I got to spring training in February 1981 and threw lights out — fastball in the low 90s, and my slider had teeth, broke late and sharp. Nasty. I was back on their radar. Amazing how the hurt fades in such moments.

Then it happened. I was on the mound in Pawtucket and let a fastball go. POP. I felt as if I had been shot in the shoulder. I flipped a couple of changeups in there and got out of the inning.

I headed off the mound and signaled to my pitching coach, Mike Roarke, to follow me to the locker room. I told him straight out what happened, and followed with this: “I’m not coming out of the game.” He said he had to pull me. I was supposed to go to the big club any day, and they needed to know. Not to mention he did not want to see me ruin my arm.

What he did not know is that my arm had been bad for years.

He was a mountain of a man, an old catcher with busted hands; he knew how to play with pain. I told him that this was my shot and that if he didn’t help me, I would deny this conversation ever happened. Right then and there, he reworked my delivery to take pressure off my shoulder, and I headed back out to the game. No one ever knew.

After that, Mike kept tweaking my delivery to make it work. He suggested more changeups and to back down on the fastball. He saved my career before it ever started. I made it back to the bigs in 1981. I never saw the minors again. We had a great trainer, and I grew up as a pitcher in one of the toughest ballparks for lefties in the bigs. I stayed with Boston until the winter of 1985. My left arm spent 1985 both starting and relieving. Ten games in April, mix in warming up, that’s as bad as it can get when your arm’s hanging.

Whatever It Took in ’86

O.K., so I got traded to the Mets. I could not tell you one thing about them. I had been in the A.L. for five years. Their clubhouse vibe was edgy: Let’s do everything hard. Even Davey Johnson carried himself with the confidence of a man with a gun in a knife fight. It rubbed off on me quickly. I felt at home at last. We wanted to win at all costs. That team made playing hurt the rule, not the exception. Sore? Take this. Tired? Take this. Overserved last night? Take this. There was no “next year.” It was now or nothing. The speed we were running at would never last. We all knew it but didn’t give a damn.

As for my arm? Standard operating procedure: the trainer wanted to talk about my routines and quirks and such. We all had them. He had to decipher our superstitions, security blankets and legitimate concerns to our physical health. Trainers who have been around filter the garbage as well as the best sewer treatment plant. I slung my brand of bull, and the trainer, Steve Garland, pretended to buy it. He’d ask how I was doing, and I’d say, “Fine.” He knew that I was lying and that that was the way it was supposed to be. I trusted and liked him right off.