A Swing And A Prayer

Mike Lowell is 28 but has a much older head. The Florida Marlins' third baseman puts only so much stock in mid-May stats and standings. As Memorial Day loomed, his team, 76-86 in 2001, was 23-21 and in second place in the National League East. A good start. He was batting .337, fifth in the league. Solid. He knows deep truths. The season is long. Baseball is a game. Real life unfolds when there's no umpire around to decide fair and foul.

When reporters gather by his changing stall and ask Lowell why he is batting 66 points higher than his career average, he doesn't know where to begin. With his father-in-law, Jose Lopez, who spent 15 years as a political prisoner in Castro's Cuba, who taught Lowell the meaning of patience in a way no wait-for-your-pitch Little League coach ever could? With his father, Carl, who fled the communism of Cuba in 1960 for Puerto Rico, where he pitched for the national team, went to dental school and made a life for himself? With the day, more than three years ago, when a doctor placed two fingers under Lowell's scrotum at a spring training physical, asked him to cough and sent him straight to Oncology?

Lowell settles on this: hot afternoons in the final weeks of the New York Yankees' dominating 1998 season, in the dank recesses of Yankee Stadium, after his September call-up from Triple A Columbus. The organization had imparted baseball just as his father had: mechanics, preparation, carriage. "The Yankees taught me how to blouse my pant leg," Lowell says. (A prize to you if you can find another 28-year-old who uses that phrase.) But nothing the former 20th-round draft pick saw in his stops en route to the Bronx made an impression on him like those first tours through Yankee Stadium's darkened tunnels. He heard before he saw. Thwap. Grunt. Thwap. Grunt. Thwap. Grunt: rightfielder Paul O'Neill, in the late innings of his estimable career, alone, hitting in a batting cage seven hours before game time. "Seeing Paul O'Neill in the cage, it gave me a whole new appreciation of dedication," Lowell says. "Here was one of the great players in the game, with the title clinched, and he's taking extra hitting every day."

Lowell shares this memory while sitting in his one-story house in a bilingual, middle-class Miami suburb called Kendall, away from the beach. He is in the second year of a contract paying him $6.5 million over three years, but the only difference between how he lives now and how he grew up in Coral Gables is that now he has a pool, plus an office filled with baseball books and autographed balls and bats. (On the bat signed by Arizona Diamondbacks third baseman Matt Williams are the words YOU PLAY THE GAME THE WAY IT SHOULD BE PLAYED.) On a shelf are hitting books by Ted Williams, Mike Schmidt, Charlie Lau. There's also a history of baseball in Cuba, written in Spanish. Lowell's surname (it comes from his paternal grandfather, who is German) will fool you. He was born in San Juan and came to the U.S. as a child, but he's as Cuban as Hemingway's Old Man. Miami and Lowell fit como mano yguante. Like hand and glove.

October 1998 was a dream, nearly. Lowell wasn't on the Yankees' postseason roster, but he wasn't far off it. He was told to stay loose at the team's spring training complex in Tampa in case an injury required a last-minute roster change. After New York swept the San Diego Padres, Lowell received a World Series ring.

The next month Lowell married the woman he had begun dating at Coral Gables High, Bertha Lopez, smart and vivacious, with a degree in early childhood education from Miami's Barry University and a couple of years on the Miami Heat dance team. (Mike has a degree in finance from Florida International.) They dated for seven years, through good times and bad. During their courtship doctors discovered a tumor on Bertha's right ovary. She said to Mike, "If I can't have a baby, I'll adopt. If you're not comfortable with that, then we should terminate our relationship."

Mike's view of the world is Cuban and Catholic. To him, fathering a child is a sacred obligation. He is one of four children. He said, "Breaking up is not an option. Whatever road you take, I'm taking it with you." She was 22; he was 23. Their heads were far older. The surgery went fine, if the removal of a tumor-noncancerous, it turned out—and an ovary can ever be said to be fine. After the operation the doctors told Bertha she would be able to have children. She and Mike wept with joy.

Three months after the World Series, on Feb. 1, 1999, Lowell received a call from Brian Cashman, the Yankees' general manager. We think the world of you, Cashman said, but with Scott Brosius ahead of you at third, you're not going to play for the big club anytime soon. Lowell had been traded for three pitching prospects. He was thrilled. He would be playing at home. More important, he would be the Marlins' every-day third baseman.

Eighteen days later Lowell was at Pro Player Stadium on a day reserved for physicals: eyes, ears, lungs, heart, genitalia. An internist, Dr. Aldo Alamo, did not like what he felt. There was a lump on one of Lowell's testicles.

"Have you ever been hit with a ball there?" the doctor asked.