Molina Page 17

  Three-run homer!

  Now it was 5–3.

  In the eighth, Erstad hit a solo home run: 5–4.

  It was the bottom of the ninth. Still 5–4. On the mound for the Giants was Robb Nen, who had more saves than any closer in Giants history. We put two guys on. Up came Troy Glaus. A single would tie the game. Troy hit a double. Two runs scored. We won 6–5! The stadium erupted. We flooded out of the dugout to tackle Troy. It was one of the greatest comebacks in World Series history.

  Young John Lackey took the mound for us in Game 7. He’d been in the Major Leagues for all of 125 days, and he was starting Game 7 of the World Series. Cheo had caught him several times in the minors earlier in the season and huddled with me before the game. His inside fastball worked as a cutter, Cheo told me, so you should use it to your advantage against lefties.

  “And use the changeup,” he said, “even though it’s not a great pitch for him.”

  Lackey gave up a run in the first inning. In the second, I hit a run-scoring double to tie the score at 1–1. Garret Anderson hit a three-run double in the third inning to put us ahead, 4–1. Now it was up to our pitchers and me to hold the lead. Lackey gave up nothing for the next three innings. Brendan Donnelly, another rookie, replaced Lackey in the sixth. Cheo kept me relaxed. “One inning at a time,” he said when I came into the dugout. “Get each pitcher through one inning.” He sounded just like Pai.

  Donnelly got through the sixth and seventh.

  In the eighth, Scioscia brought in K-Rod, Francisco Rodriguez—another rookie, just twenty years old, fresh out of Double A. These were not exactly your typical World Series pitchers. But over eight innings, they gave up just one run and five hits.

  When I returned to the dugout for the bottom of the eighth, I looked Cheo square in the face.

  “I don’t want to cry on TV,” I said. “So when we win, don’t come to me because you’ll make me cry.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Three more outs.”

  “I’m serious, man. Don’t come to me.”

  We were holding a 4–1 lead when Troy Percival came in to pitch the ninth. He got two outs. We were one out away. Kenny Lofton was at the plate for the Giants. I called for a fastball up and away. Lofton swung. The ball sailed into center field. Darin Erstad positioned himself under it. I pushed my mask up over my forehead to watch.

  “Fall down already!” I yelled, my heart pounding.

  The ball dropped safely into Erstad’s glove. Oh my goodness. I hurled my mitt into the air, ripped off my mask, and bolted to the mound. Erstad was racing in, holding the ball over his head. I leaped onto Percival as everyone from the dugout swarmed us, jumping and screaming and hugging. In the jostling, I fell to the ground and suddenly found myself on my knees as if in prayer, my eyes closed and my arms in the air, thanking God. This was beyond dreams. Beyond anything.

  When I opened my eyes, there was Cheo.

  “I told you!” I said, climbing to my feet to hug him. We held on to each other and cried.

  “We won a frickin’ World Series ring!” Cheo shouted into my ear.

  The pain in my legs and back was gone. The sickly nervousness was gone. I couldn’t feel anything. It was like my body was no longer a physical thing but just weightless energy. Pure emotion. Joy, disbelief, gratitude, relief.

  Cheo and I stood with our arms over each other’s shoulders and let the roar of the crowd roll over us.

  “This is amazing!” Cheo said. “Listen to that. Look at all these people.” Tens of thousands of clapping, cheering people in red-and-white rows rising into the night sky.

  “I wish we could give this to Pai,” I said.

  As families came into the clubhouse, I thought about how much I wanted Jamie to walk through that door. Instead there was my wife. Kyshly and Kelssy jumped on me and squealed when I doused them with water instead of champagne.

  When they left, I ducked into my locker.

  “Mai?”

  “Ay Dios mío, mi hijo! What a special moment for my two special sons!” I could hear people yelling and laughing. “It’s Bengie!” she yelled.

  She said the house was packed, and the carport and the street were packed. Pai had set up a television in the driveway, and the whole neighborhood had gathered to watch. Pai was out there now, Mai said, watching the clubhouse celebration on TV. Yadier was driving through the streets in a caravan of honking cars. People were going crazy, she said. I asked about the Hall of Fame banquet earlier in the day. They had a great time, she said. They chartered a bus for the two-hour drive to the event, and Pai wore a suit!

  Suddenly he was on the phone.

  “Hey, mi hijo, congratulations! You stuck together! That’s how you’re supposed to play the game.”

  He asked for Cheo, but I had no idea where he was. The clubhouse was bedlam.

  “We’ll talk tomorrow, Pai. Congratulations on the Hall of Fame. We really wished we could be there. Mai said it was great.”

  “Thanks, I’m so proud of you boys.”

  Ah. Maybe the beer had loosened his tongue. But he said it. I knew that no matter what else I did in my life, I had earned Pai’s respect. By any yardstick, I had measured up. More than measured up.

  When we hung up, I called Jamie. I wanted her to know how much she had helped me. This time she answered. She sounded as if she’d been crying. “I’m so happy for you,” she said.

  “You should be here.”

  She said to go enjoy the party, that we’d talk later, and she hung up.

  I drank more that night than I ever had in my life. I was celebrating, for sure. But I was also numbing myself. From the outside, I had hit the jackpot, won the lotto. The happiest moment of my career and, besides my little girls, I had no one to truly share it with—someone who understood what this unlikely success meant to me, who knew the hard road I walked to get there. In the crowded clubhouse, I felt as lonely as I ever had.

  I had to have Jamie in my life. The decision was made before I realized I was making it.

  I WON THE Gold Glove that year. It was the first time in eleven years any American League catcher had wrested the honor from Pai’s former player, Pudge Rodriguez.

  PAI WAS WAITING for us at the airport when my wife, daughters, and I flew in for Christmas. His face was open and happy. His belly was round and soft. When a few people recognized me in the terminal and asked for my autograph, I saw Pai watching and smiling. In their dining room, he showed me photos from the Hall of Fame banquet. He wore a dark suit and white shirt. Mai wore a flowered blouse and dark slacks.

  On the wall behind Pai hung a team photo of Los Pobres. I was eight or nine. I was small and worried-looking. I couldn’t remember if I was happy. Did I like playing baseball, the game itself? Or did I play because baseball allowed me to be with Pai every day? Because that’s how I could gain his approval?

  I wanted to tell that serious little kid not to worry so much. You’ll someday play better than you ever imagined. You’ll make Pai proud.

  That’s what I thought on that December day, that Pai’s respect was like a win in the record books. Once earned, it was there forever. I was wrong.

  I TOLD MY wife I wanted a divorce.

  She said no. No decent man left his children.

  I said I’d be there for the girls. I would always take care of them.

  “What do you think your father would say?” she asked.

  A knife in soft flesh. She knew Pai would disapprove, and that it would kill me. But I believed that when I explained the situation, he would come to accept it. He had to know I wouldn’t make such an important decision without careful thought. And he had to know my daughters meant more to me than anything.

  I wasn’t going to tell Mai and Pai, or the girls, until my wife and I had reached an agreement and I had found a place of my own. It wouldn’t happen overnight.

  Jamie and I hadn’t talked much during the off-season and hadn’t seen each other since Game 1 of the World Series. She had continued to be dista
nt in our conversations. I told her I was moving forward with the divorce.

  “Don’t leave for me,” she said. She was still in Seattle.

  “I’m leaving no matter what. I want a chance to be happy.”

  I was already making plans for Kyshly and Kelssy to stay with me in Anaheim while they were out of school for the summer.

  The following June, as defending World Series champions, the Angels flew into San Juan to play a three-game series against the Montreal Expos at Hiram Bithorn Stadium. Cheo and I bought about a hundred tickets. Mai and Pai invited everyone they knew to the house for a big party with onion steak, avocado and fried plantains, rice, and beans and chicken.

  Nervous about playing in front of old classmates, cousins, aunts, and uncles, I struck out my first at-bat. Then I got four hits, including a home run in the eighth inning. I heard the crowd chanting my name as I rounded the bases. I pointed to the section filled with family and friends. Mai was bobbing up and down on her creaky legs, waving her hands over her head. Pai was on his feet, too, clapping and smiling. We locked eyes, and Pai pumped a triumphant fist at me.

  A MESSAGE WAS waiting on my answering machine one night in July when I arrived at my Anaheim apartment after a game.

  Jamie had been in a car accident. She had severe whiplash and hairline fractures in her neck, a dislocated kneecap, a broken wrist, fractured ribs, and a condition called temporomandibular joint disorder, which was causing so much pain in her jaw that she could barely eat. She couldn’t work. I wanted to fly right up there. But I couldn’t, so I sent flowers and more flowers. I called every day.

  I didn’t see her until we played in Seattle in September, two months after the accident. I went straight to Jamie’s apartment from the airport. When she opened the door, I caught my breath. She was so thin I could see the ridges of her shoulder bones through her T-shirt. She had a cast on her wrist and a collar around her neck. Her face was pale and her eyes hollow, the result of bronchitis from the broken ribs.

  I didn’t realize I was crying until she wiped my face. It was a shock to see her so frail.

  “I’m okay. It’ll just take time.”

  “What can I do?” I kept asking. “How are you paying the rent? The doctor bills?”

  “I have some savings and insurance. I’m getting by.”

  As we talked, I felt a deepening embarrassment that I still hadn’t filed for divorce or looked for a place of my own in Yuma. If I were already divorced, or at least officially separated, maybe Jamie would have let me take care of her properly instead of from a distance, as if I were some well-regarded but casual acquaintance. She wanted no part of a married man’s money.

  I ENDED THE season with another Gold Glove and fourteen home runs, tying my highest total.

  “You can hit twenty,” Pai said when I was back in Puerto Rico for a visit in the off-season. “You stay healthy and you’re capable of twenty.”

  Twenty? I smiled to myself. I wasn’t a twenty-homer player. But I loved that he thought I was.

  The following season, in June 2004, St. Louis called Yadier up to the big leagues. He was just twenty-three and had spent less than four full years in the minor leagues, about half the time Cheo and I did. I knew he’d get to the Majors quickly. We all knew. He’d been catching since he was five years old. His arm was like a grenade launcher. Like all of Benjamín Molina Santana’s sons, Yadier didn’t brag or show off. But unlike Cheo and me at his age, Yadier knew he belonged with the best in the world.

  His arrival in the Majors prompted stories about the near impossibility of three brothers from one family becoming catchers in the Major Leagues.

  “An explanation?” Yadier said, answering reporters’ questions. “I don’t have one. It’s a thing of God, you know?”

  Soon after Yadier was called up, Pai and Mai flew to the States to watch their sons play. They stayed a week with Yadier in St. Louis, then a week with Cheo and me in Anaheim. Pai was so soft with my girls. I watched him toss a Nerf ball to them in my living room, and when they threw it back, he pretended to fall backward from the force. Kelssy and Kyshly collapsed each time in giggles.

  Pai doted on them in a way he never did with my brothers and me. He pushed plates of food at them—“Mama, you gotta eat.” I remember one day when Kelssy was little we were at a hotel in Puerto Rico with one of Pai’s Little League teams. They were there for a tournament. Pai was playing dominoes when Kelssy tugged at him and asked if he’d take her to the pool. Pai didn’t interrupt his dominoes for anything, so I was about to pull her away and take her myself. But Pai was already summoning someone else to take his place at the table. He took his shirt off and jumped right into the pool with Kelssy.

  My parents knew nothing yet of my disintegrating marriage. They didn’t know I was sleeping on a couch downstairs when I was in Yuma and that I stashed the blanket and pillow in a closet before the girls woke up. During my parents’ visit, I was the dutiful husband. I said the right things. I behaved as if all were well. I didn’t even have to put much energy into playing the role. It was the default setting in my brain: I did what they expected me to do.

  In July, a few days after my thirtieth birthday, we played a series in Seattle, and Jamie threw a small party in her apartment with some of her friends and family. She made onion steak, my favorite, and a chocolate Coca-Cola cake.

  Her neck and back were still painful at times, but she was well enough to work. She told me she was moving back to California. She’d be doing freelance work again.

  We’d been talking on the phone for five years by then. We’d been alone maybe four times. It was ridiculous when I thought about it. But it was perfect in a way, too. We knew each other so well from our hundreds of conversations. I bet we had talked more hours in those five years than most real couples talk in a lifetime.

  Still, I didn’t know for certain if she felt about me the way I did about her.

  In his first season in the big leagues, Yadier’s Cardinals reached the World Series, facing the Boston Red Sox, who hadn’t won a championship in eighty-six years. Mai, Pai, José, I, and other family and friends descended on St. Louis to cheer on Yadier. The Sox swept the Cardinals. Still, Yadier had made it to the World Series. Some players spend their whole careers without ever getting there. Now all three of us had been.

  IT WAS THE summer of 2005. The Angels were in New York to play the Yankees. Jamie was there for work. I walked into the hotel late one afternoon after visiting Mai’s cousins in Brooklyn. It was an off day. When the elevator door opened, Jamie walked out.

  “Hey,” I said. “Where you headed?”

  “Dinner.”

  We still had never been out for dinner, just the two of us. When she was on the road with the Angels, she usually ate with the guys from the crew or by herself. I usually got room service or went out with Cheo.

  “Want some company?”

  She smiled. “We can share a cab.”

  In the taxi, she said she hadn’t been heading to any place in particular. And she wasn’t really all that hungry. She just wanted to get out of her room. I suggested a movie. The cab dropped us at a theater, but every movie was sold out. So we strolled through Times Square, talking about the previous night’s game, about music, about how two people from such small towns ended up with jobs that took them to Times Square. We talked about how weird fate could be. Our hands brushed. I slipped my fingers through hers. Neither of us acknowledged it.

  Jamie looked spectacular even though she was just in jeans and a sleeveless top. Her hair was pulled back off her face in a ponytail that reached halfway down her back. I kept glancing sideways at her. We wandered into a park, where a guy in dreadlocks played a steel drum and young couples pushed baby strollers. There was a stone fountain, and people sat on the rim of the basin, relaxing in the warm evening air.

  We stopped to watch the cascading water and listen to the steel drum. I turned toward Jamie and took her face in my hands. I leaned in and kissed her. I felt her arms wrap
around me, and it felt as if we had done this a million times, as if it was the most normal thing in the world to be kissing in front of a hundred passersby at a fountain in a park.

  “I love you,” I said. “I think I’ve loved you since the first time I saw you in spring training.”

  Jamie laughed and said she never imagined being with me.

  “But everything with you is so easy,” she said. “We’re such different people, but it’s like we’re soul mates.”

  She said she had realized she was falling in love a few years ago, and that was when she pulled away and didn’t answer my calls for days and weeks at a time. “I knew I wanted to be with you and I couldn’t. I knew it wasn’t right to have feelings for a married man. I never wanted to be a factor in your decision to divorce.”

  I said my divorce was moving forward with or without her. She wanted to know about Kyshly and Kelssy. I’d get a house near them. It would be better for everyone, I said.

  “You need to be sure.”

  I said I’d never been more certain about anything.

  We stopped at Tower Records and I bought her a Mariah Carey CD. I wanted to give her love songs. We said good night before we reached the hotel and entered through separate doors. She didn’t want to give anyone any ideas about “us”—she had her reputation to protect. But I was already thinking about what our kids might look like.

  SOMETIMES, MY PRIDE could get the best of me. A catcher had to swallow his pride for the good of the team. Take the high road. Be the grown-up. I was still learning.

  One game I noticed that whenever our pitcher gave up a hit, our shortstop shook his head. I didn’t like the guy too much to begin with. He was all about himself. I’d sometimes see him texting and talking on the phone behind the dugout between innings. I had no respect for guys who didn’t play the right way.

  “Why were you shaking your head?” I asked him in the dugout.

  “He should have thrown a fastball on a two-two count right there!” he said. I thought my head might explode. This guy was questioning my game-calling?