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" David Cone, lead tenor of the split-fingered fastball, spent an evening at the Metropolitan Opera a couple of years ago, listening from a box seat in the house that Vanderbilt as Placido Domingo sang Otello. This in itself is unremarkable, since both opera and baseball are genres of voluptuous lyrical expression, loved beyond rational explanation by the devotee, that any sane human bred into a culture of quick-riff garbage finds skull-numbingly boring, primarily because both demand an extended commitment of time and attention. Both opera and baseball freeze the moment in order to plumb and exalt the soul&amp;#039;s emotion, unfurling at a stately, infuriating, nineteenth-century pace until, in one case, the fat lady trills at last or, in the other, Don Zimmer finally finishes scratching himself.  Nor is it odd that David Cone found himself enraptured at the Met, even though he grew up the freckled, wild-eyed Irish son of a graveyard-shift meat packer in Kansas City, Missouri, and has been pitching baseballs for his bread since 1981. Cone, after all, has lived a long time now in New York City, where anything may happen at any time, even such an aberrance as a weird sex act in bullpen, which was the 1992 headline denoting a civil complaint lodged against none other than David Cone, stating that he had summoned a pair of female fans to that cavern of hurling repose, where, it was alleged, he performed an unsavory pregame ritual involving both his pitching hand and his pecker, an act that Cone has steadfastly denied and that seems to have never actually occurred. No, the strange thing happened afterward, when, fluttering on the wings of Moorish song, Cone went backstage and met the master, who raised a hand to hush Cone as he began to introduce himself. &amp;quot;You,&amp;quot; said the great Domingo. &amp;quot;I know you. You are David Cone. You went 20-3 with the Mets in 1988.&amp;quot; David Cone has never been your typical jock-millionaire. For one thing, he&amp;#039;s a union leader -- not merely a figurehead, but someone who sits at the negotiating table, who speaks honestly and openly, at length and in depth, about revenue sharing, franchise values, competitive balance, and the rights and responsibilities of the men who play ball to earn their living. For another, his eyes and smile are lit like a loon&amp;#039;s, like those of a man who has seen and done some wicked shit, and I&amp;#039;m not talking here just about his job, which is to hurl pork chops past pit bulls, or his wild-man proclivities, which are -- sorry, were -- the stuff of locker-room legend. His eyes are flecked with green and gold and always ablaze -- to cop a chunk of cheese from that old relief ace and father of aestheticism Walter Pater -- with a hard, gemlike flame. And though his relentless self-torture on the mound is a statistical fact -- early in his career, Cone went nearly eight full seasons without a single missed start, routinely throwing 140 to 150 pitches per game -- it hardly conveys the depth of his wide-eyed presence, or the sly disjunction of his thin smile, half demure, half demonic.  At thirty-six, with a money arm that has been unzipped more often than Bill Clinton&amp;#039;s trousers, Cone works season to season, game to game, pitch to pitch, in fierce pain, staring sixty feet six inches into a catcher&amp;#039;s mitt to avoid gazing at a future without baseball.  &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ll miss having that ball in my hand,&amp;quot; he says, sitting in the clubhouse before practice. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m going to have trouble with it, emotionally. I&amp;#039;d like to say, &amp;#039;Hey, I&amp;#039;m a little more well-adjusted than that -- I have a future and I have a mind and I have things to look forward to,&amp;#039; but to me it&amp;#039;s just about...I love to pitch so much.&amp;quot; The right arm that was once a blowtorch is a welder&amp;#039;s rod these days. Early in 1996, a blown artery -- an aneurysm -- in his pitching shoulder needed a vein graft; in 1997, the shoulder needed surgery again. He suffers from chronic tendinitis in the shoulder now; on a good day, it hurts. He&amp;#039;s back at spring training, gearing up for his fourteenth year in the bigs, his fifth with the New York Yankees. You can grow up loathing the Yankees -- Cone learned to hate them as a teenager, watching them snuff out his Kansas City Royals in the American League playoffs in 1976, 1977, and 1978 -- but it is not a bad thing to spend the twilight of a long, fabled career wearing the pinstripes. Nor is Legends Field, located at the terminus of short but unscenic Steinbrenner Drive in Tampa, a bad place to ease an old wing back into the fray.  Yankees owner George Steinbrenner made his money the old-fashioned way -- he inherited it from his daddy, who built ships -- and he enjoys lavishing it on his roster of millionaire heroes. The players&amp;#039; locker room is huge, clean, and nearly fragrant; their shower shoes are dark blue to match their caps; a groaning buffet table is laid out near the showers; a well-stocked beverage cooler hums against the wall nearest Cone&amp;#039;s corner locker along pitcher&amp;#039;s row, a prime chunk of real estate that attests to his old-warrior status. When the young arms leave the clubhouse and lope out to center field for calisthenics, they toss their gloves onto the grass along the right-field foul line; Cone carries his with him so that he needn&amp;#039;t return for it. When they finish with a jog around the field&amp;#039;s perimeter, Cone is the hindmost dog in the pack.  &amp;quot;No wasted effort,&amp;quot; Cone snickers after practice, throwing on a shirt and shorts. He is a solid six-footer, thickish of trunk, but he seems slight and unmuscular among his teammates. &amp;quot;How many bullets are left?&amp;quot; He has become a sniper on the mound, learning to throw every pitch in his arsenal with mastery, at a variety of speeds and arm angles. He has lost velocity and gained trust in himself, and he won twenty games last year for the first time since the &amp;#039;88 season that wowed Domingo. Still, his arm faded toward autumn, and already the Yankees&amp;#039; coaches are talking about giving him extra rest between starts. He gets acupuncture treatments several days a week, hoping to lessen the pain. He wants to start on opening day at Yankee Stadium.  &amp;quot;I love being out there on the mound with the ball in my hand. I can control the game. I&amp;#039;m out there. No clock -- nothing happens until I throw that thing. Nothing happens. I love that feeling.&amp;quot;  Something furrows Cone&amp;#039;s brow and drops his voice just then, something few men -- athletes or not -- give voice to: fear. &amp;quot;Maybe I should&amp;#039;ve left after last year,&amp;quot; he says quietly, &amp;quot;but I&amp;#039;m not ready. It scares me.&amp;quot; When the Kansas City Royals traded David Cone to the New York Mets in 1987, he was just twenty-four, a K.C. boy who&amp;#039;d signed with his hometown club right out of high school and had never even seen the place he now refers to simply as the City. He found out about the deal the morning after he&amp;#039;d called his family to tell them that he&amp;#039;d made the Royals&amp;#039; opening-day roster; fighting back tears, he packed up his locker and left the clubhouse without a word. With five minor league seasons and twenty-two and two-thirds innings of major league pitching on his r\u00E9sum\u00E9, he came east to join up with a crew of fiercely gifted rogues, winners of a Wagnerian World Series the prior October -- one out from a final loss, they saw Red Sox first baseman Bill Buckner let a weak bouncer trickle through his aged, injury-stiffened ankles -- a brigade of becapped, beer-swilling, coke-snorting, skirt-chasing, swinging dicks that may reign forever in the annals of baseball history as the purest mass embodiment of Satan ever to don jocks. The team boasted future rehab kings Dwight &amp;quot;Doc&amp;quot; Gooden and Darryl Strawberry, along with pug-uglies Lenny &amp;quot;Nails&amp;quot; Dykstra, the human amphetamine; Randy Myers; Roger McDowell; Fat Sid Fernandez; and the Mets&amp;#039; guru, first baseman nonpareil Keith &amp;quot;Mex&amp;quot; Hernandez, who by that time was a chain-smoking, thirty-three-year-old veteran with a reputation for packing his nostrils and cartwheeling naked through the locker room.  The Mets were a pack of bastard wolves. Cone sat silent in a corner of the clubhouse. He knew the rules: A rookie didn&amp;#039;t speak unless spoken to; a rookie carried balls; a rookie toted bags. Then a couple of starting pitchers got hurt early and David Cone stepped into the middle of the rotation, and suddenly pitcher Ron Darling and none other than Keith Hernandez himself were tutoring the new kid in the fine art of metropolitan living.  &amp;quot;I couldn&amp;#039;t believe it,&amp;quot; Cone recalls. &amp;quot;I was so in awe of them. They taught me how to love the city. They showed me the ropes.&amp;quot; Ropes? What ropes? &amp;quot;The East River and the Hudson River,&amp;quot; he says, laughing. &amp;quot;Anything in between was fair game.&amp;quot; The Mets lived large and won their share, but they never made it back to another series. As for Cone -- who owns three World Series rings now (two from the Yankees, one from the Toronto Blue Jays) and a Cy Young Award he copped in &amp;#039;94 and 168 big-league victories and homes in New York City and Tampa, who founded and funds an eponymous charitable foundation and peppers his postworkout conversation with words like ruffian and laden and tenuous, who has become the most cogent, visible, and articulate union spokesperson not only in pro sports but in any labor movement -- he spent most of his nearly six full seasons with the team in complete control on the pitching mound and in utter chaos everywhere else.  &amp;quot;The swaggering, arrogant Mets,&amp;quot; Cone says fondly, his smile spreading. &amp;quot;We played hard and we partied hard. I&amp;#039;m not ashamed of that. I was no angel -- I did some things I shouldn&amp;#039;t have done, lived a lifestyle I shouldn&amp;#039;t have lived. I had a blast at times; other times, I probably compromised my job, my duty to do my job, to be ready as a professional.&amp;quot; To say the least. Cone&amp;#039;s evolution from riotous youth to elder statesman began with an end-of-season game in Philadelphia between the Mets and the Phillies on October 6, 1991. I was in Row 2, behind home plate, in a stadium three-quarters empty, in seats sold below face value by a listless, lonely scalper ten minutes before game time. I was there only because nothing in life is so perfectly gorgeous and wholly devoid of significance as the final bow of a baseball season between two hopeless major league teams -- well, maybe opera, or Matt Damon -- but on that cool afternoon, Cone was the toughest pitcher I&amp;#039;ve ever seen.  &amp;quot;Fucking amazing,&amp;quot; I wrote in my journal that night. Cone had struck out nineteen men, tying the National League record shared by Hall of Famers Tom Seaver and Steve Carlton. The fans -- Philadelphia fans, for God&amp;#039;s sake -- watched in near silence; it was the sound of awe. By the third inning, the Phils&amp;#039; hitters were walking back from home plate to their dugout smiling in bafflement, rolling their eyes, and shrugging helplessly. Cone himself never changed his expression. He looked like the guy on the gallows wearing the noose.  Small wonder: He was awaiting arrest. That morning, a Mets official had informed Cone that a local woman had gone to the Philadelphia police with a story about how Cone had invited her to his hotel room the night before and forced himself upon her. An investigation cleared him, but Cone&amp;#039;s alibi -- he&amp;#039;d been out partying with his teammates until 6:30 a.m. -- didn&amp;#039;t keep the media hounds at bay. Until then, Cone had seemed like a cherub among the Mets&amp;#039; louts; now he hid in his apartment as the tabloids howled his name. It got worse the next spring, when a Florida woman calling herself Cone&amp;#039;s girlfriend told police there that she had been sexually assaulted the previous spring, not by Cone but by three of his teammates. Cone, who had a live-in girlfriend back in New York City -- she&amp;#039;s now his wife -- found himself confessing to the detectives that yes, indeed, he&amp;#039;d had sex with the Florida woman, that, to tell the truth, on two separate occasions he&amp;#039;d enjoyed her and another woman&amp;#039;s fruits simultaneously, but no, sir, she was not his girlfriend.  The official report of the Florida investigation -- this one, too, wound up (surprise!) dropped -- was publicly released just after the bulletin that Cone supposedly choked his chicken in the Mets&amp;#039; bullpen.  That&amp;#039;s when David Cone decided to meet the press. &amp;quot;You can&amp;#039;t fight the media,&amp;quot; he says now. &amp;quot;The worst thing you can do is hide from it. Stand up. Be honest. If there&amp;#039;s an area you don&amp;#039;t want to get into, just say, &amp;#039;I&amp;#039;d rather not talk about that.&amp;#039; All those mistakes I made put me under tremendous strain. I had to decide: Either I could withdraw or I could take it head-on.&amp;quot; Cone did Stern and Imus, poked fun at himself, and pitched well, but the Mets, a vapor trail of the team he&amp;#039;d joined in &amp;#039;87, sent him to Toronto at the trading deadline. He leased an apartment at the SkyDome, ambled into the Blue Jays&amp;#039; clubhouse in the heat of the &amp;#039;92 pennant race, found his locker, and unpacked: one glove, a pair of cleats, and a carton of Marlboros.  &amp;quot;That was my trademark,&amp;quot; he muses. &amp;quot;Dave Stieb and Pat Hentgen&amp;quot; -- two of Cone&amp;#039;s new pitching mates -- &amp;quot;were going, &amp;#039;Look at this fucking guy.&amp;#039; That was me: the hired gun.&amp;quot; After helping Toronto win the World Series, Cone became a free agent. He signed back with Kansas City; the team that had inked him for $17,500 in 1981 now gave him a three-year, $18 million deal, half of it up front. He was the highest-paid pitcher in the game, but cash wasn&amp;#039;t a big issue -- better teams in bigger markets gladly would have paid more for his arm.  &amp;quot;I made the decision to go home,&amp;quot; Cone says, &amp;quot;and start a different life, get involved in the community, develop an identity on the Royals, and try to reverse things.&amp;quot; David Cone is a typical baseball player in ways that have proved crucial. He signed his first contract with the Royals when he was eighteen years old. Six years later, when he was traded to the Mets, Cone was told, not asked, about it. When he went 20-3 for New York in &amp;#039;88, the club gave him a $240,000 raise. That&amp;#039;s long green, to be sure, but it&amp;#039;s also, at best, a fifth of the bump he&amp;#039;d have earned if he&amp;#039;d made the majors one season earlier. And when the Mets shipped him to the Blue Jays after six years of duty, he again had no voice in the decision. In fact, Cone&amp;#039;s return to the Royals was the first choice he&amp;#039;d had about where to pitch in twelve years of playing ball professionally. When the baseball players struck on August 12, 1994, Cone started going to union meetings. &amp;quot;Just to educate myself,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re in the middle of a strike, relying on lawyers talking about labor law and economists talking about economic theory, which I think might be the worst thing in the world, other than legal theory, and here we are -- ballplayers. We want to play the game. We feel lost. &amp;quot;People thought we didn&amp;#039;t care about the game, that we didn&amp;#039;t love the game -- just greedy ballplayers wanting more. That whole perception hurt. We tried to fight it. Most of us are from modest backgrounds, overwhelmed by the money we&amp;#039;re making. We tried to prove that we were just trying to stand up for our rights. But nobody wants to hear that. You&amp;#039;re not going to get any sympathy. Millionaire ballplayers shouldn&amp;#039;t get any sympathy from the fan -- the simple issue is billionaires fighting millionaires. There&amp;#039;s no sympathy, the World Series was canceled, and the hell with all of you, you&amp;#039;re all wrong. And there&amp;#039;s some truth in that.&amp;quot; But the more Cone learned and thought about the rights of players to earn market value and retain some control over where they played, the more determined he became to fight the owners. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s hard to believe that some of the most powerful and influential people in the world, who&amp;#039;ve done an unbelievable job of running their businesses and building them up, can&amp;#039;t run a baseball team. They spend too much money? They can&amp;#039;t control themselves? &amp;quot;The owners keep the books. You run your business; you solve your revenue-sharing problems. Pay us what you want, at some point in our careers let us be free agents -- let us choose where we want to work -- and, other than that, do whatever you want.&amp;quot; Cone became the American League player representative by default. &amp;quot;Nobody else wanted it. One of the biggest fears of getting involved with the union is the repercussions on down the line. The other players were telling me, &amp;#039;You have enough status, you speak well enough -- we need you on the front line.&amp;#039; It woke me up, seeing the fan reaction, dealing with owners, going to the White House to try to negotiate a settlement. I think in the long run it helped me appreciate the game a lot more.&amp;quot; Of course, four days after the strike was settled in &amp;#039;95, the Royals gently reminded Cone that there&amp;#039;s nothing free about free speech: They traded him back to the Blue Jays, who in turn traded him later that same season to the Yankees. This time, Cone didn&amp;#039;t have to fight back any tears.  &amp;quot;David is a tremendous asset,&amp;quot; George Steinbrenner is saying, &amp;quot;a leader in the truest sense of the word. He&amp;#039;s a warrior in the truest sense. That&amp;#039;s the supreme compliment that you can pay an ath-a-lete.&amp;quot; George, who is, I&amp;#039;m deeply ashamed to say, from Cleveland, and who is also, in the truest sense of the word, a putz, is making one of his forays through the clubhouse, patting his assets on the butt and making certain that the dozens of Adidas logos are hanging straight. With his blue canvas shirt, his old man&amp;#039;s abdomen bulging beneath his khakis, and his skin buffed to a pale-pink glow, he looks as out of place in a locker room as tits on a toad. Having said his piece on his pitcher&amp;#039;s behalf -- Cone himself is doing a television interview back on the field -- he slaps me hard on the chest. &amp;quot;Okay?&amp;quot; he barks. &amp;quot;Good to see ya. Nice to see ya.&amp;quot;  I depart the clubhouse just in time to see Don Zimmer, the Yankees&amp;#039; sixty-eight-year-old bench coach, through the doorway of the coaches&amp;#039; locker room, buck naked. You can call yourself a baseball fan, make the pilgrimage to Cooperstown, and hock your grandma&amp;#039;s silver to buy a Mark McGwire rookie card, but you don&amp;#039;t truly know baseball until you&amp;#039;ve seen Don Zimmer&amp;#039;s cascade of flesh, led southward by the dowsing rod of his manhood.  Manager Joe Torre, talking to a gaggle of reporters in the hallway outside his office, catches the same panorama and winces. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m sorry I turned around,&amp;quot; he says. Out on the field, Cone is answering a question about his chances at the Hall of Fame. &amp;quot;Clemens, Seaver, Gibson, Maddux -- I just don&amp;#039;t see myself in that category. I&amp;#039;m flattered that maybe it&amp;#039;s debatable at this point.&amp;quot; Later, over lunch, I bring up the Hall of Fame again. Two hundred career wins, I say, and two more World Series rings just might get him in. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m two good years away from two hundred,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;It would be nice.&amp;quot; Plus, you&amp;#039;d be the only guy who has two hundred wins, five rings, and has documentedly had sex with two women at once. That&amp;#039;s got to impress the voters. Cone laughs. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s documented, that&amp;#039;s for sure. You have done your research.&amp;quot; Then he gets serious. &amp;quot;I like the pitcher I am. Before, my arm never hurt. I&amp;#039;d just rear back and throw harder when I got in trouble. But I&amp;#039;ve learned the art of backing off, subtracting rather than trying to add. Instead of &amp;#039;Oh, my God, I&amp;#039;ve gotta throw the best fastball of my life right now,&amp;#039; I&amp;#039;ll wet this one up a little bit or make that one move. Bases loaded, 3-2 count -- take a little off. That&amp;#039;s the number-one lesson to learn as a pitcher, the toughest lesson: Less is more sometimes.&amp;quot; Sometimes, yes, less is more. Other times, more may well be nothing, nothing at all. For years, Cone has flashed on a vision of himself on the mound. It&amp;#039;s opening day at Yankee Stadium. Yogi Berra&amp;#039;s there, and the shade of Joe D., along with sixty thousand stomping New Yorkers. Don Zimmer&amp;#039;s in the dugout, scratching. And after all the introductions and Placido Domingo&amp;#039;s rendition of the national anthem and Cone&amp;#039;s eight warm-up pitches, after the umpire brushes off home plate and leans in behind the catcher, after the leadoff man finishes knocking the clay off his spikes and adjusting his cup, Cone stares in for the sign. The crowd hushes, awaiting the first strike of the season.  It never comes. David Cone&amp;#039;s not ready yet, not ready to go. Ball in hand, he freezes time. &amp;quot;The umpires are screaming,&amp;quot; he says, eyes aglow. &amp;quot;Nah, I don&amp;#039;t wanna throw it. Fuck &amp;#039;em -- I ain&amp;#039;t throwin&amp;#039; it. I&amp;#039;m just gonna stand here for a while and soak it up.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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