Imperfect An Improbable Life by Jim Abbott

Author:Jim Abbott
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780345523273
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Published: 2012-04-03T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

Up there in those rows of blue seats, among those 27,000 faces, those hopes and expectations, Dana sat behind home plate, twenty rows up, to the first-base side. I’d left her on the Upper East Side hours ago, and she’d made her way to the ballpark by game time, which she always did when I pitched.

I never looked up, never found her, but always sensed when she was there, and was grateful for it. I knew she wanted desperately for me to win, which, of course, made two of us. On television, Tony Kubek introduced the sixth inning by saying, “The Indians do not yet have a base hit,” but that hadn’t really crossed my mind, or Dana’s. I was looking at the other “0,” the one in the “runs” category, and the growing stack of water cups.

Three months earlier, on another Saturday afternoon—that one sunny and warm—in the Bronx, I’d taken a no-hitter into the eighth inning against the Chicago White Sox. I was sitting where I was now and Dana was where she was that day, when Bo Jackson came up with an out in the eighth, me five outs from the unthinkable. I’d made a good pitch and Bo flared a single to center. Then I’d made another good pitch and Ron Karkovice homered down the left-field line, and so we both remained sore enough from that emotional whiplash to be quite and totally satisfied with victory.

Now ahead 4–0—Velarde had homered to lead off the bottom of the fifth—I was thinking “win,” and Dana was, too, and the Indians probably were wondering where that guy from six days ago had gone.

Jim Thome led off the sixth inning. He had this very flat swing that stayed in the strike zone for a very long time, which meant I couldn’t have my curveball or cutter stay on the same plane for very long. I needed to pitch downhill, a term my pitching coach with the Angels, Marcel Lachemann, so often used, so that the ball arrived in the vicinity of Thome’s bat on an angle. Though he’d not been in the league long, I recalled he’d hit some balls hard to left—his opposite field—against me before. Sure enough, on a two-ball, one-strike pitch, he lined a curveball to shortstop that Velarde gloved near his right shin. I’d take the out, even a loud one.

Then, before I’d run into the top of the Indians’ order, I walked Junior Ortiz. Ortiz, you might recall, was the Indians’ number nine hitter, and he arrived batting .239. I not only walked him, by the way, but walked him on four pitches, causing me to scream something very loud into my glove that, even from a couple hundred feet away, might have made Bronx denizens blush.

Kenny Lofton came up, took a strike, fouled off the next two pitches, then took a fastball up. Now, by the time I was done, only two hitters would have as many or more plate appearances against me than Lofton and hit for a better average against me than Lofton.

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