Maury Allen
...going by the book
|
DAVID CONE |
 David Cone |
Knowing when to quit is never easy--
if you're a DiMaggio--or David Cone
By MAURY ALLEN
of TheColumnists.com
DAVID CONE retreated deep
into his own psyche after pitch 147 was called ball four to Doug
Strange in the 1995 American League Divisional Series between
the Seattle Mariners and the New York Yankees.
He joined the one pitch pitchers--Ralph Branca, Ralph Terry,
Bob Moose, Mark Littell, Mike Torrez--who were identified lifelong
by one throw of one baseball 60 feet six inches.
Cone would win 20 games later for the Yankees, pitch a perfect
game, anchor a staff that would drive the team to four championships
in five seasons, play out his contract in New York and resurface
in the summer of 2001 as the Red Sox hope for ending the Curse
of the Bambino with a Yankee reject.
It won’t happen. It never does. It never could. Baseball
is much too cruel for that.
“Victory has a thousand fathers,” John F. Kennedy once
said. “Defeat is an orphan.”
Front runner is the term applied to teammates and friends, sportswriters
and fans, bosses and critics when an athlete is measured in his
moments of glory and his agonies of defeat.
David Cone’s psychological innards are explored smoothly
in Roger Angell’s study of the rise and fall of the 38-year-old
right hander in “A Pitcher’s Story: Innings with David
Cone” (Warner Books) with analysis of the rise of his successful
career to the fall of his 4-14 2000 season.
Cone has most often been described as a gun for hire in the 1990s
as he chased free agent millions from the Mets to Kansas City
to Toronto to New York and on to Fenway. What is pounded into
the reader’s mind is how difficult it is for any of them
to quit.
Joe DiMaggio walked away after the 1951 season despite a two
year contract offer from GM George Weiss of $100,000 a year when
that was serious Alex Rodriguez money. His knees were going and
his arm was gone.
The Yankees didn’t care. They thought he would still sell
them some tickets, work with a kid named Mickey Mantle and keep
the link from the past in working order.
“Don’t you know why he quit?” brother Tom DiMaggio
asked me as I sat in DiMaggio’s Restaurant on San Francisco’s
Fisherman’s Wharf one gorgeous summer afternoon in 1975.
I shook my head in ignorance.
“He wasn’t Joe DiMaggio anymore,” said the Yankee
Clipper’s older brother.
That thought stayed with me strongly for the next quarter of
a century. A handful quit. Dozens and dozens of athletes hang
on, squeeze out another painful year, kid themselves and finesse
their employers.
It’s not about money. No modern athlete need concern himself
with the high cost of educating his children or paying for his
cemetery plot.
It’s about “not being Joe DiMaggio anymore.”
Retired ball players remind me now of Tom Brokaw’s Greatest
Generation. Suddenly these guys who saw so much death and destruction
and avoided sharing those experiences for more than half a century
are spilling out their guts. They can’t wait to talk about
the blood and thunder, the pain, the anguish, the dirt, the tyranny
they survived.
Mostly, as they pause in the late years of their life, they reconstruct
the bond with others. It wasn’t about war and killing and
shit on a shingle. It was about the sharing of a barracks, a
tent, a fox hole, a ship or a plane.
Cone at 38 in his 21st professional baseball year isn’t
going to lead the Red Sox to a pennant or the end of the Curse
in its 81st year or a Boylston Street parade. He can sit around
that Boston locker room, slip on a couple of those five World
Series rings, tell tales late into the night of the glory that
separates the winners from the also-rans.
Cone is handsome, bright, white, a guaranteed post-career broadcaster
or baseball executive. There is no mention in the book about
sitting above a stadium making trades or schmoozing in a press
box with old sportswriter friends as he awaits his three innings
on the air.
The book is about his past career successes and that Strange
failure, about his 2000 season psychodrama, about another chance,
another season in the bigs even if he isn’t David Cone anymore.
What he has already accomplished this year, no matter what the
final tally, is a chance to do it again next year. If it won’t
be Boston, it will be Pittsburgh or Kansas City or back in New
York, anyplace with Major League meal money and first class travel
at team expense.
Ron Swoboda, a 1969 New York Mets World Series hero and one of
the wittiest guys a sportswriter could schmooze with, was facing
the end.
“You know what the worst thing is about being a ball player,”
he said. “You die twice, once when they release you and
again when your body goes. The first time hurts a lot worse.”
David Cone, like most of them, is simply trying to stay alive.
© 2001 by Maury Allen.
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