Chris McPherson

Published in the June 2002 issue

NAT KING COLE IS ONSTAGE, bathed in smoke and blue light. Billiard-ball smooth, he rolls up to the microphone, silver in the haze, and opens his mouth. The first note out of it is perfect, and the second one is, too, and the next and the next and the next--they're all crystal. Out of some inner space comes a song, "Unforgettable," all fluid and shining and eternal, the music and the lyrics aligning like the planets before them. Too soon it ends, Nat disappearing into the fog, applause echoing from the shadows. But at least the magic of the universe came down to earth, if only for a moment.

So thought the man conducting the orchestra. His name is Joe Zito. Today he is at a ballpark in Phoenix--where his son, Barry, is working out under boundless spring skies--and the game gives him time to remember. There were nights, Joe says, when the music was so pure, it left him in tears. It was the same when he wrote his songs--the ones for Frankie Avalon and Bobby Rydell--the melodies first striking him in dreams and pouring out into the dark, returning only when he let go, when his mind was free and open and clear.

To find the same kind of bliss, Barry performs an elaborate pregame ritual that includes meditation and yoga and a lot of awfully deep breathing. By the time he finally makes it to the mound, he looks to be in something close to a trance, appearing as though, as an anonymous clubhouse wag once suggested, he's suddenly realized that he left the iron on. All he can see is the catcher's mitt, and all he can hear is his own voice, whispering encouragement. "If you have the state of mind of happiness and wholeness," Barry constantly reminds himself, "that's going to come back to you in life." Then he lets go, ever his father's son.

Looking back now, it all feels somehow inevitable to Joe--fate first intervening when he saw Roberta float across the stage as one of Nat's angelic backup singers, the Merry Young Souls. As things turned out--strange how these things always turn out, isn't it?--they would marry, and they would have children. First came Bonnie, then Sally, then, nine years later, Barry. He was different from the start, alive with vibration. By Joe's count, Barry tore through five mattresses and nine bumpers before finally breaking free of his crib. "He had this incredible energy," Joe says. "Nothing could hold him." Barry was eighteen months old when he made that first crib escape, charged for a red plastic bat and a ball, and woke the house with his banging about in the hall. Joe remembers struggling out of bed that morning and looking down at his son--this boy was possessed--and wondering, What if?

Joe had long believed that children reveal their true selves early on, leaving parents to encourage nature's course. Bonnie was good with numbers, and she would become a money manager. Sally had a way with the piano, and she would become a musician. Barry's talent was harder to assess. He was electric, athletic like jazz, but the Zito family was not a sporting one, and so Joe remained unconvinced until Barry was seven years old, ready to play his first game of organized ball. When his coach asked him to run out to his favorite position, Barry bolted for the mound, no hesitation, and snapped off his first curveball. It dropped like a broken heart.

Joe closes his eyes now and smiles. It was one of those moments, he thinks, when you could feel the magic of the universe coming down to earth--note by note, pitch by pitch.

Barry Zito is standing in the middle of the Oakland Athletics' punk-rock clubhouse, staring into a television camera, hot lights illuminating his dark, vacant eyes. The TV reporter asks Barry questions, and Barry gives answers, a scene you'll see in any given clubhouse on any given day. What sets this scene apart, however, is the present condition of Barry's uniform pants, which are undone and falling down, and the present position of his right hand--partner to one of the most coveted left hands in baseball--which is tucked inside his underwear, cupping his Merry Young Souls. Barry holds the pose until the interview clicks to a stop, at which point he frees his right hand and offers it to the oblivious reporter, who shakes it and smiles. Observers file a mental note.

Not that Barry meant to do it. He doesn't really mean to do anything. He's utterly unconcerned with the trivialities of the world around him. Just look at the guy. His thicket of matted hair, dyed blond after last year's blue, needs a power wash. His fingernails are chewed to nubs, not from nerves, but because it's easier than hunting for clippers in a locker that looks as if it's been turned inside out. And though he is not without a certain barfly style, he never looks more than five minutes removed from the worst pale-faced hangover of his life, all of which makes him seem a particularly unlikely vessel for the divine.

Until he opens his mouth.

"I'm gonna get deep on you, dude," he says, having been conditioned by past response to give warning. "When it comes to creative people--musicians, artists, writers--to be good at what they do, they can't do it all themselves. They have to be a tool for something else. When I'm standing on the mound, I want to let my body be played like an instrument. It's really hard to be consciously unconscious, but that's what you have to be." He leans in, as if to give away a secret. "And you need to believe. Because what you think in here"--he points to the side of his nappy head--"is going to happen out there. I might throw a pitch down the middle of the plate, but if I believe the hitter's going to swing through it, he's going to swing through it."

No shit?

"If you think something is meant to be, it's meant to be," he says, biting into his thumbnail. "You can make it happen."

Here's the proof: The fifteenth game of his major league career coincided with the fourth game of the 2000 American League Division Series, held in front of almost sixty thousand dyspeptic fans in the black hole that is Yankee Stadium. The first thing Barry did that evening was find a very quiet place. Then he sat and meditated, visualizing the four distinct beats of his delivery, the flawless, leggy delivery that is forever being compared to Steve Carlton's. Then he walked from the bullpen to the mound, sucking up all the energy of the place and making it his. Then he said to himself, I'm going to shove this ball up their ass. And then he allowed a single run in an 11--1 win.

Last season, Barry won seventeen more games, lost eight, was twice named Pitcher of the Month, and was again picked to face the Yankees in the playoffs, this time in the third game of the ALDS. He pitched eight innings, giving up two hits and one run. Though Oakland lost the game 1--0 and would eventually concede the series, Barry had earned his place in fantasy leagues and in our imaginations. As his manager, Art Howe, says: "You know what makes him exciting? He wants to be someone people remember."

Baseball has a proud history of inspired, like-minded men, pitchers especially, all-time characters such as Jim Bouton and Bill Lee and Mark Fidrych. But not all of them were like Barry Zito. Not all of them boasted a delivery as good as the punch line.

THE UNIVERSE demands that for every beginning, there is an end--for every molecular cloud, there is a white dwarf--and after Barry's first game of organized ball, Joe retired from the music business to guide his son to his destiny. He knew nothing about baseball, and less about curveballs, but he read books and watched tapes, and every night he would pass on the lessons to Barry in their San Diego backyard. "I thought playing baseball was a lot like playing the piano," says Joe. "To get better, you practiced and practiced and practiced some more."

Later, Joe would enlist a long series of professional tutors, including retired Padre Randy Jones and onetime Mariners scout Craig Weissmann. Each of them honed a delivery that was, by its nature, all fluid and shining and eternal--compelling enough for Seattle to draft Barry right out of high school, albeit in the fifty-ninth round. He elected not to accept their offer, telling his father, "I think I should be a first-rounder." Joe, never one to question a man's inner truth, agreed.

His future unclear for the first time in his life, Barry went off to college, enrolling at the University of California at Santa Barbara, then transferring to Pierce College in Los Angeles, then turning down the Texas Rangers when they drafted him in the third round, and then moving on to the University of Southern California, where he was named the Pac-10 Pitcher of the Year in 1999. Soon thereafter, he was selected ninth overall by the Athletics and was handed a signing bonus of $1.59 million. He was promoted to Triple-A Vancouver before the end of his first minor league season, to Oakland the following July, and to the mound at Yankee Stadium that October.

"Ever since he was a child, Barry has studied for greatness," says A's pitching coach Rick Peterson. Perhaps not coincidentally, Peterson was also one of Barry's demanding tutors, another one of those men who called him out to the backyard every night, without fail. "I really didn't feel like I had a choice," Barry remembers.

After his first big-league start--during which he struck out Anaheim's Mo Vaughn, Tim Salmon, and Garret Anderson with thirteen pitches--he realized that, in fact, he never did.

Though Barry pays no mind to the world around him, the world has no choice but to pay mind to him. His arrival in the clubhouse can be felt, energy radiating off him like heat. He comes in through the back door, motion and light and noise, his six-foot-four-inch freshman body poured into black pants and a loud, big-collared shirt that might have come from his father's closet. He makes for the kitchen, fetches a box of cereal--for now, thanks be to God, his belt remains buckled--returns the smiles offered by his teammates, and throws himself into the first bowl of a three-bowl breakfast. He is content.

It's just another morning at the ballpark for Barry, but there is something genuine and pure about him. Professional athletes--and baseball players more than most--are too often world-weary and careful, obsessed with the upkeep of hollow images. Barry is none of this. For him, everything is as it is, and there is nothing to be ashamed about. He thinks himself invincible, because life has never given him reason to think otherwise.

He slurps up the last of his cereal, glides across the room to his locker, and changes into his uniform. He pulls on his number 75, a number that leaves him last on both roster sheets--numerical and alphabetical--and tugs his socks high enough to make his uniform pants look like bloo- mers. The final touch? Oakland's regulation white-ass cleats, pimped out like the rest of his exuberant life, as distinctive as his getup. Off the field, he plucks his guitar, surfs under honey skies, and has twice played a tights-clad toy soldier in the Oakland Ballet's presentation of The Nutcracker. He also indulges in a passion for women--Latino women, preferably--that he is only too happy to talk about. "Lots of chicks like fat wallets," he says with a shrug. "Sometimes I'll be with a chick and my mind will start going, Does she really like me for who I am? and all that crap. But then I'll snap out of it, because ..." Here he laughs, understanding how ridiculous it all sounds. "Because, really, who cares? I'm gonna have my fun."

It is a worldview that relaxes a man, makes him open. Too open, perhaps, in the eyes of some of his teammates. Early in his rookie season, Barry told a national television audience about the stuffed animals he keeps for company. For the rest of the year, he was forced to escort a three-foot bear, Mr. Jangles, on every road trip. Undeterred, he later let slip to reporters that he'd given thought to "dressing like a girl." That admission earned him a trip through the lobby of a Baltimore hotel clad in a wedding gown. On yet another evening, he sparked a family dinner-table conversation on bestiality after he found Internet footage of a woman being mounted by a dalmatian. In that instance, the only repercussion came from his Mexican Catholic girlfriend. "She was ready to die," he says now, smiling. Then he laughs the laugh of a young man with a blessed left arm, standing under the hot lights of a television camera with his pants down and his hand in his jock, confident that fate is in his back pocket, an ace up his sleeve.

There are new limits to Barry's openness, however. He admits to saying "real sick shit" to older players to try to get a rise out of them, but he has learned that certain subjects are better kept to himself. Such as his interest in physics.

He is currently reading in preparation for an astronomy course, but he talks about it quietly, pausing to glance over his shoulder at the life-and-death card game unfolding behind him, lest he be accused of witchcraft. Still, he can't help getting excited when he explains that the scientists busily splitting atoms have strengthened the validity of the big bang theory by discovering atomic subsystems that act in the way an embryonic universe might have done. "Dude," he says, those dark eyes widening. "I just tripped out when I read that." Behind him, another hand is dealt. No one asks Barry if he wants in.

Baseball, like the military, has built-in safeguards against nonconformity. The strength of a man's character is judged by the shine of his boots or the height of his socks, and the most important thing in life--outside of claiming Kunduz or the American League West--is fitting in. Be all you can be, but for chrissakes, don't be queer about it or the result will be exile, self-imposed or otherwise. It happened to Jim Bouton, to Bill Lee, to Mark Fidrych. And it will happen, if he allows it to happen, to Barry Zito. It is up to him to endure.

He has been tested, wedding gowns and Mr. Jangles aside. Last season started off badly for Barry, who was 6--7 through late July. It was, by all accounts, a trying time, but his father had a ready diagnosis. "He forgot who he was and how the universe operates," says Joe. "Baseball is not a game of chance. Nothing is left to chance. If you create the psychological state, it will become a physical fact. Whatever you see in the visible world, it started in the invisible world, in the mind. The universe took care of the rest...." Joe stops midstream. "I must ask. Does any of this sound off-the-wall?"

At its core, his opinion is not far removed from Art Howe's more conventional assessment: "He didn't trust his stuff anymore." But the infinite scope of Joe's perspective doomed any of the usual remedies--a change of undershirt, say--to failure. Instead, he locked himself away with his son for four days. They read to each other and talked to each other and remembered how the music came, late at night and without warning, when Joe's mind was free and open and clear. Barry emerged from the sessions reborn, an instrument to be played. He went 11--1 with a 1.32 ERA to close the season, finishing on a nine-game winning streak--one as long as Rick Langford or Dave Stewart ever managed in Oakland--and restoring his faith in the cosmos, big bang theory and all.

In Barry Zito, of course, there was never really any doubt. He can count up all of those moments when the magic of the universe has come down to earth--note by note, pitch by pitch--and he has been made to believe, over and over and over again. "I'm going to be in this game for a long time," he says, certain. "I want to make my mark."

There are places where he already has. At the bottom of his locker lies his cap, turned inside out. There is something written in black marker on the yellow foam front, but he flips it over before it can be read. Asked about it, he seems hesitant. He is still exuding shyness when he finally relents, halfway showing his handiwork. Written there is a reminder, pressed flush against his frontal lobe: LET IT DO THE WORK THROUGH ME. And so long as he remains transcendent, he knows that he'll hear no arguments.

So long as he remains transcendent.

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