CAMMY’S SWEET HOMERS BECOME LEGEND
This is an excerpt from Dan Good’s book “Playing Through the Pain: Ken Caminiti and the Steroids Confession That Changed Baseball Forever,” which is being released today. It has been printed with the permission of Abrams Press. The excerpt recounts Ken’s infamous “Snickers game” on August 18, 1996, when he battled food poisoning to hit two home runs during the Padres’ series in Mexico against the Mets.
BY DAN GOOD
Ken started to feel sick. At first, he didn’t know what was wrong. His stomach was doing somersaults. His forearms, calves, and hamstrings cramped.
As it turns out, Ken had eaten salad, failing to follow the food instructions the team had given to each player before the trip. And now he was paying the price. Food poisoning — Montezuma’s revenge. After a sleepless night, much of it spent in the bathroom, Ken was back at the ballpark white as a sheet and badly dehydrated. Manager Bruce Bochy was in his office when the team’s assistant trainer, Todd Hutcheson, and team doctor Jan Fronek put Ken on an adjacent table, using a coat hanger for a makeshift IV.
“He can’t play,” Hutcheson told Bochy.
After one bag of solution, Caminiti “started focusing a little better.” So they gave him another bag. All the while, Bochy saw no way he was going to submit a lineup card with Caminiti’s name on it.
As game time approached, Bochy prepared to walk with his lineup card to home plate. He still didn’t see how his third baseman was going to be ready for game time.
“I’m going down, Kenny, maybe we can use you later in the game,” Bochy told
him.
“Hold on,” Caminiti responded, following his manager.
“Cammy, just stay there,” Bochy told him.
“Hey, I’m good. I’m good.” “Cammy, I can’t put you in there.” “Look at me, I’m telling you — I feel great. I just needed some IV.” Bochy paused.
“Sure enough, he talked me into it,” Bochy said.
The team planned to keep a close eye on Caminiti. He slipped on his uniform just before 4:05, game time. He stepped onto the field and ran two sprints. The sun was beating down, and Hutcheson was putting eye black “stickers” on outfielder Steve Finley’s cheeks. Caminiti yelled to “Hutch” for a Snickers, the gooey chocolate bar featuring peanuts, caramel, and nougat. But given the noise from the cheering fans, Hutcheson misheard Ken and brought Caminiti a batch of the eye black stickers.
“Not stickers. I said Snickers,” Caminiti told Hutcheson. Ken quickly got his candy bar and scarfed it down.
Leading off in the second, Ken stood outside the left-handed batter’s box, his helmet bill pulled nearly over his eyes. He inhaled and exhaled, his breathing labored.
He grimaced as he stepped into the box and set his bat.
Paul Wilson delivered, and Caminiti swung through the first pitch, late.
Strike one.
A short walk and a deep exhale and Caminiti was back for the second pitch, a ball outside. One and one.
He leaned his bat against his leg and adjusted his batting gloves, barely stepping out of the batter’s box — why expel any extra energy? The next pitch was another ball. Two and one.
Ken wiped his nose, spit, and dug in. This was going to be the pitch.
Wilson threw over the plate, and Caminiti pounced — a laser beam. The ball climbed over the infield and kept carrying, settling into the leftcenter stands. Caminiti, half an hour after being strapped to an IV, had just hit a home run. He took a slow trot around the base paths. He wasn’t showing up Wilson — he simply couldn’t run any faster due to his weakened state. He stopped running before reaching home plate and walked across, taking the thirty-odd paces from home plate to the dugout
with his hand on his left hip.
There, Bochy and his Padres teammates smiled and laughed. Some IV fluid and a Snickers bar, and Ken went from death personified to hitting a home run.
He came up again in the bottom of the third with two runners on. Wilson delivered a fastball on the outside corner for strike one.
The second pitch was a ball outside.
The sweat dripped off Wilson’s nose. Caminiti had been battling sickness and dehydration, but now Wilson’s stomach was in knots.
Wilson threw the ball down and in, and this time Ken smashed it to rightcenter ... get up, get up, get up, and it was gone, to give the Padres a 4–0 lead.
As Ken rounded third, he stuck out his tongue at coach Tim Flannery, their usual routine, but this time he wasn’t playing — he was gassed.
The crowd celebrated Ken’s accomplishments with noisemakers and “the wave.”
He came up once more in the fifth. During the at bat, broadcaster Gary Thorne discussed the IV solution Ken had received before the game.
“Is that legal?” fellow broadcaster Ralph Kiner asked.
“It’s medically appropriate,” Thorne responded, laughing.
“’Cause I’ll start taking it if it’s all
right,” Kiner said.
“Just a little solution to fight off the dehydration. Lotta water. Probably some sugar.”
Ken, wincing and squinting in the batter’s box, worked the count to 3and-2 before striking out. He swung and missed, and the momentum carried him three steps outside the batter’s box — he had to pause to steady himself from falling over. Another long, cautious walk to the dugout, and Caminiti’s day was over, the legend forever forged.
He received another liter of IV fluid after playing and signed autographs for an hour.
“I don’t know what happened,” he said after the game. “Actually, I didn’t think I touched the ball.”
Ken’s teammates, awed by his performance, started playfully requesting Caminiti’s treatment, IVs and Snickers, themselves.
Ken’s tear continued after the team returned home: He hit a grand slam the following day against Montreal’s Pedro Martínez as part of a six-RBI output; then, two days after that, on August 21, he hit two more home runs to key a series sweep over the Expos. He’d already surpassed his career high for home runs in a season with more than a month left.
The Padres, starting with Ken’s “Snickers game,” won ten of eleven games to build a two-game lead over the second-place Dodgers. After Ken showed his teammates how far he would go to play — and playing through food poisoning was a step beyond the shoulder or hamstring pulls or abdominal issues — it forced them to dig deeper, too.
Ken would have fought to play that Snickers game regardless of the importance — he was pulling similar exploits playing winter ball in Puerto Rico under manager Tom Gamboa — but the playoffs being so close gave him extra motivation. The Dodgers entered that fateful August day with a one-game lead over the Padres.
But there was more than a month left in the season, and seven games left between the two teams. Ken was certainly motivated to overtake Los Angeles, given that he’d played 1,200 major league games without reaching the playoffs, and this was his best chance to get there.
There was always something deeper with Ken, a desire to keep playing no matter how much pain he faced, affirming his belief that life’s all
That drive inspired the sweetest performance of his career.