The Game from Where I Stand: A Ballplayer's Inside View - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Doug Glanville played outfield for the Philadelphia Phillies, Chicago Cubs, and Texas Rangers from 1996 through 2004. From 2008 to 2010, he wrote the online column “Heading Home” for The New York Times and provided baseball analysis for XM Radio's MLB Power Alley. In the spring of 2010 he joined ESPN as a baseball analyst, contributing to Baseball Tonight, ESPN.com, and ESPN The Magazine. He serves on the executive board of Athletes Against Drugs, the fundraising committee for Boundless Readers, and advises high school student athletes as a special consultant to the Baseball Factory. Glanville grew up in Teaneck, New Jersey, and is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. He lives with his family in Chicago.

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INTRODUCTION

"Now batting, the center fielder, number six, Doug Glanville."

For fifteen professional seasons, nine of them in the major leagues, those words (or some variation of them) began my workday. I heard them in tiny small–town ballparks and in triple–decker urban stadiums that seated fifty thousand people or more. I heard them in spring training; I heard them in the playoffs; I may have even heard them in my sleep. The sound never got old.

I was a center fielder, and once I got a taste of what that meant, I never wanted to play any other position. There is no other place on the field with such uninhibited sight lines to take in all that baseball has to offer. My job as the center fielder was to run down everything hit in my direction, but it was also to lead, to make sure my fellow outfielders knew where to play before the ball was hit.

There is an immense beauty in standing in the center of the outfield and being able to see everything. From center field you can see where the catcher is setting up and, based on your knowledge of your team's pitching staff, know to a high degree of accuracy what is about to happen. You can watch a pickoff play about to develop and anticipate that the base runner is about to erase a potential run by being too jumpy. You can even see what is happening in the stands and note that your dad just got back to his seat after buying a big bag of popcorn.

A center fielder has to fully understand where the other players are relative to one another before every pitch. If I had a speedy right fielder playing alongside me, I could feel confident giving him more room. I had to know the abilities and range of everyone on the field to maximize our chance to record an out on any given play. If I was too close, I cut down our range as a team; if I was too far away, balls fell in safely. I had to be able to look at my teammates and keep our spacing constant, accounting for the count, the wind, the speed of my fellow outfielders, even my sore hamstring.

These calculations became second nature to me, because unlike most ballplayers, I am an engineer by training. When I was draft ed by the Chicago Cubs in the first round of the 1991 amateur draft, I was a junior at the University of Pennsylvania, studying systems engineering. Not that many Ivy League student athletes are scouted by the pros, but the Cubs must have seen something they liked, because they picked me twelfth overall, one slot ahead of a high school phenom from New York City named Manny Ramirez. (Hmmm, wonder what ever happened to him.)

Once I signed on the dotted line accepting the Cubs' signing bonus offer, dream met reality and I began my journey to the big leagues.

As a first–round draft pick, all eyes are on you and there is no other place to be but center stage. In July 1991, I reported to the Geneva Cubs, who played in a college town in upstate New York. I lived on Main Street and remember hearing the light change from green to yellow to red. My rite of passage began.

In 1992, I made a stop in the Carolina League in Winston–Salem, complete with three roommates. We seemed to have a revolving door out front since every other day one of us was affected by a front–office move. Released, demoted, promoted.

After the season, the front–office executives who had draft ed me were fired, and the new regime sent me back to the same level in 1993 with a promise of advancement midseason. True to their word, I was promoted to the Double–A Orlando Cubs. Welcome to the world of Disney.

I would play in Orlando for two seasons, and my once–promising career seemed to be stuck in neutral. But in the fall of 1994, I received an invitation to play in the Arizona Fall League. It was here where it all started to come together. A player–of–the–week award gave me optimism that I was seeing progress. I was performing well against the best the minor leagues had to offer.

When the final tallies were counted, my performance in the fall league solidified a spot for me on the Cubs' Triple–A team in Des Moines, Iowa. I did not know it at the time, but it was here that I would face an unexpected test. The manager of the Iowa Cubs, Ron Clark, and I did not get along. Our differences had begun the year before, when I was in Orlando. Clark was the minor league director of instruction at the time, and after one game he called me into the office to discuss a base–running decision I had made. Clark told me that I had made the wrong choice. I disagreed, but we didn't agree to disagree; we just fought for the last word. He would file this act of insubordination away.

In Iowa, every day was a battle. It was a year of constant badgering and a lot of tentative mistakes on the field, but one of the things that kept me going was the encouragement of our hitting coach, Glenn Adams. Keep working, keep your head up, he told me.

At season's end, my numbers were unimpressive. By now, I was twenty–five years old, which is ancient for a minor leaguer, and the Cubs asked me to play in the Instructional League that fall, an opportunity typically reserved for much younger players and a sign that my future had to be now. Fortunately, I met Tom Gamboa, a manager who would take me to Puerto Rico to play for his Mayaguez Indios in winter ball. It was there that I found my stride, winning an MVP trophy and, the next year, a championship.

To play so well after being buried in Triple–A was striking, even to the Cubs' front office. What was in the water in Puerto Rico? Part of the problem was that my Triple–A manager never took the time to know my story.

That story was one of determination. I chose to complete my college education after I was drafted, to fulfill a promise to my family. I had taken a leave of absence during the spring semester of my senior year to play for Winston–Salem, but when the fall came, it was my time to finish what I started and graduate.

My parents had set the tone for education. Growing up as the son of a math teacher and a practicing psychiatrist gave me a strong academic base.

My mom, who hailed from Rocky Mount, North Carolina, was the oldest of four children and a born teacher. She followed this knack for leadership right through the public school system in my hometown of Teaneck, New Jersey, where she taught for over twenty years. She thrust herself directly into Teaneck's commitment to introduce diverse groups of people to one another by organizing cottage parties and by participating in cross–cultural social events like "Friendship Day." She had the strength common to the most uncommon teachers: a sense for making her audience know that she was talking to each person individually.

My father left his homeland of Trinidad and Tobago at the age of thirty–one in the midst of a political shakeup in the school system, where he had served as an assistant headmaster. His journey would take him to Howard University in Washington, D.C., where he would attend medical school. His skill in critical thinking helped shape the way I evaluated situations and people. His vast array of responses to scenarios and his unwavering ability to disarm anyone with one cool phrase were transformational for me. Through genuine humility, he brought everyone into a common space.

He was also a true Renaissance man. His primary passion was writing poetry, and after his passing he left a collection of poems for everyone to continue to learn from and find joy in.

But it was my brother who was all about baseball. He laid out a plan for my baseball destiny by listing the steps to major league glory. He is still playing baseball today, at the age of forty–seven; he is the one member of our family who has always passionately followed his heart, whatever...