This time I didn't need any hints to know when to quit and walk away... for good.
I'd had a good run. Since the day I graduated from high school I'd never worked a single day of my life at a real job, and for part of my professional playing career I'd even been a minor star during my prime, good for at least ten home runs and twenty stolen bases each season. Pretty darned good at times, especially for a middle infielder like me, but I would never get an invitation to the Hall of Fame, until they open a wing just for the rest of us mere mortals. I did earn two Gold Gloves and three All-Star appearances, and the awards look nice sitting on my fireplace mantle, but Cooperstown has never given me a call to put either my bat or glove into the museum, nor will they ever.
The bad side about having been a career professional athlete all of my adult life is that I had never gone to college and didn't have a lick of experience at doing anything else normal with my life. I didn't even have an off-season hobby that I could cultivate into a second career. Looking back on it, I should have done something useful with my six month long off-seasons. Something... anything! Learned carpentry, collected antiques, gotten a real estate license... anything to fill the time just a tad more productively.
I didn't. Now, retired for nearly two full years now, I was bored out of my rather empty skull and quietly going crazy looking at the ever constricting four walls of my house. Don't get me wrong, I love San Francisco and I probably played the five best years of my entire career here so sometimes older fans still remember me, but it was getting old playing resident tourist. Not to mention that some long ignored voices were calling to me, beckoning me to return back home to Chicago. My mother was getting too old to tend to my disabled father and she was almost begging for my help. I had no problems with sending her money -- I had done so for over twenty years, the problem was that I had no intention of ever being in the same house with my father again. He'd had two heart attacks and a stroke, but the surly old bastard was just too mean to die.
My father was the only son of a Lithuanian immigrant who arrived in Chicago in 1938 and worked in the meat plants for forty years. My father did the same, in fact both men were carved from the same unyielding block of granite, and each treated their wives and children with the same brutality and insensitivity that they used while cutting carcasses. My father didn't like baseball and never once watched me play a game, either in my high school or major league career, but he loved the Chicago Bears football team with a passion. It was my mother who signed my professional baseball contract for me when I was seventeen so that I could leave home -- hopefully forever. She knew then that she had lost me but the alternative was worse... I was pretty good and ready, and quite able, to kill my own father the very next time he laid his brutish fists upon me.
I wasn't completely insensitive to my family. I called and wrote, occasionally, and I'd visit my mother every season when passing through Chicago, but I never once again set foot inside the family home. I would arrange to pickup my mother from the street corner or meet her elsewhere and then take her out for a little shopping and a nice dinner. I'd offered more times than I could count to buy her a home of her own if she would just leave my father -- but she never would. She was catholic and divorce was unthinkable to her, then and still now. If not happy, she was at least content with her life and was prepared to live and deal with my father for another forty years, if necessary.
It was a miracle that I didn't inherit the family anger management problems. If anything, I'm too patient and count to at least twenty before I even think about blowing my stack. I can count the number of times that I've lost my temper since I became an adult on one hand, with fingers left over. Much too patient probably sometimes... something my ex-wife took advantage of shamelessly. She was an expert at passive-aggressive manipulation and for four years she ruled the roost until I came home early from a road-trip three days early with a slight injury to find her our bed with her boyfriend. She'd been having an affair with him for nearly two years and had been supporting him with my money. She had been patiently waiting to divorce me after the end of this season when I would be a free-agent and would undoubtedly get a fat pay increase by moving to another team. It very nearly worked -- I hadn't suspected a thing.
We lived in a no alimony state at the time, and after hiring a good PI to lock down all of the evidence, I escaped from the divorce without losing even a sock, let alone my shirt. I even received a default judgment for theft from her boytoy to recover the money she had lavished upon him. She loved him enough to marry him, and as far as I know they're still together. To stay out of jail, he sends me a check every month for $20, so I can't sue him for non-payment, but I know I'll never receive back anything close to the full owed amount. In some bad moods, I've considered selling my debt to the nastiest south side mob-owned collections agency I can find, for ten cents on the dollar just so I could enjoy the fun of watching the professional leg-breakers collect! Nah, I am over it... and I guess everyone has a right to try and find a little happiness in this world.
Anyway, to make a long story short, Mom's health is none too good now as well and it's getting harder for her now to tend after dear old dad, who has been in a wheelchair since his third heart-attack. I really need to pay her a visit... as soon as I can think of a way to help her that she would accept -- other than moving in back home! About some things, she's as stubborn as my father.
*************
Boredom makes you do strange things, like kick up your heels and yell out 'Oh, hell yes!' when you get an invitation in the mail to be the paid guest of a Caribbean cruise line for one of its regular "Legends of Baseball" cruises. Ok, the actual honorarium payment wasn't very much... but I would get paid airfare, a 1st class cabin and VIP treatment. That alone was enough to make me accept their offer five minutes later over the phone.
I really needed a change of scenery!
The first cruise as a guest was actually a lot of fun. Most of my other 'so-called' "Legends" were other minor stars like me that had had long careers and some minimal name recognition, along with one or two borderline almost HOF'ers thrown in for name appearance. You can't get a real bonifide enshrined Hall of Fame player for the kind of peanuts they were paying, not when they can get at least fifty to over a hundred dollars for each and every autograph they sign. They are a commodity, and not to be wasted signing for free on a cruise only to see the signed photos and balls showing up on eBay immediately afterwards.
Unlike most of my veteran ball playing companions, I took the effort to show up for all of our scheduled events (mostly) sober, and I put on (and kept on) my best public relations smile the entire five days of the cruise. Surprisingly, it was the youth baseball skill clinics that I enjoyed the most. I hadn't before shown much if any interest in coaching, especially kids, but I found I had the patience to do it... and sometimes even enjoy it! My other vets would disappear the minute their scheduled times were over, but increasingly I found myself remaining and staying until the last kid... and older mature fans, were done.
The word got around that I was the 'nice' former ballplayer, and the cruise line happily signed me up for all of their following Legends cruises that year, both in the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico, Baja and even the Alaskan cruises. They even agreed to a very minor pay increase in my honorarium.
That year I spent about twelve weeks on-board various ships, and having the time of my life. At home, I began to become involved with the local Little League, acting as sort of a roving instructor for all of the city teams... unpaid... and loving every minute of it!
One of the very best things about Little League is Little League Moms, many of which are mostly certainly MILF's. Oh, yeah definitely. I've had more than one coach tell me that after they select the best players for their team they then fill in the rest of the roster by picking the kids with the hottest looking moms. The coaches might have their fun with the bored housewives looking for a little excitement, but there was no shortage at all of very pretty divorcees... some of which were even nice to be around outside of a bedroom. Soon I was juggling two different ones that I sort of liked a lot, but didn't quite 'love' either of them. I think they both wanted a bit more from me, but were quite willing to accept what I was capable of offering. I think they even knew about each other too, but were polite enough to not discuss the competition.
Still, both relationships were sliding into 'friends with benefits' territory when I finally did meet a woman on a cruise that seemed to cover all of my bases, but with a frosty glare, struck me out on three pitches, looking.
*************
Marcy Lynn Rutherford was an impossible woman to overlook. She was tall with long golden wheat colored hair that fell nearly to her skimpy bikini bottom and she had large round pale breasts that hardly slumped at all inside of her nearly equally insufficient top. Nearly at once, my stomach churned exactly the way it did during my playing days when I stepped up to bat against one of the game's premier fastball pitchers, a menace who could (and often did) throw a hundred-mile an hour fastball past me before my eyes had even blinked.
She was out of my league, as far as looks were concerned, and from the looks of some of the single men nearby she had already been singled out by the wolfpack as their preferred intended prey. Over the next hour, I watched better, taller and much more handsome men than me approach her to get shot down cold. Strikeouts, every one.
She was none too sober, even by the early afternoon, but she seemed to be quite in the mood to [celebrate], and often had her teenaged son and daughter with her. A little snooping (ok, stalking) revealed that she was a very merry brand-new divorcee who was here for a "Quilting Cruise", and most very definitely not here to dally with men, and very certainly not looking to start even a quickie short term romance.
I thought it was a rather clever marketing tool of the cruise line to have quilting events for the women while the sons and husbands were attending the Baseball Legends events, keeping everyone busy and happy. This is how I got to meet her rather troubled son, Jeffery.
