QUOTE:
I've always thought the real lesson in Jim Bouton's classic book, "Ball Four" was found in its final passage, when he wrote, "you spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time."

Like the former Yankee hurler, I've spent my entire amateur career chasing that Holy Grail – getting the ball to run, sink, curve or just nudging it up the radar gun by a few mph. But Bouton ultimately was right: Control of the ball - and with it, the at-bat, the game, sometimes even your life - ends the moment it leaves a pitcher's fingertips.

I learned this hard lesson July 10 at Smith Field in Parsippany, when the curveball I threw not only froze in the middle of the strike zone, it turned into a missile searing toward my skull. Thanks to a combination of topspin off the hitter's bat, and a rock near the mound, a last-second bad hop left me defenseless as the ball struck me in the eye.

The explosion in my head might as well have come from a 12-gauge shotgun; that's how loud it was. The ball sliced open my cornea, completely detached my retina, ruptured several areas of the eye socket and broke nearly every bone on the right side of my face.

I remember drifting, floating - was I dying, I wondered? - then landing on the ground with a sick thud. I could feel the blood pouring out of my nose, my mouth and from the cut on my cheekbone, which had been split in half.

"I can't see, I can't see," is what I kept screaming before my words dissolved into a sound that can only be described as a rung lower than primal. One of my teammates, a Roxbury police officer, turned away in horror.

An iron, black curtain was now covering half my field of vision, and as I felt my face beginning to swell, I heard another teammate say, "it's worse than Tony C."

He was talking about Tony Conigliaro, whose gruesome, purple-eyed contusion will forever be remembered by baseball fans. Forty-plus years later, the Red Sox' outfielder, struck in the face by a Jack Hamilton fastball, remains the worst-case scenario of baseball injuries.

At least Conigliaro regained his vision; the emergency room doctors at Morristown Memorial Hospital weren't as optimistic for me. One of the surgeons advised me to prepare for a life with only one functioning eye. "Hey, it didn't stop Sammy Davis Jr." he said, trying to be light-hearted.

At that point, I asked for a moment of privacy: The doctor left the room, as did the half-dozen teammates who accompanied me to the hospital. The Morris Mariners were my friends, fellow warriors, but at this moment I was utterly alone. I called my wife who was home with our two young children and told her I was half blind. We both started to cry.