One Halloween, the trick was on me.
It happened in 2011, at a costume competition in Raleigh, North Carolina, where I was living at the time. It wasn’t the Fall Classic I had hoped for during my playing days, but five years after retirement from baseball, it was enough to get the juices flowing. It could have been Yankee Stadium, even though it was really a happy hour spot in the Research Triangle.
Halloween has long been a big deal to my family. Growing up, my brother reveled in what I called “Hack-A-Thon” movies as his apprenticeship to horror costumes. These B-movies would slash their way into characters he could employ to scare unwitting children who dared to walk up to our door.
My wife is excellent at sewing costumes, and Halloween is one of the times her talent takes center stage.
Sure enough, at this costume competition, she was at the top of her game. She was pregnant and showing, so she’d decided to dress as a witch, standing behind her cauldron. She wrapped black material around her belly to be the cauldron and accented her look with metallic witch-like colors — shimmering purples and greens. Surely a costume with a witch exploding around a cauldron would earn some votes.
Me? In a last-minute moment of inspiration, I decided … to go as myself. The baseball player. In a minor protest of playing in the steroid era, though, I decided to juice up plain old Doug Glanville a bit. So, I dug up my old Texas Rangers uniform, stuffed my body with T-shirts and clothes to add muscle, and added some props, including fake supplement pills in a giant white plastic bottle labeled “BIGGUN” — the affectionate name Jim Thome would use to greet me and his other teammates.
“Hey, Biggun!”
Then I went to Kinko’s, photocopied my baseball card from Texas, blew it up, and put a rope through it so I could wear it around my neck. I crossed off certain stats and doctored the numbers. I raised my home runs by roughly 75 per year, and all my other key power numbers, too, making Barry Bonds’ stats look like he bunted every single at-bat of his career.
The final piece: plastic syringes sticking out of my body at various points. It was humorous, but also an expression of some of the real frustration I have over what PEDs did to baseball. I played in the heart of that era and I was surrounded by ghosts. I was never sure who was enhanced and who was not. I never knew who was real and who wasn’t.
The venue was packed with contestants. At various moments, people stopped me to pay their respects to my outfit. But here’s where the trick part starts: Not one of them knew I was dressed as myself.
Eventually, someone asked if I was a fan of Doug Glanville’s, which of course I said I was. When someone went as far as to tell me, “You look a lot like Doug Glanville,” I said I was his cousin. Still, he wondered, why hadn’t I dressed as a star player if I’d really wanted to win?
Nevertheless, when the time came to announce the winners, I took first place in the “Sports” category, and the spoils were legit: a $200 gift card, which I accepted enthusiastically. Then the post-trophy questions started coming.
Why did you pick this particular player and theme? Wait, who are you, really?
I decided to come clean and admit the truth: “Yes, I am actually Doug Glanville.”
And to my surprise … no one believed me.
No one.
It was only when we were leaving the party, walking toward the parking lot, that I turned a doubter into my first believer.
I showed him my driver’s license. And still, he didn’t believe me.
Then my wife showed him her driver’s license. “Now,” she asked, “would we go this far?”
I suppose being anonymous was something I craved at different times during my playing days. But I also didn’t want to be forgotten. A typical retired baseball player’s conundrum: We want to play the trick and get the treat.
At any rate, I could always blame the costume.
Typically, I miss a lot of the Halloween festivities because I am covering baseball’s annual Fall Classic for ESPN. But this year, with a travel day in the World Series schedule, you might see me walking the streets of Connecticut. I might be one part of my wife’s medley of “Inside Out” characters: Envy, Sadness, Ennui, Boredom, Nostalgia, Anger.
(And if that doesn’t work out, because of the challenge of herding four kids ages 8 to 16 with varying degrees of Halloween interest, I might end up as Bass Reeves or a character from Tron.)
It will be a treat. Don’t be shy to say hello. And if you don’t recognize me, well, that’s OK, too.