Game Over 
Sports
The Coach’s Son
Growing up in Houston, pro baseball star Chuck Knoblauch would turn to his father whenever he was in a slump. He can’t anymore.
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A huge Astros fan, Knoblauch went to about a dozen games at the Astrodome every season. He was so obsessed with the team that he knew what brand of glove and shoes each player wore and memorized all the uniform numbers. His favorite player was outfielder Cesar Cedeno. (“Number 28,” he remembers.)
He played basketball and football too, but after his freshman year at Bellaire, he was all baseball, playing three years under his father. He always felt the pressure to perform at a high level and stay in line. “Being Ray Knoblauch’s son, it was always, ‘Oh, he’s playing because he’s the coach’s son.’ So if I screwed up, it was open season for everybody to attack me.” Including his father—yet he wasn’t yelled at only for what he did on the field; there was also his temperament. “I was pretty psycho back then,” he says. “I could go nuts with the best of them. I mean, I’d just snap sometimes.” He’d rant and rave in the dugout, ram his bat into the ground before flinging it down the foul line, throw helmets everywhere. “I’ve really mellowed over the years,” he says. “The anger beats you up mentally and physically. But I still have my moments.” In his senior year Knoblauch sat out the season with a broken leg, but he cheered as his father coached the team to the state title. Then, after graduation, he enrolled at Texas A&M University to play in the revered baseball program and Ray retired from coaching.
Knoblauch played center field for the Aggies his freshman year, then became an All-American shortstop. “He wasn’t a real cutup,” recalls Mark Johnson, A&M’s baseball coach since 1984. “He was all business on the ball field. Even when he came to practice, he had an agenda. He was very self-conscious about his play and always wanted more and more feedback: ‘How’s my swing? Did I dip? Am I staying down on the ground balls?’ In fact, if there was anything I needed to scold him about, it was his working too hard. I was always telling him to relax, to not beat himself up so much. He was his own worst enemy at times.”
In 1989 Knoblauch was drafted by the Twins organization in the first round. He was the twenty-fifth pick overall—unusually high for someone who didn’t hit homers or throw 95-mile-per-hour fastballs. “My father wanted so badly for me to be picked by the Astros,” Knoblauch says. “He was really upset about it. I wasn’t. I was just happy to be picked by anybody.” After signing for $120,000, Knoblauch wanted a guarantee from Twins officials that if he played well enough his first season in the minor leagues, he’d be invited to the big league training camp the following spring. “Hit .280 and we’ll invite you,” then—general manager Andy MacPhail told him. “Make it .300,” Ray chimed in, to his son’s chagrin. MacPhail would say later, “I knew then that this was a kid with the genes of a competitor.”
In his one year with the double-A Orlando Sun Rays, Knoblauch switched positions from shortstop to second base and hit an impressive .289. His manager, Ron Gardenhire, described him to reporters as a “headstrong” player who angered teammates with his intolerance of “any screwups, either by himself or his teammates,” but he managed to get invited to spring training in 1991. Although he was a non-roster player with only 187 minor league games under his belt, he batted close to .400 and made the cut, beating Nelson Liriano, a five-year veteran, out of his second-base job. In that first season, he batted .281, scored 78 runs, and stole 25 bases—enough to earn him the American League Rookie of the Year award. He went on to hit .350 in the playoffs and .308 in the World Series, helping the Twins to become world champions.
In the years that followed, he and the Twins went in opposite directions. He became the AL’s best second baseman and leadoff hitter, but the team never matched its success—not even close. Although he signed a five-year, $30 million contract in August 1996, the following fall he informed the Twins that he wanted to waive his no-trade clause and be dealt to a contender as soon as possible. “Why would somebody want to stay here to play?” he said at the time. “Believe me, there’s nothing fun about losing ninety games. It makes it difficult to go to the ballpark.” (The Twins would ultimately lose 94 games en route to a franchise-record fifth straight season under .500, finishing 181Ú2 games out of first place.)
On February 6, 1998, Knoblauch was acquired by the Yankees for four minor league prospects and $3 million in cash. “Chuck had that fire we needed,” Yankees manager Joe Torre says. “He’s a tough player who never takes the safe way out. He does a lot of things to create an attitude.” Indeed, when you ask people about Knoblauch, they say admiringly that he “plays like a coach’s son,” which means he’s mentally rock-solid and fundamentally airtight. “He is constantly demonstrating the way the game is supposed to be played,” says Yankees general manager Brian Cashman.
His at bats, in particular, are masterful—more epic events than fleeting moments. After each pitch, he performs a bizarre ritual: He steps out of the batter’s box, tugs at the shoulder of his uniform jersey, unwraps and rewraps the Velcro of his batting gloves, pounds his bat against his cleats to knock loose dirt, stares at his bat, mumbles something to himself, and then finally steps back in. “It’s more time to think than anything else,” Knoblauch says. “The count. The situation. Everything.” He has also made an art form of the ten-pitch at bat. Aside from hitting from a crouched stance, which reduces his strike zone to something the size of a postage stamp, he rarely swings at bad pitches and has the ability to foul off pitch after pitch after pitch, wearing down the opposing pitcher. He’s a see-and-react hitter who seems to always find a way—whether by a walk, getting hit by a pitch, a bunt, or a hit—to get on base, which accounts for his .391 on-base percentage. “He’s a true leadoff hitter,” says Willie Randolph, the team’s third-base coach and its former leadoff-hitting second baseman. “He’s one of the few in baseball who really understand that role.”
And yet, you wouldn’t know it this year, for reasons that mystify him as much as anyone. He seems himself as he hunches over on a stool in the Yankee clubhouse, sipping hot chocolate and looking into the bottom of his cup with a far-off gaze. In his stall half a dozen black-and-red bats smeared with pine tar are lined in a neat row, and on an upper shelf sits a picture of him and Lisa. But he isn’t himself: He has a sore knee and middle finger, a bandage on his right knee, scratches of assorted lengths on his feet and lower legs, and a bruise on his forearm. “Oh, I’m a mess right now,” he says with an uneasy laugh.
He’s asked the obvious: Is he trying too hard to impress his new team?
“No,” he says, stone-faced. “I don’t need to impress anybody.”
He is then asked if maybe he’s feeling the pressure of New York City.
Another quick no, followed by a pause, then an explanation: “I’m a firm believer that pressure comes from within. If you concentrate on the game, you’ll be all right. My father taught me that.”
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