Within days after graduating from high school I was in Sarasota, Fla. playing in the Rookie League. We had a party back in Summit, and then I got on a plane and flew down to Florida. It was my first time in Florida. The Royals had two guys pick me up at the airport, Joe Gates and Darrell Parker. We were on our way back to Clark Road and the training complex, when we stopped off in this area of Sarasota called New Town. It was all black. Joe and Darrell knew a couple of girls there.
I’m just off the plane and I’m sitting in the car for about an hour or so. They just left me sitting in the car, and I’m thinking, “What the heck is going on? I don’t even know these guys and already they’re abandoning me.”
Finally we got to the Royals Academy. It was the first year they had stopped doing the Academy, but that’s where all their players in rookie ball stayed. It was like a dormitory — rooms, classes, recreational halls, a pool and a cafeteria. There were four fields. I think my first contract was for $500 a month, and by the time they took out the little bit of taxes, you needed to live on a campus (like the Academy).
The very next day I got my uniform and everything like that and I was on the field that day. I went straight into the outfield.
They had drafted me as an outfielder. Everybody knew I could run. When we would run our sprints, I would always win them. But even though I had never played outfield in my life, they had it in their brain I was going to be an outfielder. I didn’t even have an outfielder’s glove. You know you’re supposed to use the long glove. I liked to feel the ball when I caught it. I never liked those gloves that were so long you couldn’t feel anything. I just couldn’t run with one of those big, tall gloves. So all my gloves through my whole career were short because my catcher’s glove was short.
The first glove I had was a MacGregor, and it was made of kangaroo leather. I had that glove for a long time. I got it restrung several times, and it really looked ugly because it was restrung so many times. I think I also played with an A2000. I had so many gloves after that first one, but I could never find one that fit me like that first one I had.
I not only had to figure out what glove worked for me, I didn’t have a clue what I was doing in the outfield. I barely even knew where to line up, and I sure didn’t know how deep to play people. We did a lot of drills, and I was really working extra. I had two managers in the minor leagues. Billy Scripture was my rookie ball coach and my Double-A coach. John Sullivan was my A-ball coach and my Triple-A coach.
It was up to Scrip to teach me how to play the outfield. What Scrip did was that he found out what motivated me. Money motivated me. So he would put a ball bag on second base and he would say, “If you hit that bag, I’ll give you a dollar every time you hit it.”
That made me concentrate. I had to learn how to make my toes right, put my body in the right position and make my arm right so I could aim and throw at the bag. I’d be doing drills-ground balls, fly balls, line drives, Texas leaguers, hump back. I probably dropped three or four of the first fly balls that were hit to me. They went up in the air, and it was like “holy cow.”
The Royals always kept my mom up to date on what was happening with me as I made my way to the major leagues.
Balls had been coming at me from a guy’s hand just 60 feet away. It wasn’t like I had been watching someone swing a bat, hit it and then have to judge where it was going. I hadn’t even shagged any fly balls when I was in high school. When we did our drills in high school I did them as catcher. When I went to shag balls I went to the infield, short or second. I wasn’t going to walk all the way into the outfield.
I don’t know if I had ever been in the outfield. When the ball went up in the air I just couldn’t judge where it was going to come down, and I’d end up missing a few balls. Seemed like my first instinct would be to go one way and the ball would be somewhere else, so it was different, and it was really tough.
I missed a lot of balls out there in the outfield, and all of a sudden everybody was talking about me. That hadn’t ever happened before. When people were talking about me before it was always about good things. So this was different. I felt like guys were hounding me.
“How could you be the No. 1?”
“You can’t hit.”
“You can’t field.”
“You can’t throw.”
Everything I was doing seemed to be hard. The hitting was hard. The catching a ball in the outfield was hard. The trying to make my arm be a long-throwing arm like an outfielder instead of a cock-it-back-at-the-ear thrower like a catcher was hard. Everything seemed to be hard.
It was the first time in my life anything was that hard. I didn’t cope too well in the beginning. I was feeling sorry for myself. I was still torn up because I had mixed emotions about baseball and football. I was homesick. But feeling sorry for yourself just magnified everything. And I didn’t know how to joke around. I was a football player. If you talk about somebody, you are hounding them. I know now that they were all joking. But I couldn’t take it then. If you said something I was fighting mad. I was quiet, but I had a quick temper. When guys were getting on me I would withdraw even more. Then I’d get my feelings hurt, and start crying. I’m telling you, when a tear came out of my eye I was going to hit somebody. Somebody was going to get hit. I was fighting my own teammates, fighting other guys.
I finally got it and learned when people were getting on you, you can feel sorry for yourself or you can do what I did. I just got mad. I was in scuffles and arguments every day. It was like, “This is what you guys think I’m doing, I’m going to prove to you that I can play this game.”
But it wasn’t immediate. I not only wanted to play better to show them, I wanted to play better for me.
So we’re about halfway through the season, and I was really hitting in the low 100s or something. Then I got really hot and made the all-star team for that league. But I had real trouble with pitchers for a while – and the reason is because they were so wild. It was hard to stand in and hit against them because you never knew if you were going to get hit.
Here’s an example. When you are in high school you might find one, maybe two, guys in the whole league pitching-wise that are going to even make it to Single-A or Double-A. Now, when you get to the minor leagues, you have the best players in their city or state or college. You were one of the best players in your state, but now you are competing against a bunch of guys who were also the best. You are figuring out, “I’m better than this guy and that guy, but what about the guy over there?” So with the pitching, you get the best players from all around and you put them in the rookie league. In rookie ball you might have only one guy out of that five who has control. The rest of them are just raw.
They can throw the ball hard, but they’re going to throw it anywhere at any time all over the frickin’ place. So for me, it was hard to stay in and hit. You have guys who can throw really hard and end up maybe throwing a no-hitter in the big leagues who were wild as hell in the minors. So it was very tough, not just for me but for everyone in the rookie league.
Billy would do crazy stuff to try and teach us to stay in the batters box with wild pitchers. If a guy was bailing out, he would turn on the machine and let the machine toss a ball into his own chest and say, “See, it won’t hurt you.” We’re all rookies, 17, 18 years old. Our first time in professional baseball, and this is the guy we run into – a crazy man who has pitching machines throw balls into his own chest.
When you get to Single-A ball you might have two pitchers who have control. When you get to Double-A you might have three of those pitchers who have control – what I mean by that is maybe three of them who will make the majors at some point. When you get to Triple-A you might have four guys, maybe five who have control and know where the ball is going and when you get to the big leagues you are supposedly facing five out of five.
So, in that way, it’s easier to hit the higher you get in the minors. That’s how I did it. I would have loved to hit for a higher average in the minor leagues all the way through and hit higher in the big leagues. But the way I look at it, most of the guys who hit higher in the minor leagues don’t hit higher in the big leagues. George (Brett), one of the greatest hitter of all time, never hit .300 in the minor leagues.
It might have helped my hitting if I had stayed a catcher because I would have been seeing pitchers every day from that perspective. I wouldn’t have been worrying about playing a whole new position and have that occupying my mind. And when you look at a catcher who hits .250 it doesn’t look that bad. But you get to the outfield ... that’s where you have guys hitting .320, .330 with 24 home runs and 100-some RBIs. For me it was, “OK, what do you have to do different to get in the same category with those guys?” I might have broken every record in the world if I had stayed as a catcher with speed, but I would have gotten bigger, my knees would have gotten sorer. I probably wouldn’t have stolen as many bases.
So it worked out the way it worked out. I think the hitting would have been easier early in my career if I had been a catcher. But the Royals drafted me as an outfielder from the very beginning. Being a catcher was never on their mind for me.
After the season was over I went home for a few days, and then I came back down to Florida for Instructional League. Scrip was down there for that. Scrip was one of those old baseball characters. At that time we didn’t have SportsCenter or MLB Network or anything like that. We only had “This Week in Baseball.” They would come down and do things on Billy because he did some weird stuff, man. He would do things like take a bite and tear the cover off a baseball. So they were coming down to do films of him all the time.
Another weird thing about Billy is that he seemed to take a special interest in me. They would bring the top prospects down in the winter, the same complex where the Rookie League guys stayed. Nobody had a car down there, but there was one station wagon at the complex. Billy used to let me have the station wagon, I guess because I was always on time. If he said curfew was 11, that’s when I was back. The guys knew, when I was driving, that the car was parked in a particular place. When it got to be 30 minutes before curfew, we would meet back at the car.
I’d tell them, “If you are not here, you’re done because I’m leaving.” So he always let me have the car ... I don’t know why. And he would take me places with him.
Billy was a world-class skeet shooter. He would always take me with him skeet shooting. Like on a day when we only worked half a day, the other half he would tell me to get in the car with him and we would go some place or some event where he would be skeet shooting. I saw him hit 99 out of 100 from the hip one day – not aiming – just firing from the hip.
I don’t know why he did that, I don’t know if it was to keep me out of trouble or for me to see and experience something different or just to keep me occupied. I respected him for that. I got to see another side of life.