As a pitcher, Cone was a tenacious, bulldog of a hurler who had tapped his talent to the max to become a mainstay of three Yankee championship teams. As a man, he was a one-time party animal who had grown into a thoughtful leader, not only for the Yankees but for all players. (He was a key negotiator during the players’ strike.) Moreover, Cone was respectful, if appropriately wary, of his obligations to the press and regularly held court for writers. The consensus among those who cover baseball was that Cone was distinctly perceptive about the game he played.
Angell could never have imagined the season that would unfold. For Cone, his 15th Major League Baseball season was a disaster. It was a season of physical and emotional struggles played out on the sports pages, where the bottom line was unambiguous: failure upon failure upon failure. To Cone, it must have seemed like some kind of Jobian test, one that bewildered him and to which, at times, he found no more profound response than furtive chain-smoking. Cone, whose career-winning percentage going into the 2000 season was a lofty .638, would win only four games all season while losing 14; his earned run average hovered at almost seven runs a game, a mortifying level that was just about double his previous career mark.
The miserable season raised the prospect that Cone, whose marvelous career had already taken him into the playoffs five times with the Yankees, Blue Jays and Mets, would be forced to endure one final humiliation by being scratched from the postseason roster. Yankee manager Joe Torre, however, stuck with his struggling star, a display of both hope and mercy that is a testament to Torre’s class. Or, as in Angell’s always slightly more nuanced view: “Anti-sentimentalists can put the move down to sentiment … and anti-royalists will mutter that only the Yankees, with their supporting case of expensive starting and relieving and closing specialists, can afford to be kindly or strategic in this particular way.”
But there were obvious limits to Torre’s faith and they were conspicuous. In the Subway Series, Cone got the call just once and pitched to but a single batter. Cone retired that batter, Mike Piazza. And when the series was finally over, and the Yankees had triumphed once again, Cone felt only relief. “A tremendous relief,” he told the author. “At least nobody can blame me anymore.”
Perhaps the single most remarkable thing about “Pitcher’s Story: Innings With David Cone” (Warner Books), is that Cone allowed it to go on or, more specifically, that he continued to cooperate with it once his season began to go sour. Athletes are notoriously superstitious, and it would have been easy for Cone to decide that Angell must be the demon force, the new factor in the mix, wreaking havoc on his career. But Cone did nothing more than suggest to Angell that perhaps the book wasn’t proceeding as the writer had expected and hoped. Anytime Angell wanted to withdraw from the project, Cone would understand. Cone, of course, understood far more than that. “We don’t know how it’s going to turn out,” Angell told him. “This is more interesting.” To that, Cone could only say, “I can see that. I guess.”
Angell was, of course, right. Just as tragedy trumps comedy, failure is far more compelling than any sports success story. And Angell’s graceful prose and passionate fandom coupled with Cone’s brooding insight into his own miseries has produced one of the most memorable baseball volumes ever. As both Angell and Cone realized early on, “Pitcher’s Story” did not turn into the book that either of them had initially imagined. “Instead of an inside look at a wizardly old master at his late last best, this was going to be Merlin failing headlong down the palace stairs, the pointy hat airborne and his wand clattering.” It obviously hurt Angell to tell the story almost as much as it hurt Cone to endure the season. We feel their pain-profoundly.
Baseball has always had a special place in this nation’s literary fabric. A slow, cerebral and contemplative game that possesses a special place in America, it lends itself beautifully to all forms of the written word in virtually every form. From classic fiction like “The Natural” and “Shoeless Joe” to inside-the-game accounts like “The Longest Season” and “Ball Four,” from the kid-classic “epic” poem “Casey at the Bat” to Angell’s own elegant essays in The New Yorker, literary baseball is indeed a rich feast.
I have been delighting in a recently issued collection of baseball columns by the late New York Times legend, Red Smith. Despite some dated language, Smith’s writing still dazzles. Here’s Smith on the death of Yankees slugger Tony Lazzeri at age 42: “When the iceman cometh, it doesn’t make a great deal of difference which route he takes, for the ultimate result is the same in any case. Nevertheless, there was something especially tragic in the way death came to Tony Lazzeri, finding him and leaving him all alone in a dark and silent house-a house which must, in that last moment, have seemed frighteningly silent to a man whose ears remembered the roar of the crowd as Tony’s did.” And in what may be baseball’s most fabled game, when Bobby Thomson’s two-out, ninth-inning homer propelled the New York Giants to the National League pennant over the Brooklyn Dodgers, Smith hit his own home run: “Now it is done. Now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it. The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly implausible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again.”
Smith’s take on that drama shows great prescience, as a half-century later reality, with its O.J.s and other macabre tales, has virtually eradicated invention. Smith trafficked in prescience. In a column, entitled “The Appearance of Evil,” he decried the fact that “championships are being decided not on the field, but on the auction block.” And he wrote that in 1952!
Still, Angell’s work is in a class by itself. This book has the texture of a great novel as Cone endures more and more pain, physical and psychic, in the increasingly feint hope that he might coax just a little more out of his tattered shoulder. That is an effort that oftentimes seems heroic, but, other times, sad and almost pathetic. Few great athletes age gracefully and decide to leave on their own accord. (Those that do, like Michael Jordan, always seem compelled to tempt the fates.) For every Ted Williams, exiting with a homer (and, in Williams’s fashion, without a tip of the hat or a curtain call) and a classic John Updike rendition of the moment, there are far more scenes like the specter of Willie Mays, taking the bucks when he was the faintest shadow of greatness.
But one senses with Cone that baseball is worth clinging to with every fiber-indeed every damaged and strained fiber-of his body because he believes that life will never be as glorious or as much fun again. His wife, Lynn, tells Angell: “His greatest fear is that he’ll never find something to replace what pitching has meant for him.”
That’s why one season later, Cone is down in Florida, still trying to rehab his shoulder, still trying to find his missing slider, and still trying to make it back to the majors-this time with the Yankees’ arch-enemy Boston Red Sox. Last week, in extended spring training against a lot of kids who were in diapers when he began his pitching career, Cone pitched two shutout innings. More important, the radar gun had his fastball topping off at an acceptable 89 miles per hour. His comeback remains a longshot (though the prospect of Cone pitching for the Sox against the Yankees in Yankee stadium is indescribably delicious). But nobody who reads “A Pitcher’s Story” can possibly wish Cone anything but one last fling.
