by Guy Franks
Quiet!… I’ll talk to the player, Rex. I’ll take care of it.
Rex
I want him suspended, Glover, not talked to! If you don’t suspend him, I’ll call Horace and he’ll suspend him!
Speed
You’ll need a pair of suspenders for that.
Shake
You’re not getting anyone suspended. Stop pushing me, Rex. I’m trying to stay calm here but you’re pushing me. You’re not calling anyone. It’s my job to discipline players—not yours. Your job is the stadium, my job is the ball club, so stay out of my business.
Rex
Then do your job! Suspend him now or I’ll have you fired!
Speed
Fired and brimstone.
Shake
You’ve lost it! You’re outta your mind!
Rex
I’m warning you! Don’t fuck with me!
Speed
Face to face or back to back?
Shake
Speed! … You really want to go down this road with me! Over a water cooler! Huh, Lyon? You got zero clout with the front office. Zero! The only thing you’re gonna do right now is shut your mouth and get out of my clubhouse.
Rex
I’ll have you fired!
Shake
Outta my clubhouse! Now! If not, I’ll pick you up and throw you out myself!
Speed
Make it a knuckleball.
Rex
He threatened me! You all heard it!
Rick
We haven’t heard anything. Just your big mouth.
Shake
I’m done with you. Outta my clubhouse… Out!
Rex
How dare you. I’ll have you fired.
Speed
You better go, sir, before he throws you for a strike.
(Rex exits.)
Shake took his cap off and ran his hand back and forth across his hair then shook his head in wonder as if to say “Can you believe it.” The players who witnessed the altercation looked either shocked or amused. They’d been treated to two sideshows in less than fifteen minutes.
Speed threw towels down and began cleaning up the mess and Shake stepped around him and walked out to the field. He was flustered and mentally needed to step out of the box and clear his head. Rex acted like a madman. Shake felt sorry for him—for his financial and family problems, his memory loss, his exile from the homestead. It was all sad, but enough was enough. The old man was now completely off his rocker and the best course was to stay out of his way. Rex was like a great wheel rolling downhill. If you tried to hold on you were apt to break your neck.
Shake walked onto the field and looked up at the sky. The cloudless blue sky went on forever. It felt about seventy-two degrees and there was a slight breeze. A great day for baseball, he told himself, but it wasn’t convincing. Something like foreboding swam underneath his thoughts and it wouldn’t go away. Twice this morning, before the first pitch even, the dark side of the force had manifested itself (yeah, he was a Star Wars fan). What else was coming, he wondered. It was best to keep a heads up.
Mischief, thou art afoot.
Take thou what course thou wilt.
The game with the Yankees kicked off at 1:00 without a hitch. There were one and a half innings in the book before the weirdness began.
The stands were packed and the Kingsmen were tied 2-2 in the bottom of the second. There were two on and two out and the count stood at 2-2 on Ortiz, whose number was twenty-two.
“Deuces are wild,” noted Rick.
(At that moment, up in Fenway with two outs and a count of 1-2 on Don Baylor, strike three got past the catcher on a wild pitch. Romero scored, Buckner went to second and Baylor was safe at first. The next batter Dwight Evans would hit a three run homer. In Tallinn, Estonia, at that moment, Heike Drechsler leaped and set the women’s long jump record at 7.45 meters. It was her second jump. Back at Beehive Stadium, Ortiz swung hard at a 2-2 pitch and missed. His bat flew out of his hands and nearly hit Kalecki in the head who was coaching third.)
In the top of the third Benedict started barking at the home plate umpire. Todd Clinton was behind home plate and Shake considered him the worse ump in the Eastern League. In the field he was bad enough, but behind the plate he was a crime against humanity. He had a floating strike zone that was confusing to both hitters and pitchers, and a strike on the outside corner early in count wasn’t necessarily a strike later in the count. It drove Shake mad. He and Clinton had had their run-ins before. Twice last year, Clinton ejected Shake—once for arguing balls and strikes and another time for a brutal out-call at third base. In Shake’s opinion, the guy was strictly bush league.
At ball four, Steve Basset snapped the throw back from Estrella and walked off the mound to cool down.
“Hey, Blue, hammer that plate down!” yelled Benedict. “It’s moving around!”
“Mix in some consistency once in a while!” added Shake
Benedict kept it going: “Did your glass eye fog up? If he’s pitching too fast we can ask him to slow it down for you!”
Clinton took his mask off and stared into the Kingsmen dugout.
“Can you see that far?” shouted Burton, getting into the act.
“Yeah, we’re on the third base side, not the first base side!”
Clinton took three steps towards their dugout and yelled, “Enough from you! One more word and your outta here!”
Benedict coughed “Bullshit!” into his fist but the umpire missed it or ignored it and walked back behind the plate. “Let’s get a batter up here!” he shouted before putting his mask back on.
Shake and company kept their cool for the rest of the half inning—at least until Hoffman and Hamilton turned a nifty double play to end the inning. The call at first was close but correct.
“Hey, Avery!” yelled Shake at the first base ump. “Nice call. You might want to think about giving lessons.” Avery pretended to ignore the compliment but Shake saw him crack a smile.
In the bottom of the third, Prince singled and promptly stole second. That brought up Hamilton. On a 1-1 pitch, Dane bent out of the way of an inside pitch only to have it called a strike. Now Kalecki got into it. “You better swing,” he cried out from the coach’s box. “You’re standing in the strike zone!” Dane ended up grounding out to first and Goff lifted a high fly ball to left to end the inning.
As the Kingsmen ran out to take the field, the P.A. system started playing the theme from Love Story. That was a cue that some guy in the park was about to propose to his girlfriend. Shake noticed that his infielders had stopped throwing the ball around and were watching the proposal up behind the dugout. His coaches and all the bench players stood up and looked over the roof of the dugout to check it out. Shake ignored it all.
What he missed was this: a guy in jeans and a t-shirt, with his Kingsmen cap turned backwards, was on one knee in front of his girlfriend, holding a small black box up to her. The entire crowd awaited her reaction, only it wasn’t what they expected. She was shocked—shocked as though a searchlight had just been thrown on her—and she quickly became upset. Cornered, she looked around. Next she blushed deeply, shook her head no, and ran for the exit. There were yelps and groans from the crowd as the embarrassed young man stood back up. His buddy on the other side of him started laughing uproariously and the young man turned around and punched him in the face. A fight broke out.
“What’s going on?” asked Shake as he heard the odd crowd noise and noted the reaction of his players on the field.
Rick lowered himself back down. “Unbelievable,” he laughed. “She said no and ran off, and his buddy started laughing so he punched him. Now we have a fight.”
Shake went up the dugout steps to take a look. Sure enough it was a fight and security people were rushing to break it up.
“It’s getting weird out here,” said Rick as they came back down into the dugout.
Shake took his spot and mumbled to himself, “There is something in the wind, that we cannot get in.”
Luis Santiago was up in the stands in his civvies charting pitches. Or pretending to. He waited until Basset’s girlfriend Gwen Cymbel got up from her seat and then followed her. She went into the Women’s restroom and Luis waited for her and pretended to run into her when she came out.
“Whoa,” he said in mock surprise as he flung his arms around her. “Oh, hi, Gwen. Sorry about that.”
“Luis, hi. What you doing down here?”
“Charting pitches. I came down to use the restroom.” He still held her in his protective embrace. They were face to face. “You okay,” he asked.
“I’m fine.” She smiled and looked at both his arms. “You can let me go now,” she added. “I won’t fall. I promise.”
“Oh, sure. Sorry about that,” he said… “I could get used to that,” he slipped in under his breath but loud enough for her to hear. She ignored the comment so he quickly shifted gears. “Steve’s looking good out there. The ump’s kind of a jerk, but you just have to work through it.”
“Yeah, he’s getting a little frustrated. But like you say—he’s got to work through it.”
“What you looking for?”
“Huh? Oh, a soda, but the lines are too long.”
“We’ll take care of that,” he said with a wink. He grabbed her hand and quickly led her over to the concession stand. “What do you want?”
“Diet Coke.”
Luis stuck his head in the side door and got the concessionaires attention. They knew him immediately and happily took his order. In thirty seconds he had a medium Diet Coke and handed it to Gwen with a flourish.
“Impressive,” she said.
“My pleasure.” He saw that the Diet Coke bought him some time and she was willing to stay a minute and make small talk.
“How’s Cathy?” she asked.
“Who? Oh, Cathy. She’s fine, I guess,” he replied with some confusion. But he quickly sorted it out: Cathy had been his date when he had gone out to dinner a couple weeks ago with Steve and Gwen. The double-date was part of his plan to ingratiate himself with the two of them while all the time working his magic on Gwen. He was sure it was working. As for Cathy— she was a local and one of the many women he dated over the season. “She’s not my girlfriend,” he clarified. “Just a date.”
“She seemed nice,” added Gwen, sipping her soda through a straw.
“Yeah. I don’t have a girlfriend. I’m still looking for the right gal. You wouldn’t happen to have a twin sister?… No? Too bad. Hey, have you seen my new car yet? It’s right over here—you can see it through the fence.” He grabbed her hand again and led her away from the concession stands.
“You bought a new car?” she said cheerfully. “Let’s see it.”
He held on tight to her hand and walked her away from the lines of people and over to a chain link fence where he pointed out to the parking lot. “See, over there. The red Corvette. Two hundred and thirty horsepower. Convertible. Totally awesome, right?”
“Wow, looks fast.”
Luis liked to think he knew women, and one thing all chicks dug—even devout Christian chicks like Gwen—were fast cars. “Yeah, I just picked it up Thursday. Cost a fortune but had to have it… Now where’s Steve’s car? Over there, right? The beat-up looking Nissan. Really? Come on, Gwen, you need to get him to upgrade his ride. Make him get a Camaro or maybe a Trans Am. Something with balls. Oops, I mean something with a little oomph.” (He pumped his fist out to make his point.) “You know what I mean?”
“Right now we’re saving our money for the wedding,” she said innocently. “Maybe after we settle down.”
“The vette’s got leather seats,” he added quickly, ignoring her remark about settling down. Her hand had gone limp—the signal to him to let go—but he still held on tightly. There was less than three weeks before the All-Star break and his bet was on the line. This was his opportunity to make his move and no one was better at making The Move than him. “You need to check it out. Go for a ride. I’ll put the top down. How about after the game?”
“Steve and I are going out to dinner.”
“Perfect. Later then. I’ll pick you up at your motel.”
“No, that’s too late for me.”
“It’s never too late,” he insisted. She frowned and looked away from him, so he put his other hand on her elbow and tugged gently. “Come on, Gwen, it’s never too late. Look at me. Please…. I have something to tell you and I can’t keep it in any longer. I love you… No, don’t look away. Please. I love you and I had to tell you. I loved you the first minute I saw you.”
“I thought you were Steve’s friend?”
“I am, but if it comes down to my friendship for him and my love for you—my love for you wins out every time. I can’t help it.”
“What can I say? You’re making me uncomfortable. I’m not—”
“Don’t say anything, just hear me out. Let me come by your motel tonight. We’ll go for a moonlight drive and just talk. No pressure, nothing more. Just let me talk to you. Give me a chance.
“I’m going back to my seat.”
“I’ll pick you up at eleven tonight. I’ll take you wherever you want to go, and we’ll just talk.”
“You’re not picking me up,” she said sternly, twisting her arm free from his grasp. “I hear what you say but I’m sorry. I love Steve. We’re getting married. And that’s that. I’m sorry, Luis.”
She turned to walk away so he pounced. (The Move wasn’t working so it was time to swing wildly for the fences.) He took her in his arms and pulled her close. “You don’t have to save yourself for me. You can have me now. None of this waiting crap. If you were my fiancé there’d be no waiting. You’re too beautiful a woman. Don’t you want to feel a man inside you? Don’t you want to feel me inside you? Come on, grab a handful and let’s get it on!”
“Help!” she cried.
Startled, he let her go and stepped back.
“You’re disgusting,” she said. “Stay away from me or I’ll scream. Steve’s going to hear about this. Just wait and see. I’m going to tell him everything.”
“I’m so glad you said that,” he replied earnestly, feigning great relief. “Thank, God. That’s exactly what I wanted to hear. And I win the bet. Thank you, thank you, Gwen.”
She had spun away but now stopped in her tracks and looked back at him. “What do you mean bet?” she asked. “What bet?”
“Well, it’s kind of a long story, but one of the guys in our prayer group—I won’t tell you his name—claimed you were a fake. He said the whole virgin thing was a fake and that you were out of Steve’s league and played around on him. I called him a liar and almost got in a fight with him. I told him that in your case—and I knew you—that your virtue matched your beauty. But he kept dissing you so we made a bet. A hundred bucks. I bet him I would make a move on you and you’d turn me down flat. I have a reputation as a ladies man—”
“I’ve heard that.”
“So he took the bet and here we are. I won and more importantly Steve won. He’s marrying a true-blue woman… But you don’t need to tell Steve all about this. I mean, my part he’d probably laugh at but you’d have to tell him about the guy in his prayer group who was putting you down. Then Steve would demand to know who it was and I’d have to tell him and then there’d be trouble. In the clubhouse, on the team. Trouble. So I’d appreciate it if we just keep this to ourselves… I’ll give you half my winnings,” he added with a joking smile, hoping for the best.
“Okay, Luis,” she said smiling back. “I won’t say anything. Not that I believe a word you say, but I wouldn’t want to be the cause of a fight in the clubhouse. For now anyhow.”<
br />
“Fair enough.”
“I got to get back.”
“Me, too,” said Luis as he walked next to her. He glanced down at her necklace. The prize. To his amazed disappointment, he realized he wasn’t going to get his hands on that by bedding her. He’d have to figure out another way.
In the top of the sixth the Yankees took the lead 5-3. It wasn’t so much they were getting to Basset as it was Clinton the home plate ump. When Basset was on the mound, the strike zone was a postage stamp, but when the Yankees took the mound it grew to the size of Arizona. As a result of getting squeezed by Clinton (which, Shake was sure of, was intentional), Basset had to throw more pitches, which meant he got behind in more counts and had to groove more pitches that the Yankee hitters could take advantage of. Shake was close to fed up with it.
“He’s at ninety pitches and we’re only in the sixth,” said Benedict.
“Let him finish this inning,” replied Shake. “Get Tito up. He’ll go in in the seventh.”
“Right.”
Basset got out of the inning but gave up three runs. As he walked off the mound, he glared at the home plate ump. Shake waited for his young ace to sit down and went over to him. “You’re done for the day,” he said putting his hand on Steve’s shoulder.
“I got more.”
“No, not with this dipshit behind the plate. Call it a day. Sometimes it’s just the luck of the draw. Sometimes you get Paul Runge behind the plate and sometimes you get Mr. Magoo.”
Steve nodded with a grateful smile and went to go look for his jacket. Lousy deal, thought Shake. Stuff like that could mess with a kid’s confidence, but Basset was tough-minded and major league material. He was sure the kid would get over it. But not Shake.
The first hitter Hamilton, fearing anything close would be called a strike, swung at an 0-2 pitch and popped it up to second. As the Yankee second baseman back-peddled, he tripped on the cut of the grass and went down. The ball fell for a hit. Finally, thought Shake, a little luck. But Goff struck out on a called third strike at the letters. One out. The fans were on Clinton big time and the Kingsmen bench had been chirping at him all day. It was a steady rain of insults. He had gone into hunker-down mode, ignoring everyone, while effectively wreaking his revenge. The Kingsmen had been told by their coaches to go up there looking for a pitch to hit.