GARRETT
I’ve told exactly one story from my playing days at every camp, clinic, and coaching job I’ve ever had, and it’s the forty-five minutes. You’ve maybe heard a version of it — hitting guys pass it around like a relic — but you’ve heard it wrong, because the version that travels starts in the cage, and the real one starts three weeks earlier, with the worst stretch of my professional life, and the man responsible for it was my hero, and he was standing thirty feet from my locker, and he would not stop watching me.
Spring training, my rookie camp. I was a kid with a good swing and a hitch in it — everybody said so, the way everybody says things, vaguely, like weather — and I was trying to make a club that had Thane Briggs on it. Understand what that meant to me. I’d grown up on that swing. I had done my homework on that man the way seminary students do homework. And I get to camp, and the greatest third baseman alive starts watching me hit.
Not coaching me. Watching me. Every cage session, somewhere in my peripheral vision, planted, arms folded, that face doing absolutely nothing, those eyes doing absolutely everything. Day after day. He never said a word. And a twenty-two-year-old does the only math available to a twenty-two-year-old: he’s seen the hitch. He thinks I’m a fraud. The best player in the world has audited my swing and filed me under garbage, and he watches me every day the way you watch a car accident developing.
I stopped being able to look at him. I want that on the record from my side, because I’ve since read it from his: he wrote that I wouldn’t look at him, and he was right, and he cataloged it, because of course he did. I couldn’t look at him. My hero was a silent column of judgment at the edge of every rep, and my swing — you can guess. The hitch got worse. Everything got worse. You cannot hit while conducting a trial in your own head with the verdict already in.
I can give you one day of it and you can multiply. Second week, back fields, live BP. I’d hit two ropes and felt almost human, and then I heard the cart, and then I didn’t have to look because you could feel the man arrive the way you feel a cloud cross the sun — the whole field’s chatter dropped a register — and my next four swings were a scouting report on panic. Rolled over twice, cued one off the end, missed a cookie clean. And the coaches said nothing, because the coaches had stopped saying anything to me, because — I understood this later — they were waiting to see what he was seeing, and none of them wanted to paint over the work of whatever was going on behind those eyes. Even my failures had an audience of one. I called my brother that night and told him I was drowning in front of the one man I’d have crossed the country to impress, and my brother, who you’ll meet in a minute, said the thing he always said when I brought him noise instead of signal: “Tell me what he does, not what you feel.” And I said, “He watches. Every day. Just watches.” And my brother went quiet in the way that means he’s working, and I was too far inside my own misery to hear what that quiet meant.
Three weeks of that. Three weeks of the best baseball education on earth standing thirty feet away feeling like a sentence.