Excerpts

Chapter 1 Chip off the Old Block The first wood bat I ever held was as big as I was. It was a Louisville Slugger with Mickey Mantle's signature etched on it. Dad kept it in the den closet, and that thing was like gold. He'd had it since he was a shortstop at Stetson University, but Dad never hit with it. He used one of the Jackie Robinson models Stetson got from Louisville, or a Carl Yastrzemski, maybe a Nellie Fox or an Al Kaline. But the only time he put his hands on that M110-a skinny-handled, thick-barreled model like Mantle used to swing-was to admire it. I was three when we moved to Pierson, Florida, after Dad took a job teaching math and coaching baseball at Taylor High School. He let me take the Mantle bat out and hold it under his supervision, but it never left the den. It wasn't as if I was going to take it out in the backyard and play with it anyway. Hell, the thing swung me. "This was Mickey's signature bat," Dad told me the first time I tried to hoist it onto my shoulder. It was so heavy I almost lost it over my back. I thought, How do you hit a baseball with this? Then my dad picked it up and put it on his shoulder. Oh, OK, that's how. Mickey Mantle was the reason my dad fell in love with the game of baseball and the reason he hoped I would, too. It didn't take long. Whenever those closet doors swung open and that bat was out, Dad started telling Mantle stories. "The whole reason I want you to hit left-handed is because of this guy," he'd say. "He was my favorite player. He was the best switch-hitter in history." As a kid, Dad saw Mantle hook a line drive for a home run over his head in the right field bleachers at Memorial Stadium. My dad grew up in Baltimore, before his family moved to Vero Beach, Florida, and his uncle took him on the bus to see the Yankees play the Orioles. On those days, Dad was a Yankees fan. He said Mick's homer was still on the rise when it sailed over his head. "God-awful swing of the bat," he'd say. "From a guy who was only five foot ten, but as strong as an ox." Storytelling was as much a part of my baseball upbringing as taking swings in the backyard, especially where Mantle was concerned. When I got older, people actually told me I looked like Mickey Mantle-even my manager, Bobby Cox, who played with Mantle in 1968 with the Yankees. But as a kid, I didn't even know what Mantle looked like. I didn't see many pictures of him. I only heard my dad talk about him. I just thought he had to be the coolest guy ever because he had the coolest name ever: Mickey Mantle. Mickey was one of those baseball players people knew by their first names, like Whitey, Reggie, Yogi, Babe, Hank, Cal. I wanted to be like that, too, and knowing Dad, that's probably why he and Mom settled on "Chipper." I was born Larry Wayne Jones Junior. My dad is Larry Wayne Jones Senior. A couple of days after they brought me home from the hospital, my dad's aunt Dolly came to visit and said I looked so much like Dad that I was a chip off the old block. Mom started calling me Chip, which became Chipper, and it stuck. On the first day of kindergarten, my teacher, Mrs. Taylor, called me Larry when she took roll. I didn't answer. I'm not even sure I knew that was my name. Dad always said the name Larry wouldn't be remembered, but Chipper would be. There are now a few Mets and Yankees fans who might disagree with him, but to everybody else, I was always just Chipper. My parents nailed the name. Trying to switch-hit like Mantle wasn't going to be nearly as simple. But before I could think about swinging left-handed, I had to learn how to hit the fastball. We lived on a ten-acre farm, and like pretty much everybody else in Pierson, we grew fern. Our backyard pitcherÕs mound was basically a sand pit, with a root for a rubber. Dad stood in it, with his back to the hay barn, as he went into his windup. Forty feet away, I took my stance in front of a chalk strike zone we drew into wood paneling on the back wall of our garage. Dad was pushing thirty years old. I was seven. But that was how we did it: father against son. Dad would throw a tennis ball, and I swung a piece of PVC. I used to wear the rubber handles off aluminum bats, and PVC pipe was more durable, not to mention more abundant because we used PVC to irrigate the fernery. "Put the bat on your shoulder, pick it up, push it back," Dad preached. "Keep it level through the strike zone." We played simulated games all the time, my whole childhood. But one particular afternoon, we were working on something specific. Dad was trying to teach me not to step in the bucket. Stepping in the bucket is what you do when you're scared to death of the ball. You bail out. So when I swung-and this was right-handed, my natural side-I was stepping toward shortstop instead of the pitcher. If your upper body goes toward shortstop as well, the only way you can generate any power is by pulling the ball. My dad always wanted me to use the whole field. "Step at me," Dad said as he threw, again and again. "Step at me." But with every swing, I stepped toward short, bailing out. Finally, Dad tried logic. "I'm not going to hit you," he said. "I will never hit you." No sooner had the words come out of his mouth than he drilled me right in mine. A tooth went flying, blood everywhere. I started squalling. I glared at him, with my hand to my mouth and my tongue rooting around where that bottom tooth used to be. "You just said you weren't going to hit me!" Mom was on her horse on the other side of the house. I chased her down, wailing the whole time. "Dad hurt me! He said he wouldn't hurt me, and he hit me in the face. He knocked my tooth out!" When you get older, you learn that getting hit by pitches is just part of the game; I got hit eighteen times in my career at the big league level. The degree of pain it caused didn't matter to me as much as where the pitcher hit me. That told you what his intentions were. Paul Quantrill hit me on purpose in Toronto in 1999, but he did it the right way. We had hit Carlos Delgado earlier in the game in retaliation for showboating. The night before, Delgado hit a bomb off the hotel in right field at SkyDome and flipped his bat within two feet of our dugout. So everybody knew something was coming. Delgado took his base, and it was over. But then our reliever John Hudek hit Craig Grebeck in the back of the neck. Hudek didn't mean to do it, but it looked bad, and I was coming up second in the next inning. Quantrill threw the first pitch six inches outside, which made me think nothing was going to happen. So I dug in on the next one, and he hit me right between the numbers. It pissed me off, but I was young and stupid. I was too hot-headed to realize that's exactly the way it should be done: Hit a guy in the back, the butt, or the leg. Don't throw at his head. My dad's intent was pure, of course, not that my mom was buying it. She didn't bother getting off her horse when I came crying to her. She rode over to Dad and met him with one of her patented stares. "What the hell is wrong with you?" she said. Dad didn't have much to say. He was counting his blessings it was just a tennis ball. I found out years later he told Mom that night he was afraid he had just ruined baseball for me. He was worried I might never want to get back in the box. It was going to take a lot more than losing a baby tooth to keep me away. Yeah, it was a baby tooth, and it was already loose, not that I was going to tell Dad. I was too busy milking it. All Dad did that day was pretty much cure me of stepping into a pitch for the rest of my life. I stepped in the bucket my whole career. It's one reason I added a toe tap, to help me keep my weight on my back side. I took a little step toward the pull side so I could clear my hips, and my hips and hands could explode through the swing at the same time. "Hips and hands!" was another of my dad's sayings. Actually, my little step in the bucket probably helped me avoid getting hit throughout my career because I could jackknife out of the way. But as a kid, fear of the ball was never my biggest motivator. Wanting to beat my dad was. Even when I was seven and eight years old, Dad could throw a tennis ball as hard as the good Lord would let him, and I could put it in play. Switch-hitting is what he used to give me a new challenge. He dangled it out there one day when I was talking a lot of smack, and I bit-hook, line, and sinker. "All right, buddy boy, turn around to the other side," he said. "See what you can do." I'd seen Dad bat left-handed. He didn't switch-hit in college, but I knew he could do it. "All right," I said. At first, hitting left-handed felt really weird, like a reverse swing. To make it feel more normal, I tried hitting cross-handed, with my left hand as my bottom hand. But whenever Dad saw that, he said, "Boy, fix them hands." Growing up an only child in rural Volusia County, Florida, I could entertain myself for hours by throwing up rocks and swinging at them. I tried to hit an oak tree, first from the right side, then from the left. I'd tell myself, "OK, hit a ground ball." Voom. "Hit a line drive." Voom. "All right, go deep." Voom. Then I'd turn and do it from the other side. It was both ways, all the time. Goofing around, I'd brush my teeth left-handed. I tried to write left-handed. To this day, my handwriting is only a hair messier left-handed, but you can tell it's my signature. Switch-hitting took a more serious turn on Saturday afternoons. Every week, I looked forward to four o'clock, after the Major League Baseball Game of the Week was over, when I got to strut my stuff in front of Pops in the backyard. Dad and I would watch the game on NBC, then go out back and imitate the two lineups. More often than not, one of the teams on TV was the Dodgers. They were my dad's favorite growing up in Vero Beach, where the Dodgers trained for sixty years. I was a huge Dodgers fan, too. Dad usually let me be the Dodgers, and he'd take the other team, and we'd emulate the hitters in their lineups. Hitting like Steve Garvey, I kept my hands in tight, rode them low. For Dusty Baker, I held my bat high, straight up. As Mike Scioscia, I kept the bat flat and started it on my shoulder. I wanted to hit left-handed as much as possible, so I put my own twist on the lineup. The Dodgers used to bat Davey Lopes, who was right-handed, leadoff, but I wanted another lefty in there, so I put center fielder Kenny Landreaux in the number two spot. Reggie Smith, a switch-hitter and a utility guy, was going to play somewhere for me, maybe left field. If he was in left, I put Franklin Stubbs, another left-hander, at first base. Scioscia, a lefty, always caught for me over Steve Yeager, a righty. Playing those imaginary games in the backyard helped me learn to switch-hit. I learned how to play the game when I took the field with my buddies. A baseball uniform was the holy grail for me. I got my first real one at age nine when I moved up to Little League with the Pierson Lions Club. You could not rip that thing off me. It had a royal-blue shirt with "Pierson" in diagonal cursive across the chest and a big swoosh underneath, white pants, and stirrups. I thought it was the prettiest shirt I'd ever seen. I'd wear the whole uniform to bed. It was like jammies. I had to wait until I was ten to get the number 10, the number my dad had worn since he was a kid. He wanted to wear 7, Mantle's number, in Little League, but the coach's son had it, so Dad took 10. My friend Leonard Butts had it my first year in Little League, but I got it my second year. I had to wait a year for it when I got to the big leagues, too. Dad was still wearing number 10 as the varsity baseball coach at Taylor when I was in elementary school. Every day after school, IÕd stop at the Handy Way, grab a Coke and a candy bar, and head across the street to the high school field for their practices. If they were hitting, I'd shag flies. If they were taking infield, I'd flip balls back to the hitter. If they finished early enough, Dad would throw BP to me. Dad idolized Mantle. I idolized Dad. I used to go through his scrapbooks all the time and read about his Stetson teams. I would sit Indian style in front of the closet where the scrapbooks, photo albums, and Mantle bat were, and read about Dad and Mom. It was a full day's worth of entertainment for me. My dad was everybody's all-American in high school in Vero Beach-quarterback of the football team, shortstop on the baseball team, point guard on the basketball team. I loved to look at his Stetson box scores in the DeLand Sun-News, but I had no clue how to read them. So I'd just scan the articles for Dad's name. "Larry Jones chipped in with a single and a double to pace the 10-hit attack by the Hatters." Excerpted from Ballplayer by Chipper Jones, Carroll Rogers Walton All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.