Blue Jays’ Garcia Thankful for Patience, Teaching of Ferraro

Between them exists a bond of trust and friendship that has endured long after their association. Between them are hundreds of hot days in small towns spent working in the sun. Between them is respect, admiration, perhaps even the love that sometimes fuses a caring teacher and a willing pupil.

Such a relationship, between player and coach, is not unique in baseball. What makes this unusual, even awkward, is that the pupil, Damaso Garcia, is a standout with the Toronto Blue Jays and Mike Ferraro, who helped to shape the all-star second baseman, coaches for the Kansas City Royals.

And so they smile and exchange pleasantries as they cross paths on the field. Maybe even share a laugh. To do more, however, would be to tamper with the spirit of competition that separates them. Friendly or otherwise, they are opponents now.

“I say hello to him,” Garcia said Monday after his team surrendered the field to the Royals for a light practice, “but what I really want to do is pick him up and hold him over my head. If someday I have to thank somebody besides God for my success, it’s him. So when I say hello, it’s in the happiest way.”

They met for the first time in 1975. Garcia was an 18-year-old who had been a soccer player through most of his youth in the Dominican Republic and had been signed to a baseball contract only because he ran and threw exceptionally well. Ferraro was 31, a journeyman ballplayer starting his second season as a manager in the Yankees’ farm system. One had so much to learn and the other had so much to impart.

“He knows the truth,” Garcia said. “I didn’t know how to catch a ball, how to turn the double play, how to hit. I knew only how to throw hard and to run. I was lucky to have a person like Mike Ferraro to work with me.”

Garcia would spend five years in the Yankee organization before his inclusion in the trade that brought Rick Cerone to New York. Ferraro was Garcia’s manager during the first four seasons, from Oneonta through Fort Lauderdale, West Haven and Tacoma.

“Nothing was natural,” said Garcia, an American League all-star in each of the past two seasons. “Everything was work, work, work. I’m proud of myself that I did it (reached the majors) in five years. But I owe it all to Mike Ferraro. He had all the patience in the world with me.”

His was a very raw talent. Because his experience in baseball was so limited, Garcia had developed no instincts for the game. “I remember we had a rundown in Batavia one night,” Ferraro recalled, “and he was in the middle. I had to tell him, ‘You’re playing second base. This isn’t soccer where you follow the ball.’ ”

There was another disturbing habit Ferraro had to break. “He’d catch a lot of hard-hit balls through the middle barehanded,” the coach said. “Instead of reaching across his body with the glove, he’d just stick out his hand. It showed me how big and strong his hands were.”

If there was a single moment that cemented the relationship, it occurred very early. Despite extra hours spent on fundamentals in spring training, Garcia wasn’t prepared for the demands of organized baseball. Ferraro broke camp with an astonishingly young team (Domingo Ramos, the shortstop, was 16) and it promptly lost nine of its first 10 games.

This was not well-received in Oneonta, where the previous club had been 53-16 and finished first in the New York-Penn League under Ferraro. And a prime target for the fans’ dissatisfaction was the second baseman who, by his own count, averaged an error a game. “They were ready to run him out of town,” Ferraro said.

“He calls me in,” Garcia recalled, “and he tells me he’s not going to play me at home, so the people don’t get on me. He plays me away, so I’m in front of different crowds and the pressure’s not there. I watch the others play and I learn at home. He got my confidence back.”

Willie Upshaw, who plays alongside Garcia in the Blue Jays’ infield now, also was an 18-year-old neophyte on that team. “He got a hit for me his first time up,” Ferraro said, “and he didn’t get another hit all summer.” It was only a slight exaggeration. Upshaw batted .088 (Garcia hit .268). Yet, the team finished above .500 at 35-34 and the youngsters learned much about the game.

A former infielder whose knowledge exceeded his ability, Ferraro was particularly taken with Garcia’s desire to improve. “He had a tremendous arm,” the coach said. “And I’ve never seen a second baseman with range like him. But what I remember clearly is that he’d say, ‘I want to learn, I want to learn, I want to learn.’ It was that way every year. He was always very determined.

“I remember he hit .265 at Fort Lauderdale and the next year he asked me, ‘What do you think I’m going to hit?’ And I told him, ‘.265.’ He couldn’t understand. But he was moving up in competition. It’s not until you spend a couple of years at one level that you start to see the results.” And it’s true that Garcia batted exactly .265 in Double-A ball at West Haven in 1977 and .268 at the Triple-A level at Tacoma in 1978. His major-league average for six seasons is .287.

Despite Garcia’s promise, however, there wasn’t a place for him in the lineup with the Yankees, who were busy contending for pennants. “In the year at Tacoma,” Ferraro said, “Al Rosen wanted him to play shortstop. In two weeks there, he showed me he could have been a great shortstop. I hated to see the Yankees get rid of him.”

But Thurman Munson died in 1979, while Garcia was shuttling between the Bronx and Columbus, and the big league club needed an everyday catcher. Garcia was sacrificed along with Chris Chambliss and Paul Mirabella.

“I was happy,” Garcia said. “I never thought I’d play with the Yankees. They had Willie Randolph and I couldn’t develop there. With the Yankees, I could still be in Triple-A. Or they could have lost me for $25,000 in the minor league draft.” It so happens that’s how they lost Upshaw after the 1977 season.

Ferraro spent four seasons as a Yankee coach, but his career with the organization was undermined in the second game of the 1980 playoffs when he waved Randolph home and into an out at the plate. It was the beginning of the end for his friend and manager, Dick Howser, and eventually himself. Ferraro managed the Cleveland Indians for most of the 1983 season, then joined Howser in Kansas City in 1984.

“He was a great person to play baseball for,” said Garcia, taking time to acknowledge a debt in the midst of his joy. “He’s fair to people. He probably saw I was an innocent in the game, that I didn’t know anything. I owe him a lot.”

The man was pleased Garcia felt that way. “It’s a pleasure watching him now, watching them now,” he said, thinking of the first baseman as well as the second baseman on the East Division champions, “even if they are taking money out of my pocket.”