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For some reason, baseball fans believe their favorite players should be like the Pope. Not that they must be infallible, but that their presence should last forever. So it is with some sadness that we behold the day when a treasured athlete decides to hang it up. Just recently, Cal Ripken Jr., the new "Iron Man," decided to retire at the age of 40, at the end of the current season. Testimonials have already started to pour in like eulogies. The average career of a professional ballplayer lasts slightly longer than a presidential term. For those who hang on for 15 or more years, especially with one team, as did Ripken, there is a special affection.
The life span of an athlete should be described like dog years, for only in that context can we discuss a 38-year-old as finished, washed up, put out to pasture. David Cone has been thought of in that context. And Roger Angell is the type of writer who can chronicle the declining years of a star without being too maudlin or cynical. The author, sports editor for The New Yorker, is a gifted analyst of the national pastime (FIVE SEASONS, ONCE MORE AROUND THE PARK) as a game made up of "people," not merely "athletes."
A PITCHER'S STORY was envisioned as a much happier project. Angell wanted to look at the life of Cone, an unusually thoughtful man, an aging cowboy heading off into the sunset (which is not an inappropriate metaphor, considering the seemingly-perennial free agent was often looked on as something of a hired gun). Cone, at the time a New York Yankee, had attained pitching Nirvana, tossing a perfect game against the Montreal Expos in 1999. The next season the floor dropped out from under him. He won but four games while losing fourteen, unable to significantly help the Yankees as they headed for another World Championship. The whispers began: "He's had it; he's done."
The old saw is that baseball is a game of inches. For pitchers, the measurements are even less forgiving. The strike zone is 17" wide (its height depends on the batter); for a pitcher to miss by molecules can mean the difference between a pop up caught by the shortstop and a ball that goes over the centerfield fence. For Cone, during this year, it was more of the latter. After thousands of pitches, the book ponders, how can such a trained athlete lose his way?
A PITCHER'S STORY follows the maturation of Cone from his little league days through all the ups and downs along the way to the big leagues, including surgery to remove a life-threatening aneurysm from his pitching arm. The author supplements these travails with interviews with those close to Cone, his inner circle. We read of a strict upbringing in a family where sports were important, of his development from little league standout to high school prospect to major league stardom. He has been one of the best of his generation, but Angell portrays him as a man, not just a bubble gum card. A PITCHER'S STORY is not your typical "kiss and tell" biography. Cone's story is depicted with sensitivity, never sensationalism.
At one point, when asked about the progress of the project, Cone responded wearily, "It isn't the book that was planned. That was going to be...technical things about what pitchers do and how they take care of themselves, and who owns the pitcher's arm. But it changed." Cone deserves a great deal of credit. It would have been easy to change his mind, to decide that he didn't want a public airing of his decline. But then this pitcher is not one of your stereotypical monosyllabic, scratching, spitting sports Neanderthals.
After a rough spring, Cone is trying to make a comeback with the Yankee's nemesis, the Boston Red Sox; the competitor in him obviously wants to keep going. You can't help wonder with him as he muses, "Thirty-eight is old for a pitcher. Maybe I should retire and become a young man again."
--- Reviewed by Ron Kaplan (ronk23@aol.com)
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