A Day In The Life Of Jerry Hairston

An Inside Look At What It’s Like To Be A Big Leaguer, On And Off The Field

A few minutes after midnight on Saturday, July 24, Jerry Hairston steers his white-diamond Cadillac Escalade through the darkness and into the driveway of his three-story townhouse in Owings Mills, Maryland, 10 miles north of Baltimore. He is returning from Camden Yards, where a little less than 90 minutes earlier, the Orioles had lost to the Minnesota Twins, 7-3. Hairston played the entire game in right field and went 1-for-3 at the plate.

Though it’s after midnight and the Orioles will play the Twins again this Saturday at 6 p.m., Hairston’s not quite ready for bed. He injured his back making a difficult catch against the outfield wall in Kansas City five days earlier, and he’s still very sore.

So he draws a hot bath, adds some Epsom salts, slips LL Cool J, Boyz II Men, and Mariah Carey CDs into his sound system, and hops into the soothing water. Thus begins a day in the life of a major league ballplayer.

For two-and-one-half to three hours of most summer days or nights, a big league player’s life is on public display, to tens of thousands of fans at the park and many more thousands via television. But during the rest of the day, players’ lives are not so glamorous. They prepare for games, spend time with their families, and go about the same quotidian rituals, routines, chores and amusements of most Americans. Hairston, the Orioles second baseman-turned-right fielder (at least temporarily), shared with Outside Pitch the full chronology of this particular day in his life, both what he did and what he was thinking, on and off the baseball field.

Hairston had agreed to a similar rendering of 24 hours of his life during the 2003 season, but the date chosen turned out to be an inauspicious one. It was May 20, and in his first at-bat of that evening’s game in Anaheim, he twisted his ankle while fouling off a pitch, breaking a bone in his foot and missing the next three and one-half months. So much for that story — at least for 2003.

July 24 of this year turned out to be more fortuitous. Hairston, who has had more than his share of bad luck injuries, including breaking a finger in the first exhibition game this spring and thus missing the first six weeks of the regular season, survived July 24 without mishap.

He gets about 7-8 hours of sleep, following his hot bath and wakes up about 9 AM.

But he’s immediately in a rush.

He and his wife, Tanaha, have a Bible study session to attend not far from their home. So he has to leave his bed earlier than he would prefer and still barely has time to munch on a muffin and a trail mix bar before heading out the door and going to nearby Kingdom Hall, where the Bible study is held. The Hairstons spend about an hour there and then return home just before noon. Hairston hops back into bed for a nap, sleeps until about 1, gets up and dresses, and heads to the ballpark.

In his car he listens to Janet Jackson and No Doubt on his CD player. And he thinks about the upcoming ballgame. This is a common theme of Hairston’s life on virtually every day of the baseball season—concentrating on a gamme about to be played or rehashing in his mind a game that has just been completed.

On this Saturday afternoon, as he drives to Camden Yards in downtown Baltimore, Hairston thinks about what he hopes to accomplish in the game and on the importance of being focused. He also knows that he will be facing the Twins’ Terry Mulholland, a left-hander whom he has never before batted against. He really doesn’t know what to expect of the veteran Mulholland. He can go over a scouting report and listen to advice from his hitting coach and other players, but none of that is the same thing as standing in a batter’s box and actually seeing for oneself how a fastball moves or a curve ball breaks.

Hairston makes a brief stop on his way to the park at a bakery and sandwich shop on Reisterstown Road for a turkey sandwich, which he eats in his car. He pulls into the players’ parking lot at Camden Yards, walks down the steps and through the corridors in the underbelly of the park and into the Oriole clubhouse. The first thing Hairston does is go to the spot between the locker room and the showers where the day’s pass list sits. He signs up for two tickets, to be left for his wife and a friend. He heads to his locker, takes off his civvies, puts on some workout shorts and heads back to the trainer’s room. There Hairston hops into the Jacuzzi to soak his still-aching back. He’s joined in the Jacuzzi by Rafael Palmeiro. The two players talk about Palmeiro’s eldest son, Patrick, who is a constant presence this summer in the Orioles’ clubhouse.

After his brief spell in the Jacuzzi, Hairston has his ankles taped and then fully dresses for batting practice.

But well before batting practice even begins, he goes to the inside batting cage not far from the locker room to get his fundamentals down pat for the game. Hitting coach Terry Crowley looks on, and batting practice pitcher Rudy Arias flips him some underhand tosses to hit from up close. “Some guys hit off the tee,” says Hairston. “I prefer to get flips. I go over my check points in my swing—where my hands are on the bat, where my feet are, things like that.”

At 3:47 in the afternoon, he walks down the corridor from the clubhouse through the dugout and onto the field. It’s time for pre-batting practice stretching.

At just after 4, with his body well-stretched from the workout, he begins to loosen his arm, throwing a ball with Palmeiro and Melvin Mora.

He walks over to the batting cage for a while and chats with Mora and Miguel Tejada, who are getting ready to hit. Hairston is in a hitting group this day with the two men who will follow him in the lineup, Darnell McDonald and Ken Huckaby. They won’t be going into the cage for another half hour, so he trots out to right field to shag flies. Scant few fly balls come out his way, however. So it’s mostly just standing around, talking to other players nearby like Karim Garcia and a few pitchers. The irony is that Hairston is standing about 200 feet behind Brian Roberts, who is taking ground balls at second base. This is the position that Hairston was supposed to be playing this year, before his spring training injury sidelined him and gave Roberts a chance to assume the second base job. When Hairston returned to action from the disabled list on May 11, Roberts was hitting and fielding well, and manager Lee Mazzilli did not want to take him out of the lineup. But the manager also wanted Hairston to play, thus the transformation to right field. It’s clearly not where Hairston prefers to be. He is a superior second baseman, and the outfield is foreign terrain for him, though he’s been mastering the position adroitly. He and Roberts are good friends, but they know that one of them will almost definitely be traded, as only one of them can realistically play second. Hairston has been a team player and a trooper, holding back his tongue and dutifully accepting the right field assignment without complaint. Still, he’s not thrilled to be away from second. “It’s weird,” he says of his move to right field. “I’m being patient.”

He trots into the infield and stands on second base for two minutes, taking throws from Tejada, who is being hit grounders by coach Sam Perlozzo. He then shifts over to his normal second base position, next to sub Luis Lopez, ready to field a few grounders off the bats of hitters in the cage. Few come his way.

At 4:30 he goes into a room off the dugout to get two bats—a heavierr than normal one that he’ll use for his first couple of rounds of batting practice, and then a bat that’s the same weight as the one he’ll use in the game. “In the first couple of rounds,” he explains, “I really concentrate on getting on top of the ball and on hitting the ball the other way. In the last rounds, I take the hands to the back and try to swing them down through the zone.”

With an hour and a half left to game time, he steps into the batting cage. First he lays down two bunts. Then he takes 10 pitches from southpaw batting practice pitcher Vince Horsman. He hits some line drives and grounders, mostly to left, then lopes around the bases as McDonald swings in the cage. Back at the cage he talks with Justin Morneau of the Twins before returning for eight more cuts at the plate. In all, this afternoon, Hairston will swing at 37 pitches in the cage. None leave the ballpark.

When his group’s time in the cage is up, he, McDonald and Huckaby pick up the loose balls around the cage. He talks briefly with Jacques Jones and Torii Hunter of the Twins, two players he knew well during their years in the minor leagues, and at 4:45 he steps into the Oriole dugout. There he signs autographs for a couple of kids who will be honorary batboy and batgirl for the day. And then it’s back to the clubhouse to get mentally ready for the 6:05 game. He tries to relax and consumes a protein shake and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

At 5:53, about 15 minutes prior to game time, Hairston leaves the clubhouse and goes onto the field. He runs in the outfield for a few minutes to loosen his legs.

Just before game time, he’s back on the field for “The Star Spangled Banner.” The game begins at 6:07.

Things begin uneventfully for Hairston.

No balls come his way for the first few innings. He bats for the first time in the bottom of the second with one out and Palmeiro on first, carrying a .307 average into the game. On a 1-2 pitch, he hits a hard line drive to left, but right into the glove of the right fielder.

“I was hoping that I’d get to see at least three pitches that at bat,” he says. “I’d never faced Mulholland before. I wanted to see where he was coming from, what kind of pitches he had. You can hear stuff from the hitting coach, but it’s not the same as actually facing a pitcher.”

But Hairston fell in an 0-2 hole early, so he had to alter his approach.

“When you get two strikes, you’re more on high alert. You never want to take defensive swings, but you need to be ready for anything and put the fat part of the bat on the ball. He threw me two curveballs, one for a strike, and when I saw the second curve I wanted to take a good, aggressive cut. I didn’t want them to keep throwing breaking balls. He hung it a little, and I reacted, and fouled it off. The third pitch was a cutter on my hands a fastball, and I hit it pretty good.”

He comes to the plate again in the fourth inning, with the Orioles trailing, 2-1.

There’s one out and no one on base. On a 1-1 pitch, he bounces a single in the hole between the third baseman and shortstop.

Mulholland throws immediately to first. Hairston, an aggressive runner, has been picked off several times in recent weeks. Not this time, though.

“I know he has a really good move,” he says of Mulholland. “As a base stealer, you never want to be timid. You’ve got to realize that there are times you’re going to be picked off. Rickey Henderson told me the biggest thing about being a base stealer is that you can’t be afraid about being picked off. Henderson got picked off, all the great ones have. You can’t think about that.”

But getting picked off third base by a catcher, as Hairston had been a few days earlier, is another matter. “When you get picked off by a catcher, that’s upsetting,” he concedes. “That bothered me more than anything. When you get picked off by a pitcher, especially a left hander, I don’t worry about it at all, because you’re often going on the first move. So you don’t really think about it.”

At first base, Hairston contemplated trying to steal, but he wanted to familiarize himself first with Mulholland’s move. “I wanted to see a couple more moves, draw some more throws, but he never did it,” he explains.

In the top of the fifth, still without a single play to make in field, Hairston runs over to get a foul ball hit down the first base line. He picks the ball up, and in hook shot motion, heaves it to the fans on the flag court, above the scoreboard.

“I just wanted to throw it, just do a little Magic Johnson mini-sky hook, just have a little fun with the fans,” he says. “Sometimes, you have to pick your time to have fun. This game is not easy, you have ups and downs, it can be very frustrating. You have to pick your time to have fun.”

Moments later Morneau drills a line drive to right. Hairston sprints in, dives straight forward, and makes a beautiful catch.

“I’m reading balls off the bat better,” says the neophyte right fielder. “As an infielder, I try to anticipate. If you listen to the best athletes in any sport, the biggest thing, I think, is anticipating. As an infielder, you’re always anticipating. On that one, I just got a good jump on the ball. Fortunately I was able to make the play.”

As he jogs back to the dugout, the fans offer him a nice ovation.

“That was real nice,” he says. “I’ve got a couple ovations from them. I think they realize I’m trying to do the best I can out there, and they appreciate it.”

In the outfield, Hairston is closer to the fans than at second base and can sometimes hear what they are saying.

“But sometimes I block it out,” he says, especially on the road. “I haven’t had a problem at all at home. Most of the time I’m just trying to concentrate on what I’m doing out there.”

His third at-bat of the game comes in the 6th inning just after Tejada has tied the score with a homer.

He fouls a few balls off, then hits a little grounder to first. Hairston sprints down the line and at the last second, as Mulholland is about to take the throw at the bag, Hairston dives head first to the base. He’s just out. But this is the same way he broke his finger in spring training. Managers hate seeing these types of head first slides into a base. So, ironically, does Hairston himself.

“I don’t recommend it,” he says. “I wouldn’t advise kids to do it. I’m just trying to get there as fast as I can. I wish I wouldn’t do it. After I do it, I get upset at myself some times. It’s just reaction. I don’t like it. I’m just doing it. But I don’t want to do it. You can get hurt in so many ways, and I don’t want to increase my chances of getting hurt again.”

Sometimes Hairston will return to the video room in the clubhouse during a game to look at tapes of his at-bats, if he’s feeling uncomfortable. But that’s not the case this game. “I felt pretty good, decent that day.”

In the outfield, he thinks of little other than what’s going on in the game. “If there’s a meeting on the mound, I might think about my next at-bat,” Hairston says. “Otherwise, while the game’s going on, I’m thinking about where I need to be, is he a pull hitter, will he ever go the other way, do I need to play shallower?”

Hairston is unhappy with his final at-bat of the day, in the eighth inning, when he flies out to right.

“That was a terrible at bat,” he says. “I was really disgusted with myself after that at-bat. Every hitter wants to get hits. When I get upset, though, is when I feel I didn’t do all I could that at-bat. I try to get a hit every at -bat. But I didn’t do all I could with that at-bat. I felt I wasted an at-bat. That’s my biggest pet peeve in this game. When I do that I get very frustrated. I was thinking too much—was he going to throw me a slider, what would he throw me? When you think like that you, you don’t do well. I didn’t take a good, aggressive swing. You should watch the ball and take a good aggressive swing. The worst thing is to take a half swing. That time I babied it. You want to fire your hands through the zone. You never want your hands to be lazy. And when that happens I get upset. I threw my helmet to the side, kind of disgusted. Sometimes I do things I wish I didn’t, but I get upset sometimes. That’s me. I wish I was like Harold Baines. He’s really calm. My dad was like that, too. That’s not me. I’m very hard on myself. Nobody’s harder on me than me.”

Hairston was on-deck when Tejada scored all the way from first base in the eight on a steal, a wild throw and a gutsy dash for the plate.

“I was helping him to slide to the right, to my left,” Hairston says of the play. “He is a special player. We high-fived each other. I hope he gets some votes for MVP. He deserves it. I know our team isn’t doing all that well right now, but he definitely deserves it.”

Tejada’s daring play ices a 4-2 Oriole victory. After the last out, Hairston shakes hands on the field with his teammates.

He then returns to the dressing room, gets an ice pack for his back in the training room and showers.

He goes to the players’ private lounge, talks over the game with Roberts, and eats stuffed turkey, some barbecued ribs and broccoli, washed down by a Gatorade.

A little before 10 p.m., he heads back home. Though his wife was at the game, he didn’t see her. At their house, though, they watch television together. There is no talk of the ballgame before they turn off the lights around midnight.

“I try to leave baseball at the park,” he says.