Imperfect by Jim Abbott

Author:Jim Abbott [Abbott, Jim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-345-52327-3
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-04-02T16:00:00+00:00

ON JUNE 1, 1988, the day of baseball’s amateur draft, Bobby Fontaine, the scouting director for the California Angels, stood in a doorway in the executive offices at Anaheim Stadium and told Tim Mead, the Angels’ PR man, “We did it,” just like that.

Mead knew immediately what Fontaine was saying. He’d overheard enough of the deliberations prior to the draft. After weeks of debate, analysis, debate, general agreement, and more debate, the club had taken the left-hander from Michigan, the Olympic hopeful, the Sullivan Award winner, the one-handed guy.

Not in the second or third round, as many had projected, but in the first round, eighth overall.

The phone rang in the living room on Maxine Street in Flint. A reporter wanted to know what it felt like to be a pro ballplayer and an Angel, the first I’d heard. I didn’t really know, actually. The Tigers, where my heart was and who carried the unimaginable dream of playing at Tiger Stadium, had the twenty-sixth pick, and speculation held that they might select me. In my neighborhood, they were professional baseball. The Angels weren’t one of those teams people in Michigan thought much about, but I was thrilled to go so high. Eventually the Angels’ general manager, Mike Port, called. It was true, I was going to get paid for playing baseball, which I’d only recently begun to consider. I’d been 26-8 with a 3.03 ERA in three seasons at Michigan, but the big leagues, any pro ball, seemed a long way off, until the phone rang, and then I was never so happy that the battery held up on that old remote receiver.

George Bradley, one of the team’s scouting coordinators, had been around the Michigan team earlier that spring. In Austin, Texas, for one of my earlier starts, he’d run into Don Welke. He shook Welke’s hand, nodded toward the lefty on the mound, and said, “You knew what you were looking at three years ago, didn’t you?”—more a statement than a question, really. On draft day, Bradley told the newspapers that the club was not concerned with my condition.

“We didn’t even look at it that way,” he said. “Over the years he has overcome that handicap. It’s like a guy with glasses. He uses glasses to correct his vision. Jim has overcome his problem. He won’t have a problem fielding. He’s mastered fielding.

“Take a look around the big leagues and see where the left-handed pitching is. Our club needed left-handed pitching and there were only a few in the draft.”

The Angels set up a conference call and the questions were predictable.

“I always grew up playing baseball and liking it,” I told reporters. “I never thought about anything holding me back. I was going to play until someone grabbed my spikes away from me and told me to sit down, you’re not good enough anymore. As I look back on it, I guess it was a different situation and if I had any common sense, I probably would’ve stopped. But growing up, playing with one hand never entered my mind as holding me back.

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