The Beginning

Our family moved from Fall River, Massachusetts, to Swansea, and then to Somerset around the time I was ready to play Little League. My dad, Joseph, and my mother, Connie, had wanted to leave the triple decker tenement we lived in in Fall River for some time and they finally scraped together enough money to purchase a very modest home in a working-class neighborhood — one that was best for my sister, Judy, and me to grow up in.

Little League baseball seemed to come pretty easy to me and I was like every good player at that age in that I played shortstop and I pitched. I was a terrible pitcher but a good left-handed hitter. I could tell — and all the coaches could tell — that there was something there a little bit different than the other kids. My team was the Orioles. I think the fact I was good got my mother interested in what I was doing with sports. My mother was a dance instructor and a hairdresser, and my father worked at Globe Manufacturing, a rubber plant in Fall River. We moved to Swansea first, where we had a very modest little home. Our home was just down the road from my mother's parents. My grandfather was a huge, huge Red Sox fan. And my father was a huge Ted Williams fan. So that's how I really got involved with the game of baseball. I could remember sitting with my grandfather. In those days most of the games were on radio. He'd sit out on his porch and he'd be smoking a big cigar while listening to the games. I'd sit there and listen to them with him. And he would just go absolutely bonkers when somebody would walk. He hated walks.

My mother knew nothing at all about baseball, but she probably became one of the biggest fans the Red Sox would ever have before she passed away. But she learned everything about the game through my father and through watching me. Our house in Somerset was a step above what we had in Swansea. And the location was ideal because I was only 50 feet away from a park, which had a baseball field, a basketball court, a softball field, and a little pond that used to freeze in the winter, so we were able to skate on it. I had all the sports right there for me to do all the time. And that's where I spent all of my free time. It was a great place to grow up because there were always kids at that playground doing something.

We had all these weird games where you had four guys on the field and one would be hitting, one would be pitching, one would be in the outfield, and one would be in the infield. And we just used half the field. If it was a right-handed hitter, everybody would play the left side. Because I was a left-handed hitter, they'd pitch to me from third base. If I'd pull the ball they wouldn't have to move. So, I'd hit it to that field.

I could hear my mother yell for me from the house when it was time to come home. It was that kind of a setup.

When I started playing organized baseball the coaches immediately made me the shortstop, which was usually the best player. I had my Yaz stance with the bat held high. Yaz was my hero. It was 1967 when I really took to listening and watching all the games. That team caught the attention of everybody in New England. I was lucky enough to watch what he did in '67 when he won the Triple Crown in one of the greatest seasons by any player in history. And then I got to play with him, which was pretty remarkable. Every time I played against him when I was with the Angels was pretty amazing.

But back in Little League, I know there were officials and coaches fighting over me. I don't know what the ins and outs were. I just know my coach was Pete Reese and that I always ended up on the Orioles. That was my first introduction to organized baseball. It was a ton of fun. Four years of Little League went by so fast. At that time, Little League was for kids nine to 12 years old. And those years just seemed to fly by.

My dad loved baseball and he played softball late in life, on nights and weekends when he was still working. He was a kind guy. After working at the manufacturing plant, he became a furniture salesman at Mason's Furniture in Fall River. His love for Ted Williams was off the charts. Everything Ted did, that's all he talked about. He loved horse racing and dog racing. He liked to play cards. And he would always try to get my mother to move to Florida, but she would have none of it until later on in life when they eventually wound up down there. If my mother said I was a bad boy one day, he was responsible for coming home and taking care of it with the strap. I think half the time he was using the strap on me he didn't know what I had done wrong. But he wasn't pushy, sports-wise. He just had a love for baseball and that love kind of trickled down to me. He taught me a lot about baseball, but I think I was more self-taught.

I used to pretend the back of my grandfather's house was the Green Monster. I used to throw the ball up by myself and then try to hit it off the Green Monster. It just so happened that right field was the longer part of the field, so I thought I was playing at Fenway. The roof itself was the screen at Fenway Park and the house was the left-field wall. It wasn't green. I think it was something like a pink house, some weird color. And I remember going out there and just throwing the Wiffle balls and tennis balls and whacking them off the house. Maybe that's how I got my opposite-field stroke. The problem is when I got to the big leagues I couldn't reach the left-field wall!

Those childhood days were special to me. There were no worries. There were no complications. It was just having fun. I had a good family. I felt loved. The atmosphere I grew up in is what I knew. My life was playing baseball and, later as a teenager, spending time with my friends, smoking Marlboros and drinking Buds.

Baseball was my first love. I loved all sports. When basketball season would come around, I'd play basketball. And then football. And flag football. But baseball was always the one I looked forward to, for some reason. Maybe it's because I felt I had some talent there. I don't know. I guess it was built into my family because of the way my father and my grandfather emphasized it and talked about it so much.

The one thing I always had going for me was that I was fast. I remember some fast kid from Somerset High wanted to race. We raced, and I think the kid beat me. And I couldn't believe it because nobody had ever beaten me before. I always had really good speed. That helped me in a lot of sports, especially in pickup basketball games, because although I couldn't shoot, I could drive by people. I was always the end in football because I could run the routes and beat everybody.

When I got to high school, my coach, Jim Sullivan,...