivered when I picked up speed. It convulsed when I hit fifty.

  “Suave,” Pai said, laughing. “Easy.”

  Later that morning, I set out for Mayaguez, babying the old car across the Cordillera Central—the Central Mountain Range—through Vega Baja, Arecibo, Aguadilla, Rincón, passing homemade crosses scattered along the hairpin curves. About ninety minutes into the drive, the skies opened. Pai had warned me that the windshield-wiper motor was burned out. I turned the knob anyway. Nothing. I slowed the car and rolled down the window.

  I held the steering wheel with my right hand and grabbed the wiper with my left, trying to pull it bac
k and forth. To get a better grip, I leaned farther out the window. Rain pelted my face. I couldn’t see a thing. With my hand still on the wiper, I crooked my neck to keep my head inside the car. When it rained at night, driving was hopeless. I couldn’t manipulate the wipers nearly fast enough to see the road. Even if I fixed the wipers, I still couldn’t drive safely in the rain. The tires were bald. I found myself hydroplaning even in a light shower, praying to God to save me from sliding off the road or hitting another car. The two-and-a-half-hour commute often took three and a half hours at night.

  I wasn’t nervous about joining the Mayaguez team. I knew a few players, including one of their stars, José Hernandez, a Major League infielder from Vega Alta.

  “Oye, cabrones!” José hollered in the clubhouse when I arrived. “This is Bengie Molina. He’s my brother, and I don’t want any of you guys trying to mess with him. If I see it, you’ll have to deal with me.”

  José knew I was quiet and shy on top of being the only Single A guy in there. He knew I could be a target for pranks and other funny business. I was a little embarrassed by José’s declaration but also appreciative. I’d work my butt off to make him look good.

  The bullpen was behind a fence along the right-field line. During the day, it was like any other bullpen. But once the sun dropped, it was a cave. There were no lights, just the spillover from the ones in right field and first base. I got into the habit of widening my eyes before each pitch, like opening the lens on a camera. I had to focus completely on the pitcher’s hand, following the ball from the point of release into my glove—an elapsed time of half a second. I don’t know if the human eye can actually track an object as small as a baseball traveling that fast. Maybe our eyes pick up the trajectory and extrapolate from there. Now factor in the movement of the ball, especially on breaking pitches. The only hope I had of catching pitches that broke and dipped was to train myself to see how the ball was actually moving instead of how I expected it to move.