Wrong again, but never happier to be wrong….
Bobby Valentine will wear #25, paying homage to former Red Sox star Tony Conigliaro, his old roommate with the Angels. “I will gladly take it off to put it up on that wall,” Valentine said, pointing to the facade where retired Red Sox numbers hang.
If this means nothing to you, maybe I can change that with pps 124-127 of SHRINK THYSELF:
If people remember anything about Tony Conigliaro, it is only the details most vivid and least interesting. “The ballplayer who got hit in the head, right?” they will say with the same cadence they would reduce the story of Lot to “The salt wife guy, right?” Here’s what I know, and it is not nearly enough. Tony Conigliaro grew up in Revere, Massachusetts, twenty-five miles North of where my rented Impala is right now. This is how I remember the beginning of 1964 in Boston. Everyone is still crying over Jack Kennedy, then girls start screaming over the Beatles, then the screams die down around the middle of March for three weeks, then they’re back up again in April for Tony Conigliaro. He is nineteen and already in the big leagues, playing with the hometown Red Sox. Home run on the first pitch he ever sees at Fenway Park. Then the next season, 1965, he leads the American League in homers. Thirty-two, I think. Movie star handsome, TV star accessible and jock cocky. On his nights off, he starts singing in nightclubs, mostly Beatles stuff, and he even records a couple of 45s, which chart locally and are bought by every woman in New England under twenty.
Then it’s August 18, 1967. Five months into his best season, Tony Conigliaro, crowding the plate as he always does, can’t get out of the way of a high, inside fastball from Angels pitcher Jack Hamilton. Can’t. The ball crashes into his left cheek, just below his eye. He lays in the hospital for eight days, and everything you read is bookended by two ghoulish measurements: How close the pitch had come to killing Tony C. and how close Tony C. might be to coming back.
He sits out the entire 1968 season while his vision slowly retraces its steps from the outskirts of 20/400. We hear he may return to the majors as a pitcher, but that has to be the scribbling of some wag who read way too much Malamud. He’s back in right field for Opening Day, 1969 in Baltimore, when he breaks a 2-2 tie in the tenth with a two-run home run, then scores the eventual winning run in the twelfth. I am 15 and relieved. Not so much that he’s okay, more that he’ll still be okay in seven years, when he’s 31 and I join him in the Red Sox outfield.
He has the finest season of his career in 1970, thirty-six homers and 116 RBI, and the Red Sox reward him. By trading him. To the Angels. I don’t know, you tell me. Look, I know baseball can be ironic. And thoughtless. But baseball does not mindfuck in public. Not usually. Trading Tony Conigliaro to the team that almost killed him is like sending George Wallace to finish his rehab in the Bremer family’s guest room.
The Angels had the nickname emblazoned on the back of his road jersey. Tony C. Now, he’s a cross between lounge act, capo and some guy in a 12-step program. He becomes another afterthought in the Orange County sun and retires after half a season in Anaheim. He holds a press conference after his plane lands at Logan Airport in Boston and says, “This is the end of Tony C.”
Now explain this. Four years later, four years out of baseball and running a nightclub and notching whatever blondes were left in Greater Boston, he somehow wins a spot on the 1975 Red Sox roster as a designated hitter, and, in eye-rubbing redux, hits a home run on Opening Day. Seriously, explain this, other than a promotional ad for the Make A Wish Foundation. This time, the comeback sputters until June. Tony C retires for good. And the story begins.
For the next six years, he bounces around as a TV sportscaster and occasional color man on NBC’s Game of the Week. The letter I found from Sy Siegel had reached the San Francisco affiliate a few months after he’d been let go as its fill-in sports anchor. On his thirty-seventh birthday, Tony flies back to Boston to try out for the full-time job as color man on the local Red Sox telecasts. It’s more confirmation hearing than audition. Tony C is still an epic hero in New England, albeit Achilles, and the job is his to lose. He’s still cocky, fit and handsome like a guy worth leaving your husband for, if you had a husband. No one is asking him about the eye anymore. He’s going to be a home team baseball analyst. The blind spot is implied.
Two days after the audition, his brother Billy, another former major leaguer, is driving Tony to Logan to catch a flight to San Francisco and start preparing to move back home. On the way to the airport, Tony Conigliaro suffers a massive heart attack that leaves him with permanent brain damage. He’s in a coma for months, and then for the next eight years, if you’re paying attention, the only news you ever hear is about him moving a couple fingers or saying half a sentence to an ex-teammate. Those are the last eight years. He’s dead at 45.
