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  The ’73 Phillies finished last again, but their new boys made some noise. Schmidt batted .196 but had 18 homers and 52 RBIs. Boone finished with a .261 average, 10 homers, and 61 RBIs. More important, he handled a veteran pitching staff featuring future Hall of Famer Steve Carlton, Jim Lonborg, and Ken Brett—in just his second full season as a catcher. That fall, after Reggie Jackson and the Oakland A’s beat the Mets in the World Series, Dad was second runner-up (behind the Giants’ Gary Matthews and the Expos’ Steve Rogers) for the National League’s Rookie of the Year award.

  It turned out he was born to be a catcher. Despite standing six foot two and weighing 200, my dad was a ping hitter (his words, not mine). But that big brain of his came in handy. He was good at thinking two or three pitches ahead. He’d outsmart hitters by calling for fastballs on breaking-ball counts and bully a pitcher into throwing the right pitch. He’d bark at a strike-zone-squeezing umpire, or block the plate against a charging runner, or steal a strike call by “framing” a borderline pitch—snagging it in the webbing of his mitt and pulling it back an inch, making a ball look like a strike. He hit only three home runs in 1974 and just two in 1975, but his all-around game was so strong that he made the National League’s All-Star team in ’76, backing up Johnny Bench.

  The game changed forever in those years. In 1975, with help from the players’ union, pitchers Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally beat the owners in court. For the first time in history, baseball players became free agents. Now they could choose who they worked for, just like anybody else. As a result, players’ pay started rising, and it hasn’t stopped since. The man responsible for this happy result—more than Messersmith, McNally, or anyone else—was Marvin Miller, the longtime executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA).

  Miller led the players to legal victories that ended the “reserve clause,” an eighty-year-old rule that tied players to their teams forever, like servants. The reserve clause had given owners all the power in salary negotiations, which meant there were no real negotiations. It was the clause that had allowed the Tigers to cut Gramps’s pay after his All-Star season in 1956. Nineteen years later, Marvin Miller and the MLBPA beat it in court. Now players could finally sell their services to the highest bidder. Some fans may not like it, but what’s more American than that?

  The end of the reserve clause led directly to today’s multimillion-dollar salaries. I’ll agree that some of those salaries sound ridiculous. Fifty million dollars for a .250 hitter? But you have to ask yourself why this is happening. Are the owners of major-league teams idiots who like throwing their money away? No, they’re businessmen. Smart, ruthless businessmen who pay workers—pitchers, catchers, and hitters—what the market will bear. Modern baseball salaries are nothing but capitalism in action. Major-league talent is rare, and in an age of $200 tickets, $12 beers, and billion-dollar TV deals, baseball stars are as valuable as $20-million-a-picture movie stars. That’s why I don’t begrudge today’s players their $100 million contracts…even if Robinson Cano’s $240 million deal with my old team makes me wonder what I’d be worth today.

  Back in 1974, my dad’s third year in the majors, he considered quitting the game. “I figured I could go to med school and do a better job providing for my family.” A year later, just as he was scrapping and pinging his way to All-Star status, Miller and the players’ union had changed the game, and my dad’s life, forever. By 1977, his salary was up to $80,000. By 1985, the California Angels would be paying him $880,000 a year.

  Dad admired Miller. So do I. Dad served the union as the Phillies’ player representative, and later as player rep for the whole National League. I followed his lead as an active member of the MLBPA, pushing my teammates to support the union that made so many of us multimillionaires. By the way, it’s a travesty that Miller, one of the most important men in baseball history, is not in the Hall of Fame. But don’t get me started on the Hall of Fame. That’s another topic we’ll return to a little later. For now, let’s just say that there are lots of great bats and balls and plaques in Cooperstown, and some people who are going to be mad at me when they throw this book across the room.

  Dad had what some baseball insiders—Peter Gammons, Aaron Boone, me—consider a Hall of Fame career. He did it with smarts and toughness as much as talent. One night, Ted Williams joined Gramps at a Phillies game. Gramps was thrilled to see his old idol and teammate again. Williams was in his sixties by then. After watching Dad catch one of Carlton’s victories, blocking sliders in the dirt all night, he told Gramps, “That’s the best catcher I’ve ever seen.”

  Among other things, Dad was the most durable receiver of his time. He played with torn ligaments and broken bones. Catching 140-plus games a season, the ultimate gamer helped Schmidt and his teammates turn the Phillies from doormats to pennant contenders. Dad made four All-Star teams. He batted over .270 with 60-plus RBIs year after year, winning seven Gold Gloves as the league’s best-fielding catcher while bullying, babying, and whatever-it-tooking a pitching staff that featured surly ace Carlton, veterans like Jim Lonborg and Jim Kaat, and flaky closer Tug McGraw. According to Dallas Green, who replaced Ozark as Phillies manager in 1979, “Boone ran a pitching staff as well as any catcher I’ve ever been around.” One pitcher called him a genius. Another said, “Throwing to Bob Boone is like falling in love.”

  But then, pitchers are weird.

  I don’t know about pitcher-catcher love or even genius, but I do know that Dad was smart enough to go against conventional wisdom. In those days, everybody said baseball players had no business lifting weights. “It’ll make you muscle-bound,” people said. Dad ignored them. He not only lifted weights, he lifted and worked out all winter so he could report to spring training at his fighting weight. At a time when players still smoked cigarettes in the dugout—when most guys’ idea of doing curls was sitting at a bar, lifting beers—Dad worked out 364 days a year, every day but Christmas. He talked the Phillies into installing Nautilus exercise machines in their locker room—the first big-league clubhouse with a weight room. That was in 1975, after he and Carlton, another stubborn individualist, began working with fitness guru Gus Hoefling. “It was just me and Carlton for the first couple years. Then it caught on with the other guys, and changed the game,” he says. “I know I couldn’t have caught as many games, or lasted as long as I did, without all the time I spent in the gym.”

  He won bets by hitting the floor in the clubhouse and doing 1,000 sit-ups in a row. That bet was a lock for Dad, who could easily do 1,500 or even 2,000 sit-ups. As if that wasn’t freaky enough, he and Carlton built strength and flexibility with a daily kung fu routine.

  Picture a couple of ballplayers in the disco ’70s, doing kung fu exercises while their teammates lounge around playing cards, dipping Skoal, and smoking cigarettes. Anyone but a pair of hardnosed SOBs like Carlton and Boone would have been laughed out of the ballpark. A few of the veterans teased them with lines from the hit song:

  Everybody was kung fu fighting,

  Those kicks were fast as lightning.

  It was all very funny—until Carlton went 23-10 to win the 1977 Cy Young Award. Until Boone made another All-Star Game. Pretty soon their teammates were pumping iron and kung fu kicking, and the best was yet to come.

  On the first day of October 1980, the Phillies trailed the Montreal Expos by half a game. There were no wild-card playoffs yet—you had to win your division to make the postseason. And the Philadelphia Phillies had a long tradition of losing. The World Series had been going on since 1903, and they were the only one of the major leagues’ original sixteen franchises that had never won a World Series. The Yankees had won 22. Even the Cubs had won 2. Philadelphia hadn’t even reached the World Series since 1950, and hadn’t won a single Series game since 1915. But 1980 kind of looked like it might be their year.

  Schmidt, now the best player in the game, led the majors with 48 homers. His teammate Greg Luzinski had more sheer light-tower power, but Schmid
t was a better home run hitter because he could hit the ball out to all fields. In his quiet way he was The Man in the clubhouse, sauntering through there like he knew he was going to hit a couple homers. Schmidt won his first National League MVP award that year and his fifth straight Gold Glove at third base. (I guess Gramps had been right to tell Dad to find a new position.) Carlton won his third Cy Young Award with a little help from his Gold Glove catcher. The Phillies slipped past Montreal by a single game to claim the NL East, and then edged Nolan Ryan, Joe Morgan, and the Houston Astros to win a trip to the Series against George Brett and the Kansas City Royals.

  All Brett did that year was bat .390, the highest big-league average in forty years, with 24 homers and 118 RBIs. He was the American League’s MVP. Outfielder Willie Wilson hit .326 and stole 79 bases. First baseman Willie Mays Aikens smacked 20 homers and drove in 98 runs.

  Dad had struggled that season, batting only .229 with 9 homers, playing part of the year with a torn ligament in his knee. Then he broke his foot in a home-plate collision in the playoffs. His foot was killing him, but he found his stroke at the plate and batted .412 in the World Series, which came down to a pop-up and a cross-up.

  In Game 6, with the Phillies leading the Series three games to two, Philadelphia had a chance to break the home team’s age-old curse. The fans were holding their breath at Veterans Stadium, praying for one more win.

  The Phillies took a 4–1 lead into the ninth inning. They had left-handed closer Tug McGraw—Tim’s dad, for you country music fans—on the mound. But McGraw looked scared. He usually had perfect command of his pitches, but during his warm-ups every pitch came in high. Dad was jumping to catch them. McGraw fell behind the Royals’ Amos Otis with two balls at helmet level. His catcher kept trying to figure out what was wrong. Was Tug’s release point off? Was his stride too short? He couldn’t figure out the problem, but he could see the scared look in his pitcher’s eyes. So he went to the mound.

  “Tuggles,” he said, “we can’t afford to walk him.”

  “What am I doing wrong?” McGraw asked.

  Dad shrugged. “I dunno.”

  “Well, figure it out! What do I do?”

  They stood on the mound with the whole world watching. Finally, Dad handed him the ball. “Aim lower.”

  McGraw came back to strike Otis out. Phillies fans felt pretty comfortable. One out, nobody on. Then Willie Aikens walked. John Wathan singled. Jose Cardenal singled. Suddenly the bases were loaded. Frank White, the Royals’ second baseman, stepped to the plate with the tying runs on base. McGraw looked exhausted.

  White popped the first pitch toward the Philadelphia dugout. Dad tossed his mask aside and took off after the ball—the second out the Phillies were dying to get. He was settling under it when Pete Rose, playing first base, came running over. “Charlie Hustle, they called him,” Dad remembers. “But there I am waiting for the ball to come down, and where’s Pete? Late to the play. And it’s the first baseman’s play. So I’m waiting for him to take charge, thinking, Where’s Rose? He’ll be here any second.”

  Dad had one eye on the ball and one on Rose, arriving a step late. The ball came down. Boone expected Rose to call for it. Rose waited for Boone to catch it. At the last instant they both reached for the ball. It bounced off Dad’s mitt. For a second it looked like the Phillies had blown one of the biggest outs ever. Then Rose snagged the ball out of midair—the most famous grab in modern Phillies history.

  Pete Rose and Bob Boone have been friends for forty years, but they’re a couple of the most competitive guys you ever met. They’ve been bitching and laughing about that play ever since.

  “Charlie Hustle my ass,” Dad says. “If he’d hustled he would have made that play easy.”

  Pete says, “I seem to remember one of us caught the ball, and his name wasn’t Boone.”

  Two outs. But the Phillies were still in a fix. The bases were still loaded and McGraw was pitching hurt, wincing every time he threw his out pitch. The screwball is a nasty, unnatural pitch that kills elbows. Maybe that’s why no major leaguer throws one anymore. Tug McGraw was thirty-six years old, and he’d thrown thousands of them in his fifteen years in the majors. Now his left elbow barked every time he twisted it sideways to spin one away from a right-handed hitter. If each screwball was a bullet, Tug was out of ammo.

  Willie Wilson came up. All he’d done for the 1980 Royals was hit .326 with a league-leading 230 hits.

  Dad went to the mound again. “We’ll get him out with screwballs,” he told McGraw.

  Tug shook his head. “Boonie, my fingers are numb. I might have one screwball left.”

  “Screwballs,” Dad said.

  They got a strike with a first-pitch screwball. So Dad put down the sign again: screwball. McGraw shook him off. Dad didn’t care. He put down four fingers and wiggled them—the sign for a screwball. McGraw shook him off again. As Tug remembered, “I shook him off four times. And now Willie Wilson’s looking confused, thinking, He ain’t got that many pitches! Finally I throw him a slider. He fouls it off. Now the count’s oh-and-two, and Boonie and I are at odds again. He wants a screwball, of course.” Finally they agreed to waste a fastball up and in, to set up what might be the very last screwball in Tug’s sore left arm. Only he didn’t get the fastball under Wilson’s chin, where he wanted it. It came in letter-high, right over the heart of the plate, “and Willie was so surprised that he took it!” The Series might have ended there, but umpire Nick Bremigan called the pitch a ball, a fraction of an inch high. Now the count was 1-2. Just then McGraw noticed a policeman on a horse near the home dugout. The cops were on the field to keep a Phillies victory celebration from getting out of hand, but McGraw took another message from what he saw. “The horse lifted his tail and did his business right there on the field. I looked at that pile of you-know-what and thought, If I don’t get Willie Wilson, that’s exactly what I’m gonna be.”

  Dad knew Wilson would be looking screwball. Everyone in the stadium was looking for a screwball. Fifty-five million TV viewers were looking for a screwball.

  Dad hung one finger. Fastball. And McGraw gave it all he had. Years later he remembered watching the pitch leave his hand and thinking, Hurry up and get there! The ball got there a fraction ahead of the screwgie Wilson expected. He swung and missed. McGraw leaped toward the sky. The Philadelphia Phillies were World Champions for the first time! Dad, too worn-out to jump, trudged toward the mound while McGraw and Schmidt hugged and the Philadelphia crowd started a party that lasted a day and a half.

  I remember every second of it. That game was played on a school day, but I got to play hooky to watch the Phillies. I was the eleven-year-old kid running around the clubhouse while Dad and his teammates lit cigars and sprayed champagne all over the place. We were still celebrating when Pennsylvania governor Dick Thornburgh declared the next day Philadelphia Phillies Day, complete with a victory parade.

  Dad and Pete Rose must not have been too mad at each other, because I wound up going home with Rose. Pete was practically an uncle to me, and his son, Petey, was like a cousin. That was my favorite sleepover—staying up late with Pete and Petey, watching TV. Every newscast showed “World Series hero Pete Rose” snagging the pop-up that went off Dad’s mitt, which Pete thought was funny as hell.

  The next day—Wednesday, October 22, 1980—was my first parade. I joined up with Dad again, and we rode a float down Broad Street with his teammates. The streets were jammed with half a million cheering, singing, happy fans waving pom-poms and Phillies pennants. I was sleepy and a little smelly, still wearing the champagne-stained corduroy pants and velour shirt I’d slept in the night before, but who cared? Not those 500,000 fans on Broad Street, or another 800,000 waiting at John F. Kennedy Stadium in South Philly—not bad for a town with a population of 1.7 million.

  Dad leaned over to me. There was confetti falling on us. “Bret,” he said, “remember this. Because this is what it’s all about. And remember—there are no parades for second plac
e.”

  Gramps always swore I came out of the womb hitting. “Bret was born in a bat bag,” he told people. I hadn’t had the birds-and-bees talk yet, so I might have been a little confused about where babies came from, but I knew it had something to do with baseball.

  Start with our family’s favorite story—me knocking Wiffle balls over the house at the age of two. Or was it age one? The funny thing about that story is, I seem to get a little younger every time my parents tell it. But then, my parents always said I was a freak—in a good way. “I watched Mike Schmidt and Pete Rose at work every day,” my dad told me. “But the way you swung a bat at such a young age—it was freakish. To do that at less than a year old…” Pretty soon he’ll be waving one of those embryo pictures, a sonogram, telling people I was swinging a bat in the womb. My first video highlight.

  I didn’t buy all that “one-year-old” business until I started working on this book and asked my mom about it. Now, Sue Boone couldn’t tell a lie if she tried. She doesn’t tell tall baseball stories or brag about her boys. And she swears those stories about me are gospel. “At the age of six months, you crawled for a few days,” she says. “Three or four days. It was certainly less than a week. Then you stood up, and you had a surprised look on your little face, like ‘What was I crawling around for? This is better!’ From then on, you walked. I’d take you shopping at Sears, and other shoppers would stop and stare at this six-month-old child who went up to my knee, walking the aisles like he owned the place.”

  Around that time Grandma Patsy, the champion swimmer in the family, decided I should join them in the pool. So she tossed me in. She always swore I wasn’t scared. I never cried, just splashed around till she reached down and pulled me out. A few months later, I was swimming laps.