10

Leader of the Pack

I don’t get to write the script. Whatever it is, I just get to respond.

—Don Carman

August 15, 1989

Don Carman can’t sleep.

Tired of tossing and turning and disturbing his wife, Sharon, he finally gets up and faces the wall, turning his head ninety degrees to examine his posture in the bedroom mirror. He imagines his fingertips rubbing against the coarse red stitches of a baseball as he feels for his fastball grip, his index and middle fingers extending over the seams in four places. His heart thumps as his mind races through each of the nine Dodgers hitters he will face the next day and how he will approach each one.

Attack, attack.

Before throwing a single pitch, Don maps out the entire game in his head, drawing on input from the voluminous scouting reports collected by the front office and his past encounters facing a particular opponent. The battle plan for each individual hitter is specific and exact, a finely tuned conspiracy between him and his catcher—pound Alfredo Griffin with fastballs down, jam Willie Randolph inside, keep the ball away from Mike Marshall and make him hit to the opposite field—but the overall strategy is simple: be aggressive, no matter what. Stick to the game plan even if you give up a hit or a home run.

8. Don Carman

And if there is one emotion Don Carman has perfected from a young age, it is aggression.

Growing up in Camargo, Oklahoma, the middlest of middle children (he was fourth of eight), all Don knew and was ever told was that he was too slow, too small, too stupid to amount to anything. Kids at school picked on him, his brothers picked on him, even his own father picked on him. In front of the whole class, Mr. Moore, one of his seventh-grade teachers, told him: “How can you be so stupid? I can’t even believe you’re in here. You can’t be this stupid.”

It was fight or flight. And every time, Don put up his fists.

He needs a big game tomorrow. He started spring training as the default ace of the pitching staff but faltered badly. Since rejoining the Philadelphia Phillies’ starting rotation in late July, he has pitched well, his only really bad start coming four days ago in Chicago when he walked seven Cubs and was in the showers by the fourth inning. He knows he’s on a short leash with manager Nick Leyva, who has already exiled him to the bullpen once this season and who has the maddening habit of throwing his players under the bus after a bad performance. Following the Cubs game, Leyva told the Philadelphia Inquirer: “That was terrible pitching. I mean, you can’t expect to be behind every hitter and try to win. That was awful.”1

Leyva thought he was being refreshing, feeding the media raw honesty and hoping it would kick his players in the ass, but to Don it was just stupid, a public betrayal of what should remain in the temple of the clubhouse. So in what is otherwise a meaningless game in a meaningless season, his next start against the Dodgers (who are scuffling in the hangover of a World Series victory), Don has a chance at redemption: a strong outing would make the Cubs fiasco look like an anomaly, and perhaps Leyva would start to rebuild his faith in him.

Closing his eyes and raising his clasped hands over his head, he practices his windup in slow motion, feeling his weight shift from his back foot to his front as his arm whips forward to release the imaginary ball. The night before he pitches is always like this, an anxious dress rehearsal in his underwear.

Attack. Attack.

Resetting his arms and legs for another practice pitch in the mirror, Don looks down at his left hand, examining the quarter-inch bulge of bone at the base of his left thumb. He flexes his hand, thinking back to the car accident more than two and a half years ago that forced him to relearn how to pitch. The physical strength had returned, but it had felt like one step forward, one step back ever since. He had come back too soon, reporting to spring training and telling the team he was fine, great actually, even though his hand felt like it was being smashed by a hammer every time he gripped the ball to throw. To say anything else was unthinkable—you always felt “fine.”

Attack. Attack.

Later that evening, under an overcast evening sky, Don walks out to the mound at Veterans Stadium to begin warming up. The Phillies had trained him well, teaching him from the beginning of his Minor League journey to grab the opposition by the throat and squeeze. The adrenaline pumps through his veins, his breath quickening, his heart loud in his chest. The Dodgers are Mr. Moore, his brothers, and his father all rolled into one blue-and-gray monster that he now needs to slay. His catcher and buddy, Darren Daulton, who has been with him since the low Minor Leagues, crouches behind home plate, ready to receive.

The first inning is always a struggle, quieting the butterflies enough to get locked into a groove. He never could understand the advice of “just relax out there.” This is war.

Come out hard. Fastballs down. Pound it down.

Alfredo Griffin, the Dodgers’ free-swinging leadoff hitter, begins his strut to home plate.

Be aggressive.

The thought floats in front of Don. He sees it and scowls, catching himself. He knows that the moment he has to tell himself to be aggressive, he is no longer capable of doing so. That voice is passive, meek.

Only one person is going to throw this pitch, he reminds himself.

Either that pussy—

Or this fucking guy here.

He peers into Daulton’s squat for the sign, tugs on the brim of his hat, slams the ball into his glove.

So who’s gonna throw it?

As he rocks back and extends his arms overhead, the crowd roars to life. And up in the nosebleed seats of that sea of maroon-and-powder-blue-clad Phillies fans, I sit watching with my father, an eight-year-old with a squeaky voice and buck teeth whose biggest dream is to meet the man on the mound.

Twenty-six years later in a zoo over a thousand miles away, that dream will come true.

*

Expectations are dangerous, I remind myself as I drive down I-75 between Sarasota and Naples.

For the first five thousand miles of the journey, I’ve managed to maintain professional distance, working my way into the lives and psyches of the Wax Packers while remaining objective. But with Don Carman, my idol of idols, the eight-year-old inside is winning. I have always wondered why Don stood out so much from the rest of the underdog players I liked. His name didn’t have any Fs in it, and other than playing for the Phillies, there was nothing else obvious to distinguish him. But my feelings were involuntary—I just liked him.

I’m sweating even with the air-conditioning blasting my face. The parched mountains and brown plateaus of the western United States, all I saw for days at a time just a week ago, are now a distant memory. The pancake-flat landscape of southern Florida stretches around me, row after row of tropical pines and palms flanked by mangroves at the shore, their tentacle-like roots breaking the surface of the water. This state is predictable and green and sticky.2

One of my goals as a kid was to collect all of Don’s baseball cards, which I displayed at the front of my baseball card album. In the pre-internet age, this meant scouring lists of cards published in hobby books and then pleading with my mom to drive me to dealers’ shops in their parents’ garages or basements to spend my allowance. Too sweet to say no, my mom would stand by while she watched her squeaky-voiced son haggle with man-children wearing tank tops. But again, having Don’s cards still wasn’t enough. For my hero, I wanted to do something truly special: send him a birthday card.

My mom drove me to the Greenville Pharmacy, where I selected a Hallmark card with the image of a sailboat basking in a magnificent sunset and the following message inside: “Wishing you smooth sailing all year long.” Dissatisfied, I grabbed a blue pen, crossed out the word “sailing,” replaced it with “pitching,” and then sat back beaming, admiring my own cleverness. I enclosed one of his baseball cards to sign, composed a personal message explaining exactly why I considered him THE GREATEST PITCHER IN THE WORLD, and took out my copy of Sport Americana Baseball Address List, No. 5, a listing of the home addresses of every player to ever play Major League baseball (yes, this exists). I copied Don’s home address onto the envelope, slapped a twenty-five-cent stamp in the corner, and tried to time the mail so the card would arrive exactly on his birthday. And then I waited.

I’m still waiting.

Puberty ensued, my baseball cards got boxed up, and I returned from college one summer to find my bedroom converted into a guest room painted yellow (yellow!).

Snapping myself back to the present, I rearrange the vents of the Accord, hoping to somehow channel the air even more directly in my face. A few minutes later, I reach the outskirts of Naples, now home to Don Carman.

This is not the Naples that I expected.

During the Florida land grab of the late 1880s, Walter Haldeman, founder of the Louisville Courier-Journal, led a group of Kentucky businessmen to establish the town of Naples, naming it for its similar climate to the famous Italian city. A six-hundred-foot pier, hotel, and general store were constructed for the town of 80, but more than forty years later, the population had only grown to 390. While the posh Naples Hotel was a retreat for such celebrities as Greta Garbo and Gary Cooper, the town didn’t flourish until the army arrived during World War II and spurred development. Today the population hovers around twenty-one thousand.

Modern-day Naples is a symbol of the nouveau riche, a carefully manufactured paradise of high-rise condos and beachside excess inhabited by one of the most homogeneous populations I’ve ever seen—not just white, but white and old. Other than the similarity in complexion, you couldn’t find a place more different from the sparse prairie of Don’s hometown of Camargo.

Right now, though, all I see are strip malls and swampland. I exit the interstate and pull into a worn motel called the Fairways Inn. The sky is already dark and heavy overhead, foreshadowing the daily late afternoon downpour in southern Florida, when the humidity finally snaps and the heavens open. The lobby is stuffed with colorful brochures for the kitschiest of activities—airboat tours and go-karts—and the guest rooms are arranged on a single level amid gardens of exotic plants. A shriveled woman with dyed blond hair and corrugated skin checks me in, and I walk past a group of guys in their early twenties in the courtyard, the scent of fresh cannabis wafting by.

Once in my white-tile-floor room, I grab the remote control and turn on the air-conditioning unit mounted in the wall. I hear the rain arriving in force just outside the door, a quick crescendo of drops pummeling the lush vegetation, the kind of sudden onslaught that never happens back in Oakland. I rub my feet together like a cricket under the dry cover of my bedsheets and open my Tinder account, craving a distraction. I swipe right to several profiles and a minute later match with Sophia, thirty-one, a brunette with close-set eyes and light freckles wearing an expression of soft determination in her profile picture. We begin texting.

Brad: “Yes!”

Sophia: “You stole my line.” Cookie emoji.

Brad: “Haha. I got a cookie! This is my first time in Naples.”

Sophia: “Ugh! A tourist?! I need my cookie back.”

Brad: “Not quite. I am here to research a book I’m writing. It’s about tracking down all the players in a single pack of 1986 baseball cards. One of them lives here.”

Sophia: “Oh my god. I’m in love with you.”

We go on speaking Millennial for the next hour, discussing her career as a trainer for executive assistants, our shared affection for the movie Love, Actually, and our mutual interest in yoga. We make tentative plans to go to her favorite yoga studio tomorrow afternoon after I’m finished meeting with Don at the Naples Zoo. He’s my childhood hero, and what place better evokes childhood than the zoo?

I lie on the bed in my underwear and stare at the wall in the dark, wondering if I’m hungry enough to get dressed and go out for a late bite to eat, then turn on my side and start imagining how the meeting with Don will go. How do I possibly prioritize what to ask? I toss and turn, mentally annotating my checklist of questions, then finally get so frustrated that I spring out of bed and hit the light switch, grabbing my spiral notebook and writing out a series of questions that I know I need to ask.

At the top of the list: Did you ever get my birthday card?

*

Don Carman is very earnestly trying to explain his job as a sports psychologist to me. And I’m very earnestly failing to understand.

The giraffe a few yards behind him wraps its eighteen-inch purple tongue around a leaf of romaine lettuce offered by a little boy, who squeals and looks back to his parents for approval. The zoo’s website points out that the lettuce comes from a local fine foods vendor named Wynn’s Market.

In Naples, even the giraffes eat well.

Tilting its triangular head in our direction, the giraffe beams with that slightly amused expression that giraffes seem to have permanently stuck on their faces. His ears rotate toward us.

“Almost every team has a sports psychologist now. But players never want to talk to them,” Don says.

He’s wearing a white T-shirt that says “Escape Travel Live” and a pair of brown striped shorts. The Florida sun has left his face and neck permanently flushed, and his hairline, already visibly receding in baseball cards from twenty-five years ago, seems to have miraculously stopped its retreat, frozen in a peninsular shape. He sports a neatly trimmed gray goatee and at fifty-five is handsome, with small wrinkles around his eyes.

I scribble furiously into my notebook, trying desperately to ignore the safari enveloping us.

He goes on: “And that’s because the psychologists have to report to the general manager and the owners. If a player is about to go into free agency or arbitration and there are millions of dollars on the line, the team wants to know if you’re vulnerable, if you’ve got a drug problem, something else going on. And do you think a player is going to volunteer that?”

He pauses, then answers his own question: “I don’t think so.”

Baseball has always been the most mental game simply because there’s so much time to think. Each pitch is followed by a twenty- to thirty-second gap in which the brain can betray the body in dozens of different ways, while sports with more continuous action, like basketball and hockey, rely more on pure instinct. Until fairly recently, mental troubles were treated with a simple dismissive prescription: “Get over it.” But as baseball’s wealth grew from big to obscene, executives began seeing the importance of players’ psyches and their direct correlation with performance.

Nineteen years after he threw his last pitch, Don now has one of the most fascinating and unusual jobs in all of baseball. He is one of two psychologists on staff for Scott Boras, the agent to the stars, the same Scott Boras who helped Alex Rodriguez sign a ten-year, $252 million contract back in 2000, at the time the biggest contract in the history of sports. Boras runs his own secretive miniempire out of an office in Newport Beach, California, employing not only psychologists but also an MIT-trained economist and a former NASA engineer. Decades ago, before he was accused by owners and fans alike of being Satan’s money-hoarding spawn, Boras was a hungry young sports agent looking to build a client base. He liked what he saw in Don and offered his services. Now they’ve switched places, with Boras as the boss.

Players will talk to Don because he works for their agent, not for their employer. During the baseball season, Don is always on call. When one of Boras’s clients goes into a slump, Don bolts to the airport and catches a flight to whatever Major League city the player is in for some in situ treatment.

“Is a lot of what you talk about with players baseball specific? Or is a lot of it more general psychology?” I ask.

“I would say it’s only 20 percent baseball.”

His eyes shift to a point behind me.

“Trying to get that last tidbit,” he says, motioning toward the giraffe extending its tongue for the last scrap of lettuce.

Don has perfected the art of watching and listening. Like the giraffe, he tilts his head but keeps his blue eyes rapt and intent, releasing an occasional lopsided grin that seems slightly bashful. His long, trim frame is athletic, the product of years of intense martial arts training and discipline. He and Hall of Fame pitcher Steve Carlton were among the few Phillies players willing to endure conditioning guru Gus Hoefling’s Northern Sil Lum kung fu program. Every morning at nine, he drove to the back room of the clubhouse at Veterans Stadium to work with Gus, Steve, and an occasional curious teammate. Most wanted nothing to do with it.

“[John] Kruk would come back with a drink, sit down, and make fun of us,” he says, referring to the Phillies’ rotund prankster. Although almost all players now have rigorous training regimens, in the 1980s it was exceptional.

“Kent Tekulve would smoke cigarettes in the bullpen while warming up. He would actually take a puff of a cigarette, put it down on the corner of the rubber, throw a pitch, pick it up, and take another drag,” Don says.

A typical workout with Gus included twenty-five fingertip push-ups followed by twenty-five sit-ups, then twenty push-ups and twenty sit-ups, dropping by sets of five at a time and finishing with a set of one-armed push-ups. Don would then sit with his legs elevated and outstretched and do sit-ups while a partner (often Carlton) used his legs to try and push Don’s knees together, forcing him to resist. He spent the next fifteen minutes in a constant squat as he shuffled across the room, practicing punches and other techniques while Gus coached and kicked his legs out if his form got sloppy. And that was just the warm-up.

Don loved every second of the three-hour torture sessions. He thrived on that intensity, the chance to focus every cell on whatever was right in front of him. He attributes making the big leagues to that capacity to be entirely present; although many others had more talent, they didn’t have his drive. Even now, he works the same way.

“When I’m meeting with someone, often it will go for two hours, and it will feel like ten minutes. And if we happen to be in a restaurant, I’ll have to tip double for not opening up the table.”

We leave behind the giraffes and head toward the open-air tables outside the gift shop. Grabbing some bottled waters and prepackaged sandwiches, we sit down across from each other next to the macaws and the live animal theater stage.

Although I had read about Don being a bit different, I’m beginning to see what an original thinker he is.

As a player, he grew so weary of hearing himself recite the same old clichés to sportswriters that one day he simply posted a list of thirty-seven canned responses to their questions in his locker and asked them to pick their favorite for that day’s sound bite.

I’m just glad to be here. I just want to help the club any way I can.

If we stay healthy, we should be right there.

And my favorite: I don’t get paid to hit.

(Don was an abysmal hitter, even by pitcher standards. He hit .057 in 209 career at bats.)

“What is it like to now be on the other side, working with players?” I ask.

“Players are impatient, like children,” he explains, two multicolored bracelets sliding around his right wrist. “They need a hit today. Not tomorrow or in three weeks. They need a quick fix. And I know that. They’ll call me and just say, ‘Tell me something good.’ I know what that means. It means I’m confused, I’m not sure about my approach, and I have anxiety.”

For most of his life, Don used aggression to fight anxiety. So when today’s superstars (Bryce Harper and Stephen Strasburg are among Boras’s clients) come calling with insecurities of their own, he knows how to help them fight.

“Growing up, I was on high alert at all times, as if something was about to go wrong. It was a terrible way to live.”

The sun is in full force, beating down on the crowns of our heads, the muggy air clinging to our bare arms and legs. I wipe the sweat from my forehead. I want to know more about what made his childhood so difficult but don’t want to press him just yet.

“My intensity came out of fear, fear of not making it, fear of having to go back to Oklahoma, which was the biggest fear of my life,” he says.

He goes on: “Baseball was just all I could do. I didn’t hate it, but if I had grown up in a place where there was ice hockey, I would have been a hockey player. When I played I would stand on the top step of the dugout and see thirty-five thousand people there and just shake my head. I didn’t get it.”

I tell him about my visit to Camargo, sure to mention that I had met with his coach, Bob Ward.

“It’s interesting, right?” he says with a chuckle. “It’s a whole different world. You can see why, when the scout from the Phillies came, I didn’t even know what city they played in. That’s how little I knew about Major League baseball,” he says. “I’m from Oklahoma. To me, a filly was a female horse.”

Every year from age fourteen to eighteen he grew at least an inch, many years several inches, topping out at six feet three. He played first base for Leedey High (Camargo was too small to have its own high school), where he was a slow runner and a mediocre hitter. But the one thing he could do, maybe the only thing he could do, was pitch. Although his high school coach didn’t give him a second glance, Bob Ward made Don the ace of his American Legion team staff. Don seized the opportunity, once striking out twenty-four of twenty-seven batters in a single game. Despite that success, he remained off the radar of Major League scouts because of his marginal role on the Leedey team.

As usual, Don took charge of his own destiny.

Following graduation, he sought out the meanest coach in the entire state of Oklahoma, someone who would push him the way he knew he needed to be pushed. That man was Lloyd Simmons of Seminole State College, a community college three hours southeast of Camargo.

“I knew how much the players hated him. Three guys quit on the first day,” he says. “I went into his office and said, ‘Listen, I want to play here for a year and see if I can make it to pro ball, and if not, I’m going to the University of Oklahoma.’ The last thing I wanted was a friend. I wanted someone who was going to pound me into the ground.”

Simmons pounded him. Don blossomed.

“I went 7-2 and got into the starting rotation. I didn’t see him smile all season. I go in the last day of the season and made sure the door was open so I could run. I said, ‘I want to thank you. It’s been great here for me, but I’m not going to be coming back,’” Don says. “Apparently, he didn’t think I would follow through on my promise to leave after one season. He said, ‘You’ll never step on another field, you piece of shit.’”

Don got his big break on August 25, 1978, when the Phillies held an open tryout in nearby Oklahoma City. Scouts Doug Gassaway and Don Williams watched him throw, then took him out to an Oklahoma 89ers (a Minor League team) game, where they offered to sign him.

“I kind of feel like I was manipulated by the scout, because he said, ‘Look, you might never get this opportunity. You need to decide by the end of the game or it’s off the table.’ They offered me a Minor League contract and $7,500, plus $7,500 in education expenses, which I never got.” He adds, “I had nobody to talk to. It’s just me sitting there. I pretty much made all my decisions from the time I was eleven or twelve. When to go to bed, when to get up, when to do whatever I wanted to do. My mom was busy and hardly ever saw me play. I think she saw me play once in American Legion ball when I was eighteen, but she hadn’t seen me play since Little League. It was just impossible with that many kids.” I think back to Camargo, where I stood on the site of the Carman homestead, imagining how hard it must have been to squeeze ten people into the two-bedroom house.

His voice grows soft.

At three in the morning, having just turned nineteen, Don signed the contract that would forever change his life.

“I was kind of like Mayo, ‘I’ve got nowhere else to go.’ I got in my car and drove away. I said, ‘I’m not going back to Camargo.’ Even when I was a kid I knew it wasn’t for me.”

I do a mental double take, thrown by his dated reference to An Officer and a Gentleman.

“Did that have more to do with the place or your family dynamics?” I ask.

“That’s a tricky question, because I’m sure the family dynamics had a major impact on the way I viewed the town,” he says. “It’s difficult to separate them. But I hated farming. I hated working cattle, I hated pigs. I hated them all. I swore I’d never make my kids grow up there and do those things, even though they might have loved it.”

His one escape lay in the endless fields of the Oklahoma prairie, where he and his best friend, Bobby Sumpter, would hike, ride motorcycles, and dream. They learned to swim by pushing an inner tube to the middle of a pond outside of town and willing themselves to not drown trying to reach it. They both left Camargo at the first chance, Don through baseball and Bobby through books—he went on to get his doctorate in chemistry from Cornell.

“When I talked to your mom and your brothers, they said you were really quiet and shy as a kid,” I say.

He considers this, turns it over in his head a few times the way you study a shell you just picked up on the beach.

“I was crazy quiet. I used to just watch people. I would make assessments when I was a little kid. I would take little pieces of everybody I ran into and try to build the kind of person I wanted to be,” he replies. “I was afraid of everybody. I was that kid in school at the end of class who would take his books, put them in the desk, and then wait until everyone else was gone so I wouldn’t bump into anybody. I thought I was sick all the time, but I had allergies. I always had a runny nose. I thought I was ugly, I was stupid, because I had been told that so many times.”

It’s surreal to realize that my hero could just as easily be talking about me. I think back to being bullied in junior high, ostracized to the nerd table in the lunch room wearing headgear and praying my allergies wouldn’t flare up.

“But I also felt like I had something else, something that made me really special. I was especially weird, especially quiet, especially geeky, and I felt especially stupid, but I did feel special in a way, and I didn’t know what exactly it was. But I knew I was different,” he says, his voice even.

Up until now I’ve been reluctant to ask him about his father.

I know the basics—his name was Marion, he worked in the oil business, and he died of a heart attack when Don was only fifteen. But when I interviewed his mom and brothers in Camargo, they seemed suddenly vague and evasive when the topic of Marion came up. Clearly there was more to this story.

“How old were you when your dad passed away?” I ask, even though I already know the answer.

His voice gets quieter. “Fifteen.”

“How did that affect you? Were you close with your dad?”

He leads with a deep breath, then a heavy sigh, and looks around the zoo. He’s processing, feeling for a grip on his own thoughts and emotions. I watch, trying to appear neutral, waiting.

“My wife asked me earlier today if I was going to talk about that,” he finally says, almost to himself.

“I don’t know. I don’t know.”

Then a third time: “I don’t know if I am.”

He’s straddling the picnic-table bench, hands on his knees, shoulders taut.

“The only reason I say that is, just to give you an idea . . .”

Another deep breath. A long pause. The humidity is unbearable.

“Let’s say this: I never spoke directly to my father his whole life. And he spoke to me directly maybe twice, other than for, let’s say . . .”

His voice trails off.

“Let’s just say ‘disciplinary reasons.’ We’ll use that.”

I hold eye contact, but it’s more difficult, watching the pain increase in his eyes with each word. Moving even slightly feels intrusive.

“He never talked to me. Not ‘hey, how was the game?’ He never saw me play, not one game, not basketball, baseball, nothing. The dad thing was, umm . . .”

There’s not a trace of anger in Don’s voice. But the sadness finally overwhelms him, chokes his next syllable, and he stops, his eyes filling. I don’t know what to do, how to react. My eyes start filling as well, and now I break off eye contact, overwhelmed by his raw vulnerability. I want to hug him, to give voice to his emotion, but instead I just sit with him and wait.

He collects himself, takes another deep breath, then continues in a tone just above a whisper: “I will just say this: he died in our front yard. He had gone to find my sister, who was late from a date, and we were all afraid of when he was going to come home. He had a heart attack and crashed into a tree in the front yard at two miles per hour. We were all home. Everybody, Mom, Arthur, Glenn, ran outside.

“But I didn’t,” he adds. “And I justified that by huddling the little ones and telling them that everything was going to be fine. But . . .”

Long pause.

“I’m debating whether or not I should talk,” he says, his blue eyes, full of tears, looking greenish in the light.

He lets go.

“I felt bad because I was hoping he would die.”

He gives a little nod and looks away. Several moments of silence pass, several long breaths. I picture that kid in the cramped two-bedroom house in Camargo, scared and angry and confused.

A few minutes later, we get up to resume our walk of the zoo. The grayish gravel crunches under our sandals as we walk past families and tourists with fanny packs, peering into the striped hyenas cage, the Florida panther exhibit, the South African lions.

Wanting to ease the tension and curious about his thoughts on “the baseball code” (the tendency for pitchers to throw at hitters when pitchers felt they were being shown up), I ask, “Did you ever catch guys peeking?” (Peeking is when a hitter steals a glimpse of the catcher’s hand signals, which indicate the next pitch.)

“Yeah, but I was considered a little bit crazy. They knew I would dump them [hit them on purpose],” he says. “I had times when they would bring me in just to hit people because they knew nobody would charge the mound.”

It’s hard for me to believe that this same man, this kind, deep thinker, could have once been a headhunter.

“How do you square that?” I ask.

“I think a lot was left over from childhood,” he says. “I fought all the time in grade school. I never lost. I didn’t care if I got hit or got hurt. I just kept coming. I never understood that, but it’s what I did. And I think that carried over.”

When he found his second career of sports psychology, he started to understand his own trauma, and the anger dissipated.

“When you’re that angry, what you’re really doing is feeling sorry for yourself. Anger and fear are not my motivators any longer.” He pauses. “A big part of my philosophy is, I don’t get to write the script. Whatever it is, I just get to respond. I quote Viktor Frankl a lot to players, where he said, ‘The only true freedom we have is the freedom to choose how we respond to a given situation.’”

We’ve literally come full circle, back at the giraffe pen. One of the zoo docents standing nearby is eavesdropping on our conversation. Like almost everyone who works here, she is at least sixty, probably one of the herd of retirees who migrated from the Northeast.

“If you have any questions, I might know the answers,” she offers.

Beyond the fence, half a dozen giraffes mill about in a vast pen, browsing the tops of palm trees when there are no tourists to offer them organic greens.

“Do the giraffes have names?” I ask.

“They do, but we’re not allowed to give them out. Only the keepers can use them,” she says.

“Do they respond to them?” Don asks.

“Um, they do,” she replies cautiously.

“Okay,” Don says, grinning. “Kevin! Bill!”

“This could take awhile,” I say, laughing.

The attendant does not seem amused.

“Do they have friendships, like Bill prefers Kevin?” Don asks.

“Actually, they’re all males. This is a bachelor herd, and there’s constantly fighting going on and different power struggles,” she says. “The one just coming out of the gate there is the current leader of the pack, but he was not the original leader. He had to fight his way to that position. We think there must be a power struggle going on now. So there may be a new leader soon. In fact, I’m putting my money on this one,” she adds, pointing to the giraffe closest to us.

“You mean the one here trying to eat the pole?” Don asks dryly.

Unamused, the docent continues with her narration of the herd: “He used to be the smallest. He got picked on all the time. But he’s getting bigger and starting to assert himself. I always said, someday he’s going to say, ‘I’ve had enough,’ and bam!, watch out,” she says.

*

I walk into the Green Monkey Yoga Studio and spot Sophia in a pair of tight yoga pants and a snug top that features her ample cleavage. We exchange an awkward half-hug greeting, the way it’s always awkward when you meet someone for the first time after having had a deeply personal conversation online, and she leads me into an airy space with full-length windows and wood floors where she has kindly set out a mat, foam blocks, straps, a towel, and some water.

“I thought I’d set you up,” she says, a bit embarrassed by her own thoughtfulness.

With the adrenaline still pumping from my meeting with Don, I want to get out of my head and into my body.

I sit on the mat and extend my legs straight out in front of me, reaching for my toes while using my core muscles to push my stomach forward, taking the hunch out of my back. My hamstrings burn as I strain to barely reach the tips of my toes, then force myself to reach farther, going over the top of my feet and pulling. The burn intensifies, blotting out all thought other than how horribly stiff my body is after being scrunched in a driver’s seat for three weeks.

Sophia goes through her own warm-up, cracking with each contortion of her strong but limber body, her breath in perfect sync with her movement. She’s graceful and attractive, and I can’t help but be drawn to her. I have done my fair share of yoga, but this is clearly a fixture in her life.

By the end of the hour, I feel restored and loose. My brain is calmer, less frayed, the distance between thoughts longer. It’s several seconds before I notice I’m staring at the bare studio wall.

“Thanks, that was just what I needed,” I tell her as she walks by, her mascara smeared a bit below her eyes, making her cute face look even cuter.

“So we’ll shower up, and then I’ll come by and pick you up at 8:15?” I ask as we walk out, greeted by the daily late afternoon downpour.

We race to our cars through sheets of rain, drenching us.

*

“Pull over here,” Sophia says as I swerve the Accord over to the curb.

“If we’re quick we won’t have to feed the meter.”

Sophia moved back to Naples five months ago from Washington DC, where she worked as an executive assistant. I’m grateful to have a local show me all the spots, including the best place to watch the sun set. I haven’t taken much time on this trip to appreciate the beauty of the places I’m visiting. I’ve already traveled through eleven states in twenty-one days, but whatever down time I’ve had has been spent in hotel rooms flailing away on my computer or scribbling in my notebook, trying to record every morsel of information before I forget it.

We run to the beach, where a large crowd of tourists and locals is lined up along the edge of the water, their phones extended to the sky, a magnificent blend of purple, blue, and yellow. I fumble with my phone and Instagram filters, trying to capture the moment.

“Let me see,” Sophia says, grabbing my phone as we dash back to the car.

She laughs.

“That’s terrible. Clearly not a social media guy,” she says, handing me her phone to show off her skills.

It feels so good to have this banter, this connection with someone other than a former baseball player. I have rarely felt lonely since I left Oakland three weeks ago, but Sophia’s presence, her playful teasing, makes me feel physically lighter.

“What was it like being an assistant for all these powerful people?” I ask.

“It was awesome. I’d exhaust my type A self all over someone else’s life, leaving me free to be laid back in my own,” she says.

“The yoga must help.”

“Yes sir.”

I want to kiss her. Right here in the middle of the wide Naples street.

“I could never do it,” I tell her, opening the Accord’s passenger-side door before going around to open my own.

“Do what?”

“I could never be someone’s assistant for a living. Doesn’t it drive you crazy having to be at their whim? Some of those people must have enormous egos.”

I am suddenly aware of how haughty I sound.

“Yeah, but it’s funny, I get so much satisfaction out of organizing their lives for them,” she says. “It’s like I know how lost they would be without me,” she adds.

She navigates us to a restaurant downtown where there’s a three-person band playing rock and jazz covers.

“I dated the harmonica player. He drank too much,” she says.

I’m having one of the most romantic dates of my life in Naples, Florida, with a girl I met on Tinder—yoga, sunset, and dinner in a tropical paradise. It’s certainly more romantic than any date I’ve had recently back in Oakland. It’s kind of sad, I think to myself while we drive the brightly lit city streets back to her apartment, that I’m only willing to make the time when I know there is no chance of commitment, just a fly-by-night rendezvous with a stranger in a strange place.

Unable to resist any longer and wanting to end this most romantic of dates, well, romantically, I put the Accord in park in the driveway and lean in. Her body responds, shifting to meet mine, our lips open and pressed together.

She pulls away a moment later, looking flushed and guilty.

“I’m sorry, I’m not good at casual sex,” she says.

“It’s okay,” I say with a smile. “We’re not having sex. I don’t want to.”

I’m full of shit, of course. Sophia knows this.

“Yeah right,” she says, rolling her eyes.

But first base is, in fact, as far as this date goes. We sit and chat for a while longer.

“Why are you single?” she asks me.

It’s one of my least favorite questions. I launch into a meandering explanation that she also rolls her eyes at.

The truth is that I’m single because I don’t want to end up getting divorced like my parents did. I’m scared that I will mess up again like I did with Kay. And I’m scared of making a commitment I’m not sure I can keep.

I don’t say any of this. Instead, I talk about being independent and liking my space and being picky, things that are also true but don’t tell the whole story.

I say good night and watch Sophia walk up the driveway. I watch in the rearview mirror as she shuts the door behind her.

I turn the ignition, feeling content. Don’s words float back to me: We don’t get to write the script in life. Whatever it is, we just get to respond.

*

The next morning, Don leads me into his study, his private sanctum, where he remotely massages some of the biggest and most fragile egos in all of baseball. I wanted to see him in his home environment so I can fulfill a twenty-six-year wish: to play catch with my hero.

At the center of the room is a brown leather chair in front of a desk with a small lamp and a MacBook, its lid closed. I spy a yellow legal pad on the desk with the handwritten names of several clients—Addison Russell, Mike Moustakas—with little notes in the margins and a hand-drawn check box next to each name. But they’re not actually check boxes, they’re check cubes, drawn in three dimensions.

On a second yellow legal pad is his daily to-do list, with such entries as “set up phone e-mail,” “expense report,” and “homework.” I’m there too, noted simply as “Brad” with my own check cube. He’s taking classes toward a doctorate in psychology after having recently completed his master’s.

The study is full of mementos from his career, baseballs piled high on a shelf, framed newspaper clippings, plaques and awards. There’s the ball from his near-perfect game against the Giants in 1986 and an autographed, inscribed ball from teammate Mike Schmidt, one of the greatest players of all time. If I ask about any of them, he provides an explanation, but all of the items he points out have little to do with him.

He points to an oil painting on the wall of a wolf staring directly ahead with a whimsical expression on its lips. It’s good.

“Jackson painted that,” he says, referring to his youngest son, who’s now a junior in high school. “There something different about Jackson in an unbelievably wonderful way.”

He tells me a story about when Jackson was in the sixth grade and forgot a paper at home. Don drove to the school to drop it off, and as he turned to go, a teacher stopped him and said, “Are you Jackson’s father?”

“Yes,” Don said.

“I have to meet the father of Jackson Carman. I’ve been teaching for eighteen years, and I’ve never met a child like him,” she said.

For every conversation Don never had with his father, he has ten with Jackson and his other two sons, Jared and Aaron.

“I was a stay-at-home-dad. We played catch a lot, worked the yard, went to the beach, rode bikes. My oldest [Jared] loves to talk about philosophical things, about my work. And Aaron was really shy, a lot like me. Watching him grow up, I could see what it would have been like [for me] without the other pain. It was fun to watch.”

On one of the bookshelves, in front of Socrates to Sartre, Cultural Literacy, and Philip Roth’s Everyman, stands a row of four bobbleheads: Don Carman and three characters from Napoleon Dynamite, Kip, Pedro, and Napoleon.

“I’ve seen it at least fifteen times. I can quote the whole movie pretty much.”

He leads me back into the kitchen, where I take a seat on a stool at the island in the middle. He stands up at the counter, cradling a mug of coffee. The house is big and comfortable but not ostentatious. There’s a screened-in swimming pool in the backyard and Trivial Pursuit laid out on the coffee table in the living room.

I want to know what happened at the end of his career, how he transformed from a head-hunting pitcher for the Phillies into a psychologist working on his doctorate. I knew from my research that the end of his career had been much different from that of players like Rance Mulliniks, who rode off into the sunset with a World Series title.

His last full season in the Majors was 1990 with the Phillies. For the next five years, he was a baseball gypsy, fighting for a job every spring training, bouncing from the Astros to the Reds to the Tigers to the Royals to the Rangers to the Mariners back to the Phillies to the Twins organizations, with a stop in the Mexican League mixed in. He finished his professional career in 1995, seventeen years after it began, pitching for the Gaston King Cougars, an independent team based in Gaston, North Carolina. Finally, a year older than I am now, he was done.

“For two years after I stopped playing, I went right into depression. I couldn’t even breathe,” he says.

I mention the other players I’ve met and how they also struggled with the transition—Steve Yeager too depressed to watch his beloved Dodgers on TV, Carlton Fisk’s self-induced exile—and how surprised I am that none of them seem particularly nostalgic about their careers.

“I think it’s self-preservation,” he says. “Because it’s your dream, and then it’s gone. It’s like, okay, I woke up, and I don’t get to go back to sleep and dream again.”

Don, as always, was different. Never a fan, he didn’t mind letting go of the game itself, but leaving behind the lifestyle was harder.

“What was missing from my life was structure. I had spent my whole life under structure. I knew where I was supposed to be, when to go to camp, when to show up, when to get up, everything was structured,” he says. “I started drinking. I drank quite a bit, and I didn’t even think about it. But then I realized I was doing it five days a week. It became my activity.”

His second wife, Kathy, whom he married in 1995, was the one to get him up off the floor. Literally.

“We had chatted about me going back to school, and I kept going ‘yeah, yeah.’ I was scared. It seemed like such a daunting thing,” he says. “One day I was sitting on the floor, leaning against the door of the garage. I just sat there. And Kathy came over and said, ‘What’s going on?’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’ She said, ‘I know it’s scary out there, I know it’s scary to go back to school, but you’ve got to get off the floor. Just take one class and go from there.’”

He got up.

Toward the end of his playing career, when he was struggling with the end of his first marriage, his then agent and now boss Scott Boras recommended he talk to Harvey Dorfman, a pioneer in baseball psychology and the author of the landmark textbook The Mental Game of Baseball. Don flew out to Dorfman’s Arizona compound for a weekend and met the man who would become his second dad, neither of whom was his father. In Don, Dorfman saw the same untapped potential that Bob Ward had seen in his backyard in Camargo, except this time it was the talent Don possessed above the shoulder rather than the skill of the arm attached to it.

Dorfman became Don’s mentor. He was the one who encouraged Don to continue his education after Kathy picked him up off the floor. He got his bachelor’s in psychology, then his master’s in sports psychology, and now he is working on his doctorate, although Dorfman won’t be there to see him receive it. He died four years ago at the age of seventy-five.

“I miss him every day,” Don tells me.

Don walks over to the microwave to heat up his coffee.

“What impact has your marriage to Kathy had on you?” I ask.

And here, for the first time since our conversation began at the zoo yesterday, Don’s tongue gets tied. Not because he’s got nothing to say, but because he has so much to say that he constantly edits to get it just right.

“I’d say the broadest, the biggest—besides know that—a couple things that I would say, without thinking too much—one is that people can be what they present themselves as.”

He pauses, resets, then starts again.

“It took years for me to realize that she is everything that she appears to be. And I don’t know anyone else like that, not one person, who is truly a great friend, who is truly truthful, I don’t know anybody, not one person.”

His voice trails off, his eyes well up. He sniffles, says “mmm-hmmm” with a slight nod. For the second time in two days, I’m watching my childhood hero cry.

I never get to meet Kathy, but I feel like I already have.

“Do you want to throw a bit?” Don asks me, suddenly aware of the time and leading me into the garage. I remember reading that he found an old shoebox full of fan mail in this same garage, letters he never replied to. He turned writing responses into a project with his son Jackson. I ask if he remembered getting a birthday card with a sailboat on it, but he doesn’t.

He plucks a couple of gloves and a ball out of a box, leading me out to the driveway. The hot sun, already high in the sky, beats down on us as we stand fifteen yards apart and start tossing. He demonstrates the same windup he used for all those years for the Phillies, the same series of movements that I watched from the nosebleed seats on that August day in 1989. The high leg kick, his hands held just below his bent right knee, and then the arc of his left arm as it comes whipping over the top, releasing the ball, which snaps into my glove an instant later with a loud pop, stinging my palm inside. Even in a simple catch, decades removed from his playing days, Don’s arm is still free like it was in Bob Ward’s backyard forty years ago.

The ball feels smooth and cool in my sweaty palm, a five-ounce core of rubber wrapped in yarn and covered by cowhide. I grip it tightly, moving my fingers over the relief of the red stitching, feeling its coarse surface. I toss it back.

We start out chatting about how to grip different pitches, about his fielding position after completing a pitch.

Then we just stop talking and throw in silence, the ball’s white parabola soaring against a bright summer sky.