Benchwarmer

by Josh Wilker

  Say this for Blass, Knoblauch, and Sax: they may have been making easy plays hard, but at least they were under the pressure of a game. The condition they had, which psychologists have termed repetitive sports performance problems (RSPPs), was felt more acutely and absurdly by a catcher named Mackey Sasser. In the midst of the action, when Sasser needed, say, to make a quick throw to try to nail an advancing runner, he was able to perform the difficult task effectively. It was only during lulls in the action, between plays, really, when Sasser needed to simply return the ball to the pitcher—the simplest, least pressurized live-action task in baseball—that he ran into problems. The play at that point is not quite dead, but it is as close as is possible in any sport to being so. The batter has stepped out of the box and can do nothing to influence play, and if there are any runners on base they will have given up their lead and returned to the base to stand and wait for the next forward-moving beat in the game. The catcher tosses the ball back to the pitcher, the easiest thing in the world, the first thing any baseball player ever learned to do. Picture a son playing catch with his dad. As easy as that.

  Televised versions of a given game will cut away from the inconsequential nothing of a catcher tossing a ball back to the pitcher and show replays of parts of the game that matter. But as Mackey Sasser’s problems surfaced, the cameras began to stay on him. He developed a hitch in his throw that got worse and worse. He double pumped, triple pumped, the ball stuck to his fingers as if it had been dunked in glue. The waiting pitcher fumed. Fans cackled and hooted. Sometimes when Sasser finally managed to let go, his arm motion was a spasm, palsied, as if he had never played baseball before in his life, and the ball fluttered up in a wounded looping lollipop arc and fell in the grass far short of the mound.

  I love you, Mackey Sasser. I love you like Pete Rose loved flying headfirst through the air for a triple, like a proofreader loves discovering a typo, like a new father loves folding his son’s tiny onesies. I see you there yet, Mackey Sasser, through the screen of the little television set that sat behind the counter of the liquor store where I was benched throughout my twenties, waiting for my life to begin, hoping it would and hoping it wouldn’t. I see you unable to get the ball back to David Cone, who stands with his glove out, pale, beady eyed with an exasperation bordering on rage. I see my boss, Morty, coming up beside me to watch the spectacle. In my memory Morty, rarely given over to silence, refrains from comment as he watches a grown man struggling with the simplest rudiments of his profession.

  Mackey Sasser was never an all-star like his fellow RSPP sufferers Blass, Sax, and Knoblauch, but his talents made him very useful, a left-handed hitting catcher who could rake, his batting average climbing through his early years, before his chronic troubles took over, .285, .291, .307. All other things being equal, he would have been a key contributor to big league clubs for a long time, if not a star. But his tic just worsened, and no one and nothing could help, and his career came to a stop.

  Long after his career was over Sasser began working with a psychologist specializing in the treatment of RSPPs, Dr. David Grand, and rooted out the problem, which was a compounding of trauma upon trauma through his life. The physical trauma was no surprise, as it is the lot of the catcher: collisions, concussions, battered ribs, bad shoulders, wrecked knees. According to “The Mackey Sasser Story” by Dr. Alan Goldberg (who worked with Dr. Grand in Sasser’s treatment), this litany of physical pain allowed Sasser’s RSPP to surface, but the problem was anchored far back in Sasser’s past, most deeply in his own version of that central motif of the American Dream, a son playing catch with his father:

  His father had always suffered from a very severe rheumatoid condition that significantly limited his activities and left him crippled with pain. This made it virtually impossible for his dad to throw the ball overhand when they started playing catch when Mackey was just a very young boy. Instead, his father would have to flip the ball underhanded to his son. Mackey’s father coped with his persistent pain by self-medicating himself with alcohol. He was described as a “quiet alcoholic” and, as a consequence, Mackey soon took on a caretaker role in the family starting at a very young age.

  “The Mackey Sasser Story,” Competitive Advantage,

  www.competitivedge.com/mackey-sasser-story, accessed March 30, 2014

  Abby had about one trimester left to go. I was about to become a father, a caretaker, just like Mackey had. I flexed my fingers and picked up the pen. In block lettering, all caps, one letter at a time, I took up the challenge.

  J O S H U A, I wrote.

  With Abby beside me, and with a tiny pulsing being curled like a question mark inside her, I walked one letter at a time through all my remaining signatures, fastening us all to an unreadable future.

  Schubach, Ron

  You can’t read the future. You can’t even read the past. For example, in all my delving into the archived days gone by I could never find much about Ron Schubach, the best athlete in the history of the town I grew up in (see desperation heave). I’m using his real name here, following the general approach in this encyclopedia for public figures. But I don’t know how public he is. To find anything about him on the Internet you’d probably have to be me. I’ve made a habit of searching for him, and I’ve only once in all my byzantine and unrepeatable chains of related key-word grasping ever found anything. It wasn’t from the state championship game loss in his junior season, in 1981—Schubach struggling, double teamed, his talents revealed as sublime but beatable—but was from the following year, a brief newspaper recap of a 1982 postseason high school all-star game between New Hampshire and Vermont. The article reported game details for the most part in the customarily drab, functional language of the medium, but in a single sentence the adjectives and animating verb suddenly come alive, as if the life they represented prodded them to do so:

  Fleet, acrobatic guards Ron Schubach of Randolph Union and Mike Giannaccini of Rice Memorial dazzled New Hampshire for 16 and 12 points respectively.

  After high school Schubach went to a small technical college in upstate New York, and, at least as the story came back to me, he quickly found the basketball coach there to be “a dick” and quit, never to play organized ball again. Every evening after JV basketball practice I rode the Late Bus home, and on its long meander through the auxiliary valleys of our town it passed by Schubach’s red brick house. He had a pretty younger sister, and as we rode by I would tell myself that I was hoping for a glimpse of her, but I would have been just as excited to see him, returned, even if he was just sitting there watching TV.

  Snap, Bad

  You can’t read the future. But if you’re going to become a father, I can tell you this: you will never again simply walk in your front door. You will always be carrying, carrying, carrying. Parcels, sacks, structures, wheeled conveyances, plastic contraptions, lumber, beverages, medical supplies. What’s the cause of this unceasing need? Are you stocking up for the apocalypse? Attempting to refortify the Maginot Line? You’ll wonder such things while trying to somehow work a thumb and finger free to manipulate an array of keys. Usually one or more of the objects in transit—most commonly the bag containing eggs—will slip from your grasp. Between release and impact a sibilant expletive will bloom in your mind, your solitary vestibule version of the reaction at the core of many sports failings, the in-gasp that comes just after the bungled release, that instant just beyond correction. Oh shit.

  I used to daydream about a life free of cringing recoil. In my fantasies I would imagine channeling Joe Montana. I’d think of the moment in Super Bowl XXIII when he paused in his masterful game-winning last-minute drive not to deliver straining raw-voiced exhortations or heart-swelling motivational lyricism but to offer the carefree observation, in between play calls, that a beloved obese comedian was in the stands.

  “Hey, isn’t that John Candy?” he asked a teammate.

  The clock was running down, the team under
Montana’s control was losing, and the entire field needed to be traversed, all this under the scrutiny of the largest audience of the year, any year: the Super Bowl. The slightest flinch, and the game at the epicenter of ravening American attention would be lost. For a long time, wanting to come out of my generalized cringe, I thought of all this, thought of Montana smiling at the sight of the big guy from Stripes, thought of the way the quarterback sauntered from the huddle to the line of scrimmage, in no hurry, shoulders back, relaxed. Here was a man completely at home and without worry, a man walking in his own front door carrying nothing.

  I don’t daydream anymore about miraculously assuming Montana’s preternatural ease. I’m no quarterback. I never was, but for a long time I wasn’t anything else either, which allowed for a certain a kind of daydreaming. Now I’m something. I’m an overburdened carrier cursing in a vestibule. For some reason the sheer relentlessness of the carrying that has come with fatherhood has surprised me.

  I don’t know whether it would have helped to have been prepared for this. Maybe if there had been some sort of predraft combine. If entry into fatherhood were preceded by an NFL-style combine, one of the tests would surely entail the lugging of unruly burdens through locked doors. There would probably be two versions of the test, one with only a sprawl of inanimate receptacles and objects of varying shapes and sizes to be transported through a series of ingresses and one with all the inanimate receptacles and objects plus a squirmy human receptacle of boundless love. But if an NFL-style predraft combine decided entry into fatherhood, with stopwatches and clipboards and complicated physical and psychological testing batteries assessing aptitude in the roles traditionally associated with fatherhood—carrier, provider, protector, handyman, steadfast chisel-jawed raiser of spirits, guardian of finances and automotive heartiness, calming presence, turkey carver—my chances of making a roster would be slim. Even into my midforties I still had the mealy skill set of a faltering college sophomore a few missed classes away from dropping out altogether to go sell intestine-­twisting parking lot burritos on the Phish tour—the ability to hurl a Frisbee both backhanded and forehanded, the rudimentary guitar strumming, the general familiarity with Buddhism and twentieth-century American poetry and three-for-a-dollar boxes of macaroni and cheese. My only chance of becoming a father in this scenario involving punishing gridiron drills would be if some squad’s front office had a policy of exhausting every possibility with the hopefuls rather than cutting them upon the first clear intimations of uselessness. Perhaps then I might be tried in various minor unglamorous roles to see whether I happened to have an aptitude for them. Perhaps one of these roles might in some way suit me.

  Joe Montana, interestingly enough, was not a predraft combine hero, his physical gifts not nearly as abundantly clear as those of, say, Ryan Leaf (the Ryan Leaf role of Montana’s draft year played by Leaf’s predecessor in spectacular stardom at Washington State University and in professional disappointment, Jack Thompson). Montana wasn’t big or particularly fast and couldn’t fire a football through a steel wall, all factors that led to the future legend going unselected until the third round of the 1979 NFL draft, three quarterbacks and a squat, barefoot kicker, Tony Franklin, among the many preceding him. Because football is such a meat wheel, churning up and spitting out scores of broken bodies every year, the third round, though unglamorous, is usually still the domain of players destined for an NFL roster. Occasionally a third-rounder will never make it into the NFL, but of course all Montana needed to prove he belonged was to be given a chance to show his invincible poise in game conditions. Other later-round selections weren’t so blessed and had to scramble for a roster spot.

  Trey Junkin, for example, taken in the fourth round of the 1983 NFL draft, would turn out to lack the physical gifts needed to be an NFL regular, but he nonetheless found an enduring place in the league as a long snapper, playing an incredible nineteen seasons (six more than Joe Montana). The long snapper is the specialist who enters games only for punts and field goal tries, and his job is to hunch forward and hurl the ball backward several yards through his legs. Someone with no prior knowledge of American football might describe the long snapper as the fellow called upon to perform, with the broadness of Kabuki, an exaggerated dramatization of violently pooping. No one has ever won an award or been celebrated in even the most glancing way for this skill. Even in the highly specialized, highly competitive world of a pro football team, long snapping stands out as the most arcane task and the one with the least opportunity for growth. It is pro sports’ clearest example of a dead-end job. But it does require a special skill, and Trey Junkin had it. The skill in question is the ability to grip a football and then hurl it accurately several yards backward through your legs as an unknown lummox hoping to advance someday to starting nose tackle attempts to crumple your spine.

  But Trey Junkin’s real skill was invisibility.

  I have this skill too, though I’m never confident in my grasp of it. It’s how I’ve been able for some years to pay rent and, more recently, at least approach providing for my child. I’m not a long snapper but a proofreader. Like the long snapper, the role of proofreader does not lend itself to scenarios of advancement. There is no such thing as a vice president of proofreading. I don’t mean to disparage proofreading—I am grateful that there’s at least one thing I can sort of do and that it is also something that suits my personality, or at least my desire for abnegation. Also, most importantly, as a proofreader I get a regular paycheck. I sometimes wake hyperventilating at the thought that this regular paycheck will disappear. In caveman days I would have to go out and slay a mammoth, but in this strange belittling world I proofread. It is a skill, sort of, or maybe merely a willingness to make a kind of surrender most others would be unwilling to make. Or maybe it’s a calling.

  “You do this all day long?” I’ve been asked.

  Too boring, too anal, I’ve been told.

  “I could never do what you do,” I’ve been told.

  I can’t do what I do either. Some part of me tends to get snagged on the imagined joy I am not experiencing on a given Wednesday afternoon, and so I never really have my mind on the task at hand, not in the way it needs to be. In this sense every day I fail at my profession, but my intention is not to succeed, really—it is to remain invisible. My intention is for my presence to go unnoticed so I can stay employed. This intention is often at cross-purposes with another intention, one I barely admit to myself: I want to win. I want to rise up into some championship transcendence above all cubicles and bus rides. This may be the tragic flaw of the invisible.

  In 2002 Trey Junkin’s long career seemed to be over, eighteen seasons in the league without any championships but, more importantly, without incident, his miraculous triumph over both transience and visibility complete. But that season the New York Giants had trouble finding anyone who could serve as an effective long snapper. They called Trey Junkin. He studied the team and the league and convinced himself that the Giants had a chance to go all the way. After all these years he might be able to win.

  “For nineteen years,” Trey Junkin said, “I tried to be invisible in my profession.”

  It would be nice to imagine that he said these words over a loudspeaker during a tearful ceremony before adoring fans on the occasion of his last game. But he said it to a phalanx of reporters after Junkin’s lone game with the Giants, a playoff loss in which the team squandered a twenty-four-point lead and lost when a last-second field goal attempt failed. Junkin’s snap was bad. The holder couldn’t get it down in time for the kick and instead scrambled and threw a game-ending incomplete pass. A field goal attempt earlier in the game had also failed in part due to Junkin’s low snap, which may have contributed to Junkin being unusually conscious of his motions on the final attempt. Years later he cited a teammate saying something to him just before the attempt that lodged in his mind. The teammate told him to just go nice and easy. Though it may have seemed
like good advice, it only made Junkin think about something that had always been performed with an ease and confidence beyond that of the grasping, conscious mind. The teammate would have much better served Junkin by pointing out John Candy in the stands. Such an observation would at the very least have done no harm, and perhaps it might even have lessened the burden of the moment, freeing the mind to let the body do what it knows how to do.

  Instead, Junkin went into the final play doing the opposite of going nice and easy: thinking. When he made the snap he must have known instantly that it was bad. He was the world’s foremost expert on long snapping. If anyone would have known instantly that the snap was even a fraction off, it would have been him.

  That feeling, that recoil—oh shit—I know it well from playing sports. But it’s been a long time since I played sports, so the oh shit part of my life is more generalized, a floating pulse, constant, sometimes on an off beat but sometimes thrumming loud.

  One day during Jack’s first spring I was forwarded an e-mail at work from a client. Jack was close to ten months old. The most recent layoffs that had occurred at my job were now a few months in the past. For a while no cubes had emptied. The e-mail from the client pointed out that one of the materials that had gone through me for proofreading contained a sentence with a repeated word.

  “Just curious, are your people doing a QA check of these?!?!?” the e-mail yelled.

  The repeated word—that—is occasionally repeated in suitable fashion, such as when Abraham Lincoln dedicated the battleground at Gettysburg to “those who here gave their lives that that nation might live,” so it is not something that a SpellCheck, the proofreader’s unreliable, frequently misguided assistant, will catch. The instance that had slipped past me was not one of those instances but simply a case in which the typed word had been typed again. For the rest of the day and, to some extent, as with all failures for the rest of my life, that that pulsed in my mind. It was the pulse of me hating myself, the pulse of me worrying about my job, worrying that I’d lose it, that I’d doom my family, that there was something wrong with me, a proofreader who can’t notice errors. The pulse of that that connected to a greater, more general pulse in the center of my being, the one that goes oh shit.