Becoming Mr. October (9780385533126) by Kevin Reggie; Baker Jackson Read Free Book Online Page B

years old, and I didn’t pay attention. I thought, “If you’re tough enough to trade me, then I’m tough enough to do this,” and that would be the end of it.
    But there were articles; there was a negative reaction from the fans. Nobody understood how this would work out yet. Nobody understood how baseball was a business, because the owners didn’t want the fans to look at it that way. Nobody published what
their
revenue was every year—the owners—but they published our salaries, and sometimes more, to exaggerate. I didn’t know,
nobody
knew how the fans were going to react to our treating this like a business, too, and getting the money we could.
    After all, the American pastime was a game that we got to
play
. The focus was on how we got paid to play this
game
. It wasn’t thought of as our job.
    Once I got to Baltimore, I had a good year. I stole twenty-eight bases, my career high. I knocked in ninety-one runs, hit twenty-seven home runs. I could’ve been a thirty-thirty man—thirty home runs, thirty stolen bases—if I hadn’t missed that first month of the season. Back then, that was something that only three men in baseball history had ever done.
    At the time, numbers like that weren’t emphasized as important. So you didn’t take the chance of getting injured to pad your stats. I remember on two occasions meeting Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays in 1988, when José Canseco became the first “forty-forty” man. Both Mickey and Willie said, “Gee, if I’d ever known it was such a big deal, I’d have done a fifty-fifty season.”
    We came in second, but you knew we were going to get better. I loved playing for Hank Peters, loved playing for Earl Weaver, the Orioles’ manager. Weaver told his front office, “If you sign him, we can win pennants.”
    He was right, too. The next year, Eddie Murray came up to the big leagues with Baltimore. A few years later, Cal Ripken came up, and they were already a contender. They always had good pitching. They had Jim Palmer still, and Mike Flanagan, and Denny Martinez. They would pick up Steve Stone a couple years later, and Scott McGregor and Tippy Martinez came over from the Yankees in 1976—all those arms. That gave you a Hall of Famer for your number one pitcher, in Palmer, and four other number two pitchers behind him, with Flanagan and Denny Martinez probably being number ones on most other teams.
    I loved playing for Earl Weaver. He was just an East Coast Tommy Lasorda. Just a lovable guy who loved the game. All his players loved playing for him. He was one of those characters who would get so mad that he was almost funny. Cussin’ like a sailor. As coarse as it is, Lasorda’s swearing sounded like a poem. He’s a YouTube star today because of it. Earl Weaver was the same way. When he cursed, it was like a melody.
    I liked Baltimore, too. It was a great baseball town. My family was living there, including my sister and my mother. Baltimore was a city that didn’t
feel
like a city. It was a city that felt like a community. It was in the South, but it had lots of Middle America in it. It was more of a plain, folksy kind of place, full of a lot of country folks. Because of that it felt a little more comfortable to me. They didn’t have a lot of newspapers, didn’t have a lot of skyscrapers, more two-family homes. I liked Baltimore and its fans.
    I loved playing there with Jim Palmer, who was a longtime friend. I loved playing with Brooks Robinson, who was still in the organization.I loved playing with Lee May and Bobby Grich, who were both outstanding players. We all worked well as a team—good history, good record of success. It was all very comfortable.
    Hank Peters, the general manager, was like a dad to me. Jerry Hoffberger, who owned the team, nice man, nice family. Lou Gorman was there, as the assistant general manager. Tom Giordano was there, as the director of scouting and player development. These were great baseball people, who had built a great