The curves of life - pitcher Steve Ontiveros - Baseball Special

Man," Daddy says, "I haven't looked through this in a long time."

He opens the book stuffed fat with cards memories and cruel, busted dreams. He reads some of the hand-written notes and stares at the pictures.

"Remember this day?" he asks his wife. "You looked beautiful. And this one? We were so happy. Gabriel, God, what a great name."

He turns the page.

"And here," Daddy says, "this is where we buried him."

He drops the book-the diary of an unborn baby-and weeps.

"Oh, honey," Mommy says, "I'm sorry."

Steve Ontiveros grabs his daughter around the waist and his guitar around the neck. Time for the la-la song. It isn't much to hear, really. He taught himself to play and sings a lot like you do. Eve-Ana prefers to dance, anyway.

But this isn't about music. It's about a father and the child he has left. About a persistent man still pitching with an arm begging him to quit. About how everything can change with one life.

Or one death.

"It's an incredible story," says Ontiveros, who could be the Angels, No. 4 starter if his right elbow allows him.

"What it took to get back to the majors ... it'll blow your mind."

Ontiveros showed his first promise when he won 10 games for the A's in 1987. He was a member of the talented Phillies, starting rotation in 1989, and perhaps his biggest claim to fame came in 1994 when he won the American League earned-run average title with the A's. But amid all of that promise has been an unbelievable odyssey of twists and turns. He has been on the disabled list 11 times, a total of 878 days. His injuries have been listed as strains, sprains and tendinitis. He "retired" in 1992 because his arm "was in such bad shape nobody with a brain would touch me."

The agony has been so intense, so consistent, his wife, Cindy, says she sometimes aches worse than he does. He already has suffered two setbacks this spring and might not be ready for the start of the season.

Ontiveros, 35, talks about all these things

Then he talks about feeling pain. Bones? They can be rebuilt, but where does a man turn for a hurting heart?

"Never been a lower point," he says. ,Never in this lifetime would I hold him or play with him."

Ontiveros never liked kids much. Used to avoid them, in fact. In malls, restaurants sitting on airplanes. Too much hassle. Responsibility? Come on. He already had a baseball career to raise.

But he softened by the time he was 30. He and Cindy decided to start a family. Or try to. They couldn't conceive.

"It might not seem like much to some peo-ple," Ontiveros says, "but, man, I mean that's a life in there. It's a frustrating feeling."

His career wasn't cooperating, either, that glass-fragile elbow unable to stand pitching's pounding. Rebounding from surgery, he signed with the Tigers in February 1992.

Ontiveros couldn't pitch. Too much; pain. He was released April 16. When he called home, Cindy had news for him:

"I'm pregnant."

Two months later, the baby's heart stopped.

"I never had to mourn like that," Ontiveros says. "My sister miscarried once, and I thought, ,Oh, OK, But it never meant a thing to me. Until that day."

The thoughts rushed at him like speeding lights on a midnight highway. Cindy, bent and grimacing, hugging herself, the fertility drugs raging inside her ... a friend's gift, a bib still perfectly white ... the ultrasound photos--with the head and spinal cord so clear--their only baby pictures.

"It never occurred to us that something like that could even happen," Cindy says. "All the work we had gone through to conceive. Never once."

They decided to name the son they would never know. He,d be Gabriel. Biblical translation: "God is my strength."

Cindy coped by writing, filling her journal and her void with a thousand scribbled thoughts. Ontiveros returned to baseball. Or tried to.

He called the Tigers, asking for another chance. Sure, they said, we,re interested, just not enough to pay for a flight and cheap hotel.

So Ontiveros bought the ticket himself, to Niagara Falls, where he,d pitch for one of Detroit's minor league affiliates. He lasted one game, walking off the mound and telling Tigers, officials, "Thanks. There's no way."

His curveball was gone, lost in the dark tunnel that had swallowed his concentration and desire. If he wasn't thinking of Cindy or Gabriel, he was thinking of the ache in his arm. He wanted to be home one minute, nowhere near home the next.

It can be a hollow existence, having your world controlled by something as small as a baseball. But this had always been so easy for Ontiveros, so clearly his fate. Making the majors wasn't a dream, it was an eventuality.

"My whole life was determined by how I threw the ball," he says. "My idol was baseball. My god was baseball."

And why not? He set records at the University of Michigan, was Oakland's second-round draft pick in ,82 and reached the majors with the A's four years later. Ontiveros saved eight games as a rookie middle reliever. His ERA: 1.93.

And his wife was miserable.

"He was really digging who he was," Cindy says. "It was kind of scary. I didn't think I wanted to go to the places he was going. I wasn't sure I wanted to be with someone like that."

But here they were, still together, seven years, three elbow operations and two teams later, out of work. Cindy says she "remembers a lot of silence" around the house, her husband spending much of his time sitting on the back porch, alone.

"I was humiliated, but that's not a bad place to be," Ontiveros says. "Being humble ... it was good for me because I was holding onto the wrong things then. I had to release everything, including my identity. This game had always been my life, but I didn't care about it anymore."

It was at that time Ontiveros told Cindy it was over, that he was discarding baseball. Or, perhaps, the game was discarding him.

He turned to his church, where he was being groomed as a youth pastor. One day in the fall, he was throwing a football around with some kids. Ontiveros made a few passes and noticed something-absolutely nothing.. His arm, no pain.

Then later, a game of catch with former big-leaguer Brian Harper resulted in a phone call to Andy MacPhail, then the general manager of the Twins. Harper somehow sold this guy who had pitched only 54 innings from 1990 to ,93 and went five years between major league victories.

Ontiveros kept the cap he wore in that game at Niagara Falls, still has it, in fact. Why? "It's a spiritual marker."

The Twins eventually traded him to the Mariners, with whom he returned to the big leagues on August 10, 1993, almost three years since his last appearance.

Normal baseball careers aren't subject to bookmarks. But what's normal about an All-Star pitcher who has been granted free agency four times released twice and traded once--for a guy who turned out to be a replacement player?

"See what I mean?" Ontiveros says. "It's almost like a miracle."

Miracle? Four months after his return, Cindy gave birth to Eve-Anal Biblical translation: "Fullness of life."

It took a while for Ontiveros to convince his wife they should try becoming parents one more time. Cindy, calling her husband "Mr. Tenacity," finally relented because of something written in her journal.

"It's God who creates a child, and if we have a child it's a gift from God."

Steve's words. Cindy's writing.

"He's a different man than the one I married," Cindy says. "All these things have made him into someone I really like. He's just himself now. He's Steve."

The la-la song is over now. Time for little girls to go to bed. Mommy and Daddy lie down, Eve-Ana, 2, squeezes between them. They read a story about the baby Moses and have "a family hug."

Mommy and Daddy finally stand, walk toward the door and shut off the light. Eve-Ana rolls over.

"Believe me, she knows how special she is," Ontiveros says. "We tell her every day."

COPYRIGHT 1996 Sporting News Publishing Co.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group