Jonathon Papelbon Has Attitude the Sox Bullpen Lacks .. BUT

Jonathan Papelbon Grinds His Teeth
As Manny Ramirez tests positive for performance-enhancing drugs, see what made his former Boston Red Sox teammate call playing with him "like cancer" in this in-depth profile.

By Chris Jones   MAY 7, 2009


This morning, Jonathan Papelbon reported to a college campus in his hometown of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and threw baseballs really hard at an old school buddy and minor league catcher named Craig Tatum. He could feel his massive right shoulder's limitless powers returning to him on schedule, his long fingers and elastic wrist snapping in concert. Now he's putting together lunch — "You want some pickles? Something to drink?" — at his winter retreat, a lovely Southern spread that he's just doubled in size to eight thousand square feet, the one where neighborhood kids play in the driveway, with the welcome mat that reads PAPELBON in big block letters. ("Can you tell I like to put our name on everything?" Papelbon's wife, Ashley, says.) He's wearing the uniform of the off-season athlete: tear-away pants, a blue T-shirt given to him as a parting gift from Letterman, a Boston Red Sox sweatshirt, a thin tuft of whiskers on his boyish face. He looks relaxed and happy as he pads around the brick floor of his country kitchen, the subject in the middle of a portrait of domestic bliss. Ashley, his college sweetheart, sits on the couch nearby, feeding Parker Alice, born healthy and round in late December. His beloved French bulldog, Boss, is on the couch, too, chewing a rubber toy for a change, having famously destroyed the ball Papelbon threw for the last out in the 2007 World Series. Kevin from DirecTV will soon knock at the door, wide-eyed and trembling, to fire up Papelbon's bajillion new flat-screens. Right around then, the phone will ring. Actually, it will quack like a duck.

It's the only time Papelbon excuses himself all afternoon, disappearing down the hallway for five minutes, his voice a muffled echo in the vastness. Ashley finishes giving Parker her bottle; Boss keeps chewing on his toy. When Papelbon returns, there's no outward sign that he's just received one of the great phone calls of his life — no smile, no leg jitters, no stealing a peek at Ashley on the couch, Honey, we did it. He doesn't even deem it worth mentioning. Later that evening, it's reported that Papelbon has agreed to a one-year, $6.25 million contract to close for the Red Sox, a more than $5 million raise for him and a record for a pitcher in his first arbitration year. That was that phone call. But now, in the moments after, a twenty-eight-year-old man digests the reality that he's set himself up for life in silence, with an almost impossible serenity. He celebrates, not with his trademark histrionics or with the Dance, but with a tuna-fish sandwich and a can of Diet Mountain Dew. Jonathan Papelbon has a few days left before his summer begins, before he becomes the character in a comic book. He has a few days left to summon the rage.

It will threaten everything around and about him, including his teeth. It will surface when he makes his annual drive to spring training, his mid-February blood rite. He will throw a bag with his gloves and cleats into his trunk and turn out his driveway; Ashley will be safely removed in the car behind him with Parker and the dog. Except for a brief pit stop in Jacksonville to see his parents, he will spend the next fourteen hours listening to Metallica, to Tupac, full blast. "Sometimes, I'll roll down my windows and just start yelling," he says. He will feel his heart begin to flutter, and his eyes begin to pulse, and he will begin grinding his teeth, peeling back the enamel in layers. "I'm going to have them down to the gums pretty soon," he says. "But I'm willing to sacrifice my teeth for this game." By the time Papelbon arrives in Fort Myers, Florida, he will be fully gone under, a man possessed. He will start sleeping badly, and he will sometimes not even see the hitter he's trying to murder — won't even register who's at the plate — and he will feel the tension take hold in his spine and neck muscles and crawl up the back of his skull. That's when the headaches will come.

The Red Sox, like interventionists, have tried to protect him from the burdens of being Papelbon. Two years ago, they decided to make him a starting pitcher, after he nearly threw his shoulder out of its socket during his rookie season in 2006, and so he could take vacations from himself, three or four nights off between the frenzies. They also offered him the number 21, Roger Clemens's old number, because they thought the favorable comparison might help Papelbon take to the idea. But the role didn't sit right with him, and neither did the number. He kept 58, the nobody's number that had been randomly assigned to him by the clubhouse attendant, just another rookie destined to flame out. That's the sort of slight that motivates him. Hate is gas. Before spring was over, he had asked to be returned to his cage beyond the outfield fence.

Failing there, the Red Sox tried next to fit him with a mouth guard to cut down on the gnashing, but Papelbon decided it didn't feel right, either. He chose the headaches. The mouth guard didn't dull the rage; it trapped it, and Jonathan Papelbon is the sort of man who would be doomed without release. He needs outlets. He needs winter.

Papelbon needed this winter especially. It came one series too soon, after the Red Sox lost the American League Championship Series to the Tampa Bay Rays in seven games. "I'm not afraid to call that what it was: a failure," he says — but he was relieved for the exit all the same. "I came down here as soon as I could," he says. "This is where all the hot air gets let out of the balloon." By his measure, it took about a month, most of November, before he could feel his jaw unclench, before he felt almost human again.

Even by Papelbon's standards, his summer had been hotter than most. After he and the Red Sox won the 2007 World Series in four games — after he had thrown the final pitch past Colorado's Seth Smith and squatted and screamed like an angry sumo wrestler, after he had worn a box on his head and broken out his pseudo-Irish jig on the field, after he had confessed shortly thereafter that Boss had nosed out the winning baseball and eaten it — he emerged as the latest Boston folk hero, a lightning rod in a city that attracts black clouds. Papelbon found himself at the center of a season-long storm. It reached one of its peaks at the All-Star Game at Yankee Stadium, when he let it be known that he felt he deserved to close the game — never mind that the hosting Yankees had a pretty good closer of their own in Mariano Rivera.

"That was really just my competitive nature coming out," he says. "I understand all about paying dues, I really do, but if I went there and I told everybody I didn't want the ball, who's going to want to have that guy on their team? I don't think I said anything that crazy. If I pitched anywhere but Boston, it wouldn't have been a big deal." Except that he does pitch in Boston, and it was a big deal. PAPELBUM! read the headline in the next day's Daily News (Papelbon had it framed), and something as benign as the pregame parade became a horror show. Ashley, then pregnant with Parker, heard death threats yelled at her, and Papelbon is so enraged by the memory that today, months later, the new millionaire eating a tuna-fish sandwich turns crimson. "I should never have taken Ash to that damn parade," he says.

Suddenly, it's as though his last days of cool have passed in an instant, a memory having done something even the offer of millions of dollars couldn't: After months of dormancy, Papelbon's pilot light is once again naked and aflame. There's something about him that's strangely open that way, even vulnerable, as though his nervous system runs on the surface of his skin. He has no defense. In this age of athletes-turned-automatons, he remains unguarded enough to admit that his dog ate a million-dollar baseball and then wonder why everyone made such a fuss. ("The worst thing is, he ate another one," Papelbon says, almost as an aside. "The one we clinched the American League with. I was like, Boss, what did you do?") Curt Schilling famously suggested Papelbon was stupid — "not exactly a charter member of Mensa," was how the Red Sox Republican nominee for president described his teammate to Sports Illustrated — but Papelbon's not stupid. He just hasn't acquired professional mechanisms, an understanding of consequence: He says all the dumb things most of us probably think but keep back.

Maybe that will change now that he's rich and getting more famous by the minute — maybe someday we'll look back on that phone call and say, That was the moment. Maybe Jonathan Papelbon will now become a corporate citizen, buttoned-down, modeling himself after Alex Rodriguez, after Andy Pettitte, those unsmiling semihumans who carry their secrets to the ballpark in their briefcases. Maybe now he'll embark on a hiring spree — errand boy, security guard, personal chef — and the entourage will shield him from us. Maybe Ashley will have to take their name off everything and kids won't be able to hang out in their driveway anymore. Maybe he'll become a Yankee.

Or maybe Papelbon, and others like him, will see his new contract as a reward — not just for being a great closer, but for being honest, too, for being knowable. Maybe we'll start seeing a new intangible brought to the negotiating table, a kind of humanity index. Maybe that's why he was quiet after. Maybe he wasn't trying to hide anything; maybe he just didn't want anything to change. Later, he'll answer an e-mail about where his head was at when he came back into the kitchen — because Jonathan Papelbon answers e-mails — and he'll write, "When something like this happens to you, especially in times like these, it is a completely humbling experience. I just want to go out and show everyone that I'm gonna earn this big contract." The question becomes whether he'll keep his throwback attitude or whether we'll be forced to remember the man he used to be. There's an abiding hope that, like the mouth guard, installing a governor on Papelbon wouldn't feel right to him. It would mean he was holding something back, and he doesn't seem capable of restraint. He is less a vessel, more a conduit: Everything that goes in has to find its way out.

Witness Papelbon's take on last summer's Manny Ramirez drama — the endless cycle of love and hate that culminated in Ramirez being traded to the Los Angeles Dodgers in July — unedited: "The beautiful thing about our team is, we don't let anybody get above the team. He wasn't on the same train as the rest of us." And here Papelbon starts banging his kitchen table for emphasis, the punctuation marks in his sentences changing: "He was on a different train! And you saw what happened with that. We got rid of him, and we moved on without him. That comes from the manager, and it comes from guys like Jason Varitek and Tim Wakefield and David Ortiz. Nobody is ever going to be allowed to do that. Even a guy like me, just heading into my fourth year in the big leagues — if David Ortiz gets a little, you know — I'll tell him what's up! I'm not afraid to do that. I'm not afraid to put him in his place, because I think everybody needs that. And if somebody does it to me, I understand that. I most certainly understand that. Varitek tells me all the time, 'Just shut up. Do what you're supposed to do.' So Manny was tough for us. You have somebody like him, you know at any point in the ball game, he can dictate the outcome of the game. And for him not to be on the same page as the rest of the team was a killer, man! It just takes one guy to bring an entire team down, and that's exactly what was happening. Once we saw that, we weren't afraid to get rid of him. It's like cancer. That's what he was. Cancer. He had to go. It sucked, but that was the only scenario that was going to work. That was it for us. And after, you could feel it in the air in the clubhouse. We got Jason Bay — Johnny Ballgame, plays the game right, plays through broken knees, runs out every ground ball — and it was like a breath of fresh air, man! Awesome! No question."

Just then, Papelbon's refined Southern mother-in-law, Ashley's mother, appears in the kitchen to discover her son-in-law, the father of her precious granddaughter, exorcising his various demons, waving his arms and leaving spatters of Diet Mountain Dew on the table. She must look at him, this unhinged iron giant, and see every possible future for Ashley and Parker.

"Oh, he's a handful, all right," Ashley says. "I've kind of learned just to let him go. When he was dancing around with that box on his head, I wasn't surprised. I was thinking, Oh, my God, what are you doing? But I really wasn't surprised."

Papelbon takes off his sweatshirt. He's radiating. He's broken the pledge he makes every fall. Winter is a time for family, for distraction, for him to think about anything but baseball. He needs to find another way to let off the steam that's been building.

"Maybe you should go throw the football with Boss," Ashley says.

Instead, Mariano Rivera makes an appearance — a surprise appearance, given last summer's Bronx tempest. In Papelbon's game room — pool table, awards, all the requisites — Rivera smiles out from a blown-up photograph, with his arm around Papelbon, both men in collar and tie. Rivera has signed and dedicated the photograph, wishing Papelbon the best and God bless. The autograph says everything you need to know about him: It is as artfully and delicately constructed as a suspension bridge, the bottom of each looping letter resting on an invisible line that couldn't be straighter were it drawn with a ruler. "It's perfect, right?" Papelbon says, marveling, running his finger along the level. "That's him. He's the Godfather. He made this position what it is today. Now my job is to make it even greater."

There's a story that's made the rounds about Papelbon. It's always sounded apocryphal, but he confirms it. During his first few weeks in Boston's farm system, he, like all new recruits, was subject to a battery of psychological questionnaires, trying to measure the parts of an athlete's makeup that defy easy quantification. One question was, Where do you see yourself after baseball? And Papelbon chewed his pen and thought to himself, That's a stupid question. He wrote in his frantic scrawl, "In the Hall of Fame." After, he was called into the team's office, and a group of men sat around and each asked some version of, Are you smoking crack? Papelbon couldn't understand what he'd done wrong. Didn't every player want to be in the Hall of Fame?

"I've always set my goals high," Papelbon says, looking at Rivera's shy smile. "If I sold copy machines, I'd want to be the guy who sold the most copy machines in the history of the world. Mariano Rivera is a great pitcher. I think he's a good guy. But I want to break every one of his numbers. I want to be the best there ever was."

The hardest number for him to beat will be four. Rivera has four World Series rings; Papelbon has one. It's hidden in his bedroom closet. He digs it out and slips it on one of his sausage fingers. "It's pretty gaudy just to wear around," he says. "But sometimes I'll come in here and put it on." He looks at it for a few seconds and smiles and shakes his head. "I want another one so bad." The Red Sox came close last year. At least Papelbon did his part. In his short career, he has never given up a run in the postseason. His ERA over twenty-five innings is 0.00. "I think every athlete will be remembered by what they did when it really counted," Papelbon says. "Nobody cares who was great during the regular season. Nobody remembers a loser."

He heads for his garage, or one of his garages. Down a long hallway lined with cupboards and Papelbon's hunting gear — jackets and waders in various shades of camouflage, hung in neat rows — rest his boat and a swamp buggy, flecked with mud. Duck hunting is about the only way Papelbon relaxes — truly, genuinely relaxes. His other hobby is poker, but that's not relaxing for him because he wants to win every hand, and poker is a game that rewards men who can stomach defeat. (Papelbon had a custom poker table made for team flights, which he calls the Cinco Ocho Casino. "I love playing Ortiz the most," Papelbon says. "He might be the worst poker player ever. Just brutal.") Duck hunting quiets him. He likes having only one target. "Believe me," he says, "the way my brain works, it's best when I have only one thing to worry about." Hiding out in the swamps, waiting for that single unlucky duck, he finds a peace in his focus.

It's why closing is such a good fit. "Print this," he says. "I will never start a baseball game in my life, ever." Starting is too wide-ranging. His current job is more perfectly defined, baseball boiled down to its essence: Get the next three guys out. When the game is building toward an appearance for him, when he can feel its momentum start swinging toward him, Papelbon starts preparing as early as the sixth inning. It takes him that long to channel his upset and energy. There might be fears in Boston that his becoming a father will mellow him, will make him understand that life doesn't begin with the end of a baseball game. But Papelbon believes that having his daughter occasionally flash into view will make him even better. He closes his eyes and imagines it, the subject in the middle of a portrait of conflict and chaos. The other team won't be trying to beat only him; they'll be trying to beat Parker Alice Papelbon, too. They'll be trying to take her future away as well as his, and that will make Jonathan Papelbon very angry. When the gate opens and he begins his sprint to the mound, the rest of his life, his wife's life, his daughter's life, the nice house with the dog and the pool table and the picture of Mariano Rivera in it — all of it, every current and crackle, will feel at stake. He will go deaf, and he will go mostly blind. "Signals, mitt, that's about it," he says. The look on his face, the glare, the puffed cheeks — none of that will be fake, the cheap artifice of showmanship. That will be genuine. That will be the look of a man who in that moment believes he has everything to lose. He will stare, and he will nod, and he will pull his knee toward his chest, and he will feel the bile rising in his stomach — and the nerves in his teeth will begin to scream, followed by the goblins taking hammers to his head — and he will throw a baseball really hard not at an old school buddy on a college campus in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, but at everyone and everything he hates for trying to keep him from being the best there ever was.

Papelbon opens his eyes. He takes a breath.

Summer's almost here.