Rage. Peter Golenbock
to hold my glove over the middle of the plate. Just throw the ball to me, and we’ll win.”
And that’s what I did. In the summer of my sophomore year, pitching in an American Legion game, I struck out nineteen batters and walked seventeen. That’s a lot of batters where nobody hits the ball. It made for very boring—and frustrating—baseball.
My coaches and my catchers would tell me, “Just throw it over the plate. Just let them hit it,” but I wasn’t able to do that, and it was killing me. The culprit was bad mechanics, but either the coaches didn’t know how to fix it or I was too stubborn to adapt. I didn’t know what the word mechanics meant. I certainly never heard of it when I was in high school.
I threw straight overhand, and I pitched great on a high mound with a steep pitch, but too often when the mound wasn’t high, I wasn’t able to get on top of the ball and throw it over the plate. On a flat mound I was high and wild inside to a right-hander. Righty batters were taking their lives in their hands against me.
Still, I threw a mean fastball at over ninety miles an hour, and even though I didn’t know it at the time, major league scouts were paying attention. They came to my games trying to be anonymous, but I learned to spot them because they’d huddle together in the stands with their clipboards and speed guns. The speed guns were kind of a giveaway.
One night in my junior year my father asked me, “What are you doing tomorrow night?”
I responded and he said, “We’re going to the Yankee Silversmith,” which was a fancy Middletown restaurant where the Wesleyan professors liked to eat. We only went to that restaurant on special occasions. I asked him why.
“Because the Boston Red Sox are taking us out to dinner.”
The baseball scouts had been watching me since I was a sophomore. Bots Nekola and Charlie Wagner scouted me for the Boston Red Sox. Harry Hesse of the New York Yankees contacted me, as did Len Zanke of the New York Mets.
Bots, the Sox’ top scout for New England, and Broadway Charlie Wagner, who had once been Ted Williams’s roommate, were the Red Sox scouts who hosted me and my family. Eating at a fancy restaurant in the company of two major league scouts was a little overwhelming for me. One of the first things Charlie Wagner asked me was “Do you like shrimp cocktail?”
“If you’re going to be a big leaguer,” said Wagner, “you gotta have shrimp cocktail.” And he ordered me one. Eating shrimp cocktail was one of the highlights of the visit.
Three-quarters of the way through my American Legion season junior year, Bots and Charlie invited me to a Boston Red Sox tryout camp for high school juniors and seniors.
I was scheduled to pitch a game one night, but I wasn’t able to participate. Bots brought me out to the bullpen, and he told me, “Listen, I just want you to throw a little bit, not even hard, and I want to show you something.”
Bots said he didn’t think that I was getting the most of my ability by throwing straight overhand. He had me drop my arm angle down to three-quarters.
“Just throw across your body,” he told me.
“Take a pitching rubber and look at the third base side, where you’d place your push-off leg,” he said. “If you draw a line from where your toes are toward home plate, in order to throw across your body all you have to do is stand to the third base side of that line.”
I was getting instruction from a former major league ballplayer, and I tried to do as he said. My pitching problems had nothing to do with my motion or my release point. What the change in angle did was to set up more of a rotation and a closing-the-door effect—as opposed to my previous up-and-down motion. Once I moved my left leg toward home plate and to the left of that line he showed me, it opened up my chest and hips. The result was that I could be more of a power pitcher. It may sound complicated, but what he told me was actually very simple.
“I think you’ll have more movement on your fastball if you pitch this way,” he said.
I returned home, and that night in my game against Cromwell American Legion, I pitched using the motion Bots showed me. Throwing three-quarters motion, rather than up and down, I found I could get the ball down, and I threw a lot more strikes than I ever did before. I threw a no-hitter against Cromwell, retiring the last twenty-one batters in a row.
I went back to the Red Sox camp the next day. Bots asked me, “How did you like that?”
“Pretty good,” I said. That was an understatement. I had never pitched better in my life.
In my next start against East Hampton, I used the same motion. Thanks to Bots Nekola’s advice, I was throwing nice and easy, and I retired the first twenty East Hampton batters in a row. With two outs in the top of the seventh, I was one strike away from throwing a perfect game. Coach Pehota called time and came out to the mound.
“A bunch of scouts are sitting here,” he said, “and you haven’t thrown a really good curveball all game long. You have two strikes on this guy. Snap off a really good curve and show them you have that pitch, too.”
Pehota’s intentions were good, but as I look back on it now, I wish he had stayed in the dugout. On the next pitch I snapped off a curve as instructed and hit the batter in the foot. There went my perfect game. But in those two games, using the motion suggested by Bots Nekola, I went from a guy with a wild fastball to a pitcher who retired forty-one consecutive batters.
I went from this hard-throwing, grunting, 120 percent-throwing fastball motion to this 75 percent, sidearm, easy-whipping motion. When I pitched those two no-hitters, it was like I was playing catch in the outfield before the game. I actually felt let down, because I wasn’t getting the rush from having to exert myself, even though the results were better. It was almost like it was too easy.
Before the end of summer, the Red Sox brought me to Fenway Park, where I got to meet Carl Yastrzemski. Bots had signed him. Carl, who was in civilian clothes, took me up to Tom Yawkey’s box and introduced me to Mr. Yawkey. Mr. Yawkey asked my parents to have lunch with him while Carl welcomed me to the Red Sox, and he showed me around the clubhouse and introduced me to the players.
“Bots is really high on you,” said Yaz. “We’d like you to be part of the organization.”
The Red Sox showed a lot of interest in me. With that interest, and my being Irish, I really should have signed with them. But I was strangely noncommittal, in part because my favorite team was the New York Yankees, and because my heart was actually set on becoming an NBA basketball star.
My secret goal was to be a shooting guard for the Boston Celtics. All I had to do was beat out Sam Jones. I had been so wild on the mound that baseball wasn’t fun for me yet. I also thought, despite the attention of the Red Sox, that I couldn’t really believe anyone would be interested in signing me as a pro baseball player.
As a guard on the Woodrow Wilson High School basketball team I was a brawny, six-foot-three 180-pounder. I was a magician with the ball who could dribble between my legs and behind my back, pass, and stuff the ball into the basket two-handed. I just loved the game of basketball.
When I was a junior in high school, we played a basketball game at the Waterbury Arena against powerful Wilby High School, which was among the top five schools in the state. We had no business getting within fifteen points of Wilby, but somehow at the end of regulation play, the score was tied.
In the overtime period, we scored first and quickly got the ball back. Wilby called time.
Our coach, Jim Sullivan, told us, “Stay with our offense,” but when the team walked back onto the court, I called my teammates together and told them, “Listen, they’re in a zone defense. We have the ball. Let’s stay as far away from the zone as possible. Let’s just hold the ball.”
At the time, there was no shot clock in high school basketball. I thought that holding the ball was the smart way to go. The whistle blew, the ball was passed to me, and I just stood out on the perimeter, holding the basketball underneath my arm. I did this