[h=2]He was a flamboyant player, a charismatic coach, and a sexual predator[/h]by Greg Hanlon
[h=2]Chapter One: The Player[/h]June 11, 1989. Spring fever for 15-year-old Jennifer Diaz* and her friends. Freshman year was winding down. It was Andrea's* birthday, and Andrea's father had driven Jennifer, his daughter and a group of girls down from Connecticut to a doubleheader at Yankee Stadium. A brilliant June day, right field line seats, front row.
It's a bad view of the game, but it put them on top of the field, especially close to the Yankees' 28-year-old right fielder, Mel Hall. Each time he jogged out to his position between innings to warm up, the girls would ask him to toss them a ball. Hall would fake as if he would, but then he wouldn't, and then he'd smile at them. This went on, inning after inning. Typical Hall: He was playful and mischievous, lacking the aloofness of most ballplayers, somehow more accessible and fun loving. Often, when they played the Red Sox, as they were on this day, he'd wear a T-shirt underneath his jersey saying, "Boston Sucks."
He toyed with the girls all game long — "You want the ball?" — but never gave them one. When Hall moved from right field to left field to start the second game of the doubleheader, he continued to make teasing gestures toward them. After the girls left the game early to beat the traffic, Andrea's father said they should write Hall and ask him to autograph a baseball.
Two weeks went by. They were studying at the Fairfield Public Library for their freshman year final exams when they became bored, and decided to write that letter to Hall. They addressed it to Yankee Stadium, stuck in the mail, went back to studying, and didn't think about it again.
Until a Friday afternoon soon after, when somebody called Jennifer at home claiming to be Mel Hall. He said he had noticed the blond, wholesomely beautiful girl in the stands that day, and wanted to get to know her better — perhaps she and her family would like to come to Yankee Stadium for the game tomorrow? He said he got lots and lots of fan mail but never opened it. The fact that he happened to open her note must mean it was destiny.
It was too ridiculous. She was sure somebody was messing with her, so she hung up. Maybe it was the boy she had a crush on, a huge Yankee fan who really liked Mel Hall. The two had just gone to the movies and ... the phone rang again. She hung up. This happened several more times, stretching over a couple of hours. It was a preposterous notion: Mel Hall, the major leaguer on the field that day, from the Yankees, calling her?
Yes, impossible, said her father, who was also a big Yankees fan: It couldn't be Hall because the game had already started, and Hall was in the lineup that night. But the phone rang again, and the person claiming to be Hall said he was the designated hitter that night, so he could sneak into the clubhouse and use the phone. He said he would prove to Jennifer that he was who he said he was: When he came up to bat, he would tap home plate with his bat three times.
The Diaz family gathered around the television. Jennifer's grandfather, a huge fan too, was there, and a family friend from down the street also came by. Hall strode up to the plate, charismatic as always, stylish in his ‘80s Jheri curl, a natural hitter in his element. But the first pitch came in, and ... Hall did nothing. Jennifer was embarrassed. She had always been so gullible.
Still, everyone kept watching. And before the next pitch, Hall tapped home plate with his bat three times. Then he took his bat and pointed at the television camera.
Twenty years later, Jennifer would testify in court: "We were all ecstatic."
Mel Hall's career began full of promise. He was selected by the Chicago Cubs in the second round of the 1978 draft out of Port Byron High School in upstate New York, where he played baseball, football and basketball, and was tabbed as a future star.
He raced through the minor leagues, debuted in the major leagues in 1981 and made the majors for good in 1983, when he finished third in the Rookie of the Year balloting. The following year, he and another talented young outfielder, Joe Carter, were shipped to the Indians as part of a trade for ace pitcher Rick Sutcliffe. Although the deal helped secure the division title for the Cubs, skeptics wondered if the team had just mortgaged its future.
Hall's production would never match his potential, however. During his 13-year major league career, spent with the Cubs, Indians, Yankees, and, after a three-year stint in Japan, the Giants, he was mostly a tease, a talented but ultimately mediocre player for teams that weren't very good. He never played in the postseason, never made an All-Star team, never led the league in anything important, never hit 20 home runs or drove in close to 100 runs in the major leagues, and was generally considered a poor defensive outfielder.
But just because he wasn't a star didn't mean he couldn't carry himself like one. Hall became known for his flamboyant grandiosity and his belief in his own greatness despite statistical evidence to the contrary. The highest-profile chapter of his career came with the Yankees, from 1989 to 1992, where he was a limited but popular player. On a string of insipid Yankees teams slouching their way toward four consecutive losing seasons, at least Hall had personality.
At bat, he swung hard and he swung often, producing a poor on-base percentage but pretty good home run pop. When "Sluggo," as his Yankee teammates half-mockingly called him, connected, he punctuated the moment with one of history's slowest home run trots, once clocked at 33 seconds. Early in his career, he carried three sets of batting gloves in each back pocket, so, as he explained to reporters, they would "wave goodbye as I'm trotting around the bases." He even named his glove "Lucille," the same name B.B. King gave his guitar. Hall never said why he did this, but it fed the image of him as an eccentric superstar — hold the superstar.
This image was augmented by the colorful quotes he often provided reporters. He once said he wanted to fight Mike Tyson, and played up his cartoonish narcissism by telling reporters, "When God made my body, he made something good."
He grew up poor in Montezuma, N.Y., a tiny farm community 30 miles east of Syracuse where the Halls were one of a handful of black families. His father was a muck farmer who had played briefly in the Cincinnati Reds chain, and his mother worked in a factory. Perhaps he was overstating his poverty when he told reporters, "We were so poor, we ate ice for supper. We spelled poor with one ‘O' because we ate the other one." His beginnings were so humble, he said, that after being drafted, "I signed my first contract in dirt."
By the time Hall made it to the Yankees, those days of deprivation were long behind him. He played at a time where even ordinary players were starting to get big-money contracts — Hall made at least $6.3 million in his big-league career, and at least another $2 million playing three years in Japan — and he reveled in his money and status. By some accounts, he owned 15 cars, but still had a limo pick him up from Yankee Stadium. One person close to him at the time said he would spend his large paychecks practically as soon as he got them, and that he would literally take linen bags of cash out of the bank "like in the movies." In 1992, he rented an apartment in Trump Tower, then New York's most ostentatious address, where he lived down the hall from The Donald himself, the iconic emblem of that era's brand of crass New York excess.
He owned two German shepherds, and hired a German trainer who taught them to attack at the command of "Fass!" As if that were too ordinary a pet, he acquired two pet mountain lion cubs that he claimed to sleep beside, and that he once brought into the Yankee Stadium clubhouse. Authorities confiscated the animals and fined Hall several hundred dollars, but Hall was hardly chastened: "I'm thinking about getting myself a grizzly bear," he told reporters.
"Mel flirted with danger. He was always on the edge. He liked the action, he liked to instigate," said former Yankee teammate Steve Sax, one of only a few teammates and Yankee employees contacted willing to say much about Hall today. Sax said Hall would sometimes call him "cracker" just to get a rise out of him. "There were times when he was really fun to be around — he had this great big laugh — but you just didn't know what was on the other side of the curtain."
Hall did outlandish things and found himself in outlandish predicaments. In spring training of 1989, he put up both his wife and his girlfriend in the Indians team hotel and watched the two of them get into a fight near the pool, in full view of everyone. Later that year, after being traded to the Yankees and while on the disabled list with a pulled hamstring, he got into a violent clubhouse wrestling match with Rickey Henderson. He once reportedly brought a gun into the Yankees clubhouse. All of it was taken as part of Hall's eccentricity, what Hall himself described as "me being Mel Hall."
Hall's thirst for action, impulsiveness, and crass egotism were on full display in his nightlife, where he indulged his two greatest passions: Spending money and chasing women. When he went to New York's China Club and the Roseland Ballroom, he employed a $1,400-a-night bodyguard named Jimmy McMillan. Two decades later McMillan would become semi-famous in New York when he ran for governor and mayor on the "Rent is Too Damn High" party line. McMillan said Hall would "get women out of the club and want to fuck ‘em in the car." He said Hall would give him up to $300 to give to the DJ to play "songs he could get up close to the women and grind on them." McMillan would give the DJ $10, and pocket the rest.
"Mel Hall loved sex. Sex is what drove him," said McMillan. According to a high school teammate, Hall impregnated two girls by the time he was a high school senior. The best guess of Texas authorities for the number of children he eventually sired is eight.
McMillan added, "He was a young guy who made a lot of money real fast, and he wanted to buy his way through life."
So that was Mel Hall: a disappointment as a player, a tall tale, a caricature of a narcissistic athlete untethered from reality by sudden fame and fortune, a guy who did everything in excess. No, he probably wasn't someone you wanted to be close with, but he filled up column space and kept things interesting over 162 games.
So when Hall started showing up to the ballpark with 15-year-old Jennifer Diaz, the most common reaction was one of amused curiosity.
The tabloid news show "A Current Affair" did a story on the odd couple. When Jennifer sat in the family section with players' wives 10 and 20 years older than her, his teammates teased him for picking up his fiancée at Toys "R" Us. The organization, in a portion of their 1991 team yearbook devoted to players and their significant others, even included a picture of Mel and Jennifer at a school prom. No one blinked, at least publicly. It was all part of Mel Hall being Mel Hall.
"Mel's weird," a teammate who did not want to be identified once told a reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer. "I mean a lot of guys in baseball are weird. But Mel's weird weird."
* * *
The first time Hall had sex with Jennifer, her father was asleep on the sofa several feet away. After it was over, the 15-year-old cried. Decades later, she testified that Hall told her it was OK because he would marry her once she turned 18.
She is now 40. Through all the years, as she steered her life from a subject of gawking into a remarkably conventional version of suburban motherhood, she kept it all: The photos, the love letters, the apology letters, the jewelry receipts. She needed proof. It was such a bizarre story that nobody would believe her otherwise. Sometimes it's still hard for her to believe herself. Everything happened so fast, and she had so little control over how it unfolded.
After the Friday night game in which Hall had amazed the Diaz family by tapping his bat three times on the plate, he called the house and spoke to Jennifer's mother. He told her that despite his fame and wealth, he felt overwhelmed and alone in New York, in need of a family. Jennifer's mother always had a soft spot for strays — she "loved the unlovables," as Jennifer put it in a recent interview — and Hall had a manipulator's ability to tell people what they wanted to hear. The two hit it off and talked for hours. By the end of the conversation, Hall was calling her "Mother."
He invited the family to Yankee Stadium the next day for the Saturday night game. He gave them box seats, Yankees jackets, and the signed baseball that Jennifer had asked for in her fateful letter weeks ago. Nobody thought too much about what Hall's angle was, because thinking too much would have ruined the rapidly evolving fantasy. But Jennifer's father, likely sensing that Hall might be interested in his daughter, cautioned Hall upon meeting him at the stadium that his daughter was only 15.
"Keep drinking your milk, kid," Hall quipped. Everyone laughed, the potential uneasiness of the situation diffused by humor.
The following day, a Sunday, Hall found time to speak at length again to Jennifer's mother, and the two arranged that he would come over to the house in Fairfield, Conn., later that evening. Fairfield is a well-to-do New York City suburb, but Jennifer says her family was at the bottom rung of the town's economic hierarchy: Her mother ran a daycare business out of the house, and her father was a contractor. When Hall pulled up to the Diaz home in a limo, the family was so impressed that they took pictures of his arrival.
That particular day had been rough for Jennifer: She had gone to the beach with her friends and told them about what had transpired with Hall, but, not without a little envy, her friends had made fun of her. When Hall arrived, he said he had come because he heard she was upset. He said he would protect her, and that destiny had brought them into each other's lives. And, only a day after meeting her in person, he told her that he loved her.
For the rest of the week he came over every night after the game, fantasizing to Jennifer way past midnight about their future together. Before she knew it, before anyone had asked her how she felt about it, he had moved into her family's home. Yes, Mel Hall, a major league baseball player, was coming home after every game and sleeping on the living room floor of a suburban family whose 15-year-old daughter he had just met and with whom he now claimed to be in love.
That same week, he bought Jennifer a red Chevy Cavalier convertible — despite the fact that she was too young to have a driver's license. Gifts came pouring in to her family as well. Tickets to every Yankees game for the whole clan — Jennifer's attendance was mandatory — and transportation via limo. A Corvette convertible for her father. One morning, bulldozers showed up at their home to start digging an in-ground pool. If Hall wanted to buy his way through life, as his bodyguard McMillan suggested, he was certainly buying his way into the Diaz's hearts.
At some point within those dizzying first two weeks, Hall gave Jennifer a diamond ring. She said she wasn't sure, that she was a little scared, so Hall said they could call it a "promise ring" until she was ready to commit. But for all intents and purposes, in the minds of the people who had any say in this — that is, Hall and Jennifer's family — the two were engaged to be married from that moment onward.
"It was a whirlwind," she said. "Everything went really fast. But I think that was his intention, to keep everything moving. I think he seized that opportunity. He was always talking about that whole ‘destiny' thing, because I had so many questions and wasn't ‘all-in' at that point."
Prior to Hall's sudden, inexplicable arrival in their lives, Jennifer's mom had operated her daycare business in the living room. But because Hall was sleeping there, and because he had promised to take care of the family's financial needs to a degree the Diaz's couldn't have dreamt about before, she discontinued the business. Jennifer's father continued to work, but the upshot was that the family had become financially dependent on Hall.
"They sold out," Jennifer would testify later about her parents. "They turned their brain off for three years. They were star-struck. They trusted him. And he was calling my mom ‘Mother,' and she thought she was helping this New York Yankee who needed a family and needed a home and needed care and love, because he didn't get it from his family, and she felt responsibility to take care of this Yankee and trusted him."
Jennifer's family became just as visible at Yankee games as she was, which provided public cover for Hall: If her parents were OK with what was going on, who were his teammates to judge?
"Whenever I saw her with him, they were usually there," said Jim Leyritz, a teammate of Hall's during the era. "I never saw it as a child predator type thing. He was almost a father figure to her. He never talked nasty or dirty about her. There was a respect factor there." As the photo of Hall with his teenage girlfriend in the Yankee yearbook suggests, even the front office seemed to tacitly condone the relationship. (Jeff Idelson, the Yankees director of media relations and publicity at the time and now president of the National Baseball Hall of Fame, declined comment through a spokesman for this article. Tom Bannon, publisher of the 1991 yearbook, did not respond to an interview request.)
Hall eventually moved from the living room into the master bedroom, which he shared with Jennifer, displacing the parents to her old room. When he began to touch her sexually, which he did before he had intercourse with her, she pretended she was asleep. As things progressed to intercourse, she didn't tell anybody, but nobody asked too many questions.
They were "together," in a semi-consensual relationship, for three years. All the while, Hall had maintained to Jennifer's parents that he would keep her "pure" until she turned 18, at which point he would marry her. (The age of consent in Connecticut was and still is 16, a year older than Jennifer was before Hall started sleeping with her.) In deference to Hall's promise, Jennifer's mother let Hall meet his needs with other women on the road, happily signing onto that condition if it meant that Hall would marry her daughter and take care of the family for the rest of their lives.
Somehow, despite the fact that Hall shared a bedroom with their daughter, Jennifer's parents believed that Hall was refraining from sexual contact with her until she was 18. They continued to believe this in the subsequent decades — even after Hall was convicted for sexually assaulting an underage girl. When Hall's lawyer cross-examined Jennifer during the punishment phase of his trial, after he had already been found guilty, the lawyer tried to discredit Jennifer by noting that even her own parents didn't think they were having sex.
"That's why I have issues with my family, ma'am," Jennifer replied. "That's why I'm here alone."
The agreement Hall brokered with Jennifer's mother enabled him to sleep around, but Jennifer remained under the impression that he was faithful. She would have every reason to think that, given Hall's maniacal possessiveness. He would pick her up from high school and insist that she make a beeline to the car, without looking up. He allowed a small circle of friends he perceived as non-threatening, but made her end friendships with others. Particularly threatening to Hall was the boy Jennifer had had a crush on before Hall invaded her life, a 15-year-old high school sophomore who quickly became the subject of consuming jealousy for the 28-year-old major leaguer. Jennifer used to love going to the beach, but Hall stopped that. She thinks the pool on the family property was Hall's attempt to keep her out of the sight of other men.
"It was Mel Hall all the time," she testified. "Any time he left [for a road trip], he would reprimand me and tell me not to see anybody, not to talk to anybody, not to go anywhere, not to do anything but to basically wait for his calls."
She added in an interview, "He was so excited that I was pure, that I was a virgin [prior to meeting Hall]. And I think in this sick, demented way, he was protecting that."
To mark his possession, he made her wear a diamond-encrusted necklace of his jersey number, 27, and a gold bracelet that said, "Mel." He wanted to propose formally to her at a school dance, to underscore that Jennifer belonged to him and not any of those boys, but Jennifer was too embarrassed about the idea to go through with it.
His possessiveness escalated as the relationship went on. One time, on a rare trip out to dinner, he caused a scene by getting in the face of a man he thought was looking at Jennifer. More than once, he locked her in a closet for a few hours because he didn't approve of her clothing. His note of apology for one of these episodes was entered into the prosecution's evidence during the sentencing phase of the trial. It read:
"He would tell me, ‘You would be nothing without me. You can't leave me. What's your family going to do?'" she testified.
Despite this, or maybe because of this, Jennifer found herself evolving from semi-willing chattel to a full participant in the relationship. "I wasn't ‘all-in,' but I became ‘all-in,'" she said. "I think part of it was, ‘This guy is so crazy about me.' And he would say, basically, ‘I could be with any woman, and you should be honored, you should start loving me back.' And then I thought that I did."
When Hall decided he wanted to train for the upcoming season in Florida during the winter of 1991-92, the Diaz's followed and moved from Connecticut, and Jennifer switched schools. When the Yankees season started in April, Hall decided he wanted Jennifer to live with him in his new place in Trump Tower. She was two months shy of graduating from high school in Florida, but Hall told her she didn't need to graduate as long as he was providing for her. To this day, Jennifer doesn't have a high school diploma.
She spent most of 1992 cooped up in Trump Tower, where Hall's limo driver kept an eye on her to make sure she didn't leave for long stretches to hang out with friends. Her one indulgence was going to the Carnegie Deli every afternoon for an egg sandwich.
Hall and Jennifer once went out to dinner with their neighbors down the hall, Donald Trump and Marla Maples, Trump's girlfriend and later his second wife. But at a certain point, as Jennifer remembers, the relationship between Hall and Trump soured, which Jennifer believes resulted from Hall's being behind on rent.
Ultimately, Jennifer began asking herself the same question. It wasn't that it dawned on her that she was being sexually abused — that realization didn't fully click until decades later. Rather, what began to eat at her was the asymmetry between the restrictiveness Hall imposed on her and the freedoms he claimed for himself: Why did Hall and his close friend, Deion Sanders, get to go to strip clubs when the couple visited Sanders in Atlanta, yet she couldn't leave the house? How fair was it that she had to be close to the phone when he was on the road, but when she called his hotel room one time, a woman answered? What were those four-hour trips "to the gym" about, anyway? What did it mean when the owner of the limo company Hall used once pulled her aside and said, "You need to open your eyes?"
She had long suspected he was cheating, but never had any proof. Then one night, in the fall of 1992, she drove to a Florida hotel where she suspected he was having a dalliance. She saw him in the parking lot in the midst of an angry encounter with another woman. It was obvious that the two were romantically linked.
She raged at him like she'd never raged before, and raged at herself for whatever part she had played in allowing this all to happen by buying in for all those years. It was the anger of someone unleashing the emotions she had bottled up for the previous three years. She realized then that none of the things she had been led to believe and to accept, by Hall as well as her parents, were to be believed or accepted.
"I just kept saying, ‘Why?' I wasn't even mad at the situation. I was mad because I had felt so caged. But yet he's living this life, and he's always putting this guilt on me. So it was just, ‘Why?'"
After catching him in the act, Jennifer resolved that she was done with Hall. Her parents, having seen how devastated she was that night, didn't pressure her otherwise. She talked with Hall on the phone once, but didn't see him again until she faced him down on the witness stand 17 years later.
* * *
She soon began her long climb back from being Hall's child fiancée and her parents' meal ticket into an adult capable of standing on her own two feet. Her first job was at Hooters, a halfway house of sorts for someone who suddenly needed to fend for herself, but who had been inculcated with the idea that all she was good for was smiling and looking pretty.
She began going to church. The pastor, as it happened, had been the Yankees team chaplain several years before. He told Jennifer he had prayed that she would get out of her relationship with Hall. It all couldn't have been a coincidence, she believes.
She kept going to church, attended a bible college, and through church met her eventual husband, to whom she is still married with three children. She now runs her own interior design business and lives in the suburbs of a major American city.
Yet for most of this time, she has lived with the notion that her relationship with Hall had been a dysfunctional one, as distinguished from a sexually abusive one. Although she had the feeling deep down that something was completely wrong, it was never validated by the people closest to her.
"It was brushed off. ‘You're dramatic, you're overreacting,'" she said. "To so many people around me it was normal. I never thought of what it really was until I talked to people outside the situation, and their mouths would pop open."
No, she didn't begin to have a full understanding of what she had experienced until 2007, when she learned that Hall had been charged with sexual abuse of a 12-year-old girl. Two years later, over the objections of her parents, she met with prosecutors before Hall's trial and told them everything that happened to her. She mailed them her stash of mementos, her proof.
"That's when I realized: This was abuse. And that was just the most sobering time. They [the prosecutors] looked me in the eye and said, ‘This is what this is.'"
* * *
To the Yankees organization, Hall had always walked a fine line between being a semi-tolerable eccentric and a pain in the ass.
In 1990, after Yankees manager Stump Merrill benched him against left-handed pitchers — a reasonable move considering Hall's .222 lifetime batting average against them — Hall threw a tantrum in the clubhouse, slamming Merrill's door so hard the hinges and doorknob jarred loose. He publicly demanded a trade, but nobody wanted him: "I looked around and couldn't find any takers," General Manager Gene Michael told reporters.
She remembers Trump approaching her with a challenging smile one day and asking, "What are you doing with this guy?"
As the team began turning over its roster and slowly assembling the pieces of a championship contender, Hall's act grew ever more tired. He seemed to sense that his status was threatened by the next generation of up and comers, and he took his frustrations out on one of those talented young players, Bernie Williams, whose reticent demeanor was 180 degrees the opposite from Hall's.
With Williams, Hall took rookie hazing to abusive extremes. (Some say Hall's ire was initially triggered by a Williams' base running mistake that cost Hall a cycle.) He called Williams "Bambi," mocking his large doe eyes, which were magnified by his bulky glasses. Alternately, he called him "Mr. Zero," Hall's assessment of Williams' value. He once taped a sign on Williams' locker saying "Mr. Zero," and would say, "Shut up, Zero," whenever Williams tried to speak, something that reportedly once nearly brought Williams to tears. Things got so vicious that management interceded on Williams' behalf.
"Mel was basically bullying Bernie and we put an end to it," responded Buck Showalter, the current Baltimore Orioles manager who was then a Yankee coach, via an email from an Orioles spokesperson.
And while Hall reveled in the status that being a Yankee conferred, he was hardly deferential toward the organization's tradition. During Old Timer's Day in 1992, he walked out onto the field and asked Showalter, by then the Yankee manager, "Who are these old fucking guys?"
"That's when I knew he had to go," said Showalter.
Hall's contract expired at the end of the 1992 season. The Yankees showed no interest in him and neither did any other major league team, so Hall spent the next three years playing reasonably well in Japan, hitting 64 home runs. He returned at the age of 35 with the San Francisco Giants, his best days behind him, as a pinch hitter.
"Pinch hitting is a vital role, but I will never accept it," Hall told the San Francisco Chronicle in late April. Less than a month later, he was released. Signed by the White Sox a few weeks later, he played four games in the minors and was released again. He never returned to the major leagues.
[h=2]Chapter One: The Player[/h]June 11, 1989. Spring fever for 15-year-old Jennifer Diaz* and her friends. Freshman year was winding down. It was Andrea's* birthday, and Andrea's father had driven Jennifer, his daughter and a group of girls down from Connecticut to a doubleheader at Yankee Stadium. A brilliant June day, right field line seats, front row.
It's a bad view of the game, but it put them on top of the field, especially close to the Yankees' 28-year-old right fielder, Mel Hall. Each time he jogged out to his position between innings to warm up, the girls would ask him to toss them a ball. Hall would fake as if he would, but then he wouldn't, and then he'd smile at them. This went on, inning after inning. Typical Hall: He was playful and mischievous, lacking the aloofness of most ballplayers, somehow more accessible and fun loving. Often, when they played the Red Sox, as they were on this day, he'd wear a T-shirt underneath his jersey saying, "Boston Sucks."
He toyed with the girls all game long — "You want the ball?" — but never gave them one. When Hall moved from right field to left field to start the second game of the doubleheader, he continued to make teasing gestures toward them. After the girls left the game early to beat the traffic, Andrea's father said they should write Hall and ask him to autograph a baseball.
Two weeks went by. They were studying at the Fairfield Public Library for their freshman year final exams when they became bored, and decided to write that letter to Hall. They addressed it to Yankee Stadium, stuck in the mail, went back to studying, and didn't think about it again.
Until a Friday afternoon soon after, when somebody called Jennifer at home claiming to be Mel Hall. He said he had noticed the blond, wholesomely beautiful girl in the stands that day, and wanted to get to know her better — perhaps she and her family would like to come to Yankee Stadium for the game tomorrow? He said he got lots and lots of fan mail but never opened it. The fact that he happened to open her note must mean it was destiny.
It was too ridiculous. She was sure somebody was messing with her, so she hung up. Maybe it was the boy she had a crush on, a huge Yankee fan who really liked Mel Hall. The two had just gone to the movies and ... the phone rang again. She hung up. This happened several more times, stretching over a couple of hours. It was a preposterous notion: Mel Hall, the major leaguer on the field that day, from the Yankees, calling her?
Yes, impossible, said her father, who was also a big Yankees fan: It couldn't be Hall because the game had already started, and Hall was in the lineup that night. But the phone rang again, and the person claiming to be Hall said he was the designated hitter that night, so he could sneak into the clubhouse and use the phone. He said he would prove to Jennifer that he was who he said he was: When he came up to bat, he would tap home plate with his bat three times.
The Diaz family gathered around the television. Jennifer's grandfather, a huge fan too, was there, and a family friend from down the street also came by. Hall strode up to the plate, charismatic as always, stylish in his ‘80s Jheri curl, a natural hitter in his element. But the first pitch came in, and ... Hall did nothing. Jennifer was embarrassed. She had always been so gullible.
Still, everyone kept watching. And before the next pitch, Hall tapped home plate with his bat three times. Then he took his bat and pointed at the television camera.
Twenty years later, Jennifer would testify in court: "We were all ecstatic."
Mel Hall's career began full of promise. He was selected by the Chicago Cubs in the second round of the 1978 draft out of Port Byron High School in upstate New York, where he played baseball, football and basketball, and was tabbed as a future star.
He raced through the minor leagues, debuted in the major leagues in 1981 and made the majors for good in 1983, when he finished third in the Rookie of the Year balloting. The following year, he and another talented young outfielder, Joe Carter, were shipped to the Indians as part of a trade for ace pitcher Rick Sutcliffe. Although the deal helped secure the division title for the Cubs, skeptics wondered if the team had just mortgaged its future.
Hall's production would never match his potential, however. During his 13-year major league career, spent with the Cubs, Indians, Yankees, and, after a three-year stint in Japan, the Giants, he was mostly a tease, a talented but ultimately mediocre player for teams that weren't very good. He never played in the postseason, never made an All-Star team, never led the league in anything important, never hit 20 home runs or drove in close to 100 runs in the major leagues, and was generally considered a poor defensive outfielder.
But just because he wasn't a star didn't mean he couldn't carry himself like one. Hall became known for his flamboyant grandiosity and his belief in his own greatness despite statistical evidence to the contrary. The highest-profile chapter of his career came with the Yankees, from 1989 to 1992, where he was a limited but popular player. On a string of insipid Yankees teams slouching their way toward four consecutive losing seasons, at least Hall had personality.
At bat, he swung hard and he swung often, producing a poor on-base percentage but pretty good home run pop. When "Sluggo," as his Yankee teammates half-mockingly called him, connected, he punctuated the moment with one of history's slowest home run trots, once clocked at 33 seconds. Early in his career, he carried three sets of batting gloves in each back pocket, so, as he explained to reporters, they would "wave goodbye as I'm trotting around the bases." He even named his glove "Lucille," the same name B.B. King gave his guitar. Hall never said why he did this, but it fed the image of him as an eccentric superstar — hold the superstar.
This image was augmented by the colorful quotes he often provided reporters. He once said he wanted to fight Mike Tyson, and played up his cartoonish narcissism by telling reporters, "When God made my body, he made something good."
He grew up poor in Montezuma, N.Y., a tiny farm community 30 miles east of Syracuse where the Halls were one of a handful of black families. His father was a muck farmer who had played briefly in the Cincinnati Reds chain, and his mother worked in a factory. Perhaps he was overstating his poverty when he told reporters, "We were so poor, we ate ice for supper. We spelled poor with one ‘O' because we ate the other one." His beginnings were so humble, he said, that after being drafted, "I signed my first contract in dirt."
By the time Hall made it to the Yankees, those days of deprivation were long behind him. He played at a time where even ordinary players were starting to get big-money contracts — Hall made at least $6.3 million in his big-league career, and at least another $2 million playing three years in Japan — and he reveled in his money and status. By some accounts, he owned 15 cars, but still had a limo pick him up from Yankee Stadium. One person close to him at the time said he would spend his large paychecks practically as soon as he got them, and that he would literally take linen bags of cash out of the bank "like in the movies." In 1992, he rented an apartment in Trump Tower, then New York's most ostentatious address, where he lived down the hall from The Donald himself, the iconic emblem of that era's brand of crass New York excess.
He owned two German shepherds, and hired a German trainer who taught them to attack at the command of "Fass!" As if that were too ordinary a pet, he acquired two pet mountain lion cubs that he claimed to sleep beside, and that he once brought into the Yankee Stadium clubhouse. Authorities confiscated the animals and fined Hall several hundred dollars, but Hall was hardly chastened: "I'm thinking about getting myself a grizzly bear," he told reporters.
"Mel flirted with danger. He was always on the edge. He liked the action, he liked to instigate," said former Yankee teammate Steve Sax, one of only a few teammates and Yankee employees contacted willing to say much about Hall today. Sax said Hall would sometimes call him "cracker" just to get a rise out of him. "There were times when he was really fun to be around — he had this great big laugh — but you just didn't know what was on the other side of the curtain."
Hall did outlandish things and found himself in outlandish predicaments. In spring training of 1989, he put up both his wife and his girlfriend in the Indians team hotel and watched the two of them get into a fight near the pool, in full view of everyone. Later that year, after being traded to the Yankees and while on the disabled list with a pulled hamstring, he got into a violent clubhouse wrestling match with Rickey Henderson. He once reportedly brought a gun into the Yankees clubhouse. All of it was taken as part of Hall's eccentricity, what Hall himself described as "me being Mel Hall."
Hall's thirst for action, impulsiveness, and crass egotism were on full display in his nightlife, where he indulged his two greatest passions: Spending money and chasing women. When he went to New York's China Club and the Roseland Ballroom, he employed a $1,400-a-night bodyguard named Jimmy McMillan. Two decades later McMillan would become semi-famous in New York when he ran for governor and mayor on the "Rent is Too Damn High" party line. McMillan said Hall would "get women out of the club and want to fuck ‘em in the car." He said Hall would give him up to $300 to give to the DJ to play "songs he could get up close to the women and grind on them." McMillan would give the DJ $10, and pocket the rest.
"Mel Hall loved sex. Sex is what drove him," said McMillan. According to a high school teammate, Hall impregnated two girls by the time he was a high school senior. The best guess of Texas authorities for the number of children he eventually sired is eight.
McMillan added, "He was a young guy who made a lot of money real fast, and he wanted to buy his way through life."
So that was Mel Hall: a disappointment as a player, a tall tale, a caricature of a narcissistic athlete untethered from reality by sudden fame and fortune, a guy who did everything in excess. No, he probably wasn't someone you wanted to be close with, but he filled up column space and kept things interesting over 162 games.
So when Hall started showing up to the ballpark with 15-year-old Jennifer Diaz, the most common reaction was one of amused curiosity.
The tabloid news show "A Current Affair" did a story on the odd couple. When Jennifer sat in the family section with players' wives 10 and 20 years older than her, his teammates teased him for picking up his fiancée at Toys "R" Us. The organization, in a portion of their 1991 team yearbook devoted to players and their significant others, even included a picture of Mel and Jennifer at a school prom. No one blinked, at least publicly. It was all part of Mel Hall being Mel Hall.
"Mel's weird," a teammate who did not want to be identified once told a reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer. "I mean a lot of guys in baseball are weird. But Mel's weird weird."
* * *
The first time Hall had sex with Jennifer, her father was asleep on the sofa several feet away. After it was over, the 15-year-old cried. Decades later, she testified that Hall told her it was OK because he would marry her once she turned 18.
She is now 40. Through all the years, as she steered her life from a subject of gawking into a remarkably conventional version of suburban motherhood, she kept it all: The photos, the love letters, the apology letters, the jewelry receipts. She needed proof. It was such a bizarre story that nobody would believe her otherwise. Sometimes it's still hard for her to believe herself. Everything happened so fast, and she had so little control over how it unfolded.
After the Friday night game in which Hall had amazed the Diaz family by tapping his bat three times on the plate, he called the house and spoke to Jennifer's mother. He told her that despite his fame and wealth, he felt overwhelmed and alone in New York, in need of a family. Jennifer's mother always had a soft spot for strays — she "loved the unlovables," as Jennifer put it in a recent interview — and Hall had a manipulator's ability to tell people what they wanted to hear. The two hit it off and talked for hours. By the end of the conversation, Hall was calling her "Mother."
He invited the family to Yankee Stadium the next day for the Saturday night game. He gave them box seats, Yankees jackets, and the signed baseball that Jennifer had asked for in her fateful letter weeks ago. Nobody thought too much about what Hall's angle was, because thinking too much would have ruined the rapidly evolving fantasy. But Jennifer's father, likely sensing that Hall might be interested in his daughter, cautioned Hall upon meeting him at the stadium that his daughter was only 15.
"Keep drinking your milk, kid," Hall quipped. Everyone laughed, the potential uneasiness of the situation diffused by humor.
The following day, a Sunday, Hall found time to speak at length again to Jennifer's mother, and the two arranged that he would come over to the house in Fairfield, Conn., later that evening. Fairfield is a well-to-do New York City suburb, but Jennifer says her family was at the bottom rung of the town's economic hierarchy: Her mother ran a daycare business out of the house, and her father was a contractor. When Hall pulled up to the Diaz home in a limo, the family was so impressed that they took pictures of his arrival.
That particular day had been rough for Jennifer: She had gone to the beach with her friends and told them about what had transpired with Hall, but, not without a little envy, her friends had made fun of her. When Hall arrived, he said he had come because he heard she was upset. He said he would protect her, and that destiny had brought them into each other's lives. And, only a day after meeting her in person, he told her that he loved her.
For the rest of the week he came over every night after the game, fantasizing to Jennifer way past midnight about their future together. Before she knew it, before anyone had asked her how she felt about it, he had moved into her family's home. Yes, Mel Hall, a major league baseball player, was coming home after every game and sleeping on the living room floor of a suburban family whose 15-year-old daughter he had just met and with whom he now claimed to be in love.
That same week, he bought Jennifer a red Chevy Cavalier convertible — despite the fact that she was too young to have a driver's license. Gifts came pouring in to her family as well. Tickets to every Yankees game for the whole clan — Jennifer's attendance was mandatory — and transportation via limo. A Corvette convertible for her father. One morning, bulldozers showed up at their home to start digging an in-ground pool. If Hall wanted to buy his way through life, as his bodyguard McMillan suggested, he was certainly buying his way into the Diaz's hearts.
At some point within those dizzying first two weeks, Hall gave Jennifer a diamond ring. She said she wasn't sure, that she was a little scared, so Hall said they could call it a "promise ring" until she was ready to commit. But for all intents and purposes, in the minds of the people who had any say in this — that is, Hall and Jennifer's family — the two were engaged to be married from that moment onward.
"It was a whirlwind," she said. "Everything went really fast. But I think that was his intention, to keep everything moving. I think he seized that opportunity. He was always talking about that whole ‘destiny' thing, because I had so many questions and wasn't ‘all-in' at that point."
Prior to Hall's sudden, inexplicable arrival in their lives, Jennifer's mom had operated her daycare business in the living room. But because Hall was sleeping there, and because he had promised to take care of the family's financial needs to a degree the Diaz's couldn't have dreamt about before, she discontinued the business. Jennifer's father continued to work, but the upshot was that the family had become financially dependent on Hall.
"They sold out," Jennifer would testify later about her parents. "They turned their brain off for three years. They were star-struck. They trusted him. And he was calling my mom ‘Mother,' and she thought she was helping this New York Yankee who needed a family and needed a home and needed care and love, because he didn't get it from his family, and she felt responsibility to take care of this Yankee and trusted him."
Jennifer's family became just as visible at Yankee games as she was, which provided public cover for Hall: If her parents were OK with what was going on, who were his teammates to judge?
"Whenever I saw her with him, they were usually there," said Jim Leyritz, a teammate of Hall's during the era. "I never saw it as a child predator type thing. He was almost a father figure to her. He never talked nasty or dirty about her. There was a respect factor there." As the photo of Hall with his teenage girlfriend in the Yankee yearbook suggests, even the front office seemed to tacitly condone the relationship. (Jeff Idelson, the Yankees director of media relations and publicity at the time and now president of the National Baseball Hall of Fame, declined comment through a spokesman for this article. Tom Bannon, publisher of the 1991 yearbook, did not respond to an interview request.)
Hall eventually moved from the living room into the master bedroom, which he shared with Jennifer, displacing the parents to her old room. When he began to touch her sexually, which he did before he had intercourse with her, she pretended she was asleep. As things progressed to intercourse, she didn't tell anybody, but nobody asked too many questions.
They were "together," in a semi-consensual relationship, for three years. All the while, Hall had maintained to Jennifer's parents that he would keep her "pure" until she turned 18, at which point he would marry her. (The age of consent in Connecticut was and still is 16, a year older than Jennifer was before Hall started sleeping with her.) In deference to Hall's promise, Jennifer's mother let Hall meet his needs with other women on the road, happily signing onto that condition if it meant that Hall would marry her daughter and take care of the family for the rest of their lives.
Somehow, despite the fact that Hall shared a bedroom with their daughter, Jennifer's parents believed that Hall was refraining from sexual contact with her until she was 18. They continued to believe this in the subsequent decades — even after Hall was convicted for sexually assaulting an underage girl. When Hall's lawyer cross-examined Jennifer during the punishment phase of his trial, after he had already been found guilty, the lawyer tried to discredit Jennifer by noting that even her own parents didn't think they were having sex.
"That's why I have issues with my family, ma'am," Jennifer replied. "That's why I'm here alone."
The agreement Hall brokered with Jennifer's mother enabled him to sleep around, but Jennifer remained under the impression that he was faithful. She would have every reason to think that, given Hall's maniacal possessiveness. He would pick her up from high school and insist that she make a beeline to the car, without looking up. He allowed a small circle of friends he perceived as non-threatening, but made her end friendships with others. Particularly threatening to Hall was the boy Jennifer had had a crush on before Hall invaded her life, a 15-year-old high school sophomore who quickly became the subject of consuming jealousy for the 28-year-old major leaguer. Jennifer used to love going to the beach, but Hall stopped that. She thinks the pool on the family property was Hall's attempt to keep her out of the sight of other men.
"It was Mel Hall all the time," she testified. "Any time he left [for a road trip], he would reprimand me and tell me not to see anybody, not to talk to anybody, not to go anywhere, not to do anything but to basically wait for his calls."
She added in an interview, "He was so excited that I was pure, that I was a virgin [prior to meeting Hall]. And I think in this sick, demented way, he was protecting that."
To mark his possession, he made her wear a diamond-encrusted necklace of his jersey number, 27, and a gold bracelet that said, "Mel." He wanted to propose formally to her at a school dance, to underscore that Jennifer belonged to him and not any of those boys, but Jennifer was too embarrassed about the idea to go through with it.
His possessiveness escalated as the relationship went on. One time, on a rare trip out to dinner, he caused a scene by getting in the face of a man he thought was looking at Jennifer. More than once, he locked her in a closet for a few hours because he didn't approve of her clothing. His note of apology for one of these episodes was entered into the prosecution's evidence during the sentencing phase of the trial. It read:
"Baby, when I asked you to change, it's because I love you. I know sometimes am a little tough but no one loves you better or more. Mel."
Hall never struck her, but he made life miserable enough that it was easier for Jennifer to tiptoe around Hall's tantrums than to defy him. Also, her family's finances depended on Hall, which meant that keeping the peace with him became her responsibility.
"He would tell me, ‘You would be nothing without me. You can't leave me. What's your family going to do?'" she testified.
Despite this, or maybe because of this, Jennifer found herself evolving from semi-willing chattel to a full participant in the relationship. "I wasn't ‘all-in,' but I became ‘all-in,'" she said. "I think part of it was, ‘This guy is so crazy about me.' And he would say, basically, ‘I could be with any woman, and you should be honored, you should start loving me back.' And then I thought that I did."
When Hall decided he wanted to train for the upcoming season in Florida during the winter of 1991-92, the Diaz's followed and moved from Connecticut, and Jennifer switched schools. When the Yankees season started in April, Hall decided he wanted Jennifer to live with him in his new place in Trump Tower. She was two months shy of graduating from high school in Florida, but Hall told her she didn't need to graduate as long as he was providing for her. To this day, Jennifer doesn't have a high school diploma.
She spent most of 1992 cooped up in Trump Tower, where Hall's limo driver kept an eye on her to make sure she didn't leave for long stretches to hang out with friends. Her one indulgence was going to the Carnegie Deli every afternoon for an egg sandwich.
Hall and Jennifer once went out to dinner with their neighbors down the hall, Donald Trump and Marla Maples, Trump's girlfriend and later his second wife. But at a certain point, as Jennifer remembers, the relationship between Hall and Trump soured, which Jennifer believes resulted from Hall's being behind on rent.
Ultimately, Jennifer began asking herself the same question. It wasn't that it dawned on her that she was being sexually abused — that realization didn't fully click until decades later. Rather, what began to eat at her was the asymmetry between the restrictiveness Hall imposed on her and the freedoms he claimed for himself: Why did Hall and his close friend, Deion Sanders, get to go to strip clubs when the couple visited Sanders in Atlanta, yet she couldn't leave the house? How fair was it that she had to be close to the phone when he was on the road, but when she called his hotel room one time, a woman answered? What were those four-hour trips "to the gym" about, anyway? What did it mean when the owner of the limo company Hall used once pulled her aside and said, "You need to open your eyes?"
She had long suspected he was cheating, but never had any proof. Then one night, in the fall of 1992, she drove to a Florida hotel where she suspected he was having a dalliance. She saw him in the parking lot in the midst of an angry encounter with another woman. It was obvious that the two were romantically linked.
She raged at him like she'd never raged before, and raged at herself for whatever part she had played in allowing this all to happen by buying in for all those years. It was the anger of someone unleashing the emotions she had bottled up for the previous three years. She realized then that none of the things she had been led to believe and to accept, by Hall as well as her parents, were to be believed or accepted.
"I just kept saying, ‘Why?' I wasn't even mad at the situation. I was mad because I had felt so caged. But yet he's living this life, and he's always putting this guilt on me. So it was just, ‘Why?'"
After catching him in the act, Jennifer resolved that she was done with Hall. Her parents, having seen how devastated she was that night, didn't pressure her otherwise. She talked with Hall on the phone once, but didn't see him again until she faced him down on the witness stand 17 years later.
* * *
She soon began her long climb back from being Hall's child fiancée and her parents' meal ticket into an adult capable of standing on her own two feet. Her first job was at Hooters, a halfway house of sorts for someone who suddenly needed to fend for herself, but who had been inculcated with the idea that all she was good for was smiling and looking pretty.
She began going to church. The pastor, as it happened, had been the Yankees team chaplain several years before. He told Jennifer he had prayed that she would get out of her relationship with Hall. It all couldn't have been a coincidence, she believes.
She kept going to church, attended a bible college, and through church met her eventual husband, to whom she is still married with three children. She now runs her own interior design business and lives in the suburbs of a major American city.
Yet for most of this time, she has lived with the notion that her relationship with Hall had been a dysfunctional one, as distinguished from a sexually abusive one. Although she had the feeling deep down that something was completely wrong, it was never validated by the people closest to her.
"It was brushed off. ‘You're dramatic, you're overreacting,'" she said. "To so many people around me it was normal. I never thought of what it really was until I talked to people outside the situation, and their mouths would pop open."
No, she didn't begin to have a full understanding of what she had experienced until 2007, when she learned that Hall had been charged with sexual abuse of a 12-year-old girl. Two years later, over the objections of her parents, she met with prosecutors before Hall's trial and told them everything that happened to her. She mailed them her stash of mementos, her proof.
"That's when I realized: This was abuse. And that was just the most sobering time. They [the prosecutors] looked me in the eye and said, ‘This is what this is.'"
* * *
To the Yankees organization, Hall had always walked a fine line between being a semi-tolerable eccentric and a pain in the ass.
In 1990, after Yankees manager Stump Merrill benched him against left-handed pitchers — a reasonable move considering Hall's .222 lifetime batting average against them — Hall threw a tantrum in the clubhouse, slamming Merrill's door so hard the hinges and doorknob jarred loose. He publicly demanded a trade, but nobody wanted him: "I looked around and couldn't find any takers," General Manager Gene Michael told reporters.
She remembers Trump approaching her with a challenging smile one day and asking, "What are you doing with this guy?"
As the team began turning over its roster and slowly assembling the pieces of a championship contender, Hall's act grew ever more tired. He seemed to sense that his status was threatened by the next generation of up and comers, and he took his frustrations out on one of those talented young players, Bernie Williams, whose reticent demeanor was 180 degrees the opposite from Hall's.
With Williams, Hall took rookie hazing to abusive extremes. (Some say Hall's ire was initially triggered by a Williams' base running mistake that cost Hall a cycle.) He called Williams "Bambi," mocking his large doe eyes, which were magnified by his bulky glasses. Alternately, he called him "Mr. Zero," Hall's assessment of Williams' value. He once taped a sign on Williams' locker saying "Mr. Zero," and would say, "Shut up, Zero," whenever Williams tried to speak, something that reportedly once nearly brought Williams to tears. Things got so vicious that management interceded on Williams' behalf.
"Mel was basically bullying Bernie and we put an end to it," responded Buck Showalter, the current Baltimore Orioles manager who was then a Yankee coach, via an email from an Orioles spokesperson.
And while Hall reveled in the status that being a Yankee conferred, he was hardly deferential toward the organization's tradition. During Old Timer's Day in 1992, he walked out onto the field and asked Showalter, by then the Yankee manager, "Who are these old fucking guys?"
"That's when I knew he had to go," said Showalter.
Hall's contract expired at the end of the 1992 season. The Yankees showed no interest in him and neither did any other major league team, so Hall spent the next three years playing reasonably well in Japan, hitting 64 home runs. He returned at the age of 35 with the San Francisco Giants, his best days behind him, as a pinch hitter.
"Pinch hitting is a vital role, but I will never accept it," Hall told the San Francisco Chronicle in late April. Less than a month later, he was released. Signed by the White Sox a few weeks later, he played four games in the minors and was released again. He never returned to the major leagues.
