Of anyone who has ever played Major League Baseball, very few, in any era, have looked as though they really did play for the love of the game. We learn only when they are unable to play any longer that they really did love the game for its own sake, no matter the money, no matter the controversies.
Some love it too much to keep themselves steady. Some can't bear to let the world see anything other than the difficulty involved in playing the game, on and off the field, in the inferno of the public eye. Some get slapped down unconscionably, early enough on, that the joy gets driven to places they alone are allowed to visit, when nobody is watching, and the burdens are driven forward enough to wreak havoc more than hits and runs.
And, then there are those who don't let the smugger-than-thou contingencies — in the dugout, on the field, in the press box, in the constellations of baseball government — or their own furies compromise their love of the game. One way or another, they succeed in melting away the iciest blasts fired toward them and leave one and all laughing no matter how well they are or aren't doing on the field.
When you lose someone like that you can't explain the wrench, try though you might, even if you can say without being charged with perjury that baseball really was that much better for having him around. When you lose someone like that who made baseball that way in the middle of some of its most dubious days, someone about whom you could and did say that he was great for your team even when he couldn't hit with a garage door or find the strike zone with a compass and a guide dog, the wrench twists deeper.
Jose Lima, who died Sunday of a massive heart attack at 37, was that kind of man. Forget the birth certificate that said "Dominican Republic" — this guy was on loan from his own planet. In five decades of baseball watching I can remember nobody — not even Willie Mays, before years, betrayals, and age ground away at him — who was that ebullient even in the middle of his worst of times on the field.
It didn't matter whether he was a 20-game winner and all-star for the 1999 Houston Astros or one of the culprits behind the hapless 2005 Kansas City Royals' 19-game losing streak (Lima had lost number 19); whether he was helping to pitch the 2004 Los Angeles Dodgers to a postseason (about which more anon), or keeping it real in the middle of one final major league humiliation (an 0-4/6.00+ ERA for the 2006 New York Mets), before trying again in the Dominican and Mexican leagues until last year). Jose Lima was a human antidepressant.
In his Astros days, Lima was said to have roomed on the road with a fellow Latino who was so homesick he had decided he would play ball just long enough to build a lifetime's security for the wife and family he missed so desperately, and that was that. Then he got Lima for a roommate and cab sharer. Goodbye homesickness; hasta la vista, misery. There really was no crying in baseball when the clock struck Lima Time. Which was about 25 hours a day, eight days a week.
It took the Show long enough to catch on to the idea that Lima wasn't out to show anyone up on the field. Baseball was his party and he wanted one and all in on the fun, even when he was liable to beat you senseless on the mound. Even when he was in the thick of his team's postseason and working his damnedest to get them their first postseason win since they won the 1988 World Series.
The only game the 2004 Dodgers would win in that postseason was Lima's signature pitching performance. Lima may have been the only person in Dodger Stadium and on television who was not surprised that he came out to pitch the ninth, after all, notwithstanding that the intercontinental ballistic wing of the St. Louis Cardinals was due to hit.
"Every time we've needed the big win," Dodger first baseman Shawn Green said after Lima finished his rip-roaring five-hit shutout, "he's given it to us." Which was pretty good for a guy who made that club in the first place, and got tapped at first as one of the bullpen bulls, only because Paul Shuey ruptured a thumb tendon. He shook off a horrible beginning to spend at least a month surrendering no earned runs, pitching his way into the rotation, and helping turn Dodger Stadium into a party house. He made Johnny Damon's Boston Red Sox Idiots resemble a ward of clinical depressives.
Then he gave the Cardinals something to remember him by in the ninth of that division series gem, after stadium audience and television broadcasters alike took bets on whether he'd be pulled for the pen in the sixth, seventh, or eighth innings.
He gave Albert Pujols a strike, something to turn into a foul pop into the stands past first base, a waste pitch away, and something to loft to right center, high and deep enough for Milton Bradley's horse to reach in time for a catch. He gave Scott Rolen two high sliders just outside, then a fastball right down the pipe for a called strike, then nothing better to hit than a meatball with Steve Finley's name on it. And he gave Jim Edmonds a called strike on the top shelf and something worth a mere skyscraper popup to third.
Dodger Stadium itself couldn't have been having more fun than Lima. He kicked into his usual post-game, post-win routine — hugging, high-fiving, fist-pumping, skip-dancing, cheek-smooching (teammates, pitching coach, trainer, manager, whoever was available), windmilling the crowd to ramp up the racket, then crowing into the microphone of field reporter (and former Show manager) Kevin Kennedy like a kid who'd just received the keys to his own chocolate factory and a prom date with the number one dream girl in town — into ludicrous speed.
"The fans deserve this," whooped Lima, the human 'toon who'd just snuck a stick of dynamite into the opposition's evening picnic feed and slipped out of sight two seconds before it went kaboom. "I love everybody. I'm pitching with my heart because I know they deserve it."
That was then. This would have been now: Lima had opened a southern California baseball academy recently and joined the Dodgers' Alumni Association. Two days before his death he basked in a wild ovation from the Dodger Stadium faithful, when he went there with his 11-year-old son to watch a game.
As Dan Evans, the Dodger general manager who took the proverbial flyer on him for 2004, said in the shock of Sunday's news, the biggest part of Jose Lima was the part that killed him too soon. His heart.
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