Have Glove, Will Travel_ Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond - Bill Lee [22]
The heat thickened when we exited from the cool of the arrivals building. Sweat saturated our clothes in seconds, and my legs buckled low until I was walking on my knees. Could not catch my breath. Our driver had to carry me to his car.
Ozzie had scheduled my first start for the following afternoon. I asked the driver if the forecasters thought it would still be this hot at game time.
“Weatherman says hotter.”
Oh, boy.
He saw the concerned expression on my face and laughed. “Just kidding,” he said. Oh, yeah? The next day I stood on a pitching rubber that could have doubled as the devil’s anvil. A professional ballplayer becomes accustomed to competing in every kind of weather; he should never offer the elements as an excuse for poor performance. After all, the climate is the same for both sides in any game. But the heat in Caracas did not compare to anything I had ever experienced. Hot in North America is you laboring to adjust while pitching in the meantime until that first big sweat flops over your collar and your breathing slows down to the rhythm of your windup and your heart settles and the temperature joins you as an ally, keeping your arm loose and whippy.
Hot in Venezuela behaved like another breed of hound entirely—a competitor. When you adjusted to the torrid clime, he fired up the grill until you bubbled on all sides—his signal to toss on another bag of charcoal. Our cotton uniforms, lighter than those we wore in the States, hardly relieved the discomfort. I might as well have played in an angora jumpsuit.
The configuration of our home ballpark also disturbed me. In the United States, architects align most major-league stadiums so that a pitcher faces west when he works on the mound. That means left-handers frequently throw out of the south into a westerly wind. I believed that made my ball move more.
In Venezuela, the trade winds blow in the opposite direction. I was throwing in a vortex. Every pitch in my repertoire arrived at home plate clothesline straight, without a bit of movement to confuse the hitters. For someone who relies on deception rather than velocity to retire batters, you could not have chosen worse conditions. I tried compensating by throwing a spitter. Bad idea. The ball kept drying before it reached home plate.
I started overthrowing, trying to put too much on the ball. The faster I threw, the harder they hit. In our dugout, the clubhouse boy served the players demitasses of espresso. My teammates sipped the dark beverage all through the game for extra energy, and it worked. Our hitters ran to the plate, pumped their arms, ground their bats into sawdust, and sprinted full out on the base paths. I drank a cup, but it didn’t help me. I needed to go in the other direction. Tone down. Find a balance. I asked the kid to bring me a cup of chamomile tea. That didn’t help either.
The wind, the ballpark, the heat, the humidity . . . none of these factors hampered the opposing hitters. I retired the first batter of the game on a line drive that nearly decapitated our third baseman, Luis Salazar. Had the hitter uppercut that pitch just an inch higher, the ball would have crashed through the window of some cottage in Nova Scotia. Hard singles from the next two batters put runners on first and third. Then the wolf whistles and chanting started.
Andres Galarraga had yet to play an inning of major-league ball, but we had all heard about him. Scouts considered the twenty-three-year-old first baseman the top prospect in the Montreal Expos’ minor league system. Galarraga was a right-handed power hitter, six foot four and 230 pounds of muscle and sinew. He displayed so much athletic quickness and grace for such a large man, South American sportswriters had nicknamed him the “Big Cat.”
Tiburones fans used another name for him. As soon as he stepped from the dugout, they shouted, “El grande maricon!,” a phrase that translates into English as “the big faggot.” They pinned