Kuzul

It’s 2008, and I’m on a rooftop at a high-end bar called the Sky Lounge. It’s the chief attraction at the Gaslamp Marriott Hotel, a five-star joint kitty-corner to one of baseball’s newest cathedrals, Petco Park.

There is a line in the lobby waiting to get to it, unless, of course, you’re staying at the hotel—which I just happen to be. For free. It was part of my big league “seven and seven,” or seven days of meal money and seven days of free housing.

A wide-open view of Petco Park is available from the open-air bar of the Sky Lounge. Many of the patrons come to the lounge just to gawk at it. After all, it’s much cheaper to get into the Sky Lounge than Petco. Unless you’re me and you work there. Then it’s free, just like the hotel.

A big league park in a sun-kissed beachside town, that’s where I work now. Mind blowing. It took me 21 years to make it to the bigs. Twenty-one grueling years of faith in myself and beating the odds, and now that towering temple of the game was my home field.

I was staring at it, admiring it, from the top of a five-star hotel, with a smirk on my face, a White Russian in hand and a stack of $100 bills in my pocket.

Somebody pinch me.

***

The day I got called up, I came into the park in Portland early. I was living with three other guys in a two-bedroom apartment. One of them had his kids in town, two girls, and his wife, all of us crammed in on top of one another.

We had no food in the house. No furniture besides our air mattresses, a lawn chair and an ironing board. No television, no radio, not even Internet access. It was a cell. A holding pen until the next day, when we’d all go into the stadium early because at least the locker room had proper technology and peanut butter and jelly. Sometimes I showed up so early the place was locked and all I could do was sit outside the lockers, waiting for it to open.

Everything I owned could fit into two suitcases. Any more and I’d have to pay baggage fees for it—about three days’ worth of my pay for one damn bag. My travel suit was pieced together from castoffs I found at the Goodwill. My dress shoes were given to me by another player. I always shaved at the locker room, never bought what I thought I could trick my agent into buying and owned the cheapest phone with the cheapest plan I could find.

I was a vagabond. A rube. A fake. The only thing of any significance that I had to my name was the lottery-ticket job I had. Some people felt there was honor in the chase, most folks who look at us grown men playing a kids’ game and think it’s a self-evident truth of some sort.

But there is no honor in going hungry or asking your family to wait or suffer financially so you can chase long odds. I was broke, adrift, banking on the only thing I knew. I would either make it to the bigs or watch every year I’d leveraged to play these increasingly long odds be burned up, with nothing to show for it except boring stories of glory days.

The second they told me I was going up, it was like scales fell away. My God, the freedom. It was a complete change in gravity. Like being pardoned, reborn or baptized. Yes, yes, it was a dream come true, a punched once-in-a-lifetime experience ticket. And, yes, I’d won that lottery I mentioned.

But—and I’m sad to say this—it was also financially liberating, and that’s what I held on to. I was 27 with six years of pro ball under my belt. I had four years of college next to my name. I’d been published in magazines and newspapers. I made less than I did when I was 15, working the frying station at McDonald’s. If I made it all the way through September in the big leagues, I might not have to live on the floor of my grandmother’s house when the season ended.

***  

I was called up as a starter. I’d be a replacement for Greg Maddux, whom the Padres had just traded away. I wasn’t supposed to take over for him, just to fill in the spot until a healthy Chris Young made it back from the disabled list.

On the day of the start, I remember not knowing how to get into the stadium in San Francisco. Where do players enter? I’d never done that before. It was just one of the things I’d have to figure out the hard way. One of many, many things.

I’d never been exposed to so many unwritten baseball rules before. Don’t get on the second bus to the stadium—if there is a second bus to the stadium—because that’s the veterans’ bus. Get on the early bus.

But, really, if you’re a rookie, take a cab because the early bus isn’t really early enough to look like you’re truly committed and thankful for the experience. Optics are especially important for rookies.

Which reminds me, you’ll have duties—not on your start day, but every other day of the week—so you should probably practice and observe so you know what to do on your off day.

You’ll have lots of things rookies are simply expected to do, but you won’t know what they are until you are told. The worst part of it all is that you’ll be expected to somehow know those things without being told.

A good rule of thumb is: Do everything anyone with more service time tells you to do, and do it in a way that won’t make them upset. You see, you have to look as if you’re honored to be their little helper, or the larger group will view you as a punk.

Also, you won’t know what upsets an older player until you upset them, so be prepared. They will, of course, expect you to inherently know this as well. Good luck.  

***

They say it’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing. Your debut, that is. Nothing like it. In fact, my pitching coach at the time, Darren Balsley, called me in the hotel the night before and told me to try and take it all in, slow down, savor it.

Easy for him to say.

Once I got out there onto that big league field, time hit the fast-forward button. It was so much, so fast.

There were towering stands, a massive display board and row after row of seats. I could taste salt in the air off the bay, feel the pulse of the stadium’s speakers, the hum of electricity buzzing through the place. You can’t tune it out, and you can’t slow it down. It was a machine, judging and devouring the would-be stars who got caught in its gears.

When I summited that brown agony patch in the center of the diamond to make my first pitches as a real big leaguer, I practically forgot how to pitch. Nothing was familiar. Nothing was natural. It was not the same game. It was now the only game.

I walked the first batter I faced on five pitches. My catcher came out, handed me the ball and then gave me the most profoundly useless chunk of advice any catcher has ever given me in a moment of penultimate need. “Hey, throw strikes.”

Yeah. Right. What was I thinking?

*** 

For my first start, I opposed Barry Zito. I felt good about that, actually, because I knew he wasn’t the Zito he used to be. The problem was I threw right-handed, but I hit left-handed.

There is some kind of etiquette about tapping the catcher’s shin guards when you come to bat the first time. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was supposed to do. I wanted to look cool, but I think I just kind of poked the catcher with my bat head. “Take it easy on me,” I said, “it’s my first time.”

The catcher said nothing. I swallowed. Zito wound.

Usually, the first pitch from one pitcher to another in a swing-away situation is a fastball, sometimes referred to as the courtesy fastball in case you’re the type of pitcher who feels like swinging and usually ending the at-bat on the first pitch. After that, it’s all breaking stuff, because ESPN highlights look better when the strikeout total next to your name is higher.

I took the first pitch. Courtesy or not, it’s remarkably easy to lay off pitches when you know you can’t hit any of them. That doesn’t mean they can’t hit you, though. Lefty-on-lefty is scary as hell.

Zito’s arm angle had me edging farther and farther away from the plate on each pitch, but when he uncorked that huge hook of his, I bailed out completely. I thought for sure it was going to decapitate me, but when I opened my eyes and looked to the catcher, it was caught just out of the zone for a ball.

I was certain I would see his hook again after my reaction, but it didn’t come. Zito fell behind on me, and then, as fate would have it, he walked me.

I blanked. I was not prepared for this contingency. I stared stupidly at the umpire because ball four did not compute. It had been years since I’d been on first base, and I had no idea what to do there.

Out of instinct, I actually took a step toward the dugout before it registered I was going the wrong way. I tried to play my error off like I was just going to give the bat back, forgetting they had people who collected them. Then, instead of cutting my losses and heading to first, I stepped back into the box and looked dull-faced at the umpire again.

“First base is that way,” said the umpire, gesturing with a tilt of his head.

“Yeah, r-right. Thank you, sir,” I said. I dropped my bat and jogged awkwardly down the line.        

I actually made it all the way to third base, but I didn’t score. When I arrived there, the umpire asked me when I last found myself at third base. I said I didn’t know. He laughed. Then he told me which direction was home, in case I got lost again.

*** 

On the plane ride out from San Fran and back to sunny San Diego, I sat in the back near Trevor Hoffman, Brian Giles and Jake Peavy.

I wasn’t supposed to be there, but they directed me to a seat on account of my aimless wandering, looking for a place to sit and being rejected. The plane would have taken off with me standing. Computers, cellphones, seat belts, seats—those things didn’t matter. It was a private jet, you could do whatever you wanted.

You could eat whatever you wanted, too. Trays of sandwiches, cookies, crab legs, fruit, kabobs, beers, wines, gum, crackers, cheese…it was a catered party for a puddle jump from San Fran to San Diego. I don’t know why, but I felt the urge to steal some of it and save it for later lest I never see it again.

Halfway through the flight, it became apparent that one of the guys was drunk. Whether he’d brought a bottle of Jack Daniels on the flight or just drank from the endless supply onboard was not clear. What was clear, however, was he was climbing over seat backs, smacking rookies in the back of the head. No one said a word. Not even when he started kicking and punching holes in the overhead cabinets.

“They’ll just send him the bill for it. They always do,” said the veteran player next to me.

*** 

A bus picked us up on the tarmac, next to the plane. It took us back into downtown San Diego and right into the belly of Petco, where we parked. There were fans there. God knows why. It was at an odd hour and we weren’t even going to play, just get in our cars—those of us who had them—and leave. Besides, we were awful, and we didn’t deserve fans during off hours.

One of the guys, wasted from the trip and holding a beer while standing up and looking out the bus window, said, “What a bunch of losers.” He smacked the glass with his free hand, “Get a life.”

They all waved and cheered back at him, clueless about what he was saying.

Our luggage showed up after the bus. It came in a moving van. A legion of clubhouse attendants were there to unload everything for us. They yelled out the bags by number. Mine was 57.

“Number 57!” called a set of mischievous relievers. I went up to the van to get my bag. Nothing but snickers. I went back to the pack of the players. “Number 57!” This time in a different voice. I went to the front of the line again. No bag, only snickers.

This went on for about 15 minutes. I suppose I should have learned my lesson.

*** 

Back at the Sky Lounge, I finished my drink, set it on the railing overlooking Petco and made my way back to the elevator. I rode down to my room, went in, put out the “Do Not Disturb” sign and locked the door. I pulled off my travel clothes and threw them in a pile, then collapsed on the bed.

I stared at the ceiling for a while, replaying it all in my head. I’d only been a big leaguer for 48 hours. It was all so much, so fast. Did I deserve it?

A teammate once told me that we deserved all of it. That we beat the odds and made it to the only league that mattered—the big leagues.

Whatever the powers that be wanted to give us for showing up should be taken. The world was an unfair, crazy, what have you done lately place. Lately, I’d become a big leaguer. How long that would last was anyone’s guess. It didn’t make a lot of sense, but, then again, it never really did.

Just hold on as long as you can. You can figure it all out when it’s over. 

And it will be over far too quickly. 

Welcome to the big leagues. 

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Portland, 2008. I’m standing at the entrance of the clubhouse, the cavernous confines of the now defunct Portland Beavers, staring at a list of horse names hastily scrawled in black magic marker across a hunk of brown cardboard. We’re minutes from the start of the Kentucky Derby.

The latest Vegas odds are there, on the cardboard, next to the names of each horse that’ll be running. The team’s clubhouse attendant has been taking bets for the last few days, the totals marked near the horse names, little tickets marking picket fences around the board like horse pens.

I can’t help but chuckle. After all, there is a strong possibility that no one in the room, not one of my teammates or the staff, has ever seen a horse race beyond the movie Seabiscuit. And yet, for the last few days, it’s been horses, horses, horses. Almost everyone on the team has picked a horse and laid his money down. Some by the odds, some by the horse’s name, some just to be an accessory to the chaos. Even the bat boys have made their bets.

“There’s still time,” says the team’s clubhouse attendant/bookie, sliding up behind me, placing an encouraging palm on my shoulder. “Race hasn’t started yet.”

“Nah. I’m good,” I say. “The only furniture I have back in my apartment is an air mattress, a lawn chair and an ironing board—I need all my money.”

Minutes later, the team is gathered around the clubhouse’s pair of flat-screen television sets, one at each pole, with its own cluster of players. The guys have long since tired of listening to all the hubbub about horses, what could be history, who might be a Triple Crown, what jockey is up for what…all they care about are the following words: “And they’re off.” The guys scream it, randomly, like a mini-bet that when they say it, the horses will actually obey them and start running.

“And they’re off!”

“Aaaaaaand they’re off!”

Sure enough, the bell rings and the horses break into action, charging down the thoroughfare, gulping air as the whip or their jockey forces them onward. No whip is required for the animals in the clubhouse, however. Insanity ensues. It’s only the team, no elitists with big hats or billionaires with horse fetishes, just a pack of miserable Triple-A dirt bags with a meager sum of meal money on the line.

“Come on you son of a bitch, run! RUN YOU M—-R F—-R! I got $20 on this and I can’t lose to Myro again!”

“Yes, he can!” yells Myro. “Yes he can. Trip! Fall! Break a leg!”

“Run! Ruuuuuuuuuuuuuuuunnnnnn!”

It didn’t matter who won. Winning and losing really wasn’t the point of it all. It was something to do. Something to get a rush from. Maybe for a few players, like Myro, it was $20 and some vitriol fuel, but that was it. A byproduct of the competitive athlete culture, something to get the competitive juices flowing—or if not to get them flowing, then at least a place to collect them lest they spill into other, less friendly places.

Before the Kentucky Derby, it was the College World Series. Before the College World Series, it was the Masters. Before the Masters, it was March Madness. Depending on the time of the month, a good clubhouse attendant will always have brackets up on a poster board next to the clubhouse’s announcement board, next to the roster and, ironically, close to the rules and consequences about betting on baseball.

Gambling is alive and well in baseball culture. Players may not be betting on the game like Pete Rose did, but they sure as hell are betting on something. If it’s not betting on sports games, it’s betting on cards; if it’s not betting on cards, it’s pretty much any style of bet that a player can come up with—golfing on the off day. American Idol. Ultimate Frisbee. Bowling. Bass fishing. I’ve even seen guys bet on games of Connect Four—now that’s just pathetic.

There is a never-ending supply of impromptu challenges of skill, like back during one of my earlier years with the Padres, when David Wells was still around. The big league club brought in a basketball hoop and placed bets on consecutive free-throw totals. In 2008, my old San Antonio Missions team had an entire Olympics program made up, with individual and team events and fake countries.

While many of these examples are players taking relatively innocuous forays into the world of gambling, or buying a ticket on the roller coaster of team bragging rights, there were some serious, even damning gambling issues.

When I was injured in 2010, I missed an entire season of baseball. I didn’t know what was going on in the big leagues or Triple-A—and Triple-A just happened to be Las Vegas, the gambling capital of America. I was locked up in the training rooms of Dunedin for most of the year, with my only news coming by way of injured players.

The skinny was that one of the new Las Vegas coaches had a serious gambling problem, to the point that he had to borrow several thousands of dollars from the established veteran players. He ran up hefty gambling debts, not to casinos but to the players and coaches he bummed money off of to go gambling with. To my knowledge, none of them were ever paid back. Moreover, they were afraid to draw a hard line about outstanding debts for fear of it affecting their possible promotion.

Though gambling among players is ubiquitous, Las Vegas represents a specific pitfall for players—and coaches—who are tempted by the rush of betting. Organizations know it. Of course they do. If they know about pot abuse and are willing to stick high-ceiling talent on the 40-man roster to shield players who like to toke up too often, they certainly know about the players who habitually lose their hat at the table. When I was with the Jays in 2009, they wouldn’t send certain prospects to Las Vegas in order to protect their own bet on that player’s talent.

I’ll admit, I myself was worried about playing in Las Vegas. I didn’t have a problem with gambling; I had a problem with losing. When I’d go there as an opposing player with a visiting club, like back when I was with the Portland Beavers, most of my team would be out at the tables nearly every single night we were in town.

Unless the home team, the Las Vegas 51s, imploded, the odds of us visitors winning any of the following games decreased each night we were in town. It was not uncommon for some players to sleep less than eight hours on a four-game road trip. “Vegas baby, Vegas,” they would say, massaging the dark, low-hanging circles under their eyes.

The following year I became a member of the 51s. Naturally I assumed that the results would be the same. However, to my surprise, after about two weeks of going out every night, wasting money, chasing thrills and getting drunk on comps, the urge wore off. That kind of gambling, at least for the vast majority of players, wasn’t as fun or exciting.

Sure enough, the best games of chance once again became those posted on locker room walls, or ones made up among teammates spontaneously. You could win or lose a few bucks at the tables, sure, but we all discovered that it was the social currency you won or lost that made leveraging fun.

That’s not to say there weren’t players who did both, or that the stakes never got higher than bragging rights and meal money. In 2006, while I was with the Lake Elsinore Storm in Lake Elsinore, California, the High-A affiliate of the Padres, there was a pitcher on our team who considered himself a professional online poker player, as well as a professional baseball player.

In fact, he felt he was so good that he could retire—if pro ball didn’t work out—and rely on the checks he was making online. He said he was making $30,000 a month—more than any of us made in two years of baseball wages at that level.

He would sit outside the pools of crappy minor league motels, plugged into three or four different poker games simultaneously, just playing the odds. Announcing every time he won.

“It’s really not that hard, if you know statistics. I learned most of this reading a book on what to do in certain hands. I just play those hands and most of the time I win. It’s because most people who play are stupid and just play because they want the rush.”

Many of the players saw him winning, bought that book, tried to do what he was doing and went broke or, worse yet, never got paid their winnings since the accounts were offshore with virtually no accountability.

When I was in the big leagues for the first time in 2009, the amount of meal money given to me, and I mean actual cash in hand, made me feel like I hit the jackpot. In Triple-A, $120 translated to nearly $800 in the bigs. It was more than I’d made in two months of work in short-season Single-A baseball.

But this wasn’t short-season ball. It was the big leagues, and many of the players who’d been there long enough for the culture shock to wear off took that cash money and went to the rear of the big league jet, where tables and chairs were set up and continuous games of poker were always in session. Some of the veteran players could play for hands in the thousands and not feel a thing.

I don’t want to make it seem like I’d never gambled before. In 2005, I took my money to Pechanga, just south of Lake Elsinore in California. I did dollar bets on an automated roulette table. I took $70 of meal money and turned it into $300. Then, half an hour later, I lost it all and more—trying to earn what I’d made back—about $400 in total.

I had to eat peanut butter and jelly for the next 10 days because of it. That’s when I decided gambling wasn’t for me. Well, that’s not exactly true. More precisely, that’s when I decided that the only gamble I was interested in was the long odds of winning the lottery known as trying to make it to the big leagues.

Dirk Hayhurst is a former pitcher who spent nearly a decade in professional baseball between MiLB and MLB. He is also an accomplished author and has appeared on Baseball America, ESPN, TBS’ MLB postseason broadcasts, Sportsnet Canada and more.

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Thursday night during the Yankees vs. Red Sox game, Michael Pineda cheated, plain and simple.

There was enough pine tar, Firm Grip, Valvoline or Jell-O pudding on the palm of his throwing hand, and back of his glove hand, that most of the Internet thought he had just watched the movie Naked Gun before taking the mound (skip to the 2:30 mark).

Pineda said after the game that the mystery substance was only dirt, per David Lennon of Newsday.

Please, Pineda, don’t insult our intelligence. You can do a lot of things in a Yankees uniform, including, but not limited to, giving gift baskets to groupies and having Jay Z represent you, but you cannot convince me that the glistening patch of 10W-30 on your wrist was just dirt.

And for the record, if it was just dirt, how come it only seemed to occupy two very strategic locations that also happen to be in great supply depots for ball doctors? I find the explanation ludicrous, but even if his hand was coated in wet, gleaming dirt, that’s cheating too. 

No, he was caught brown-handed, which leaves you, dear fan, with two choices on the matter: Either you can accept that he did wrong despite no force of baseball calling him out on it, or you can make up a series of rationalizations for why it really wasn’t cheating and how the rules of baseball don’t apply to him.

You’re going to hear a lot of ridiculous stuff about Pineda-gate in the next couple of days. You’ll hear that what he did wasn’t excessive and that a player is only in violation of the rules if he has an excessive amount of a foreign substance on his hand.

You’re going to hear that Pineda didn’t apply it directly to the ball, so that makes it OK.

Also false.

You’ll be told that the Red Sox weren’t complaining, and if there was something wrong, they would have.

Uh, kind of false? Let me explain.

David Ortiz believes that what Pineda and his hand did Thursday night was no big deal, per Nick Cafardo of The Boston Globe, because “everyone uses pine tar.”

In other words, everyone cheats.

That’s a heck of a stance for an opposing player to take on the issue. But, hey, if everyone (at least every pitcher) is cheating, then doctoring a ball is just playing fair, right?

Well, not right, but it’s also not wrong if no one is going to speak up when they see it and the umpires shrug and look away.

So why didn’t the Sox speak up? Good question. While I won’t say that Ortiz’s logic is sound, I will say that I don’t know one single pitcher in my career who didn’t use something on the ball that was a violation of the rules.

When I first broke into the big leagues, it was my job to carry all the slick’ems and stick’ems out to the bullpen so everyone had the tools of the trade they liked best. Sunscreen and rosin, pine tar, firm grip, Fixodent, shaving cream or a combo of various other chemicals—it is always the youngest player’s job to make sure this stuff is on hand.

We transported it in the bullpen “Candy Bag.” Part of that bag was exactly as the name states: candy. The other part—the part you are instructed to never take from the bag in broad view of fans or cameras—was the naughty stuff.

God help you, young rookie, if you didn’t have a veteran reliever’s favorite baseball super glue packed and ready every game.

Most of the time it was little dabs here and there—on the hat bill, under the belt, on the back of the hand. It was an art delivering it to the mound and getting your hand to it on the sly.

I knew pitchers who developed full-on, between-pitch, body-touching ceremonies just so they could get a little tar on their fingertips without their motion looking suspicious. I knew guys who, after getting a fresh ball from the umpire, could have that pearl scuffed on one side and tarred on the other within three windmill-like windings of their arm.

We were sneaky about it because we knew what we were doing was cheating, but also because we had respect enough for the other team’s pitchers not to broadcast what we were up to. If we made it too obvious and forced their team to call us out, then, by golly, we’d have to call them out too.

The real sin wasn’t so much getting a little something on your hand or ball, it was being overt about it.

Many bats have pine tar above the legal mark. Most pitchers slop sweat, rosin, sunscreen and tar onto their pearls. Lots of hats have splotches of sticky brown goop on them. It’s so common that it even induces a no-biggie reaction by an opposing hitter whose team just got beaten by the most obvious cheater of 2014.

But if you start down that rabbit hole of calling technicalities, where will it end up? How many umpires would it take to hold Grant Balfour back from killing someone if the opposing team finally questioned that hat of his? 

What Clay Buchholz did last year put him on the map. Then there was Jon Lester in the World Series. How could the Red Sox call out the Yankees without having their own guys get fingered in the return fire?

Thus this kind of cheating gets written under “something everybody does,” which, ironically, paradoxically, is supposed to make it OK, just as long as you don’t cheat recklessly.

At this point, you may be asking yourself if you missed something. After all, we do live in an age when the outcry from the players is to clean up the game, level the playing field and make it fair so no one gets screwed out of a possible payday they’ve worked their whole life to achieve.

What kind of flagrant hypocrisy are we dealing with when players can scream that performance-enhancing drug use is cheating when they don’t know who is doing it, but then they can watch someone grease up a baseball that is directly employed to dismantling their team’s bats right before their eyes and see no fault?

Don’t act so surprised. Baseball is nothing if not hypocritical. Case in point, when Lester was spotted with a glob of mystery goo on his mitt during the World Series, Yankees fans shook their heads with disgust at the Red Sox cheating the Cardinals uncontested, while Sox fans declared it all to be part of the game and something only whiners would point out.

Thursday night, after five innings of Pineda dressing his arm up like a pine tree, Red Sox fans demanded justice, while Yankees fans contended, “Cry me a river—if he was really doing something wrong, your team would have said something about it!”

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Game 5 of the National League Division Series between the Pittsburgh Pirates and the St. Louis Cardinals will feature Pirates’ rookie-phenom Gerrit Cole facing the Cardinals’ dominant ace, Adam Wainwright.

Former major league pitcher Dirk Hayhurst breaks down this starting pitching matchup in the latest edition of “Behind the Mic.”

Wednesday’s Game 5 in St. Louis is scheduled for 8:00 p.m. ET on TBS.

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Game 3 of the National League Division Series between the St. Louis Cardinals and Pittsburgh Pirates will feature the Cardinals’ Joe Kelly facing dominant lefty Francisco Liriano of the Pirates.

Former major league pitcher Dirk Hayhurst breaks down this starting pitching matchup in another edition of “Behind the Mic.”

Sunday’s Game 3 in Pittsburgh is scheduled for 4:37 pm ET on TBS.

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