When I showed up for my first taste of professional baseball, I was coming off a wrist surgery. I had broken it diving over the catcher’s head against Harvard 6 days before the draft (This was before I learned that I wasn’t a slide guy) and they needed to insert a screw into my Navicular bone. So I showed up in August, I was 3 months late to a Short-Season Advanced Rookie Ball team that only played a 4-month season. And coming off a wrist surgery… my bat speed was almost non-existent.

It was also my first real-time playing with wooden bats. Those things are heavier than the aluminum bats I was used to. If you start using a wood bat even in a normal situation and you’re not used to them, it can get ugly. For me, it did.

My first week there I was still “rehabbing” so I could only practice. No games yet. During batting practice, I found myself fouling a lot of balls back into the batting tunnel. And a lot of balls out of play down the right field line. My timing would have been ok, but my bat speed was WAY slower than I was used to, so I was actually late on everything. When I finally hit a batting practice home run to the pull side about 6 days in… everyone on the field gave a sarcastic (and possibly pre-planned) round of applause!

Gary DiSarcina (DiSar) was the manager for that team. The Lowell Spinners. He had played in the big leagues for a long time himself and made an MLB All-Star game or three. Suffice to say, he was legit.

I finished the season and was happy to be healthy and back to normal by spring training the next year. I got promoted to Low-A the next year with a new coaching staff and a new manager. But minor league spring training games are all right next to each other, so I saw a lot of games on the field Disar was coaching. During one of those spring training games I was watching the field he was coaching and I saw him lift his coach’s skull-cap helmet straight up and down twice while looking at the first base coach.

I asked him about it afterward, and he said “Oh, you saw that did you? The first base coach and I have secret signs for when we’re watching new draftees. Lifting the helmet twice means, ‘This kid’s got no chance…’ and if the other coach scratches his armpit, that means, ‘Definitely gonna strike out!’ We used to give those signs when YOU were hitting ALL THE TIME!”