Ed Cipot was eating and drinking his way through the New York Mets 1977 Christmas party at a restaurant in Shea Stadium when a priest began walking toward him from across the room.
Cipot immediately wondered what he had done wrong.
Instead, the priest, Joseph DiSpenza, simply asked, "You're a Catholic, aren't you?"
PHOTO: NY TIMES
As a matter of fact, that was true. As a matter of consequence, Cipot's Roman Catholicism didn't seem particularly relevant, at least to him.
He had been invited to the Diamond Club on that day solely as a power-hitting outfielder in the minor leagues.
The Mets already had plans to put him on the major league roster for spring training in 1978 and to bring him up that September for his first taste of the big show.
Everything in Cipot's life had pointed this way, from the spring twilight when he tried out for Little League in his hometown, Highland Park, New Jersey, a 9-year-old tornado with the bat.
He went on to set slugging records for his high school team, was drafted by the Mets in 1974 and played his way up from the Appalachian League to the Tidewater Tides in Triple-A.
He was "22 years old and 190 pounds of pure hostility," as Cipot put it in a recent interview, and "certainly not living my faith, more like la vida loca."
By August 1978, the month before he was supposed to be called up to the majors, Cipot was mired in an 0-for-25 slump. Stepping up to bat against the Columbus Clippers one day, he heard the manager call, "Sit down!"
A utility infielder went to pinch hit. When Cipot returned to the dugout, he started screaming and throwing punches at the manager.
He drove back to New Jersey after the season ended that autumn, feeling, he says now, as if "I'd gone from top prospect to prime suspect."
He found himself calling DiSpenza to see about having dinner together.
DiSpenza was a sports psychologist in addition to being a priest, which was why he spent so much time around the Mets.
He worked with players on motivation, visualization and even elements of hypnotism, and he was friendly with Joe Torre, the team manager.
That first dinner, DiSpenza and Cipot spoke little about religion, mostly about how the player, so angry and frustrated, could rediscover what he had always loved about the game.
A few more years passed, and Cipot drifted down the ladder to the Double-A Eastern League before retiring in 1982, his dream terminated at age 26.
He moved to Manhattan, interested in building a second career in acting, which had already yielded a couple of roles, including one as a minor-league ballplayer.
Again, he phoned DiSpenza, and through a friend of the priest he was invited to sit in on a few classes at Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio, before formally studying with Stella Adler
That same year, Cipot's father, Frank, a devout man, died, and Cipot realized he was turning to DiSpenza as a kind of surrogate.
Cipot began to drive the priest on his rounds: a wedding in the Bronx, a funeral on Staten Island and one time a baptism where Willie Randolph, then a Yankees infielder, was a godparent.
At DiSpenza's behest, Cipot started running a recreation program for neighborhood children at the St. Columba parish near Hell's Kitchen in Manhattan.
It had been impossible for Cipot to be around anything to do with baseball since retiring, until he played Wiffleball with those children, until he took them to Yankees games with free tickets the priest had received.
In doing all this, Cipot started to remember the way he had felt as an altar boy in grade school, "a sense of the meaning and importance of a priest, the sense of God being with us."
He recalled, too, that even in his dissolute years in the minors something had inspired him to find a Catholic church every Sunday morning, no matter what city he was in, no matter how he had misspent Saturday night.
Later in the '80s, struggling with an actor's chronic search for paying parts, Cipot asked DiSpenza yet again for advice. For the first and only time, DiSpenza mentioned entering a seminary.
Cipot did not take that next step until 1993, the year DiSpenza died.
"I kept hearing a voice asking me, `Eddie, what are you doing with your life?' " Cipot recalled. "I couldn't get this out of my head, that maybe God was calling me to do what Father Joe did."
Ed Cipot was ordained as a priest at St. Patrick's Cathedral in May 2000. As Father Cipot, he served in two parishes in Harlem, St. Charles Borromeo and Resurrection, and spent a year as vocations director for the New York Archdiocese, in part looking for unexpected midlife candidates for the priesthood, as he had been.
Since January, he has been assigned to work at the Holy Child Parish on the southern end of Staten Island.
On many nights recently, Cipot watched the Mets' playoff games on the rectory's television set.
At the age of 50, he said, his own career and its culminating disappointments "feel like a lifetime ago."
He has not run in a decade. But he still has the muscular forearms and thick wrists of a natural hitter.
Just lately, he said, he has been thinking about taking up a parishioner's offer to join a local softball team.
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