was looking out for me.
I had one other heartthrob in high school—and one other strikeout. Joe was instrumental in that one, as well. Mary Lou Retton.
Actually, we both had crushes on her. This was just after she’d won the gold medal in the 1984 Olympics. I thought it was meant to be—her mother’s Italian, after all. So Joe was over at my house one day and we spent the afternoon figuring out how to call Mary Lou. Somehow we found the number. I didn’t have the guts to dial it, but Joe did, and I guess it threw him off when her mother answered. He was holding the phone out so I could hear, too, and he said, “Hello, is this Mary Lou Retton’s mother?”
She goes, “Yes, who’s calling?”
Joe just looked at me, with huge, terrified eyes, and hung up.
CHAPTER FOUR
A fellow named Joe Godri, who is now the head baseball coach at Villanova, likes to say that he was the guy who blocked me from the Phoenixville High School lineup. Godri was two grades ahead of me, and the position we both played—first base—was his until he graduated.
All the while, however, I had plenty of encouragement from the likes of my dad, my friends, Ted Williams, and—in front of the whole student body—the manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers. I don’t know if my father was the one who arranged it, but Tommy Lasorda came to our high school to speak at an assembly in the auditorium, and as he was wrapping up he pointed straight at me and said, “And one day, I’m going to sign him .”
Afterward, kids came up patting me on the back as though I’d actually made it. It was embarrassing, but also significant. That was when I started reading everything I could find about the baseball draft. Obsessing about it, really.
With my goal clarified and my expectations taking flight, I couldn’t wait to start wreaking havoc on the Ches-Mont League. I was six foot two, uncommonly strong, and still plenty awkward—one of the youngest students in the junior class—when our coach, Doc Kennedy, turned me loose as number thirteen in purple and white, finally starting at first base for the Phoenixville Phantoms. I came out hacking.
At Phoenixville, there was no left-field fence, and with my not-blazing speed it was almost impossible to hit a home run in that direction. The situation persuaded me to drive the ball to the opposite field, which came fairly naturally. In right, however, there was a row of trees just inside the fence, and oftentimes the umpires would have to decide whether a long fly ball should be ruled a home run or not when it was cuffed around in the leaves or knocked down by a limb. I still hit twelve homers that year—and three triples, which should have been home runs—in eighteen games, and batted .500 with thirty-eight RBIs. My mom saw it all from her Chrysler minivan.
There has long been a misconception that I materialized out of nowhere as a baseball player. The fact is, I had two exceptional high school seasons and was not unknown to the area scouts. My junior year, by some accounts, was one of the greatest high school seasons in the history of Pennsylvania. The rap was that we played in a weak league, but I don’t know about that. Boyertown and Downingtown were much bigger schools than Phoenixville. They had senior classes of almost fifteen hundred students, while ours was just under two hundred.
Boyertown came in as a very heralded team my junior year—they had a couple of guys who went on to play in the minor leagues, plus a stadium with lights —and they won the conference, but we drubbed them when we played. Our football team took a beating on a regular basis, but there was no problem in baseball. We had good ballplayers, including Mike Fuga, who later played at Temple. We kicked ass. It was disappointing that we got bumped out of the district tournament on a bad day, because I really felt like we had a team that could have gone far in state.
My senior year, those trees in right field were no longer a problem.
I had one other heartthrob in high school—and one other strikeout. Joe was instrumental in that one, as well. Mary Lou Retton.
Actually, we both had crushes on her. This was just after she’d won the gold medal in the 1984 Olympics. I thought it was meant to be—her mother’s Italian, after all. So Joe was over at my house one day and we spent the afternoon figuring out how to call Mary Lou. Somehow we found the number. I didn’t have the guts to dial it, but Joe did, and I guess it threw him off when her mother answered. He was holding the phone out so I could hear, too, and he said, “Hello, is this Mary Lou Retton’s mother?”
She goes, “Yes, who’s calling?”
Joe just looked at me, with huge, terrified eyes, and hung up.
CHAPTER FOUR
A fellow named Joe Godri, who is now the head baseball coach at Villanova, likes to say that he was the guy who blocked me from the Phoenixville High School lineup. Godri was two grades ahead of me, and the position we both played—first base—was his until he graduated.
All the while, however, I had plenty of encouragement from the likes of my dad, my friends, Ted Williams, and—in front of the whole student body—the manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers. I don’t know if my father was the one who arranged it, but Tommy Lasorda came to our high school to speak at an assembly in the auditorium, and as he was wrapping up he pointed straight at me and said, “And one day, I’m going to sign him .”
Afterward, kids came up patting me on the back as though I’d actually made it. It was embarrassing, but also significant. That was when I started reading everything I could find about the baseball draft. Obsessing about it, really.
With my goal clarified and my expectations taking flight, I couldn’t wait to start wreaking havoc on the Ches-Mont League. I was six foot two, uncommonly strong, and still plenty awkward—one of the youngest students in the junior class—when our coach, Doc Kennedy, turned me loose as number thirteen in purple and white, finally starting at first base for the Phoenixville Phantoms. I came out hacking.
At Phoenixville, there was no left-field fence, and with my not-blazing speed it was almost impossible to hit a home run in that direction. The situation persuaded me to drive the ball to the opposite field, which came fairly naturally. In right, however, there was a row of trees just inside the fence, and oftentimes the umpires would have to decide whether a long fly ball should be ruled a home run or not when it was cuffed around in the leaves or knocked down by a limb. I still hit twelve homers that year—and three triples, which should have been home runs—in eighteen games, and batted .500 with thirty-eight RBIs. My mom saw it all from her Chrysler minivan.
There has long been a misconception that I materialized out of nowhere as a baseball player. The fact is, I had two exceptional high school seasons and was not unknown to the area scouts. My junior year, by some accounts, was one of the greatest high school seasons in the history of Pennsylvania. The rap was that we played in a weak league, but I don’t know about that. Boyertown and Downingtown were much bigger schools than Phoenixville. They had senior classes of almost fifteen hundred students, while ours was just under two hundred.
Boyertown came in as a very heralded team my junior year—they had a couple of guys who went on to play in the minor leagues, plus a stadium with lights —and they won the conference, but we drubbed them when we played. Our football team took a beating on a regular basis, but there was no problem in baseball. We had good ballplayers, including Mike Fuga, who later played at Temple. We kicked ass. It was disappointing that we got bumped out of the district tournament on a bad day, because I really felt like we had a team that could have gone far in state.
My senior year, those trees in right field were no longer a problem.