108 Stitches by Ron Darling

Author:Ron Darling
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

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When I was traded to Oakland in the middle of the 1991 season, the A’s sent right-hander Joe Slusarski to their Triple-A team in Tacoma to make room for me on the roster—just one example of the dominoes that fall when a team makes a move. Joe had been up and down with the big club, but he seemed to figure in the team’s plans for the future, so I think he took this demotion in stride. The assignment was only temporary: Joe was named to the A’s starting rotation the following year, after beating out Jim Deshaies in a heated spring training battle for the final spot.

(Take that, Dave Righetti!)

Joe continued to pitch well and appeared to be on the upward arc of a solid career … until he wasn’t. Before we broke camp the following spring, he played a round of golf with fellow pitchers Gene Nelson and Rick Honeycutt at a resort in Scottsdale, where he was felled by a jumping cholla. Joe hit a ball into what passes for “rough” out there in the desert, where it came to rest near a bush or a cactus of some kind. It turned out to be a jumping cholla plant, which drops all these menacing stems and seeds to the ground at the slightest touch. Those suckers can be deadly! Joe got a mess of spines stuck in his pitching hand when he reached for his golf ball, and within minutes he was screaming in pain. His fingers swelled to the size of ballpark franks, and there was damage to the tendons in his middle finger.

He was never the same pitcher after that—at least, not in the eyes of A’s management. He made two more appearances in an A’s uniform, the first in relief of me in a game at Comiskey Park later that season, where neither one of us pitched well, even though we eked out a 12–11 win with a three-run rally in the ninth.

Joe finished out his career with the Astros and Braves, who (mercifully, for Joe) played their spring training games far away from the not-so-friendly confines of the Cactus League.

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