Growing up, when I was a kid, I thought it was going to be girls.  It made sense.  Girls like Bonnie Stewart, or Katie Davis, or Erica Puccio.  They were going to break my heart.  I didn’t know if it was going to happen on the other end of an ill-conceived phone call, or in the middle of a school-sponsored dance, or during some reckless lunchtime dare in the cafeteria.  But I knew for a fact that it was inevitable.  I would get rejected.  I would get turned away.  That’s life, right?  Maybe I wasn’t tall enough.  Or I wasn’t blonde enough.  Or I wasn’t rich enough.  I wasn’t something enough, that’s for sure.  Every single time.

            That’s the way it was.  For years.  In middle school, in high school, in college.  Even past that point.  I remember there was that time a couple of years after graduating from college that Kristen called me and told me that things were over, that she was going to be living with another guy.  Dear God, that sucked the life right out of me.  That was rock bottom.  At that point, I was twenty-two, broke, unemployed, living at home with my mom, and the woman I loved was moving in with someone three days after breaking up with me.  I was in seriously rough shape.  Not eating, not sleeping.  Just a wreck.  My friends and family started whispering behind my back, wondering if I was going to be okay.  They were worried about me.  I took it hard.  But it wasn’t surprising – because that’s how it felt to have your heart broken.

            But something changed.  Maybe girls changed.  More likely, I changed.  And I don’t know what happened, but over the years, I discovered that there was a new and unexpected danger.  Over the years, I discovered that baseball broke my heart far more often than girls ever did.  And that’s the sad, sad truth of it all.
 

The Natural

Do you remember Eric Davis?  The chill he sent down your spine?  In 1986 and 1987, you couldn’t convince me that there was a better player on the planet.  Couldn’t be done.  In 1986, he hit .277 with 27 homers and 80 steals.  At the age of twenty-four.  Who did that?  And his next year looked even better: a .293 average with 37 homers while swiping 50 on the basepaths.  Whoa…

            I was 14 years-old in 1986.  And I was in love.  Yes, I was.  It was heaven.  I thought I had found my Willie Mays. 

Eric Davis, the World’s Greatest Athlete.  Eric Davis, the man who could do everything.  Eric Davis, my favorite player in baseball.

But…

But he got hurt.  Of course he did.  And he kept getting hurt.  Normal injuries, like a bad knee.  But also weird injuries, like a lacerated kidney.  Like colon cancer.  These were not your standard baseball injuries.  No.  These were clear signs to let you know that, in no uncertain terms, the Baseball Gods were not going to unleash Eric Davis on the world.  Who knows?  Perhaps the world was not ready for him.

See, I wasn’t simply rooting for Eric Davis.  I wasn’t merely hoping that he would be a great player.  I had wanted him to revolutionize the game.  I had wanted Eric Davis to torch the baseball record book with his blazing talent, and to leave the smoldering remains behind in his glorious wake.  I wanted a player the world had never seen before.  I wanted history.  I mean, when they sent Neil Armstrong up in his rocket, everyone was rooting for him to land on the moon, right?  Nobody was rooting for engine trouble, were they?  We wanted joy.  We wanted triumph.  We wanted dominance.

We wanted history.

But it wasn’t to be.  I was getting initiated into the cycle of hope and disappointment that characterizes baseball.  There were hard lessons I needed to learn.  If I needed a soundtrack, Mick sang those notes four decades ago: “You can’t always get what you want.”

They still play that song on the radio.  Because even though The Stones wrote it before I was born, the chorus is a universal truth.  And it is one that baseball plays out in front of me, time and again.

The Kid

I live in Somerville, MA, which is very convenient.  I can take the subway two stops to work, and the cost of purchasing a home in Somerville was lower than buying one in Cambridge.  I mention this because, if you were a baseball fan living around these parts in the spring of 2003, you would have a hard time forgetting the remarkable season when Jeff Allison from Peabody threw a no-hitter against Somerville, striking out 20 of the 22 hitters he faced.  The scary part?  It wasn’t even all that unusual for him.  Coming off a dominant performance against Cambridge High, it was his second no-hitter in a row. 

His absurd stats told the story of the season.  In his senior year, Jeff Allison threw 63 and 2/3 innings.  He gave up 13 hits.  He struck out 142.  He walked 9.  And he gave up no earned runs.  Which meant, of course, that his ERA was 0.00. 

Unreal.  The kid was unreal.

Baseball America, in its wisdom, named him their High School Player of the Year.  The year before that, it was Scott Kazmir.  And the year before that one?  Joe Mauer.  Two years before that?  Josh Hamilton.  And sure, all those guys were awesome athletes, tremendous players.  But none of them were pitching in my town, you know?  Those guys weren’t lacing them up to play the local Somerville Highlanders.  Jeff Allison was ours.  He was one of us.  And just like Kazmir and Mauer and Hamilton, he was going to be a superstar.  How could he fail?  He was the best player in the country!  From Peabody, of all places!

By the time he was 21 years-old, Jeff Allison had overdosed on heroin.  Twice.  This was in addition to his well-documented addiction to OxyContin.

The kid with all the tools – the one with everything to live for, the one with the greatest right arm this area had ever seen – was on a long, slow walk into darkness.  And in our voyeuristic frenzy, we were witnesses to the spectacle of it all.  The Can’t Miss Kid was going to crash and burn, and he didn’t have the time to pick a soft spot to fall.

            When I heard the news it struck me that, when he was nineteen, I wanted to trade places with Jeff Allison.  I wanted his preternatural talent.  I wanted his life.

            And when he was twenty-one, wheeled into the emergency room of Winchester Hospital, after his second heroin overdose, nobody wanted to trade places with him.  No.  At that moment in time, his vast reserve of baseball talent was completely devoid of value.  At that moment in time, Jeff Allison just wanted not to die. 

            (Note: It is worth remembering that Jeff Allison’s life isn’t over.  His baseball career isn’t over.  Pitching in the low minors for the Marlins system, he is fighting to reclaim his potential, working to keep his sobriety.  Following in the footsteps of Josh Hamilton, there is still time to salvage a career.  There is still hope.)

            (Second note: It is also worth remembering that none of this changes the heavy, heavy sadness I felt when I heard the news about his drug use, and his repeated brushes with death.  You can’t wipe that away so easily.  Some chapters you always carry with you, no matter how the story ends.)

The Curse

            Then there was the 2003 American League Championship Series.  And, even as I write this, even as I think about it, years after the fact, I realize that maybe I’m not completely over it.  It still makes me hurt.  It still makes me flinch.  Grady Little.  Pedro.  Aaron Boone launching a Wakefield offering deep into the New York night.  I remember trying to breathe, trying to teach myself how to inhale and exhale again.

            I felt…  how did I feel?  Miserable?  Depressed?  No.  Not quite.  How do I catalog the emotional turmoil?  How do I give it a name?

            Numb.  I felt numb, is how I felt.  I couldn’t feel a thing.

            I felt exactly like the time I waited a year for Nicole to come back from Chile, only to have her break up with me immediately on her return.  Yeah.  That’s how I felt.

            Why did Grady leave him in?  Why?  It made no sense to me.  The world made no sense.

            I rapped my head on a cold steel door.  Just to make sure I could still feel something.  Just to make sure I was still there.

            And I wondered why I put myself through this.  Why I did this to myself.  Why I cared so much.  I wanted to wish it all away, to make sure this was the last time I ever felt this way.  “Never again,” I swore to myself, “never again.”  And I meant it at the time.  Even though I knew better.

            I remember riding the subway to work the next day, feeling empty and dejected.  It seemed like everyone was wired to the same wavelength.  We were all lifeless, hurt little creatures.  But standing next to me was a construction worker I had never seen before, nor have I ever seen again, and he started yapping. “I knew they were going to blow it,” he said.  “That’s the Red Sox, they always blow it.”  And somewhere, in the back of my head – in the reptilian part of my brain that is deluded into thinking that I could be a passable Ultimate Fighter if only I dedicated myself to training and could disregard the fact that I am fat and afraid of pain – my coherent thought process started to fracture and I wanted to walk up to this guy and punch him square in the face.

            I really did.  I thought about it.  I pictured myself doing it, reaching back and hitting the guy with a right hook. 

            But I didn’t.  I couldn’t.  I was drained, man.  I was done.  That Boone homer had taken all the fight out of me.

            Has that ever happened to you?  Wanting to punch a stranger in the face?  Because of baseball?

            It’s happened to me.

            More than once.              

            I think that says very sad things about me.  And/or baseball.

The Quote

            A little while back, Jen K. wrote me an email where she pointed out the Bart Giamatti quote.  (Which is kinda funny because a couple of weeks later, she sent me an email telling me that she didn’t think things were going to work out, but that we could still be friends.  Full circle.)  Giamatti was a good commissioner.  He was smart, thoughtful, and he loved the game.  And whenever I think that there’s something wrong with me, that maybe I’m wired the wrong way, I think about what he said and try not to be too hard on myself.

Talking about baseball, Giamatti wrote: "It will break your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.  You count on it, you rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then, just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops."

I don’t know what I could possibly add to that.  He said it far better than I ever could. 

That’s the Catch-22, isn’t it?  The more emotionally invested you are, the more passionate you feel, the more you love baseball — the more you open yourself to get hurt.  Sometimes, you’re devoted to someone who doesn’t deserve your devotion.  Sometimes, the person you love doesn’t love you back.

Wrapping Things Up

So here it is.  Baseball finds itself full of champions and heroes and Hall of Famers.  It focuses on the homers and the rifle throws and highlight reel catches.  At the end of every season, we see champagne showers, confetti explosions, and city-wide victory parades.  And I won’t be writing about that.

I’m not here to gloat and taunt.  I won’t write about how my favorite team is better than yours, or how my favorite player is God-like while yours is walking garbage.  The online world is already far too full of rooting interest flame wars.  It’s exhausting.  It’s pointless

Instead, here I plan on writing about broken things.  Broken players, broken games, broken teams.  Guys like Herb Score.  Like Pete Reiser.  Like John Rocker or Brien Taylor or Toe Nash or Nick Esasky.  Vessels for our hope that got a little lost along the way.  I’m going to write about them because deep down, I’m broken – just like them.  And my hope is that by writing about these things, I can lessen the pain, and the hurt won’t be so bad.  Maybe I can take steps towards feeling better again.  Start feeling more complete.  Start feeling whole. 

And who knows?  One day, maybe I’ll finally work up the nerve to finally pick up the phone and tell Becca how I really feel…

If you have any thoughts you want to share, I would love to hear from you.  I can be contacted at

roeltorres@post.harvard.edu.  Thank you.