Sometimes it will happen in the middle of an at-bat. Other times, in the middle of a meal.
An image will appear in Todd Hundley’s mind. He’ll see the face of his beloved mother, Betty.
“It hits you in the weirdest places,” Hundley saysbetween drags of a cigarette. “Sometimes just out of the blue, man. I’ll be catching and then–boom!–I’ll think of her. You get emotional but you try to keep it down. There are good days and bad days.”
The Hundley family lost Betty to cancer six months ago. But it might as well have been yesterday.
“Todd has not had an opportunity to grieve,” says his father, Randy. “I think there are a lot of things he needs to deal with as far as this is concerned.”
Father and son have been seeing a counselor to help them cope with the loss. The two are frequently at each other’s side, going to dinner, playing golf and working on Todd’s throwing.
“It has been great for me to be here with him,” says Randy, a fan favorite who spent parts of 10 seasons catching for the Cubs. “I hope it has been great for him. We talk about everything. Everything. And he shares with me. I hope that has been a help to him. As a dad, you don’t know. You hope and pray that it helps, but you really don’t know how he’s reacting inside.
“People have no idea . . . ballplayers are human beings and they have stuff to deal with just like everybody else. Sometimes I don’t know how he does it.”
Few major-leaguers have experienced higher highs and lower lows than Hundley, who turns 32 in May. He bashed 41 homers for the Mets in 1996, setting the single-season record for a catcher. New York loved him and Hundley embraced all that the city had to offer.
But the romance wouldn’t last. Hundley rushed back to the field in 1998 after reconstructive elbow surgery 10 months earlier. He hit .161, suffered through a humiliating 34-game stint in left field and became the target of manager Bobby Valentine, who whispered to reporters that Hundley had been staying out late, drinking and partying.
Hundley didn’t respond to the setbacks the way most athletes would have. He didn’t form a shell. In a way he enjoyed having the New York tabloids ripping him.
“I just laughed about it,” he says. “Obviously you don’t want bad press, but bad press is better than no press. You’re on the back page of the Post and millions of people are seeing it. It was cool. It was neat.”
Hundley and his wife, Tiffany, kept the pages with the cleverest headlines.
“I have them all,” he says. “You can’t take this stuff personally. New York was a great place, a different world. Look, I know a lot of people would trade places with me in a heartbeat.”
Hundley’s life didn’t get any more peaceful when the Mets shipped him to Los Angeles after the 1998 season. Following in the spike marks of Mike Piazza and Gold Glove winner Charles Johnson, Hundley drew the ire of the few Dodger fans who cared.
“There was a lot of pressure in L.A.,” said Eric Young, Hundley’s teammate on the Dodgers and now with the Cubs. “They were booing him left and right.”
The fans couldn’t peer through Hundley’s catcher’s mask to see the anguish on his face. Hundley’s elbow pain was so acute that some days he wished he wouldn’t be written into the lineup. Little wonder, considering he batted just .207 and committed 16 errors in 1999.
After an improved 2000 season with the Dodgers, Hundley signed to play with the Cubs. It made for a nice story, the local boy taking less money–$23.5 million over four years–to help his father’s old team. But Hundley, whose deal includes a limited no-trade clause, has little room for sentimentality.
“If the team wasn’t good, I wouldn’t be here,” he says. “There’s no amount of money you can pay me to come here and lose for four years.”
Considering his past, it’s fitting Hundley has had an eventful spring. He strained an oblique muscle in his side, got plunked in the ribs by Arizona sidearmer Byung-Hyun Kim and came down with bronchitis.
“Spring training, I just hate it,” Hundley says. “You tear your body down and you’re susceptible to a lot of stuff. I was constantly sick in L.A. from dust allergies, and out here I get it again. That’s why I’m looking forward to getting back to Chicago, the Midwest, back to some normal weather.”
But Hundley has some work to do before being ready for Opening Day. He is hitting just .263 this spring with 15 strikeouts in 38 at-bats. He has swung at chin-high fastballs and waved at countless changeups.
His defense, long a fertile ground for his critics, has been erratic. Hundley has not thrown consistently since his elbow surgery on Sept. 26, 1997. In an effort to throw without pain, he developed several bad habits.
“My brain was trying to protect my elbow and I wasn’t doing the right things mechanically,” he says. “I stunk. My idea was let in two [runs], drive in three.”
Young, playing for the Dodgers in 1999, didn’t know what to expect when he covered second base. Some of Hundley’s throws skipped a few feet past the mound; others went shooting into center field. Young tried to block as many as he could to save Hundley an error and hide him from ridicule.
“He was battling a lot of things,” Young recalls, “but he didn’t complain one time or make any excuses. He could have had a bad attitude, but I knew how hard he was working.”
Hundley has to keep working to get his throwing right. He made 13 errors last season and threw out just 20 percent of attempted base-stealers, second lowest in the National League.
Randy, who has served as a volunteer coach this spring, says Todd has fallen back into some of his bad routines.
“A lot of that comes from throwing from the outfield,” Randy said, “and from rehabbing his arm. Every day I’d say, `Son, I don’t care if you can only throw the ball 10 feet, you have to throw it your natural way.’ We’re trying to correct it, but there are some tough habits to overcome.”
Randy is emphasizing three things when Todd gets ready to throw: Separate your hands. Take your arm directly back to your ear. Keep your right foot planted.
Randy and Todd worked together on his throwing over the Christmas holidays. Todd noticed immediate improvement.
“He said, `Dad, I want you to be with me in spring training,'” Randy says. “He talked to [manager Don Baylor] and asked if it would be all right.”
Baylor embraced the idea, saying that no one knew Todd’s throwing better than his own father, who was an excellent defensive catcher. Todd is determined to limit the opposition’s running game this season, but he says it will take a team effort.
“You want to throw out as many as you can,” he says, “but if the pitcher doesn’t give you a shot, I don’t care who’s back there, Johnny Bench or Pudge Rodriguez, you’re not going to throw the guy out.
“The major-league average for throwing guys out is about 30 percent, but to me, it’s an unfair stat. It takes three guys to throw a baserunner out. If one guy doesn’t do his job, the catcher gets blamed. That’s wrong.”
Hundley says that few Dodger pitchers sped up their deliveries to give him a chance.
“[Kevin Brown] did because he understands the game,” Hundley says. “[Chan Ho] Park didn’t care. Carlos Perez didn’t care. The bullpen didn’t care. If you’re above 1.6 [seconds to the plate], I could steal off that.”
Hundley takes another puff from a cigarette. He’s on his fourth Marlboro Light when the subject turns to Betty, who died on Labor Day.
“It’s heartbreaking,” he says. “Your life can change for the good or the worse. Mine has changed for the better. I don’t drink alcohol that much anymore. I’ll have a beer once in a while.
“My wife and [four] kids are everything to me now. Before I had blinders on and was just locked in on baseball. My family has always been important, but there were other priorities. This brought me back to my family.”
Todd always was close to his father, who celebrated the birth of his son on May 27, 1969, by hitting a grand slam in San Francisco the following day. It was Randy who called Todd last September to deliver the news of Betty’s death.
“My wife was passing away, dying, with him on television behind the plate at Dodger Stadium,” Randy says. “You’re talking about a tough thing, a tough call to have to make.”
Even with all the family around, Randy still worries about Todd. Whereas Randy has the persona of a cowboy–slow and steady–Todd is fidgety, like a covered pot with boiling water. He has smoked since he was a teenager, ignoring dozens of warnings from his father.
“It’s long past what I can do,” Randy says. “I lost my dad to the stuff, but I never smoked myself. Obviously it’s a very difficult thing to stop or else people wouldn’t be doing it. He has a lot of stress that he’s dealing with.
“I’m his dad. Do you think it’s going to make any difference, regardless of how much I pound on him? I tell him I’m proud of his effort [to quit]. If I could, I’d take a hammer and hit him right between the eyes. Unfortunately, this is something he has to do on his own.”
Todd says he has cut back drastically on chewing tobacco and is down to about 10 cigarettes a day, some of which he hides in his baseball cap. He would love to quit, as much for himself as for Betty, whose body was invaded by cancer.
“It’s tough, man,” he says. “And the doctors don’t want to mess with it when the season comes up. But with my mom. . . . I’m trying. And at the end of the year, I’m gonna quit.”
