Hardcover
-
SHIP THIS ITEMTemporarily Out of Stock Online
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
David Wright played his entire Major League Baseball career for one team, the team he dreamed of playing for as a kid: the New York Mets.
A quick fan favorite from Virginia who then earned his stripes in New York, Wright came back time and again from injury and demonstrated the power of hard work, total commitment, and an infinite love of the game.
Wright’s stats are one thing. He was a seven-time All-Star, a two-time Gold Glove Award winner, and a two-time Silver Slugger Award winner. He holds many Mets franchise records and was nicknamed "Captain America" after his performance in the 2013 World Baseball Classic. But there is more: The walk-offs. The Barehand. The Subway Series and World Series home runs. And the electricity that swept through Shea Stadium then Citi Field whenever number 5, “the Captain,” was in the game.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781524746056 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 10/13/2020 |
| Pages: | 368 |
| Sales rank: | 1,152,783 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.40(d) |
About the Author
Anthony DiComo is the Mets beat writer for MLB.com and a former chairman of the Baseball Writers' Association of America's New York chapter. He also is an analyst for the SNY channel and a regular contributor to MLB Network.
Read an Excerpt
one
The Pudgy Kid at Shortstop
To this day, my father isn't sure quite what possessed him. Shortly after I was born, once the initial bursts of elation and exhaustion and emotion had faded, my dad, Rhon, had a chance to steal away from the hospital for a few hours. Intending to drive straight home for a bit of rest, he instead found himself pulling into the parking lot of a local department store. This was a few days before Christmas, and as he puts it, the shelves were mostly bare-but there was my dad, rummaging around them long enough to find a plastic glove, a kid-sized Louisville Slugger, and a cheap baseball.
Rhon Wright was never much of an athlete, too short for basketball and too small for football, but he did play baseball and enjoyed the game. He wanted to instill that same love in me.
In the weeks that followed, my grandmother constructed a wooden plaque with prongs sticking out of it to hold the bat, as well as spots to store the glove and ball. That contraption hung on my bedroom wall from the first days of my life until I was old enough to go play outside with them. They were perfect. At first, I could barely lift the bat, but I never got tired of trying alongside my father and grandfather in the backyard. When I got older, my dad told me to swing it underwater, because he had read that that was how Gregg Jefferies trained. I was probably better equipped to handle a Wiffle-ball bat, which I often did, standing with my back to my grandfather's pool and trying to hit his looping pitches for hours.
To say I was predisposed to a love of baseball would probably be an understatement. From the time that I could walk, everything on both sides of my family revolved around a ball and a bat.
So enthused was I about the game that one afternoon, when my mother, Elisa, spied a Little League team playing, she stopped the car, got out, and asked someone at the field how old I had to be to register. Turned out I was a year too young, but the next spring, I was out there in uniform, ready to make my Green Run Little League debut. I showed up with the same wooden bat my dad had bought on his way home from the hospital, which embarrassed him only a little when he realized all the other kids were swinging aluminum.
We learned that sort of stuff on the fly. Quickly, Saturday turned into the best day of the week. I would wake up and spend all day at the field. I would eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner at the concession stand, watch the other games, and play in mine, loving every second of it. Three younger brothers-Stephen, Matthew, and Daniel-eventually came along, one every three years. We all played baseball. None of us could get enough.
What's amazing to me now, looking back, is how much my parents sacrificed to help make that possible.
My dad was raised in the Hampton Roads region of Virginia, which in those days was generally just referred to as Tidewater. It encompasses Norfolk, the biggest city in the area; Virginia Beach, where I grew up; Chesapeake, where we moved when I was a teenager; and several other communities. Dad met Mom at a local roller-skating rink, convinced her to go on a double date with two other friends, and managed to turn that one date into many more. Rhon and Elisa became high school sweethearts. In 1978, when she was nineteen and he was only eighteen, they got married.
At the time, my mom was working at the local Navy Exchange store, while my dad was earning some cash at an auto dealership with his uncle, selling muscle cars, which were all the rage. Within a couple of years, they switched: She started working at the dealership, doing bookkeeping and other tasks, while he worked security at the Navy Exchange, rooting out shoplifters. That sparked Rhon's interest in law enforcement, and once he was eligible at age twenty-one, he applied to the police academies in Norfolk and Virginia Beach. Norfolk, a much more urban area with some relatively high crime rates, called him back first. A career was born.
Until I grew older, I wasn't really aware of the dangerous nature of my father's work. Flipping through channels as a kid, I watched Cops and saw the officers busting down doors and catching bad guys, but my brothers and I always thought there was no way my dad did that sort of stuff. When we all sat together for family dinners, my father never talked about his work. My parents completely shielded us from it, even if that wasn't totally on purpose. To Rhon, the work didn't always seem all that dangerous. To me and my brothers, it was just what he did. Our biggest thrill was having him flip on the siren for us as we drove around town in an unmarked police car. Sometimes, we'd get to wear screen-printed T-shirts that the officers made to celebrate successful missions, even though we didn't really know everything that went into them.
It wasn't until I was an adult that I learned the truth from a couple of his partners at a local gym.
"Your dad was a bad dude," one of them told me.
"Him?" I replied, incredulous.
Him. I had always pictured Rhon with his feet up at the local precinct, donut in hand, pushing paper from behind his desk. But when his friends started opening my eyes with stories of his time on the beat, I learned that he actually was that guy in Cops, breaking down doors and catching bad guys. Rhon started out on precinct patrol, wearing a uniform, driving his cop car around town. Eventually, he worked his way into the K-9 unit, which doubled as the Norfolk Police Department's SWAT team. If the situation required advanced weaponry or tactical expertise, my dad would get the call.
Promotions throughout the 1980s took him out of uniform but not out of danger. Going undercover for the department's vice and narcotics division, Rhon eventually took charge of that entire unit, leading armed missions involving informants and search warrants and criminals hawking drugs. On one such mission, a fleeing perp shot at him from a distance in a city park. Another time, my dad and a partner wrestled a man brandishing a knife to the ground. There were plenty of other scrapes along the way. Rhon didn't reach the paper-pushing, donut-eating phase of his career until much later, when he topped out as Norfolk's assistant chief of police. At that point, I was really only just beginning to understand the nature of his previous work.
My dad took his job seriously and was very, very good at it. That translated to life at home, where he created the type of culture you might expect from a cop. My brothers like to joke that we lived in the strictest home in Virginia, and as the oldest of four boys, I had it worst. We were taught to say, "Yes, sir," and "No, sir," to the adults we encountered. We were taught to shake hands and look people in the eyes. Curfews were strict. Punishments were no joke, often involving my parents' threatening to take baseball away from me and my brothers. At that age, I'm not sure I could have imagined a more terrifying fate.
My mom, Elisa, eventually moved from her work at the car dealership to jobs as a teacher's assistant and a school security officer, where she spent all day dealing with kids. She was definitely the more lenient of our parents, so we often went to her to try to plead down punishments. We simply couldn't get anything past Dad, who could sense the smallest fib. He was strict and punctual. If he told me to be home by ten o'clock and I snuck upstairs at 10:04, he wouldn't say anything that night. Instead, he'd wait until the next morning to ask what time I got home.
"Ten o'clock," I'd tell him.
"Did you?" Dad would reply.
"Yeah," I'd say.
"Did you?" he'd ask again.
A pause. "No," I'd admit under the pressure of his questioning. "It was ten oh four."
And 10:04 wasn't okay. That was his nature. He'd ask simple questions about things like schoolwork, allowing us to bury ourselves with our answers. If I made a B in one of my classes, I always knew the question would come: "Could you have done better?" I couldn't say no, because there was always something more I could have done. That lesson was always there, always lurking in the back of my mind. He wanted us to fulfill our potential. He wanted to make sure that we didn't have regrets. He wanted to make sure that we maximized our abilities, and without that sort of upbringing, I'm not sure we would have.
As one of our Little League coaches, my dad was also tougher on me than on anyone else on the team. I thought I deserved to play shortstop, where all the best athletes played. Instead, Dad put me in the outfield, saying I needed to earn my way onto the dirt. I was upset, but that's just the way he was. He made me earn everything, which I eventually did-my claim to fame as a youth baseball player occurred when I hit two home runs in a Little League All-Star Game. Doing that, while getting to wear the cool jerseys, made for one of the best days of my young life.
Looking back now, the sort of discipline my dad instilled in me was pretty critical to my development. Even once Rhon let me play the infield, I was no natural-born athlete. I was actually a little round as a child, which made for some early life lessons when I started playing football in addition to baseball. Teams were decided by weight, not age, and if I wanted to play within my normal age group, I had to tip the scales at a certain amount.
When that became an issue one autumn, I found myself at risk of having to move up a level. My dad used it as motivation, teaching me about my body and the things I would need to do to become an elite athlete. That summer, he was working on the SWAT team at the police department, so it was paramount that he keep in shape. Rhon went jogging daily, usually for up to five miles at a clip, in addition to all the running he did at work. While he never made me go with him, let's just say he lovingly recommended it. Inevitably, on those runs, I'd fall behind and my dad would snap his fingers loudly, encouraging me to catch up. It worked, helping me cut weight and learn about my body. But it wasn't all that fun. I remember some days I'd come home from school and shower by five p.m., thinking if I had already showered, I wouldn't have to go jogging.
On weekends, we'd run charity 5Ks and 10Ks. Again, this wasn't my favorite way to spend a Saturday, but I could see the transformation in my body. I made weight at football, building the foundation I would need to stay in shape throughout my big league career. During the off-season, I became a runner myself, sometimes dragging my brothers with me to an old landfill in Virginia Beach called Mount Trashmore. We would sprint up, jog across the top, do sets of push-ups, and run down. Football might not have worked out as a career, but it wasn't because of my weight or my effort. It was because I hated getting tackled. What can I say? I was soft.
I was also fast and athletic, despite my weight. In one youth game, an opposing coach came up to my coach at the time, Allan Erbe, and said, "I wish my team would hit more balls to your pudgy shortstop."
"I wish they would, too," Erbe shot back.
It's easy to look back on those years and see how lucky I was, but at the time, I don't think I appreciated the discipline and structure my parents instilled in me and my brothers. I might not have fully realized how important it was until I wound up having kids myself. Growing up, it could be infuriating when my dad was tough on me. I probably slammed a lot of doors around the house. I probably cursed under my breath quite a bit. I can't even count the number of times I was fuming mad because I felt like the punishment for some transgression didn't fit the crime. But when I look back now, I understand the discipline helped me make choices that I might not have made had my parents raised me differently. I doubt I would have accomplished what I did without that grounding in my youth.
Table of Contents
Introduction 1
1 The Pudgy Kid at Shortstop 5
2 Tidewater Boys 23
3 "Adult Stuff" 33
4 The Grind 43
5 Going Home Again 57
6 Flip-Flops and Karaoke 69
7 Bigger, Faster, Stronger 77
8 Fame 93
9 October 113
10 Collapse 125
11 Déjà Vu 139
12 Red, White, and Blue 151
13 A Stranger at Home 165
14 Playing through Pain 179
15 Commitments 197
16 Captain America 213
17 The Face of MLB 227
18 Spinal Stenosis 237
19 Cookies 253
20 October, Again 265
21 Fall Classic 281
22 Back, Neck, Shoulder 293
23 Last Chance 305
24 A Night to Remember 319
Epilogue 335
Acknowledgments 339
Index 345
Related Subjects
Customer Reviews
Explore More Items
