Molina Page 14

  “Well, first I give thanks to God,” I said. “And second to my father, who taught me everything.”

  In the morning Mai and Pai bought three copies of Puerto Rico’s two main papers, which had photos of me hitting the grand slam. At the kitchen table, I watched Pai’s eyes move down the pages. Then he folded the papers and smoothed the wrinkles.

  “Next season is yours,” he said. I knew he meant the Angels.

  I’d had all of two months as a starter in the big leagues. Todd Greene’s shoulder could be healed. The Angels could sign a starting catcher. There were no guarantees for me.

  But I couldn’t help thinking about what my cousin Mandy told me about Pai when I was a kid: “If he says it, it must be true.”

  All these years later, I still believed it.

  PART

  4

  WHEN I PULLED into the lot of Tempe Diablo Stadium in Tempe, Arizona, for the start of spring training, my eyes went straight to the gigantic, wide-stanced A on the roof. I loved that A. The first time I saw it, it kind of reminded me of the Statue of Liberty because it was a symbol, at least for me, of arriving in a new world. I remember relatives from Puerto Rico who had moved to New York saying they felt like they loved their new city more than people who had been born there did. Pro baseball was still a new world for me, and I felt an immigrant’s love for everything about it. I loved the Angels’ training complex—the brick walls of the park, the uniform with my name on the back, the craggy buttes beyond the left-field fence. I loved the moment on the first day every spring when I walked from the clubhouse into the dim underground hallway and then emerged into the bright morning sunlight at first base. If I were a poet I might have made something of winter giving way to spring, dark opening to light. As a ballplayer, the field was symbol enough. Not a footprint on the dirt, not a divot in the grass. You felt like it was waiting for you to leave your mark.

  Todd Greene was in camp. So were Walbeck and Hemphill, all of us again after the same job. Terry Collins was gone, however. Mike Scioscia—a forty-two-year-old former catcher—was getting his first shot at managing. He set a new tone immediately with morning team meetings, where in addition to talking about baseball stuff, he dispatched players on crazy assignments. He sent several Latin players to dinner with a young American pitcher from the Deep South. No one was allowed to speak his native language. They had us crying the next day recounting each side of the butchered conversation. Another day he sent players out to report back on a local ostrich festival. During the team meeting the following morning, an ostrich suddenly galloped into the clubhouse, sending us scrambling for cover. A saucer-eyed Ramon Ortiz dove into his locker. “Mire el pollo grande!” (Look at the giant chicken!) Another day, Scioscia showed up with two Arizona State University mathematics professors who proceeded to make pitcher John Lackey retake an algebra test he had flunked nine years earlier. In Scioscia’s meetings you could count on two things: You’d learn something, and you’d laugh.

  During games, however, Scioscia was like an operative assessing his target—considering variables, noting patterns, anticipating moves and countermoves. He pounced on the smallest opportunity to gain the upper hand. He played to win every inning of every game, even in spring training. Everyone knew we didn’t have the talent to compete against the top teams. But apparently no one had told Scioscia. He reminded me of Pai with Los Pobres.

  With a week left of camp, Scioscia called me into his office.

  “Have a seat.”

  I had been in that chair before. I knew the drill. I was being sent down.

  “I want to be straightforward here,” he said. “You got nothing to worry about. You made the team. We believe you can do the job.”

  I was stunned. Camp wasn’t over, and he was giving me the job. I was on the Opening Day roster. Not a fill-in, a call-up, a disposable part.

  “I want you to understand something,” he said. “The reason you’re here is defense. The way you handle your pitchers. I want you to take care of these guys like they’re your own family.”

  “Thank you,” I finally said, rising to pump his hand. “I won’t let you down. I’ll take care of those guys.”

  “I know you will.”

  It was early morning, an hour before practice. I walked onto the empty field in my shower shoes. All those years. The bus rides from Cedar Rapids to Peoria, Midland to Shreveport. The broken wipers on the Nova. The dozens of failed tryouts. The soda-cracker barbells. El Caballo Loco. The spikes on the phone wire. The dark Mayaguez bullpen. And of course, all those afternoons with Pai on the field across the street.

  I called him that afternoon when I got back to the hotel.

  “I’m on the team.”

  “Which team?”

  He thought I meant one of the farm teams.

  “Opening Day roster, Pai.”

  “For real?” He laughed. “Opening Day? Oh, mi hijo, I’m so happy for you.”

  “Thank you for everything, Pai.”

  Mai got on the phone and whooped it up. Then Pai got back on.

  “Don’t waste this opportunity.”

  What? After all I had I been through to get this far? Did he really think I’d do something to blow it now?

  I called Cheo at the Cubs hotel in Mesa to give him the news. Later, after Cheo and I went out for our usual Panda Express dinner at the mall, I was still thinking about Pai’s comment about wasting my opportunity. Maybe his warning was meant not for me but for his younger self.

  When camp broke, Todd Greene was sent to Triple A. I was named the starter.

  After I packed up my locker, I tipped the clubbies.

  THE ANGELS STUNK. We sank in the standings every week. But every day we showed up at the park utterly convinced we would turn the season around. Scioscia’s team meetings and nutty assignments in spring training were paying off. Our inside jokes and stories had the effect of bonding us like a family. They reminded us we were in this together. Us against the world.

  Scioscia continued to hit the same themes he did in spring training: Play smart, play hard, pay attention to everything, outwork your opponent, think more about the name on the front of the jersey than the name on the back. And win today.

  I caught almost every day and learned the nuances of each pitcher. With high-strung, talkative Ramon Ortiz, I was hard-nosed and blunt; he wouldn’t listen otherwise. With Scott Schoeneweis, I spoke more gently; a kick in the butt only got him rattled. I talked to Jarrod Washburn more like a friend. With Tim Belcher, a veteran and Cy Young contender, I just listened; he knew what he wanted to do. The most important thing, Scioscia often reminded me, was to build trust and respect. You want your pitcher to know you’ve done your homework, that you know which hitters are hot, which are scrapping. A pitcher has to have complete confidence in what you’re calling. He can’t hold anything back on his pitches. Doubt is a killer.

  I remember one game coaxing our erratic twenty-two-year-old pitcher through the first few innings. Then I took back-to-back foul tips to my fingers and lost feeling in my hand. The numbness gave way to prickly pain, like when you put heat on freezing hands. Then the hand swelled and stiffened. But I wasn’t leaving the game. The kid’s focus and confidence might crack if he suddenly had to switch to a different catcher. With a ballooning hand, I hit a home run to win the game. In the clubhouse afterward, I was a ragged, sweaty heap of black-and-blue—a great kind of ragged, sweaty heap. It was the best feeling because I knew I’d given everything I had. I’d gone all out. The papers the next day played up my home run. They didn’t understand that the home run contributed less to the win than the work behind the plate.

  Scioscia was a gifted teacher, following in the footsteps of Mrs. El-Khayyat, Bill Lachemann, Sal Fasano, and, of course, Pai. He’d call me into the office to ask why I called for this pitch instead of that one. He pointed out flaws in my thinking. Late in the game, he told me, don’t give a hitter anything in his comfort zone, even if you think you’re outsmarting him. Go with your
pitcher’s best pitch. Respect the hitter’s strengths. Respect your pitcher’s strengths.

  On the days I wasn’t catching, I watched the game closely, the way I did with Sal. Against the Toronto Blue Jays one day, I noticed a pattern with one of their players, Carlos Delgado. When he was on base, he alternated taking big leads and short leads. The next day I was back behind the plate, and Delgado was at second. I waited until I knew he would take a big lead and called for a half pitchout—far enough outside so the batter wouldn’t swing but easy for me to catch and throw. I whipped a bullet to second and nailed Delgado. Inning over. I got Delgado at second base again the next day when, on a throw home from the outfield, he tried to stretch a single into a double.

  My defense was attracting attention. “Have the Angels Found a Catcher?” one newspaper story asked. I was described in another story as “the ponderous rookie who runs like a catering truck and plays like a Porsche.” There was no question I had gotten slower since becoming a catcher. All that squatting and hunching. I had gotten thicker, but I actually didn’t weigh much more than I did in college.

  JAMIE WORKED ON the TV crew at about half our home games. I had to find a way to meet her. During batting practice one day, I saw her in the dugout chatting with Kenny Higdon. Here was my chance. I clattered down the steps to retrieve a bat I didn’t need. I looked directly into her eyes as I approached. I nodded, passed by, took a bat from the rack, and clattered back up the steps and onto the field.

  During our next series I almost ran smack into Jamie in the hallway outside the clubhouse.

  I felt my face burn.

  “Hola!” I said. Jeez, really—hola?

  “How’re you doing?” she said.

  “How are you doing?” I parroted back.

  “Good!”

  I couldn’t think of a single other thing to say. She smiled, waiting.

  “Okay,” she said. “Good luck today.”

  Not exactly how I had played it out in my head.

  I concocted scenarios in which she and I could be together. It was childish, magical thinking. Even if I weren’t married, I had no chance with her. I was nothing to look at and obviously no conversationalist. She was actress-beautiful. Yet there was something about her that made me feel as if I knew her. Maybe it was true that there was one perfect person for each of us, that one-in-a-billion you are lucky enough to find. I began to think of her as my black pearl. It was rare enough for a diver to find a white pearl. To find a black one was like being kissed by God.

  I badgered José Tolentino to get me her phone number. José was a Spanish-language broadcaster for the Angels. I often saw him and Jamie talking.

  “Sorry, B-Mo,” he said. “She doesn’t go out with athletes. She doesn’t go out with married guys. She doesn’t go out with guys with kids. You’re oh-for-three.”

  I just wanted to get to know her, I told him. She was amazing.

  “Not gonna happen.”

  “Just ask her.”

  “She’s not interested,” he said.

  “Ask again.”

  I pestered him for weeks until one evening my phone rang in my hotel room in Baltimore.

  “Hey, it’s Jamie. You’ve got five minutes to tell me what’s so important you can’t tell me on the field.”

  I didn’t recognize the voice. “I’m sorry, who?”

  “Uh, Jamie from KCAL? José told me I should call and put you out of your misery.”

  “My Jamie? My black pearl?”

  “Black pearl?”

  I told her about the rarity of black pearls and how she was my black pearl. As soon as the words escaped my mouth I knew how insane and cheesy they sounded.

  Jamie laughed. “You don’t even know me.”

  “I feel like I do.”

  But her story was not at all what I expected. She was a lot like me. She told me she grew up on an island, too, a place called Whidbey Island in Washington State, and that her family didn’t have a lot of money either. She always loved sports. She recorded games on ESPN and watched them after her parents went to bed. She was twelve when she saw a woman working as a sports reporter on television and knew that was what she wanted to do. She made a map that day of every bed-and-breakfast within ten miles of her house and applied as a maid to earn money for college. By age fifteen, she was managing one of the B&Bs. And at sixteen, she set up her own housecleaning business.

  I told her about my wife and two daughters, about Dorado and Mai and Pai and my brothers, about the field across the street with the spiky backstop and light poles and tamarind trees, about pulling a tire on the sand and lifting homemade weights.

  She said she had earned a bachelor’s degree at Washington State University, worked freelance for ESPN, ABC, and Fox, then landed at KCAL as an associate producer and stage manager for Angels games. She was nominated for an Emmy when she was twenty-two. She told me about the advice she received early on from former ESPN anchor Robin Roberts.

  “In this industry,” Roberts told her, “you can never put yourself in a position where someone can misunderstand what you’re about. It takes a lifetime to build your reputation, and five seconds to lose it. And your reputation is everything in this industry, especially for women.”

  Jamie said that’s why she didn’t date athletes.

  I told her I didn’t expect to date her. But I just had the greatest conversation of my life. I had never talked so much or so easily with anyone. Couldn’t we talk again? Wouldn’t she give me her number? She was hesitant. She didn’t want anyone, including me, to get any ideas. I told her I understood. She gave me the number.

  We began talking once a week. Then twice a week. We talked a lot about baseball and the Angels but also about our families and childhoods. Jamie told me her father had separated from her mother when she and her sister were young.

  “Don’t do that to your daughters. It is very painful for young girls when their father leaves.”

  “I would never leave my daughters. I’d always be there for them even if I wasn’t married to their mother.”

  “It’s not the same thing,” Jamie said.

  AROUND MIDSEASON, I sank into a batting slump. I could barely sleep at night. When I managed to get on base against the Rangers one day, All-Star first baseman Rafael Palmeiro started chatting during a time-out. Was he talking to me? This big star?

  “You know,” he said, “it doesn’t matter how bad you’re going, every time you step to the plate you have to tell yourself you’re the best guy out there.”

  “What?” I asked. I still wasn’t sure he was speaking to me.

  “You have to show the pitcher you’re confident. If you go up there defeated, you have no chance.”

  I felt my face grow hot. Could he see I was still the thin-skinned boy crying in the Pobres dugout after striking out? Palmeiro was telling me now what Pai had told me back then: Grow up. Do your job. Or go sit with your mother in the stands. I knew Palmeiro wasn’t trying to embarrass me. For whatever reason, he was trying to help.

  “Thank you,” I said. “Thank you so much.”

  Soon afterward, I began listening to “Can’t Be Touched” on my headphones before every game, channeling the fearless confidence of boxer Roy Jones Jr. by blaring his song.

  “Can’t be touched / Can’t be stopped / Can’t be moved / Can’t be rocked.”

  It became my walk-up song for every at-bat. I worked my way out of my slump.

  In June, the St. Louis Cardinals picked Yadier in the fourth round of the 2000 amateur draft. We knew that meant pretty good money, not the $770 I got or even the $31,000 Cheo got. He was sure to get a signing bonus that would be more than I made in a year in the Major Leagues. We were all thrilled for him. His success was our success, just as ours was his. While his agent negotiated with the Cardinals, Yadier stayed in Puerto Rico, working out and living with Mai and Pai.

  Around the All-Star Break, Kyshly and Kelssy flew to Anaheim with my wife for a visit. They didn’t live with me during the sea
son. The team was on the road so much, and my wife would have been alone with two babies. She preferred staying in Mexico with her family and friends. Also, I still wasn’t making a lot of money. I lived during the season at the inexpensive Candlewood Suites instead of renting a house or apartment.

  It seemed like years since I had seen my girls. We watched fireworks at the ballpark after a game. I tossed them balls in the batting tunnel when all my teammates had gone home, teaching them the way Pai taught me. We went to Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm.

  I cradled Kelssy in our bed at the hotel and understood why Pai took my brothers and me to the ball field every day no matter how tired he was. I would do anything for my girls, even stay in a loveless marriage. If keeping my daughters happy meant I had to be unhappy, that was the way it would be.

  My thick catcher’s legs carried me through the long season. I caught 130 games during that 2000 season, the most by an Angels catcher in ten years. I hit fourteen home runs.

  Scioscia told me to skip winter ball. He wanted me to rest. It would be the first year since college I didn’t play winter baseball in Puerto Rico. I went instead to Mexico with my wife and daughters. Mai and Pai wanted us in Puerto Rico. Cheo and Yadier were there. The whole family. But my wife’s family was in Mexico. Kyshly was starting school there.

  My phone conversations with Jamie ended. We didn’t have cell phones yet, and I could hardly use my in-laws’ landline.

  A month after the season ended, I was watching TV when my agent called.

  “We have an offer,” he said.

  The Angels wanted to sign me to a multiyear deal. Four years with an option. He’d know the dollar amount tomorrow, he said.

  Four years! I needed ten to qualify for a full pension, which was my goal. Lifelong security for my family. I already had one year. Now I was guaranteed at least four more. Halfway there.