Molina Page 23

  My great-aunt waved her hand, brushing away the question.

  “This right here is the real church—yourself with some people in your house.”

  I kept thinking about that. Among all the comments from all the people I talked to about Pai, that one sentence from Clara Virgen captured so much of what I was trying to understand.

  Family was my father’s religion. Baseball was its sacrament.

  In retrospect it seems obvious and inevitable that all three of Benjamín Molina Santana’s sons would become catchers. Catchers are the caretakers, the counselors, the workhorses.

  The fathers.

  Of all the jobs on a baseball field, we found the one that positioned us at a spot called home. Our job was to protect it.

  EPILOGUE

  JAMIE AND I got married on Valentine’s Day, four months after Pai’s funeral. It was a fairly spontaneous ceremony, with just Jamie’s parents, her sister, and our friends Angie, José, and their daughter, Christina. Kyshly and Kelssy were in school in Yuma, my brothers couldn’t leave training camp, and Mai wasn’t ready to travel yet. We held it in the park in front of the house we had rented in Scottsdale for spring training.

  I brought with me to training camp a poster-sized collage of Pai’s photos. I propped it in my locker in Arizona and then in San Francisco. My teammates gave me funny looks when I carried it onto the plane for road trips. I didn’t care. It was my way of keeping him close. I also had patches stitched to the inside of my jersey: One read “Pai” and the other “Mai.” On the underside of the bill of my cap I wrote the four words Pai drilled into us: “All-out every day.”

  Two days before the 2009 All-Star Game—Yadier had been voted in as the starting catcher—Jamie went into labor. Jayda Marie was born on July 11, nine months—almost to the minute—after Pai died. I held her at Jamie’s bedside.

  “She has his soul,” I said.

  I had been struggling at the plate through the season, working hard but still carrying my grief like a sack of stones. I hit well enough to hold on to my cleanup spot in the lineup. But my power numbers weren’t great. I was hitting, on average, one home run for every nine games. Going into the last week of the season, I had eighteen home runs. We were playing a Wednesday game at home in San Francisco. There were just five games left, not enough time to reach twenty, given my season average.

  I hit a home run in my first at-bat.

  Nineteen.

  Then, late in the game, I hit a pitch off the end of my bat and thought it was a pop-up. But it kept carrying. Home run.

  Twenty!

  As I rounded the bags, I felt as if my heart might swell right out of my chest. I put my head down, blinking back tears. I looked to the sky when I stepped on home plate.

  “I did it, Pai. I promised you and I did it. You always said I could.”

  I held myself together in a TV interview after the game, but broke down afterward in the clubhouse. In the car on the way home, I called Mai even though it was after 2 a.m. in Puerto Rico.

  “Hey, what’s the matter? You okay?”

  “Mai, I did it.”

  “What?”

  “I got to twenty.”

  “What? You got another one?” She had seen the first one on TV then went to bed.

  “I promised Pai.”

  She started crying.

  “He’s very happy for you right now.”

  IN OCTOBER 2009, Cheo earned his second World Series ring as a backup to the Yankees’ Jorge Posada.

  In November, Lincecum won his second Cy Young. “Bengie’s half the reason I’m here,” he told reporters in the press conference.

  I signed a one-year contract with the Giants to play through the 2010 season. I’d be mentoring rookie catcher Buster Posey, a great talent and a great person. I loved working with him.

  But at the end of June, the Giants traded me to the Texas Rangers. The team plane had just landed in Denver when my teammates looked up from their cell phones and began coming over to say how much they’d miss me. I had no idea what they were talking about. Then I saw a text message from Jamie: “Looks like we’re going to Dallas.” She had been getting texts for two hours about the trade. The news must have broken soon after we took off from San Francisco. With no Internet or cell service, none of us knew until we landed.

  I was angry that I hadn’t been told. Giants manager Bruce Bochy apologized and said he couldn’t say anything because the trade hadn’t been finalized.

  No matter what any player tells you about baseball being a business and you can’t take anything personally, it was a blow to be traded. That team was so much like a family, and being traded felt like being kicked out the front door. On the bus from the airport to the hotel, where I would wait for travel information from the Rangers, I stood up in the aisle.

  “I want to say thanks for being such great teammates and for taking care of me,” I said. “I’m really going to miss you guys. You have what it takes to win this whole thing. If you stick together as a team, you will do it. And I’m going to be watching as much as I can. You all have my number. Even if I’m not your teammate anymore, I’ll always be your friend.”

  I was about to sit down when everyone started to clap. Then they stood and clapped. I was blown away. The best standing O of my career.

  With the Giants, my jersey number had been 1. But another Rangers player already had it. The team said number 11 was available.

  “Perfect!” I said.

  Eleven had always been my number with Los Pobres.

  Two weeks after I joined the Rangers, I hit for the cycle—a single, double, triple and home run in one game—for the first and only time in my career. Actually it was a grand cycle: the home run was a grand slam. As supposedly the slowest baseball player on the planet, I would guess the probability of me hitting a triple was almost zero, especially in tiny Fenway Park. When I got to third and looked in the dugout, my new teammates were going nuts. There is no better feeling as a player than to see your teammates cheer for you like that. After the game there were fifty-five text messages, many from my buddies on the Giants.

  The Rangers kept winning. And the Giants kept winning.

  We won the American League Championship. The Giants won the National League Championship. The Rangers would be playing the Giants in the World Series.

  I became just the second player in history to play in the World Series against the team he had played for earlier in the same season. Among other things, it meant I’d get a World Series ring no matter which team won. (Any player on the roster at any time during a championship season receives a ring.)

  Before Game 1 in San Francisco, a text arrived from Buster Posey: “Hey, B-Mo, good luck!”

  I typed back: “Thanks, Buster. Enjoy the moment!”

  Reporters in the Bay Area asked how I felt playing against teammates I considered like brothers.

  “I’ve played against my real brothers,” I said. “I think I’ll be okay.”

  When I stepped into the batter’s box against Lincecum, the kid I’d mentored since he arrived in the big leagues and had been his catcher during both his Cy Young seasons, I touched the bill of my cap, and he touched his.

  The Rangers lost the Series. I watched from the dugout as my friends and former teammates swarmed the field to celebrate the franchise’s first World Series championship since moving to San Francisco in 1958.

  I retired a few months later. It was one of the most difficult things I had ever done. I had been playing baseball since I could walk. I was thirty-six. Could I have played another year or two? Yes. But I didn’t want to lose any more time with my family. I had accomplished more than I had ever imagined. And the last game of my career came at the World Series. I’ll take that kind of exit any day.

  Mai continued to live in the same house in the same neighborhood, refusing to move. The field across the street fell into disrepair.

  “It is dead,” Jacinto Camacho told me during a visit. “When Benjamín died, from that moment
on, it was as if it had been hit with an atomic bomb. Boom—everything disappeared. I stayed away for a long time. When I went back last week, it was like something tearing out of my heart.”

  I walked over to the field myself. The infield dirt was choppy and tufted with weeds. Tamarind pods rotted on the ground in left field. But along the baselines and around home plate were traces of white chalk. I could see the pockmarks of rubber spikes. A game had been played.

  Like Jacinto, I wanted to stop time so everything stayed exactly as it was when Pai was alive. But you lay down chalk lines knowing they’re going to disappear. That was another part of the beauty of baseball. You’re not meant to hold on to things: the day-to-day failures and embarrassments, even the large and small triumphs. Let the strikeouts and dropped balls and home runs disappear into the dirt and grass. Let the trophies wash away in the floodwaters. Baseball is about what you get and give up, what you earn and relinquish.

  I watched Yadier’s and Cheo’s games on TV. Cheo was with the Toronto Blue Jays, and Yadier was on his way to winning another World Series championship with the Cardinals in 2011.

  In 2012, Yadier spent close to a million dollars turning Pai’s field into one of the best youth ballparks in Puerto Rico. Pai’s many, many sons in Espinosa have a home again.

  After Pai died, Mai’s house was as busy as a bus depot, people stopping in all day and into the evening to check on her or sit on her sofa and catch up. They drove her to the pharmacy to get her meds. When Yadier bought a house in Jupiter, Florida, near the Cardinals’ spring training complex, Mai began to split her time between there and Puerto Rico. With Cheo playing in Tampa, she saw him a lot, too. And I’d make trips with Jamie and the girls.

  I saw her even more in 2013, when, two years after I retired, I joined the Cardinals as the assistant batting coach. Jamie knew I needed baseball and encouraged me to accept the job, even though it meant packing and moving and time apart when I was on the road. She always knew, even when I couldn’t imagine baseball without Pai, that my love for the game was as true as his.

  I loved seeing Yadier every day at the field. We won the National League pennant that year—marking the seventh time in nine years that a Molina appeared in the World Series. I’ve been to the World Series three times now—the first with José in Anaheim, the second on my own in Texas, and the third with Yadier in St. Louis. How could that have happened—sharing a World Series with each of my brothers? Who would be crazy enough to dream that?

  I thought about this when I was talking to Vitin during a visit to Puerto Rico not long ago. He asked if I knew he had collected the belongings from my father’s body at the hospital. I didn’t. That’s when he told me about the three things in Pai’s pockets: a Little League rulebook, a measuring tape, and a lotto ticket.

  The items seemed so ordinary, but they felt like a message, too. In those three things were nearly all of Pai’s lessons to my brothers and me.

  Through baseball, he gave us the rules and codes to live by. Integrity and humility. Respect. Play hard and unselfishly. Accept that failure is a normal part of life and move on. Pai weathered setbacks and losses with such grace because he understood that what is done is done. He couldn’t change the fact the flood happened. So he let go of everything he had lost and started over in a different house.

  He taught us that the measure of a man is in the attributes that can’t be timed, weighed, scored, or tallied. A baseball field is precisely measured—exactly ninety feet between the bases, exactly sixty feet six inches between home and the pitcher’s mound—but the players can never be. You can’t measure what’s inside them. I think Pai believed, as I do now, that the single greatest measure of a man is how fiercely he’s willing to follow his heart, on and off the field.

  By that standard, my father was the most successful man I’ve ever known. He married a great woman and raised three sons who measured themselves by him, a factory worker. And to his last breath Pai did exactly what he loved in the place and with the people he loved. The ultimate success is to live your life in your own way, by your own measure, inspired and guided by core values. Pai did that every day. To the public, my brothers and I were stars. But my father was always the real star. The true Hall of Famer.

  Now I’m happy to be following in Pai’s footsteps as a coach. I spent the 2013 season with the Texas Rangers as first-base coach and catching instructor. In the off-season I coach kids in my youth baseball program. I want the baseball field to be, as it was for me, the place where they learn how to be good men. And where, for all their failures and flaws, someone believes in them as much as Pai believed in me.

  Pai having fun in the bleachers with Mai after a game at the field across the street from our Espinosa house.

  Mai puckering up for Pai, making a show to embarrass him at a party.

  Pai’s grandma, Mama, with me in her house in Espinosa.

  Abuelita Luz Maria, Pai’s mother, in her house.

  Pai (middle) representing Puerto Rico in Nicaragua.

  Pai (middle row, first on the left) at age fifteen. He played second base and outfield for the Vega Alta Maceteros, an amateur Double A team. He made $25 a game and was the league’s batting champion a few seasons after making the team.

  The field across the street.

  Our house in Ponderosa (pictured here in 2008) that was flooded. You can still see where it is sitting on bricks.

  Me holding a bat with Pai’s grip in front of Mami’s house in Vega Alta.

  Cheo outside Mami’s house in Vega Alta, 1977.

  Yadier, two, in the yard of our Espinosa house in front of the stadium, 1984.

  Me (eleven), Cheo (ten), and Yadier (three) at our home in Ponderosa after the flood.

  Me (twelve), Cheo (eleven), and Yadier (four) at the opening day ceremony for Dorado in Río Nuevo.

  Los Pobres fifteen-to-sixteen-year-olds team. Our first and only Puerto Rican championship, in our final year as Los Pobres on the field across the street. Me (bottom row, far right), Yadier the bat boy (not in uniform, bottom row, second from left), and Cheo (top row, fifth from left, no cap).

  The first Los Pobres team. Benjamín (back row, left) and me (top row, third from the left).

  My All-Star baseball card with the 1996 AA Texas League Midland Angels.

  The first time Pai and Mai saw Cheo and me in our Major League uniforms, Tropicana Field, Tampa Bay, 2001. Yadier was just finishing his season with the Johnson City Cardinals.

  Cheo and me in Anaheim in 2001. One of the first photos we have together in the same Major League uniform.

  During Game 2 of the 2002 ALDS.

  Beating the Yankees in the 2002 ALDS.

  Me in the Rangers’ clubhouse after the 2010 ALDS, holding Pai’s framed photo that I carried with me to every game since he passed away in 2008.

  Celebrating in the Rangers’ clubhouse after beating the Yankees to earn a trip to the 2010 World Series.

  Me with my brothers after the final game of my career, November 1, 2010.

  Me with my daughters and Jamie at AT&T Park in June 2008, after the Giants’ Wives vs. A’s Wives Charity Softball Game.

  Me, Jamie, and Jayda during spring training, 2010.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THIS BOOK IS as much Jamie’s as it is mine. She encouraged me to share the story of my dad, along with my own unlikely journey to the big leagues. She pushed me to fill in the gaps of my father’s life and to capture the heroism in a life lived with humility and integrity. If she had not come into my life, this book would not have happened. She is my love, my life, my Black Pearl.

  Although this book is about my father, my mother was as powerful an influence on me and my brothers as he was. While Pai was working, Mai was always there for us, teaching us respect, making us laugh, pushing us to work hard, and instilling in us the kind of strength and love she has shown all her life.

  My daughters, Kyshly, Kelssy, and Jayda, inspire me to be as good a dad to them as Pai was to me. Thank you, Kys
hly and Kelssy, for bringing so much happiness to your grandfather’s life. You were such lights in his life. Jayda never got to meet her loving abuelo, so I hope this book will help her to know him.

  My brothers, Cheo and Yadier, are great ballplayers and even better people. For all their success, they are still as humble as they were as kids hitting bottle caps with taped-up bats on the field across the street.

  So many family and friends helped with background and details of my father’s life. I am so grateful for the hours they spent being interviewed, telling priceless stories and digging up old photos. I want to thank on Mai’s side of the family: Titi Norma, Titi Charo, Titi Ivonne, Tío Paquito, Tío Felo, Tío Papo, and Titi Rosalia. And on Pai’s side: Titi Panchita, Titi Nenita, Titi Graciela, Titi Pura, Titi Pillita, Titi Guia, Tío Chiquito, Tío Tití, Tío Gordo, Tío Blanco, and Titi Virgen.

  Other family and friends who helped either with interviews or logistics: Luisito Samot Molina, Junior Diaz, Jacinto Camacho, Mandy Matta, Vitin Morales, Morayma Arroyo, José Olivo Miguelito and Lourdes Rivera, Eliut Rivera, Pedro “Cucho” Morales, Jare Morales, Joel Morales, and Carlitos Lopez.