Benchwarmer

by Josh Wilker

  “I’m worried,” I said.

  “About what?” she said.

  “No, I mean I’m worried all the time. I worry so much I can’t enjoy the good moments.”

  “The good moments?” Abby swabbed her wet face with more tissue.

  “Like when we were all walking together along the lake a few days ago. I was worrying the whole time.”

  When I was a kid the quarterback kneel play hadn’t yet developed. Teams protecting a lead would usually run a play in which the quarterback sort of crumpled to the ground, falling on the ball, which resembled the kneel play in its brevity and simplicity but lacked the clean formality of the current-day genuflection. You can see an example of this precursor to the kneel play in the first of three final plays run by the New York Giants in a 1978 game against the Philadelphia Eagles. The Giants needed only to run three plays to win the game. On the first of these plays Joe Pisarcik takes a snap and falls on the ground. The Eagles defenders battle to get to him and are even able to make some contact. There’s no tacit agreement to hold back. It’s been suggested that the Giants’ offensive coordinator, Bob Gibson, noticed this violent attempt to get to Pisarcik and wanted to avoid it. This would explain his call for a running play on the next down, which resulted in Larry Csonka rushing for an eleven-yard gain. This left time for one final play.

  “Ever since Jack got sick, the emergency room,” I said to Abby. “But even before then. But it’s definitely worse now. Do you know what I’m saying?”

  Abby gave me a look. She’d been imagining the worst from minute one of Jack’s life.

  “Right, I know you know,” I said. “Like there’s no moment that can’t go wrong.”

  The announcers spent the seconds leading up to the final snap thanking the producers of the telecast and reciting the records of the two teams involved as if the Giants had already won. Meanwhile there was some disarray in the Giants huddle as Pisarcik relayed the news that Gibson had once again sent in a play that called for a handoff to Csonka. Everyone in the huddle wanted Pisarcik to disregard this play and fall on the ball, but Pisarcik had recently gotten in hot water for changing Gibson’s plays. The huddle confusion led to the Giants rushing to the line of scrimmage to avoid a delay-of-game penalty, and the rushed snap to Pisarcik was a little off-center, causing Pisarcik to bobble it. Csonka was a little too fast in his movement toward scrimmage. The timing and precision needed for a handoff was already marred, but Pisarcik still tried to carry out the play by shoving the unsteady oval toward Csonka. The ball bounced off Csonka’s arm and fell to the turf. Pisarcik tried to dive on it, but it bounded away and into the arms of Herm Edwards, who raced into the end zone, winning the game for the Eagles.

  I was watching that game, ten years old. I watched every football game I could back then, anything and everything that came into my house and eased the blank ache of a Sunday. The only station we got that aired pro football was CBS, and CBS played Cowboys games and Giants games, which was, in terms of the two teams’ relative appeal, like having a channel that played only Bugs Bunny cartoons and Soviet grain production documentaries. I vividly remember dozens of the Cowboys flashy, exciting stars and don’t remember a single moment in a Giants game or a single Giants player, with the sole exception of that one play and that one player, Joe Pisarcik. I didn’t even remember that Larry Csonka, a player of titanic prominence to a kid in the 1970s, symbolized most clearly by his appearance on The Six Million Dollar Man, was involved until this attempt to understand my own slippery grasp as a father sent me back to the game. But I remember Joe Pisarcik. I remember feeling terrible for him. The game was seared into my mind from that point forward, like a fairy tale with a chilling moral. The very next week in the NFL the quarterback genuflections began and have not stopped. They have managed to succeed in all instances with only one exception, which is a whole other story (see Victory Formation, the). With Pisarcik a prayer was born. It’s the same prayer I said whenever I laid Jack down into his swing. Nothing is safe, but please let this sweet small victory hold true.

  Player to Be Named Later

  That night, Jack woke a few hours after I quarterback-kneeled him into his swing, long before morning, and he was miserable and stayed that way for hours, and within that misery Abby and I hated all life, including one another, yelled at one another, then finally Abby stayed up with Jack and I went to bed feeling useless, a superfluous name on a losing roster, and logged an hour or two of guilt-frayed sleep and then took the car to work fantasizing that I’d come upon a previously unnoticed off-ramp to a rest area of such deep peace that it could take me in and then trade me back into my life transformed, still me but painless, arriving.

  But before all that, before Jack woke, Abby and I sat in the living room and talked about our loneliness, our worries. We talked and I felt better, and then a subject that we’d managed to raise previously in one or another slim quiet moment was able to surface. Another kid. A player to be named later. On one hand it seemed like the most insane thing to pursue. As it was, with just one tiny eight-month-old human among us we were barely keeping it together or not keeping it together at all, depending on the given moment. On the other hand, any time we started edging into that conversation I popped a stupidity-enhancing boner. The conversation, for me at least, quickly became about the possibility of sex, regardless of what it might bring: a new baby, or bankruptcy, or years of widespread drought and famine.

  All this is to say (to brag?): I fell on my wife like a duffel bag full of hockey equipment, so to speak. Midway through this abrupt collision, which would not turn out on this occasion to yield any new mouths to feed, I noticed that Abby had dried sweet potato paste in her hair, residue of some experimenting with solid food with Jack earlier in the day.

  I love my wife’s body, her beauty, the detritus that accrues on her as she charges through life. I wish I could fall on her like a duffel bag full of hockey equipment more often. But with a baby around, the father moves to the periphery of the roster. Weeks can go by, months. I found myself recently fantasizing about getting an incurable disease, which in itself is not novel, as I am frequently fantasizing about ways in which I might be able to become easily and blamelessly removed from suffering (see Next Ryan Leaf, the), but in this instance I was fantasizing specifically about how the incurable disease would allow me to request some heartrendingly tender “final wishes.” In short, if I was going to die the next day, my wife would pretty much have to let me go to town on her.

  Sorry—“make love” to her. Like many, I find that phrase “make love” nauseating, but there is something deeper than just a Penthouse Letters scenario in having sex with my wife. There’s tenderness, there’s the rare opportunity to touch and be touched. There’s that word, nauseating as it is to include in fuck scenarios: love.

  There’s something else too, since becoming a father. The biological involvement of a father ends, strictly speaking, with the ejaculation of sperm. You want to feel useful. You want that biologically deep reassurance that you are useful. Obviously there’s never a shortage of things that need to be done, ways in which a person could feel useful. This was what was behind my frantic attachment to dishwashing (see ex-). Was I so dedicated to clean dishes? To the contrary, I have always been a sloppy, distracted dishwasher, prone to shepherding soapy, smeared dishes back into the cupboard. The main impetus behind all my dishwashing was a need to demonstrate to myself and maybe also to Abby that I was useful, which I only sort of was. Meanwhile I watched Abby feed our son directly from her own body. Fathers don’t have this kind of primal connection after the act of conception. Fathers have boners. So I popped boners all the time and then, with a few sweet exceptions, disposed of them myself and felt even more useless than ever.

  This is the lot of the player to be named later. You lurk on the periphery of one thing until there comes a time when you are shifted to another thing. An aura of uselessness can accrue. Consider Mario
Guerrero, for example, arguably the prototypical player to be named later. In 1972 he was the player to be named in one of the most famously lopsided trades in history, when the Red Sox sent future Cy Young–award winning Sparky Lyle to the Yankees for Danny Cater, and Guerrero’s inconsequential years on the Red Sox accentuated rather than mollified the feeling that in the Lyle-Cater swap the Red Sox had been robbed. Without making any impact on the Red Sox, Guerrero was eventually traded away straight up for a player to be named later, and then before long he was traded again, this time for a minor leaguer, Ed Jordan, and a player to be named later, who turned out to be another minor leaguer, Ed Kurpiel. Two years after that, in 1978, he was sent to the Oakland A’s, who were embarking on one of the worst two-year stretches of any team in history, as a player to be named later in a massive shifting of bodies to the A’s for star pitcher Vida Blue. The A’s got Gary Alexander, Dave Heaverlo, Phil Huffman, John Henry Johnson, Gary Thomasson, and Alan Wirth—not a single player of distinction—for Vida Blue, who was not only the last remaining superstar from the team’s dynasty earlier in the decade but also the possessor of arguably the greatest name in baseball history, his name so glorious that the pile of nobodies offered in exchange for it still needed even one more name, so a player to be named later was added, and that player was Mario Guerrero. With this transaction Guerrero’s experiences as a player to be named later finally came to an end, an end that would be followed soon enough by the end of his career. But before that he played the 1978 season, a season in which he managed to score just twenty-seven times, despite getting 139 hits and coming to bat 546 times. This turns out to be a record: no one who has ever had that many hits has ever scored fewer times. Mario Guerrero, as it turns out, was historically inefficient at mattering. Hits only matter because they become runs, and getting hits without scoring runs is what he did. He was on a dreadful team, but he was also devoid of power and had little speed and little ability to increase his times on base by getting a walk; when he managed to scratch out a hit it was usually a single, and he didn’t end up going anywhere. The object of the game is to score, and in 1978 he turned in a perverse masterpiece of baseball uselessness, the player to be named later personified.

  Piece of shit, useless. But what are you going to do? You can’t trade yourself out of your life. Or can you? Obviously there’s the option for trading your life for nothing at all, but that’s more like quitting (see quitter). The truth is, you want to be named. This need has been with me for most of my life, or maybe all of my life, but I suppose I only noticed it when it started to intertwine with sexual fantasies, which in turn intertwined with long, sprawling romantic fantasies. Throughout puberty I used to lay in my loft bed for long stretches imagining a blurred idyllic union with some girl or another at my school, one who announced her boundless love by running to me. I never imagined any specific dialogue between us but just imagined that we’d be together, murmuring soul to soul, and that she would say my name softly over and over.

  It was painful to be reminded every day at school how far this fantasy was from reality. I went from class to class, invisible to the girls around me. After school at JV basketball practice I ran and dribbled and shot, and after that I waited in the hallway outside the gym for the Late Bus as the varsity practiced inside the gym. My brother would have been on the varsity squad by then, but he was away at boarding school. The Late Bus pulled into the parking lot, and I got on with the others who had been waiting. It climbed up out of one valley and meandered down into another, approximating the routes of all the regular buses earlier in the day. The sky grew dark as the bus emptied one stop at a time. The driver lived near the end of the farthest possible destination on the route. I lived beyond his house. Often I was the last passenger, the only reason the bus driver had to go out of his way. Sometimes in those years it seemed the only time I was noticed all day was by this bus driver, Mr. Race, who scowled up at my reflection in his rearview mirror as he rode past his own house. At my house the bus jerked to a stop, and the door was yanked open. Neither of us spoke. The bus lurched into motion the moment my feet hit our rutted dirt drive.

  “Oh Josh,” I called out to myself later in the night. I was up in my loft bed. I was imagining one or another of the girls I’d been invisible to throughout the day naming me.

  “Oh Josh,” I call out to myself now. Now I imagine it’s my wife saying these words. It’s always my wife now. She is the one I have burdened with the job of calling my name.

  When this is over, typically I adjust the roster of my online Strat-O-Matic 1970s baseball squad. Piece of shit, useless—those words lurk in such anticlimactic moments. While serving as the all-powerful front office ruler of my online Strat-O-Matic 1970s baseball team, I can release Mario Guerrero, pick up Ed Brinkman, release Francisco Barrios, pick up Pat Zachry. But behind all the names, that nagging shame recitation persists. Part of it is learned, I suppose. The prevailing cultural message for centuries has been that beating off is shameful, which tends to infuse the practitioner with shame. But for me the shame is primarily based not on anything external but in an unavoidable sense of loneliness. You come into your palm and there’s a rush and in the wake of the rush there’s this diamond clarity: you are alone. You tried to trade yourself out of your life and got traded right back, whump.

  Not even Mario Guerrero was ever traded for himself. This distinction is shared by four players, three of whom were something more like loaned, or traded and then returned.

  Only one player, Brad Gulden, was clearly and inarguably traded for a player to be named later who turned out to be Brad Gulden, at least according to baseball-reference.com, which I choose to consider an unimpeachable if not outright holy authority. On that encyclopedic site Brad Gulden is the only player who is specifically named within his own transaction log:

  November 18, 1980: Traded by the New York Yankees with $150,000 to the Seattle Mariners for a player to be named later and Larry Milbourne. The Seattle Mariners sent Brad Gulden (May 18, 1981) to the New York Yankees to complete the trade.

  Gulden ended his career with a lifetime batting of average of .200, precisely on the Mendoza Line. I want to name the feeling I get when I think about this perfect mediocrity. I want to sing an aria to this perfect mediocrity. I want to tell my son about the player to be named later who arrived exactly neither here nor there.

  Playing Out the String

  I once saw perfect mediocrity. It was, not completely without relation, also the first and only time I ever saw David Aardsma perform in person, though I have no recollection of anything the arbitrary starting point of my ordering of the world did that day. It was a few years ago, before my son arrived, when I still had whole wide days to burn. I went to a late September game at Wrigley between the Cubs and the Rockies, two teams I didn’t care about. Both had been mathematically eliminated for weeks.

  Through the first several innings I sat in a row near the back of the lower deck, next to a friend from work. Eventually rain delays and prolonged, instantly forgettable rallies and incessant pitching changes and the inability of either lackluster side to win during regulation began to whittle the already meager crowd down closer to nothing. My friend left somewhere in the vicinity of the tenth or eleventh inning.

  Alone, I began creeping a few rows at a time toward the sporadic, inessential action. By the thirteenth inning I was sitting in a wet seat near the field on the first base side, no one else in my row. I could see the raindrops on the batting helmet of the on-deck hitter. A rare calm came over me. Mostly I lurk around in the back rows of existence in a low-level perpetual cringe, vaguely braced for invisible blows, but once in a while there are moments when I can imagine that time has somehow been defeated, that the matter at hand, vivid and meaningless, will remain undecided indefinitely, and I’ll never have to deal with real life.

  Each team kept calling in pitchers from the bullpen, one after another, in what would turn out to be, at least acco
rding to my later attempt to identify something to hold onto from the game, a record-setting procession of hurlers. In all, twenty pitchers would take the mound, which, from what I have ascertained, is the most pitchers ever used in a single game. And just for good measure a twenty-first pitcher, Carlos Zambrano, would be the last player of any kind called into the action, not as a pitcher but as a last-hope pinch-hitter. In they came, one after another after another, none but the very last leaving even the slightest trace in my mind. Aardsma, Affeldt, Corpas, Dempster, Field, Francis, Fuentes, Guzmán, Howry, King, Martin, Mateo, Mesa, Novoa, Ohman, Ramírez, Ryu, Venafro, Walrond, Wuertz, Zambrano.

  Nowadays pitching changes occur to the accompaniment of pulsating heavy metal explosions, thick-muscled relievers charging toward the infield as if intending to shatter Joe Theismann’s tibia and fibula. This was not the case that day at Wrigley, especially as the game wore on. Instead, as pitcher after pitcher trudged onto the grassy sog, the stoppages came to resemble the downbeat mound replacements of my distant youth, when fellows from the bullpen generally resembled recreational bowlers and lachrymose vice principals, and their entrances into games were somehow homely and desultory, verging on aimless, as if they might just as easily wander into the stands as onto the mound. By the thirteenth inning at Wrigley, in a kind of hypnotic trance induced by the endless parade of ineffectual twirlers, I was thinking about how, at some stadiums in the 1970s, the inherent passivity of the bullpen entrances of the era reached an apex—or a nadir, depending on your preferences—with the use of a little electrical cart. The carts were shaped like giant baseballs topped by a suitably huge baseball cap in the same design as the one on the head of the reliever within, who rode as a dazed, somber passenger, as if to cross the expanse of the outfield on foot would have sapped too much of his limited energies.