Odd Man Out: A Year on the Mound with a Minor League Misfit - Hardcover

McCarthy, Matt

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670020702 ISBN 13: 9780670020706

Publisher: Viking Adult, 2009

Synopsis

Traces the author's tumultuous year with the Anaheim Angel's minor-league affiliate team, describing his unlikely draft in spite of his scientific studies at Yale, the racial tensions that divided his teammates, and his struggles with grueling travel schedules and steroid temptations.

About this title

About the Author:

Matt McCarthy left professional baseball in 2003 and enrolled in medical school at Harvard University. He is an intern at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Table of Contents

 

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

 

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

 

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

VIKING
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First published in 2009 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

 

Copyright © Matthew McCarthy, 2009

All rights reserved

 

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the following copyrighted works:

“Doctoral Candidate” by Gordon Edes, The Boston Globe, February 26, 2006. Copyright © 2006 Globe Newspaper Company, Inc. Reprinted with permission.

“Loaded Gun: Great Arm, but Jenks No Angel” by Tom Friend, ESPN The Magazine, June 9, 2003. By permission of ESPN The Magazine.

“Former Chowan Student/Pitcher, Randy Burden Passes Away” by Stephen Dunn, Roanoke-Chowan News-Herald, December 9, 2002. By permission of the Roanoke-Chowan News-Herald, Ahoskie, North Carolina.

“’97 World Series: A Rookie Who Knows About Pressure; After His Problems Adapting to the U.S., Livan Hernandez Takes the World Series in Stride” by Buster Olney, The New York Times, October 18, 1997. © 1997 The New York Times. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the copyright laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of the material without express written permission is prohibited.

 

LIBRARY Of CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
McCarthy, Matt.
Odd man out : a year on the mound with a minor league misfit / Matt McCarthy.
p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-01593-3

1. McCarthy, Matt. 2. Pitchers (Baseball)—United States—Biography.
3. Minor league baseball—United States. I. Title.
GV865.M218A3 2008
796.357092—dc22
[B]
2008029038

 

 

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To my teammates

Chapter 1

WHEN I WAS TWENTY-ONE, I could throw a baseball 92 miles an hour. This led to a strange courtship between my left arm and a series of pencil-mustached, overweight middle-aged men. I eventually gave up the game and later found myself as far away from the baseball diamond as one could possibly be—living in rural villages in Cameroon and later Malaysia, colorful places that still somehow paled in comparison to the alien environment of my first home in professional baseball: Provo, Utah. It was the height of the steroid era, and while Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire were rewriting the record books, those of us in the minors were trying like hell to break into the big leagues. In our clubhouse, amphetamines were passed around like candy and the allure of steroids was ever present.

It was the summer of 2002 and I was playing for the Provo Angels, an affiliate of the Anaheim Angels, who would go on to win their first World Series that year. Defeating the San Francisco Giants in an upset, the Angels attributed their success to the hard-nosed, unselfish play of low-profile players like David Eckstein and Francisco Rodriguez. But in Provo, we were a team divided.

“Separate but equal” was how Blake Allen, a right-handed pitcher from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, first described the team dynamic to me. Blake had been drafted in the thirty-fifth round of the 2001 draft and had already played one season in Provo when I joined the team. With his slack jaw, pot belly, and slow, deliberate manner of speaking, Blake was the yokel out of central casting that many of my classmates at Yale would have ridiculed. But he was also a reflective man who enjoyed dissecting people. He would’ve fit better in a Faulkner novel than in a baseball uniform.

He’d been on the disabled list for the past year and confided in me that he thought he’d never be healthy enough to pitch again. “I’ve got a wife and kid at home and I need the paycheck,” he said one afternoon in June while we were finishing our Grand Slams at Denny’s. “They can’t cut ya when you on the disabled list. It violates the collective bargaining agreement. So I just sit back and cash the checks.”

It was then that I learned about the two-party system of minor league baseball. “You’ve got your Dominicans and you’ve got everybody else,” he said in between bites of sausage. “You don’t want nuthin’ to do with the Dominicans. They’re loud, they don’t speak English, they don’t have no respect for nobody, and for God’s sake, don’t ever go in the shower when they in there.”

The team was, in fact, divided between the Dominicans (a catch-all term for Hispanic players) and those of us from the United States. There were a dozen Dominicans on our team, hailing from Venezuela, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Panama, and, yes, the Dominican Republic. And Blake was right—they were loud and didn’t speak English. Just seventeen or eighteen years old, many had been snatched out of poverty within the last year and signed to lucrative six-figure contracts. Wearing large smiles, larger gold chains, and designer sunglasses, they seemed to be playing life with Monopoly money.

“The thing about the Dominicans,” Blake told me, “is that they can play. Most of the ones on this team could play in the big leagues someday. But they won’t.” He stopped eating for a moment and looked out the window. “A typical rookie ball team will have fifteen Dominicans. Double-A will have half that. Triple-A even less. As you move up the ladder you’ll see that they just wash out.” The idea of “washing out,” I would learn, was a recurrent theme among players. It implied that your career was cut short for no apparent reason—not an injury or a slump. One day you’d show up to the field and there’d be a pink slip in your locker and no one would tell you why.

He returned to his pancakes for a moment before adding, “But I tell ya what . . . in every goddamn town we go to this year, those Dominicans will have fat white girls waiting for them.”

The Americans, in contrast, were from places like Marianna, Florida, and Tulsa, Oklahoma. Most had signed professional contracts directly out of high school and baseball was the only life they knew or wanted to know. They were fond of saying that Don Zimmer, the Yankees’ bench coach, had lived a model life because at seventy-one, he had never drawn a paycheck outside of professional baseball. I was one of the few who had graduated from college, although several had attended briefly. In general these were quiet, pious men whose priorities were the Lord and the girl back home. Pregame rituals included chapel, chewing tobacco, and numerous phone calls to family members.

After road games, we would pile into the bus and head to dinner as a team. It was an endless, nauseating cycle of Applebee’s, Chili’s, and T.G.I. Friday’s. In the restaurant, the Dominicans sat on one side, the Americans on the other. On the bus, the Dominicans all sat in the back. After games, the Dominicans showered first. During the five weeks of spring training, Dominican players would be assigned American roommates because the organization felt it was “good for them,” but during the season, a Dominican would almost never be paired with an American for road trips. “That would be cruel,” our strength and conditioning coach once said. “Six months of living with one of them? Shit.” And it was the language barrier that was always used to defend the status quo. “I mean, what the hell am I gonna say to them?” Blake had asked me one day as we were walking to the ballpark, “Ho-la, amigo?”

It took five years of distance to be able to write this after I walked away from professional baseball, although shoved out is a more apt description. Some of my former teammates became stars in the big leagues while others washed out of the minors and returned home to install carpeting. Blake returned to Alabama to run the family farm and raise roosters for cockfights. I, of course, had no idea how it was all going to pan out, or that my stay in baseball would be a brief one. A year later I’d be on the other side of the country in Boston, preparing to enter medical school and begin a new life—a life after baseball, if that’s ever possible.

 

 

 

BUT THIS STORY does not begin in Utah. It starts in New Haven, Connecticut, a place I first visited as a senior in high school. I was invited by the coach of the Yale baseball team to visit the campus on an all-expenses-paid trip, the kind that has become a ritual of the varsity athlete recruiting process. Yale was the first school to show any interest in me and I was ready to commit to them the moment I set foot on Old Campus. The other high schooler on the recruiting visit was not nearly as impressed. Chris Young hailed from Houston, Texas, and, at six feet ten inches and 230 pounds, was the largest person I had ever met. Chris and I spent the weekend meeting the coach, touring the campus, watching a football game, and spending time with players on the baseball team.

On Saturday night, the team held its semiannual Kangaroo Court, where players recounted sex acts with undergraduates in graphic detail while teammates howled and came up with nicknames for the girls, like “Donkey Punch” and “The Beating.” Between stories, players chugged beers and accused one another of engaging in activities unbecoming of a Yale baseball player, like being seen in a French restaurant or meeting a professor for coffee.

The event took place off campus in the backyard of a house where the seniors lived and the alcohol flowed freely. When Chris Young refused the first beer offered to him, several players snickered and the captain halted court proceedings to announce that Chris was destined to become “a typical Yale nerd.” A few moments after the proclamation, Chris lumbered over to me and in his slow drawl said, “I don’t have time for this crap.”

At the stroke of midnight, shouts of “Toad’s!” began to ruffle through the crowd.

“What’s Toad’s?” I quietly asked one of the freshmen.

“It’s the bar everyone goes to on Saturday night,” he said. “Tons of people. Tons of girls. It’s great. . . .”

Another player had been listening in and put his arm around me.

“Tons of sluts is what he meant to say. They get bused in from all over Connecticut. University of New Haven. Southern Connecticut State. Quinnipiac. They all come to Toad’s!”

“All you have to do is drop the Y-bomb,” another player offered before taking a swig of Jack Daniel’s from a bottle that was being passed around. “Tell ’em you go to Yale and next thing you know you’re in their pants.”

I looked over at Chris and asked if he was interested.

“No, thanks. I, uh, have to get up early tomorrow,” he mumbled.

I didn’t want to ditch him, but as a seventeen-year-old, my interest in Toad’s had been piqued.

“I’m in,” I said to cheers from the drunken players, “but I don’t have a fake ID.”

“No problem,” the captain said. “Let’s just figure out who you look like.” The next few moments were excruciating as the Yale players gathered around to examine me.

“Let’s see . . . about six feet tall.”

“Kinda big nose.”

“Brown hair with a high forehead.”

“Yeah, a high forehead. Is it a receding hairline?”

“Nah, probably not. But maybe.”

“Decent build. Not really thin, not really fat.”

“He kinda has a big neck.”

“Definitely a big neck.”

“You know who he looks like? The Pope!”

Everyone erupted in laughter and quickly agreed that I looked like the Pope, which came as a bit of a surprise to me. I was hoping for something along the lines of Matt Damon, but that night I learned an early lesson about baseball team dynamics: never look for affirmation from a group of baseball players. The Pope, it turned out, was Ben Johnstone, a center fielder on the team who was waiting until marriage to lose his virginity. Players found this act of religious observance so incredible that they’d dubbed him “The Pope.”

He lent me a spare driver’s license and with that we were off to the bar. My first night at Toad’s was a blur, but I do remember being introduced to dozens of people as “Little Pope,” “The Pope’s Little Brother,” and “Undersecretary to the Papacy.” I would come to know Toad’s much better as the years wore on.

The next day at the airport, Chris Young made his intentions clear.

“What’d you think of Yale?” I asked as we waited to check in for our flights.

“You really want to know?” he replied grimly. He was reaching for his wallet with one hand and tucking in his shirt with the other.

“Of course.”

“Well, I can safely say that I never met so many arrogant, self-centered, spoiled assholes in my life.”

“Things definitely got a little crazy last night.”

“Crazy? You want to know what’s crazy? Those jackasses aren’t good enough to play baseball at a big-time program and they’re not smart enough to get into Yale on their own. So what are they?”

I didn’t have a response. I was still thinking about all the fun I’d had.

“What are they?” he insisted, becoming angrier.

I shook my head.

“There’s no way in hell I’m going to Yale,” he said finally.

Chris opted for Princeton and within three years had signed a contract for $1.7 million with the Pittsburgh Pirates. He made his first Major League Baseball All-Star team by the age of twenty-five and went on to become one of the best pitchers in profession...

About this edition

• Publisher: Viking Adult
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0670020702
• ISBN 13: 9780670020706
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304