Second Chances
CANNON, CARL M.
Sports Second Chances By Carl M. Cannon The day Bill Clinton traveled to Baltimore to toss out the first ball, I was in the clubhouse as the president hobnobbed with the players. He lingered, as...
...I couldn't help noticing that when Paul Molitor of the opposing Milwaukee Brewers took his position at first base, Stearns, the one-time hard-ass, kibitzed with him...
...After I was done with my interviews I joined him in the stands and we watched the game...
...It's your son's 9th birthday," she said...
...I hadn't made a lot of friends in baseball," he told me while sitting in front of his locker...
...That's the way life is, with a new game every day...
...There, manager Tony LaRussa made a relief pitcher out of him, and he went on to become perhaps the greatest in history...
...I want somebody to pinch me to make sure I'm not dreaming...
...One of the ways baseball really does imitate life (to paraphrase the sportswriter Thomas Boswell) is that it affords those regular guys second-and even third-chances and gives ordinary men an occasional chance to look and act like heroes...
...You can build on yesterday's success or put its failures behind and start over again...
...All I ever asked for is to be given a chance to play...
...Both men were great second-chance stories...
...Other players in the clubhouse hovered around Clinton, seeking autographs...
...And that's the way baseball is...
...If you are going to try and play baseball again, you're taking him with you...
...In his early forties and out of baseball for the first time since he left school, Stearns found himself broadcasting games on ESPN...
...We set the ball on a makeshift tee and ask a 4-year-old to swing the bat through the ball, holding their hands just so, the way we were taught when we were little...
...He was right about that and got fired anyway after winning his division...
...He found this out the hard way after his 11-year playing career as a catcher was cut short by an injury to his throwing arm...
...When the inning was over, I told my son it felt like a dream...
...Today there are 280 leagues playing under that name with teams as far away as the Netherlands and the Virgin Islands, including the Alexandria As...
...How do you think I feel...
...My makeup was that I didn't want to befriend opponents...
...You should play on the varsity baseketball team," I told him...
...he growled...
...He was a star football and baseball player there, but I never knew he also could play basketball until one day I was assigned to guard him in a pickup game in the fieldhouse and watched as he nailed 25-footers at will...
...He realizes now that this time away may be serving him well as he pursues his goal of being a big-league manager someday...
...At the first sign of trouble on the Mets, Johnson was subjected to rumors about carousing (shades of John Tower) and then unceremoniously fired early in the season...
...they were well-paid versions of regular guys, thrilled to be in the presence of the president...
...In the same season his older brother broke Lou Gehrig's consecutive-game streak, the 30-year-old Bill found himself consigned to the minor leagues...
...Where do you play...
...My wife acquiesced, but with one proviso...
...It's only by being parents that we really understand life's first truth- that we are someone else's children...
...As a team, the Baltimore Orioles are an object lesson in second chances-for example, Cal's brother Bill Ripken...
...Al Rosen said that the greatest thrill in the world was to end the game with a home run so you can watch everybody else walk off the field "while you're running the bases on air...
...He lingered, as anybody would, in front of the locker of future Hall of Famer Cal Ripken, Jr...
...In the process, I had inadvertently broken a connection I'd had with my father-and one he'd had with his father...
...The fiery player who did not fraternize or engage in small talk found himself forced to rely on the good will of his sport's fraternity if he wanted to stay in the game...
...That's exactly what happened, and when Anderson circled the bases, the first one to greet him with a hug at home plate was John Stearns...
...I remember Stearns from my college days at the University of Colorado...
...The ball went over the centerfielder's head, and kept going...
...Take left field...
...This behavior was a reminder that baseball's hold on the imagination is only partly due to the feats of gods such as Ruth, DiMaggio, and Mays...
...On my 9th birthday, my dad hits a homer-and I get to see it...
...But then again, maybe they do...
...I needed someone to give me another chance, and Davey did...
...For many of us, it's baseball that helps bring us full circle...
...If being pugnacious helped Stearns (nicknamed "Bad Dude") keep a game face on, it didn't always endear him to others...
...That night, he limped to the plate with two outs and a man on, the Dodger faithful wondering how Gibson would even run to first if he hit the ball...
...A World Series ring and a string of 90-plus-win seasons with the New York Mets in the 1980s was not enough to insulate Johnson from the politics of baseball, which are as ruthless as anything that happens on Capitol Hill...
...Anywhere, I said...
...There's a lot of politics in the coaching ranks...
...I had stopped playing baseball when I was 16...
...I showed up at a local high school field in jeans and with my old glove...
...He figured Schott wouldn't know one coach or ballplayer from another...
...They don't get to do what Ray Kinsella did in the movie Field of Dreams, making up for lost time by playing catch with a long-dead father in a magical Iowa cornfield...
...Other times, second chances can be filled with all the drama the sport has to offer...
...Turns out, he only had to stroll around the bases...
...A few years ago, a Long Island father named Steve Sigler went to his son's Little League practice where he was pressed into service warming up a young pitcher...
...Eckersley was a starter in Boston who battled booze, a sore arm, and a divorce when he went to the Oakland A's...
...My son said, "He's going to hit a homer to win it...
...This was more than recapturing glory...
...Most of us don't get to run the bases on air in front of 20 million people the way Kirk Gibson did, but most of us have moments of our own, and plenty of second chances, too...
...I had never hit homers as a kid...
...he answered...
...Carl M. Cannon covers the White House for the Baltimore Sun...
...These men were not at the summit of the public imagination as Ripken is...
...As the great pitcher Bob Feller put it: "Every day is a new opportunity...
...Pete Rose once said he'd "walk through hell in a gasoline suit to keep playing baseball," but my state of mind was more akin to what James Thurber was getting at when he observed that most American males put themselves to sleep by striking out the batting order of the New York Yankees...
...This spring, he got that opportunity from new O's manager Davey Johnson, an example of the way the sport affords men even third chances...
...All you need to know about her is that she told Johnson that five coaches was too many, so when Johnson wanted to hire a coach named John Stearns, he had to put a warm-up jersey on Stearns without a number or name...
...Why, he wondered, do I have to play soft-ball in a beer league...
...Last season, Bill was frozen out of spring training by the baseball strike...
...I never lost confidence," he said with a shrug about an hour before a recent game...
...So he started the Men's Senior Baseball League, for men over the age of 30, originally made up of the fathers of the boys on his kid's team...
...The great example in modern baseball is probably Kirk Gibson's 9th-inning homer off Dennis Eckersley to win the first game of the 1988 World Series...
...It's a tough business," he said...
...A lot of it has to do with the other players, the ones who are not stars, the ones to whom we can actually compare ourselves...
...He was abruptly let go in 1992...
...All told, Sigler's notion has given 50,000 men a second chance at baseball...
...Some of it has to do with the nature of the game itself...
...The price Bill, like other marginal players, paid for honoring those picket lines was high, and not only in lost income...
...In any event, Ripken was comfortable enough in Clinton's presence to tell the leader of the free world that he wouldn't be a "real man" if he didn't throw the ceremonial first pitch from the actual pitcher's mound...
...the manager asked...
...Mine came five years ago when I was invited to come and watch- and maybe fill in for an inning or two on-an over-30 hardball team called the Alexandria Athletics...
...Divisions have been added for men in their twenties and men in their forties...
...With much effort, Stearns landed a series of player-development positions with various organizations, the last as manager of the Toronto Blue Jays' Double-A team in Knoxville for two years...
...We've only got eight...
...Good," he responded...
...Johnson got his third chance courtesy of O's owner Peter Angelos, and when he came to Baltimore this spring, he brought Stearns with him to coach first base...
...You want me to flunk out...
...It wasn't an easy transition for me to be a coach...
...An unexpected thrill came over him as he gripped a hardball in his hands for the first time since his college baseball career ended 15 years before...
...In the backyard, we consent to show a young pitcher how to throw a curve, but caution them not to throw it too often or when they are too young...
...I came up to bat for the first time in 19 years in the bottom of the second...
...In the bottom of the ninth with the score tied, Orioles outfielder Brady Anderson came up...
...Gibson was hurt, playing on one leg, his glory years of playing all-out every game in Detroit having taken their toll...
...This night, with my son watching instead of my dad, I looked for a fastball away and got it...
...The day I went up to Baltimore to talk to Bill Ripken and John Stearns, I brought my son, now 15...
...I was the one walking on air now, and between innings, my son came down the foul line and warmed me up...
...Sometimes a comeback is almost mundane: In March, Bill Ripken, looking around the Orioles training camp in Florida, sort of figured out that he was back on a major league team, but he wanted to confirm it: "At the end of spring training, I went into Davey's office and said, 'I am here, right?' and he said, 'Yeah.' That was it...
...I had also quit the game before I was ready...
...When he finally got another job, it was tendered by the Owner from Hell, Cincinnati's Marge Schott...
...The shortstop and the president appeared to enjoy each other's company...
...they are, after all, on the same level in their respective professions...
Vol. 1 • April 1996 • No. 32
