Grounders: A Love Story
I’m going to try to explain why I love ground balls so much, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to explain it completely. Loving ground balls is like a fisherman loving baiting the hook or casting the line. Loving ground balls is like a basketball player loving free throws. It’s only a part of the game itself, but it holds an indescribable attraction for some. And some fishermen can cast a line into a very small space. And some basketball players almost never miss a free throw. And some baseball players never seem to make an error.
From an early age, maybe playing juniors at seven or eight, I realized I was good at picking up a rolling ball and getting an out. I was a good hitter. I made contact and could run out a lot of hits. I bunted. I stole bases. I scored runs. I even pitched for a few years, until I stopped growing and the bigger kids took over. But for whatever reason, I just knew I could field a grounder and get the out. It was fun, and not everyone could do it, not at the age of seven. Believe me, I knew it was special when I heard other parents compliment my dad after the games.
Grounders. Thinking about it now, the whole concept is weird. It’s only a bouncing ball, after all. Just pick it up and throw it to first, why don’t you? Simple. Not exactly thrilling. It was expected. I loved it. All of it.
And the equipment. Real leather. Faux leather. Synth-Leather. Weave pockets. Web pockets. Solid pockets. Munoz pockets. Shallow pockets. 9” gloves. 9.5” gloves. 10” gloves. I remember my dad taking me to Brookins Sporting Goods in Mount Rose for my first real glove, the glove I was to use for all of high school and my first two years in pro baseball. I remember standing at the glove wall, this immense expanse covered in metal pegs, peppered with posters of Big Leaguers, and from each peg hung multiple versions of every glove. Glovemaster. Web Gems. Diamond Star. Haley. Choice. And the beautiful rich smell of leather that came off that wall… I was in heaven.
And I didn’t choose a Munoz pocket, after all. Shocking, I know. My first real glove was a Haley 95. 95 for 9-inch fingers, 5-inch-wide pocket. The Xavier Sainz model. I sat in the car and smelled it all the way home.
Of course, I had to work in the pocket. Every aspiring Defensive Player of the Year has to have the perfect pocket in his glove. It was a real father/son project. My dad taught me how to oil the leather (no synth leather for young Davey), how to pound the pocket with your fist, or in my case the head of a meat tenderizer with a shop towel duct taped around it. I must have pounded that pocket a thousand times. Then he secured a ball in there, tied it tight with an old shoestring, and fired up the oven. For those of you following this recipe at home, that’s five minutes at 350 degrees, then remove the very pliable glove. Take a moment to smell the leather, then double check the fold. This is very important. The fold has to be perfect, or it won’t lay flat when you toss it into dugouts. Gotta lay flat. Can’t sit there half open like it was broken in by some kind of amateur.
Then put in under your mattress and sleep on it for three nights. Not one night. Not two nights. Three nights. Like a magic spell or something. And you can’t keep taking it out and looking at it and messing with it. It has to set, like wet cement. After three nights you can bust it out and start using it. Let me tell you, those three nights were like an eternity for me. As I lay awake at night I considered the major decisions I still had to make.
Index finger out? Index finger in? Batting glove on? Batting glove off? Full name and phone number or just last name and phone number? Sharpie or ballpoint pen? On the back of the thumb, or inside on the pinkie finger? There was so much to decide. Initially I was a batting glove on finger out kind of guy. It looked really cool, and that was the way Brian Reese did it, but, ultimately, I became a no glove no finger guy, like my new hero (I found out years later Munoz was finger in because he needed all his digits to work his special pocket). I went with ballpoint pen because my dad’s name in his glove was in ballpoint pen and you could still read it and his glove was almost twenty years old
Then I started using it. This was the acid test, the proof in the pudding. And it was glorious. I took every ground ball my dad had time to hit me. He built a strip in our side yard filled with Diamond Dirt (remember Diamond Dirt?) so I could field grounders. We played catch like most fathers and sons, but we always ended with grounders. He didn’t make me do it. I asked for it. He must have hit me ten thousand grounders in that side yard and a couple thousand more on Saturday mornings on the deserted varsity diamond at our high school. I wanted him to hit me even more on Sundays, but Sundays was for church and my exhausted father said even God got to rest one day a week.
But I was good at it. That was part of the equation. When you’re young and you try something and discover you’re good at it, you just want to keep doing it forever. Every clean pick was another small pat on the back. Fielding was unlike getting base hits. Hitting always carried a randomness to its results, because, well, the whole round bat round ball thing. But fielding, that was skill and anticipation, and readiness, and hitter knowledge, and pitcher knowledge, and vision. It was a controllable outcome in a game with so few controllable outcomes. And at its best it’s pure artistry.
Most kids idolized sluggers. Mort Jones. Joe Bugliatti. Pat Patrick. And growing up in Los Angeles we all loved Tom Faraday and Olavo Senega and especially Matteo Agapan (A-ga-PAN! A-ga-PAN!). But for me it was Lalo Garcia, then Mike Burns when he was with the Vipers. I liked the way Brian Reese sidearmed the ball to first, so I tried that for a while, but I was wild and my dad made me stop. I liked Xavier Sainz and Ronny Frabel. I even had a Pete Mortenson poster on my wall. Pete Mortenson! Not exactly a household name, but if you hit a ball to his side of the infield you were out. Guaranteed. The guy was amazing. I have no idea where my dad found that poster; there was no Bazaar.com in the late Nineties. Then when I was thirteen, I discovered Horatio Munoz. The Pete Mortenson poster came down and a new poster went up.
Of course, he had been in the league for a few years before I knew of him. I was only two when he made the Knights. Like most kids growing up in L.A., I was focused on my hometown Legends (and the occasional Colt), but he caught my attention in 1997 when I was thirteen and started to get really serious about defense. That was the year he won his seventh UL Defensive Player of the Year at the age of thirty-five (the oldest shortstop to win it in UL history). Looking back, it’s amazing he never appeared on my radar before then. I guess I was just a Legends kid through and through (Adrian Nimitz, anyone?).
After I saw Horatio play, I never wanted to watch anyone else. The quickness. The speed. The unbelievable instinct. His focus, his lightning-fast hands. His situational intelligence. All two steps above anyone else in the league. And that mustache. It was like a living thing making a home on his upper lip. When I was eighteen, I tried to grow a mustache too, just like Horatio, but my dad made me stop. It looked like a living thing died on my upper lip.
Bouncers. Skippers. Bounders. Two-hoppers. Three-hoppers. Six-hoppers. Fifteen-hoppers. Wormburners. Short short hops. Long short hops. High hops. Bad hops. Barehanders. Backhanders. High hop backhanders. Bad hop backhanders. Burners up the middle. Burners in the hole. Horatio got them all. He was what I wanted to be. Hell, he was for a decade what I was hoping to be for one season.
In 1984, the year of my birth, he made nine errors. The whole season. They didn’t have Defensive Range when he played, but by today’s reckoning Munoz was a 5.62, a full point above second place Lalo Garcia. In the fall of 1999, I went to his baseball clinic in San Diego. I saw there were a lot of kids just like me, only most of them had Munoz pockets, and they all wanted to be him, too. We got instruction from other Big Leaguers, did a ton of drills, and played a few pick-up games. He didn’t show until the last day. He put on an hour-long clinic, and I drank in every word. Then a short question and answer session, a group picture, and he was gone. Never got to meet him, but that was okay. I got to be on the same field as him, and that was enough. When I got home, I told my dad I had to have a Munoz pocket. My dad never blinked. It was like he knew. Off we went again to Brookins’ glove wall. I gave the Xavier Sainz glove to my sister and never looked back.
After ten years in the Bigs, nothing about grounders had changed for me, except how hard they were hit. From Hinesville to Baltimore, it was still (and always would be) impact-react-track-scoop-set-throw. I still had the same focus and determination. I still worked my drills. My instincts were still sharp, which is why the whole thing was so confusing. It’s one thing to have a problem and know it’s a problem. It’s something else when everything you know is good and right and bad things still happen. That’s what gets into your head. In Baltimore, during the first of what might be my last few seasons in the league, with a reputation for excellent defense, I began to make errors.
I shrugged them off at first. New team, new infield, new surroundings. The first few didn’t phase me. I had confidence in my abilities. But by May 1st I had made nine errors. One May 2nd I made two more. These were not just fielding errors or just throwing errors. They were both, and they were sloppy. I was not as quick as I once was, but I was not feeling overly rushed or out of position. My entire career had been in the UL, and the batters I was facing I had seen each season for most of the last decade. But the routine outs that had come so easily to me my whole baseball life were not so routine anymore.
I made fourteen errors the first ten weeks of the season. Bobbles, late positioning, low throws, wide throws, high throws, rushed throws. It was a smorgasbord of mistakes I had never committed so frequently my whole career. Stokes stuck with me at first. He was a former player and knew what it was like to go through a rough patch. Norrell still got the Sunday starts (and was hitting .327 as a part time DH). At the beginning of June, the team was 29-23 and in first place, but I was hitting a whopping .235/2/18 with 23 runs scored and 8 stolen bases. I hit .167 in May, the result of a 1-23 slump. With offense like that you had better be getting outs with the glove and I wasn’t getting them all.
Then the specter of Terry Ruddy began to appear, first on social media where Steamer fans will never forget him, then in the press with comparisons between his first months with the team and mine. Coming to a new team creates some stress but coming to Baltimore was its own brand of pressure. When I made the Knights, I played on the same dirt as one of the KC greats, Horatio Munoz, but I didn’t replace him. In Baltimore I was replacing one of the greats. That’s different. A little voice in my head said, you have to at least be as good as him in the field. And during the quiet moments after an error when I was gathering myself, another voice chimed in.
Come back, Dave. We were so great together. Why did you ever leave? The Munoz pocket began to talk to me. I began to wonder if I should switch back, but the logic didn’t follow. If it took longer to release with a Munoz pocket, why would I switch back and be rushed even more than I already was? No, Munoz pocket and I had to stay broken up. It was for the best. I still got texts in my head from Munoz pocket.
U up? Why are you ghosting me? You know you still love me.
Of course I still love you. It’s not you, it’s me. The data says I need a shallower pocket.
Don’t listen to the data. Listen to your heart, Dave. You’re not playing well. You need me.
No, we’re done.
If we’re done, how come you didn’t throw me away? Why am I at home on the shelf next to your computer?
I can’t talk to you right now.
Why not?
Because it’s the sixth inning.
So what was it? Was I not seeing impact? No, my eyes were fine. Were my reactions too slow? Maybe. I had to admit, maybe. I realized I had to get quicker, or more accurately, I had to regain lost quickness. With the help of the team’s fitness trainer, Jeff Noriagi, I started a couple of new workouts and drills and began to feel better about things. I don’t know if I was any quicker, but my confidence was better, and renewed confidence helps everything.
I made two errors in June. I hit .294. By the end of June, we were 42-36, three games back of New York. I drove in twelve runs from the leadoff spot and raised my average to .248. This silenced all the voices, both in my head and in the stands. Baltimore fans are knowledgeable and impatient. They will wait for you to get your feet under you, but they will not wait long.
Then I made two decisions, one using my head and one using my heart, and they changed the entire season.