CHAPTER 5

Ten Feet Tall

I COULDN’T WAIT to get to Bradenton in February 1979, and when I did, it was after a crazy experiment by Chuck Tanner. Over the off-season, Chuck thought it would be a good idea to send me to the winter league in Puerto Rico to learn to play the outfield. I thought it was a rare, ill-advised move by Chuck, and the Pirates’ general manager, Harding Peterson, had to talk me into it. But I never really got my head into it, and after a few days I packed and caught a plane home to Montclair. Was I out of line, pushing my luck for a young player not yet established? Maybe. But I knew what my limitations were. I wasn’t Yogi Berra, who could just pick up a fielder’s glove and go to left field. Harding and Chuck didn’t hold it against me. After Harding talked with me, he knew I was right. “Dale wasn’t happy,” he told the press, “and he said he couldn’t put his mind on baseball. Under those circumstances, if he remained, it may have done more harm than good.”

My mind was focused on improving as a hitter and third baseman/shortstop. While I’d hit only .207 in ’78, when I got hot I blossomed, and those six homers in the stretch drive was a statement. I’d played fifty-six games, started thirty-seven, made good things happen. And Chuck took me north with the team to start the ’79 season. I played the first two months, but not regularly. I would play shortstop when Tim Foli got a rest on Sundays, third base other times, but mostly sit. Then in June the Pirates made a huge trade, swapping pitcher Ed Whitson to get third baseman Bill Madlock from the San Francisco Giants. I never saw a better line-drive hitter than Mad Dog. In his previous six seasons he’d hit .300 each year, winning batting titles for the Chicago Cubs in ’75 and ’76 when he hit .354 and .339. He could roll out of bed and hit a scorching line drive into the gap.

That move solidified the infield. With Madlock, Phil Garner, and Tim Foli, there was just no room for me. Chuck Tanner could see I was vegetating and called me into his office. “Dale, you’re going to be an everyday player in this league,” he said. “But you’re only twenty-two and I can’t have you sitting on this bench, so I’m going to send you to Portland.” That was the team’s Triple-A team in the Pacific Coast League, where I would be playing every day, staying sharp. It was fine with me. I didn’t like sitting and watching. Chuck said, “You’ll be back.” I took that as a promise.

So I went back down to Triple-A and though I felt like a yo-yo, I hit .324 in fifty-six games there and was, as the scouts reported, the best player in the league. I was called up on August 26 for the pennant run. Chuck told me on the phone, “I wanted you to go down there, and you did exactly what I asked you to do. You got yourself ready to play.” He wanted me there because Foli was hurt. So I flew from Spokane to Los Angeles, where the Pirates were playing a series against the Dodgers. But when I got in, there was a message to call Harding. He began by saying he was sorry—never a good thing to hear—but he couldn’t call me up; as a nonroster player, I had to wait until the minor league season ended. You’d think a GM would know that all along, but evidently they didn’t or thought they could get around it.

Five days later, on September 1, I yo-yoed again, flying to San Francisco, where Chuck put me right in the lineup against the Giants in Candlestick Park, batting in the eight hole. I had a big day. In the fifth inning, with us trailing 3-0, I led off with a homer against John “The Count” Montefusco. An inning later, after Pops also took one out, I hit a sacrifice fly to tie it. We went on to win 5-3. At the time, we were in the middle of a six-game winning streak, three and a half games ahead of the Montreal Expos. I played short in twenty of the last thirty games, on a bad ankle, got some key hits, and made only five errors. And we needed every hit and errorless play because the Expos—a hell of a team, with two future Hall of Famers, Gary Carter and Andre Dawson—just wouldn’t go away.

They were in first place as late as September 24, when they beat us 7-6 in Three Rivers in the third game of a huge five-game series. But then, in the final week of a death match, we went to work. As the loudspeakers in the stands blared out “We Are Family,” we bashed them the next two games, 10-4 and 10-1, to go back into first place. On the last day, against the Cubs, we needed a win to clinch—and got it, 5-3, our ninety-eighth of the season. I couldn’t play in those critical games because Tim was healthy again. Even so, Chuck told me flat out, “Dale, without you we don’t win the pennant.” That was a tremendous rush. And he was right. My job was to not lose the pennant for us because Foli was hurt. And when a man like Chuck Tanner tells you that’s just what you did, there’s nothing you don’t think you can accomplish.

However, the downer was that I was ineligible for the postseason, as are all players who get called up in September. Again, you’d think a manager would know these things, but Chuck had already had me penciled in on the postseason roster until it dawned on him. He said if somebody got hurt I would be put on the roster. But nobody got hurt and the roster was rock solid. That was the last great Pirates team. Everybody hit like hell. Madlock hit .328, Parker .310. Omar Moreno stole seventy-seven bases. We had the best defense, the best relief pitcher, Kent Tekulve. They went on to beat the Baltimore Orioles in the Series, which saw the last great virtuoso performance for Pops. At thirty-nine, he had done the impossible, winning the league’s MVP award (actually sharing it with Keith Hernandez), hit .455 in the playoff sweep over the Cincinnati Reds, then .400 in the Series with three homers—including one in game 7, winning the Series MVP as well.

I went with the team to Baltimore for the first two games. Chuck said I could sit in the dugout, in uniform, during the games. But that also ran afoul of the rules. As the commissioner’s office put it, almost comically, I could have passed along “secret information” that might influence a game—though to exactly whom I would pass it was unclear. That’s a small example of the bull you put up with from the baseball establishment. So I had to go sit in the stands, freezing my ass off because it was so cold it snowed for the first game. I hated every minute. I’m not a watcher; I’m a player. When the series shifted to Pittsburgh, I told Chuck it was too difficult to watch and not be able to contribute.

I went back home to Montclair and could barely watch it on TV. Dad, who was home in October for the first time in three years, kept telling me to stop feeling sorry for myself. “You can’t change things you got no control over,” he said. “You did good, you helped them win, be happy with that.” Easy for him to say. But he was right, and I cheered myself up knowing I had a future on the team as it would enter a new decade.

I was gratified that my teammates thought enough of my contribution to vote to give me a three-quarters cut of the winner’s share, which was $100,000 per player, so I got $75,000. not too shabby considering my salary that year was $30,000. That was a rarity; sometimes those issues about what a part-timer deserves cause fights among the regular players. I had an agent then, a big-time one, Ed Keating, the first real superagent, who began in the ’60s representing Arnold Palmer and had built a stable of players in every sport. In ’75, when free agency exploded after an arbitrator lifted the reserve clause in players’ contracts that had bound them to their teams, Ed took Gary Matthews from $46,000 a year to a five-year, $1.8 million deal. The power of the players was really on the rise, and with it would come something never seen in my dad’s time—labor versus management strife. My contract would jump to $75,000 the next year and soon zoom into the stratosphere. It was hard to believe that I could feel any higher. But that same winter, I learned that I could.

I never used hard drugs up until the early ’80s. As a teenager, I’d sneaked a few beers, like all kids, but my drug of choice was baseball. It would always be. But you never know how much circumstances will change you when you get older, especially when you become a key player on a big-league team who’s just at the tip of the iceberg of how good you can be, and you’re suddenly making big money, and you’re only twenty-three. Then, too, ballplayers were a different breed when I came into baseball. As I said, even back when Dad was managing the Mets in the early ’70s, guys on that team, guys I idealized, were smoking pot.

Neither Dad nor his coaches had any idea about it. I’m sure Dad would have sent heads rolling if he did. But he had enough to do without babysitting adult men. In the end, we all make our own beds; nobody will be there to keep you from your own devices. When you think about it, Dad had seen an earlier version of the same thing, when he kept Mickey’s drinking and carousing secret from the writers. Mickey in spring training was drunk every day. He just never showed it, so you left him alone. He played hungover and still hit balls out of the park.

Those guys from that generation were completely in the dark about hard drugs. Chuck didn’t know all the shit that was going on, and there was plenty. That was the era when cocaine scandals began making headlines in pro football, the ugliest rumors about it in Dallas, by Cowboys players like Thomas “Hollywood” Henderson, who would admit to using cocaine on the sideline, during a Super Bowl. In ’77, Miami Dolphins defensive linemen Randy Crowder and Don Reese were sent to jail for cocaine trafficking. If Tom Landry and Don Shula, two of the most dictatorial coaches of all time, didn’t know what was going on with their own players, you knew you could get away with it, unless the law stepped in. And even so, Crowder and Reese were still allowed to play after they got out of jail. As it was, there was sort of a scandal in baseball when Pete Rose said he was doing “greenies,” which was what amphetamines were called. They weren’t illegal back then, and big-league clubhouses had bowls full of them; guys would scoop a handful of them before going out on the field. I tried them, and they made me want to run through a wall. We didn’t know the damaging effects of stimulants on the heart and nervous system, or the addictive nature of it. Cocaine turned up that quotient to the nth degree. It wasn’t just addictive and life-threatening. It was also illegal.

However, it wasn’t the high life of an athlete or the accessibility of drugs that got me started on cocaine. That happened right in my own hometown, at a time when my generation was experimenting with harder drugs than booze and weed. The fact is, I was late to the party. I’d never done any of the stuff I knew guys around baseball were doing. Someone would pass me a joint at a hotel or someplace, and I’d say no thanks. I wasn’t a pot person. I didn’t want to be paranoid; I wanted to be euphoric. But then when I got home during the off-season, either ’79 or ’80, all my old friends were now doing coke. It was like someone turned on a switch and suddenly everyone was sniffing white powder up their noses. In a lot of ways, those guys had more influence on me than a Willie Stargell, because we’d grown up together. You didn’t feel like you had to watch what you said and did or like you were in the presence of greatness; you just partied.

I was still living at home, with Mom and Dad. Larry and Timmy were married, on their own, living in homes in the Montclair area, raising families. Obviously, the old streetlight rule was long gone. I’d stay out all night and stumble in at the crack of dawn. By the time I’d get up, I’d be fine. No cause for Mom and Dad to know I was partying like it was 1999. And when I say my old buddies were using, I mean all of them. Every time I went out, guys were going out back and doing it. Every party was inundated with cocaine. Montclair is an upscale community, but money wasn’t even the main factor. There was always a mix of rich and not rich. Coke was expensive, but back then someone would have it and share it. We never really knew who had bought it.

The first time for me was like that. It was at a New Year’s Eve party. I was drinking, feeling good. I was still on a natural high from what Chuck said about me winning the pennant for him. And when the powder came around, I relented. The times I’d had the chance to do it before, I’d actually been afraid to. It scared me. But I let down my natural guard. I said, oh hell, let me try it. And when it went into my nostrils and got into my brain and nerve endings, I liked the feeling. Liked it too much. Way too much. I’d never felt that way in my life. I was euphoric, on top of the world; the only thing that came close was hitting a home run. And I had to go days, weeks, between those. From then on, I was hooked. A couple weeks later, if I knew there was a party, I got a half a gram from a buddy, and the cycle of using and buying had begun. It made me feel, I don’t know, smart. Worldly. Talkative. Knowledgeable. I was in a funhouse, having the time of my life.

I didn’t think at the time about why I was so receptive to it, but I’ve thought about it since, and I believe it had something to do with the fact that I’m obsessive-compulsive. I once read where somebody gave a lecture to the best lawyers in the country and asked how many of them were obsessive-compulsive and 90 percent of them raised their hands. That goes for a lot of successful people. I could see that many athletes are obsessive-compulsive. I probably got it from Dad. It made him better, and it made me better. Whatever I did, I did it to the best of my ability. The effort was always 100 percent. And so you could say I gave 100 percent to doing coke. In the end, it was a personality thing. Something inside me said to do it, to hit it and not quit it.

That makes sense to me. But what I know more than 100 percent is that I didn’t do it because of anything in my family. There was no symbolic rebellion from my dad, no reaction to any pressure he put on me. Because there never was any. I never in my life did a drug because I was depressed, because I looked in the mirror and didn’t like who I saw, or because I needed it to fit in with shady people. If any shrink in rehab would have ever told me that there was a cavity in my soul, I would have walked out. My family was absolutely perfect. My relationships with my parents were wonderful. There was no deep-seated resentment toward anybody. I was completely happy, never had any void in my life. I just somehow made a very poor choice because, literally, everybody was doing it.

Neither did I push it to excess. At the beginning, I hardly needed any coke. It was new to me, my body, and a little went a long way. I pretty much maintained that routine. I didn’t need a lot. I wasn’t a greedy user. I was setting up the rationalization that I was just an occasional, recreational user, too smart to get into deep trouble, doing it the “right” way, the “responsible” way. Don’t worry, I assured myself, I could control it, not the other way around. I believed it, too. You remember in the movie The Big Chill when someone says it’s harder going a week without a rationalization than sex? They got that right, brother.

Nobody could have convinced me back then that I would harm myself and my career. It seemed so easy, even natural. When I went to spring training for the ’80 season, I had no intention of leaving cocaine behind in New Jersey. It’s not like I announced to my Pirates teammates, “Hey, anybody got some blow?” No one would ever do that. You just made yourself open to it when the opportunity arose. For example, many of the players stayed at the Franklin Plaza Hotel downtown. One night, after dinner and a few drinks, I, Dave Parker, John Milner, and Lee Lacy wound up in someone’s room. We were just hanging when a guy named Curtis Strong came in. He was a caterer and supplied our clubhouse buffet table, and as a sideline sold coke to players. I’d seen him before but just ignored him. But this time when he went into a side room with some of the guys, I followed along. He asked me what I wanted, and I told him. He then pulled a tin foil package from his pocket. I handed him a hundred-dollar bill and he handed me the coke.

That wasn’t the first time I’d scored some coke, or the last. I had other places I could get it, and it got to a point where these kind of deals kept going down, at hotels, even inside the clubhouse. Another guy was named Shelby Greer, a friend of Dave’s who sometimes came on road trips with us. We had a very open clubhouse in those days. Anybody could come in. All you had to do was tell the guard to let them in. Somebody always needed something. Not everyone did coke. Pops, for one, never did coke in his life, but he did use greenies; we all did.

It wasn’t like we were sneaking around. It wasn’t a crack house kind of thing—well, maybe it was for Rod Scurry, who got into freebasing cocaine, the much more dangerous form of the drug that’s smoked out of a pipe, which soon became known as crack. Rod took it so much further than the rest of us that we kind of avoided him, but it was hard ignoring a guy who sat at his locker swearing that snakes were crawling up his arms. He’d frantically shake his shoulders to get rid of the imaginary crawlers. We knew something was up with Rod but pretty much left him alone, and he pitched well, so we never thought, “Hey, let’s get this dude some help.”

Doing cocaine wasn’t something we feared. We just got together like ballplayers do, and instead of getting liquored up, we did something else that made us feel good. With my personality, I felt too good. I liked it too much, although I consciously kept it on the lowest level of usage, purely recreational, a little each time. I never gave Chuck a reason to think I wasn’t completely professional. I never missed a game, a plane, or a team banquet or engagement. I was ready to play every day. That’s how you can tell yourself you’re controlling it. When I kept rising on the baseball ladder, I was in high gear, no pun intended. I kept getting better, won a starting job, was playing nearly every game. When I would kick back and use, I felt even better. Looking back, I wasn’t just chasing a pennant. I was chasing euphoria.

Unfortunately, winning in ’79 would be the Pirates’ last crowning moment. Pops would play another couple years but was hurt a lot and replaced as the starting first baseman by Milner, then Jason Thompson. The Phillies would be resurgent, passing us by. We finished third in ’80, but, finally free of the minor leagues, I played in ninety-three games, starting sixty-three, splitting time between third and short, and even a little second base. I hit .220, six homers, thirty-one RBIs, still that work in progress but established. The next season, my progression continued—but so did the labor strife. When the two sides couldn’t come to an agreement over free agency, the players went out on strike, for the first time during a season. We went on the picket line from June 12 until July 31. Over seven hundred games were canceled, the players lost $4 million a week, and the owners lost $72 million overall. To salvage the season, a crazy split-season format was used to determine playoff teams—but nothing could have gotten us in, that year was a total loss, though I was satisfied raising my average to .241.

The ’82 season was my unveiling as a regular. The Pirates had traded Foli to the California Angels, and Chuck told me, “You’re gonna play every day.” Chuck was a stat guy, and he said that based on my RBIs per at-bat and games, “projected over the season, you’re going to be one of the most productive offensive shortstops in the game.” If I got six hundred at-bats, the projections were thirty-one homers and seventy RBIs, quite a tall order. Tim had been a great glove man but was an undisciplined hitter who had little power and almost never walked. In fact, that year for the Angels, he walked only fourteen times, then a record for playing in at least 150 games.

Chuck wanted me to prove his theory about an eighth-place hitter being much more than an easy out. Tim was also a bit of a hothead; when he was a coach on the Reds in 2000, he got into a fight with another coach. Chuck wanted a cooler head and hotter bat. That’s not what he got. I was hitting just .180 after the first month and a half and was down. I couldn’t catch a break. Once, I came up with the bases loaded, two outs in the ninth, and hit one of the hardest shots of my life, right up the middle, a sure gamer. But it just nicked the pitcher’s leg and ricocheted to the shortstop, who threw me out. But Chuck kept slapping me on the back and saying, “Pick your head up, kid, you’re in the big leagues.”

“Skip,” I said, “I’m just not doing well.”

“Listen,” he said, “you can strike out three times with the bases loaded or make a bad error, but there aren’t many guys in the world who can lose a major league baseball game. You’re good enough to be in a position to do that.”

Now that’s optimism.

He stuck with me, because he believed in me. And, sure enough, by the All-Star break I was hitting .270, driving in runs, hitting home runs, the whole schmear. I wound up playing all but six games, with 529 at-bats, hitting .263. I didn’t come near thirty homers, but my ten dingers tied me among National League shortstops with Atlanta’s Rafael Ramírez and helped me drive in sixty-one runs—from the number 8 hole, mind you—right in line with the projection. I also was fourth in total bases among the league shortstops. And, fulfilling Chuck’s goal, I was intentionally walked nine times, and thirty-three times in all, to get to the pitcher. I was on a good roll, more comfortable, able to stay in a groove.

The other players noticed. Mike Schmidt came up to me during a game with the Phillies and said, “Kid, you’re the best eight hitter in this league.” Pete Rose echoed that. When I couldn’t get a hit, he patted me on the ass when we played the Reds and said, “Don’t worry, you play this game the right way.” And Schmidt wasn’t even a particularly nice guy, especially toward opposing players. Pete was different. You’d get to first base and he’d say, “How’s your old man doing, kid? Good. Tell him I said hello.” Then you’d get to second and Larry Bowa is out there and he’d say, “How you doin’, kid? How’s Dad?” But then you’d get to third and Schmidt glared at you, his red eyebrows narrowing. It was all business. You were the enemy. So for him to praise me like that was rare. Made me feel ten feet tall.

Hitting was only half my game. The other half was defense. And I thought Chuck’s verdict on that was obvious when he said in spring training the next year that Johnny Ray and I were the most productive shortstop/second-base combination in the league. He was mainly speaking about our offensive stats, but Johnny and I had to be dependable as all-around players or else lose those starting jobs. Yeah, I did make some errors, thirty in all, but I had excellent range: I could go get a grounder in the hole and throw a guy out, or cross over to the second-base side of the infield to snare a sure hit. My arm was strong, but erratic. I played the game balls to the wall, with a lot of confidence. Maybe I should have put some of those grounders in my back pocket instead of throwing to first. The fans at Three Rivers were very good to me, right from the start, and I loved them. But some began getting on me for the errors. And that was picked up and magnified even more by the sportswriters. I began to see myself in the papers being called “Boo Boo”—after Yogi Bear’s cartoon buddy. That was unfair, since my fielding percentage was actually .961, not Ozzie Smith or Chris Speier territory, but only a few points behind Larry Bowa. The year before, Foli’s percentage was .965, and he was never called Boo Boo.

When analytics came into vogue in baseball, a new statistic was created, wins above replacement, or WAR, which calculates how many wins a guy contributed to above a replacement-level player. Retroactively applying it to the past, it was determined that I ranked fourth in the National League that season in defensive WAR. Turns out I accounted for 2.4 wins above replacements. The only National Leaguers who had a higher defensive WAR were Ozzie Smith, Gary Carter—both Hall of Famers—and Dickie Thon, a great defensive shortstop. (Here’s another anomaly—I was no speed merchant, but in ’81 I led the league in stolen-base percentage, eleven out of twelve, or 91.67, beating out Davey Lopes and my teammate Lee Lacy.)

I had to live with that Boo Boo stigma for another year or so before it kind of faded away. I only made as many as thirty errors in a season once more, and my overall career WAR is 5.5, meaning I was responsible for five wins more than all others who replaced me. To be honest, the slights meant little to me. What mattered was being able to help the team. We couldn’t have played any harder that ’82 season. Madlock hit .319, Tony Peña .296, Thompson .284. Parker was still dangerous. Johnny Ray, in his first full year, played every game at second and hit well. Tony Peña was a rock at catcher. John Candelaria’s ERA was under 3.00. Pops, in his last year, could still go up there once in a while and deliver a huge hit, and always leadership. Tekulve was thirty-five but king of the pen. But once the calendar turned to September, we couldn’t put it together and finished fourth at 84-78, eight games behind the eventual champion St. Louis Cardinals.

Still, I was feeling great. Maybe a little too great, for reasons that had nothing to do with baseball.