Ojeda Still a Handyman

It was a crisp September afternoon on Long Island. There was a hint of frost in the air. The Met pitcher knew he wouldn’t be needing the window-box air-conditioners, and he began to lift them out. As he walked along the hedges on the side of the house, he frowned. They needed clipping.

Ballplayers are funny creatures. They are almost reluctant millionaires, macho characters who feel the need to do things themselves. Bobby Grich throws his back out carrying an air-conditioning unit up a flight of stairs. Ted Kluszewski decides to build his own swimming pool. Result: Years off their careers or big points off their lifetime averages.

Bob Ojeda took down the electric trimmer and began cropping the hedgerows. It never occurred to him to hire it done.

He doesn’t know exactly how it happened--the mind sometimes shuts such things out--but all of a sudden, there was a searing pain, and where there had been a middle finger, there was a bloody stump and an end dangling by what appeared to be a red dripping thread.

“Oh, my God!” thought Bob Ojeda. “My career is over. I’ve cut off my finger.”

When his wife came out, she took one look at the hand and turned faint. Ojeda remembers thinking, “I’ve got to get hold of myself. I can’t pass out, too.” He adds: “You know how they tell you when you receive a severe injury, it doesn’t hurt? You cut the nerves or something? Well, they’re wrong. It hurts like hell.”

Somehow, the Ojedas got to the nearest hospital. There, the doctors took one dubious look at the dangling wound. They were soothing. “We’ll cut that off for you. We’ll round it off. You’ll be able to do with half a finger.”

Ojeda was horrified. “You don’t understand!” he told them. “I’m a pitcher! I need that finger!”

Actually, history shows that he may not have. The famous Mordecai (Three Finger) Brown pitched himself into the Hall of Fame (earned-run average: 2.06), despite losing the index finger on his pitching hand to a corn-chopping machine on the farm. Brown had to use his thumb to impart spin on the ball and threw a natural sinker--in his day, known as a “drop.”

But Bob had no desire to become Three-Finger Ojeda. He insisted they call the team doctor. “They looked at me as if I was hallucinating,” he says. They didn’t believe he was a big league pitcher. Why would a big league pitcher be trimming his own hedge?

But Bob Ojeda comes from a long line of people who not only cut their own hedges but sometimes other peoples’, and he insisted he was indeed a Met starting pitcher and that they contact the team. The team medics rushed him to Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan. There, Dr. Richard Eaton undertook the delicate surgery. “It was six hours of suture under a microscope,” recalls Ojeda. “Afterward, Dr. Eaton told me it was the equivalent of sewing thread together and leaving a hole in the middle.”

Adds Ojeda: “He even asked me at what angle I wanted the finger sewn back on. I told him straight, but he suggested we bend it or crimp it slightly. I’m glad we did. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to grip the curveball.”

It was next important to restore feeling in the finger. “Every day, they would prick it with a pin,” he says. “If the color did not come back, it meant the blood was not flowing to it, and they would have to cut it off.”

No Canadian sunset could ever look so beautiful to Bob Ojeda as the first lovely pink blush that came around the finger as they pulled the pin out.

“You know, I’ve been shot at (on a fishing trip with his father once), I’ve driven a motorcycle off a bridge and crashed a Corvette into a telephone pole. But I was never more frightened of anything in my life as I was that color might not come back in my finger.”

The Mets were understandably nervous the next season about the return of their wounded staffer. A pitcher with a reattached, hemstitched finger is not too reassuring, Mordecai Brown notwithstanding.

“But I knew I was all right in spring training,” recalls Four-Finger Ojeda. “I was able to break off the curve. The fastball, if anything, had more velocity. The change that Johnny Podres taught me was effective.”

Ojeda started 31 games that next season, finished five, won 13 and had two shutouts. It was vintage Ojeda.

It is an article of baseball lore that rival batters came to believe Three Finger Brown’s damaged digit was an unfair advantage. No one has yet come forward to demand Ojeda’s delivery be outlawed, like the spitball; that his curved middle finger is an illegal substance, but his 8-8 record, two complete games, one shutout and 3.43 ERA argue that he is no one to dig in on.

When Ojeda described his curveball as “average” to a reporter the other night, reliever Jay Howell, overhearing, sniffed, “Did he describe his curveball as ‘average?’ If that’s the case, I wish I had an ‘average’ curveball.”

The Dodgers signed Ojeda as a free agent this year. Now, some contracts specify no sky-diving, snorkeling, drag racing, alligator wrestling or bobsledding. Ojeda’s specifies no hedge trimming. The Dodgers would be just as glad if he didn’t do windows, either.