The Rock Says!

John Rocker is pitching for the Long Island Ducks, trying to make a comeback to the major leagues after a couple years of rehab for rotator cuff surgery. He had a pretty bad first appearance, walking four batters in a row in a relief appearance, but I figure it means I need to give you guys my John Rocker story, so here goes.

In 1999, Georgia native John Rocker was a hard-throwing closer for the Atlanta Braves. He’d gained notoriety for sprinting out of the bullpen, generally being insanely pumped up, and giving the finger to fans for opposing teams after closing out a game. Mets fans in particular hated him.

In December of that year, Sports Illustrated ran an interview with Rocker in which he, to put it bluntly, made a complete ass of himself. Among the quotes:

“The biggest thing I don’t like about New York are the foreigners. I’m not a very big fan of foreigners. You can walk an entire block in Times Square and not hear anybody speaking English. Asians and Koreans and Vietnamese and Indians and Russians and Spanish people and everything up there. How the hell did they get in this country?”

“I would retire first [before playing for a New York team]. It’s the most hectic, nerve-racking city. Imagine having to take the Number 7 train to the ballpark next to some kid with purple hair, next to some queer with AIDS right next to some dude who just got out of prison for the fourth time right next to some 20-year-old mom with four kids. It’s depressing.”

“Nowhere else in the country so people spit at you, throw bottles at you throw quarters at you, throw batteries at you and say, ‘Hey I did your mother last night–she’s a whore.’ I talked about what degenerates they were, and they proved me right. Just by saying something, I could make them mad enough to go home and slap their moms.”

Rocker was vilified after the interview. MLB fined him $20,000 and suspended him for spring training and a month of the regular season. The commissioner of baseball ordered Rocker to undergo psychiatric counseling. In the middle of the next season, he put a nice apology together.

His 2000 season started shakily, as Rocker tried to mend fences with his teammates, but he ended relatively well. In 2001, he was shakier, but he did have 19 saves in 23 opportunities by midseason. In June of 2001, while the Braves were in New York to face the Mets, the team traded Rocker to the Cleveland Indians.

And that’s where our paths crossed.

I was at Newark Airport to board a Continental flight for San Diego for the annual BIO conference. The monorail to my terminal had a few stops. At one of them, I noticed a tall, well-built guy in a black suit, about to board the car behind mine. I thought, “That guy looks like John Rocker.” Then he picked up his Atlanta Braves athletic bag and I thought, “That guy IS John Rocker!”

We got off at the same terminal, and I walked beside him to the escalator.

“John?” I asked.

He looked at me, smirked, and nodded.

“Congratulations on the new job,” I said, low-keying it. “Good luck with the transfer.”

“Thanks,” he replied.

“I’m a Yankees fan, so I’m not wishing you TOO much luck . . .”

He smiled. “Man, we’re gonna be back here next week. But I’ll try to take it easy on ’em for ya.”

“I wouldn’t expect it,” I said. We headed down the escalator. I asked him for an autograph for my publisher, who’s a Mets fan.

“So he hates me?”

“Oh, yeah,” I said, as he signed a card.

Now, keep in mind that this guy had just been traded and was in a territory where he had to assume that anyone who recognized him would greet him with “ROCKERYOUSUCK!” Nonetheless, he was perfectly cordial and friendly when I approached him.

So, as we got off the escalator, I decided to talk with him a little. I said, “Let me ask you something.”

“Shoot.”

“When all the controversy broke out after that SI piece, I remember reading a couple of articles about how you were a pretty good student, and how you wanted to go back to college and all.”

“You read that stuff?” he asked.

“Yeah. So what I’m wondering is: do you, uh, read much?”

Now, this might strike you as a weird question, given the circumstances, but I figured the guy had already been talked to death about the content of his SI interview.

I was genuinely curious to find out what the “inner life” of a ballplayer might be like (there’s another anecdote about the time I sat with the players’ wives at a Hornets game in 2002, but I’ll tellya that later), but my curiosity didn’t prepare me for what came out of Rocker’s mouth next.

He replied, “I tellya, man. It’s tough. During the regular season, we’re traveling so much, I can’t really focus on prose as much I do in the offseason, so I tend to read more poetry than novels.”

I think I kept my “cocker-spaniel tilt” to an unnoticeable minimum.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I guess my favorite poet would have to be Poe.” He then cited a poem whose title I can’t remember, but do recall that it wasn’t one of the “standards” of Poe’s oeuvre. I nodded.

“But y’know who I’m really getting into lately? And it’s gonna sound weird, because he’s not known for his poetry: Henry Rollins.”

“That makes perfect sense to me, ” I told him.

“Yeah?”

“Well, he’s like, spoken-word on steroids, and you’re relief pitcher on steroids.” I quickly added, “Metaphorically speaking.”

He laughed. “I guess you’re right.”

I pulled out a copy of the first book that I’d published, Vince Czyz’s Adrift in a Vanishing City (I always kept copies on hand to shill). I told him, “I’m a publisher, and this is the first book I did. It has a story with this really strong Poe character in it; you might like it.”

His face lit up as he took the book from me. “Thanks, man. That’s really cool of you,” he said. And we went our separate ways: I was off to San Diego, he was headed to Kansas City, to meet up with his new team.

The postscript to this meeting was two or three days later, as I was back in my hotel room after a day at the conference. I turned on SportsCenter and saw a tape of Rocker’s first press conference with the Indians. He was on fire:

“F*** the Braves! F*** Atlanta! If you’re name’s not f***ing Glavine, f***ing Maddux or f***ing Smoltz, they don’t give a f*** about you!”

And it hit me, “This guy’s acting.”

It was all there. He was totally playing up the camera, like your standard WWF (at the time) wrestler. All the bombast, all the theatrics: it was all so he could be the Heel, to get the opposing crowds fired up against him, so he could get himself fired up.

I thought, “If you just approach this guy in a normal conversation, even when he’s in a hostile place and just been told that his team doesn’t want him around, he can have a conversation about Poe, Rollins, and the travails of his work-schedule. Put a mic in front of him, and he goes bananas.” He had every reason to just ignore me when I spoke to him, or be a raging a**hole, but he was perfectly willing to just talk like a normal person. But put him on camera, and you may as well have Gene Okerlund onscreen with him.

Rocker’s career really fell apart in the last bunch of years. He had shoulder trouble, and finished the 2002 season with Texas and a humorous ERA of 6.66. He made two appearances for Tampa Bay in 2003, but was ineffective, left for rotator cuff surgery, and is now trying to make that comeback.

Writers immediately jumped on the irony of Rocker playing for a New York-area team after his comments in SI. It’s their right, but Rocker did make a pretty good observation to an AP writer last month: “Everybody is a lot different at 24 than they are at 30.”