Benchwarmer

by Josh Wilker

  Velez, Eugenio

  When you get to the top of the mountain keep climbing, says a Zen adage I have never understood. What fucking mountain? And who’s ever climbing? Life feels more like an endless shoveling. You dig and dig. When you get to the bottom, you can either lie down and die or keep digging. It doesn’t matter what Eugenio Velez did or failed to do in 2011, but what he did afterward.

  That year when Jack arrived, 2011, was the year of Eugenio Velez, just as 1998 was the year of Sammy Sosa and Mark ­McGwire. Thirteen years earlier two hulking, beloved mesomorphs—one, McGwire, a white American and one, Sosa, a Dominican from San Pedro de Macoris—had captivated the nation by blasting home runs at a mind-boggling pace, battling one another in a race for what was at that time the most revered single-season record in baseball. In 2011 two angular, anonymous ectomorphs—one, Craig Counsell, a white American and one, Eugenio Velez, a Dominican from San Pedro de Macoris—failed at-bat after at-bat to record a base hit, gaining slight notice.

  It was not altogether clear who held the record that was being approached or even what the record was. Few cared. Few even noticed. But the day after my son was born Craig Counsell went hitless in three official at-bats, which garnered some mentions in a handful of online news sources and blogs, as it brought him, so it seemed, within two at-bats of equaling the all-time record for most consecutive at-bats by a nonpitcher without a base hit.

  “It’s been ugly, it’s been bad,” Counsell said. At that point he had not had a hit for nearly two months, when he’d collected three in four at-bats to raise his season average to .236, which brought him within shouting distance of his mediocre .255 lifetime mark. Besides Counsell’s propensity for Zelig-like appearances in historic postseason moments (he scored the winning run in the 1998 World Series and was on base during the decisive rally in the 2001 World Series), the most memorable detail about the utility man to that point had been his odd batting stance, which involved holding his bat very far above his head, as if he were trying to nudge something off a high shelf. This stance had become more conventional in his sixteenth and final season, as if he wanted to blend further into the background to prepare everyone for his imminent disappearance.

  Most significant among the other hitless skeins dredged up during Counsell’s reluctant pursuit was that of deadball-era catcher Bill Bergen, the Ty Cobb of unskilled hitting, who held among his many unsurpassed failing marks at the plate the distinction of going hitless in forty-six straight at-bats. Bergen also held for many decades the record for most career at-bats without being hit by a pitch, a mark of timidity that, along with his other putrid statistics, suggests a player who approached batting like someone being forced to snatch raw meat from a lion.

  Counsell singled in what would have been his forty-sixth hitless at-bat, seemingly sparing him from joining Bergen, but then, cruelly, the Elias Sports Bureau presented evidence that Bergen had in fact gone hitless in only forty-five straight at-bats, and Counsell was pulled back up into a tie for worst. The flurry of research also pulled another player into the tie, perhaps lessening the burden. Years earlier Dave Campbell, a 1970s utility infielder, had—unbeknownst to himself or anyone else—been the first to match Bergen’s futility.

  Yet Counsell, Bergen, and Campbell had all avoided the ignominy of going an entire year without a hit. Bergen managed forty-eight hits during 1909, the year of his streak, and Campbell collected twenty-six hits the year of his. Counsell had twenty-eight hits in 2011, and like Campbell, he ended the season—­and his long career—on a successful note, managing a single in his final at-bat.

  That very same day, September 28, 2011, the last day of the Season of Going Hitless, Counsell, Campbell, and Bergen would all be released from their burden. Nobody seemed to pay much attention, but going into that final day a fourth player had pulled into a tie with the Hitless Three. In the eighth inning Eugenio Velez was summoned from the bench to pinch-hit. For this at-bat a second mark of going hitless was also at stake. As mentioned above, none of the players with forty-five at-bat hitless streaks had ever gone a whole season without a hit.

  The benchwarmer from San Pedro de Macoris who entered the last game of the season of going hitless had already had thirty-six hitless at-bats in 2011 (his record-tying forty-five at-bat hitless streak stretched back to the previous season after he had sustained a head injury, a foul line drive having found him while he was, characteristically, warming the bench), so it was merely a matter of whether he would be able to turn the zero in his hit column to a one. He did not. With one last unsuccessful at-bat he claimed the record for most at-bats without a hit and the record for most at-bats in a season without a hit.

  I want to tell you more about Eugenio Velez, but I’m overwhelmed by his body of work, by the idiotic beauty of the things that please me. I haven’t even mentioned my own ample experiences with going hitless, or the way going hitless resembles loneliness, or how flicking metaphors at a computer screen resembles loneliness, resembles need, or how the isolating demands of parenthood can make you feel like all you’re ever doing is swinging and missing. I want to say all this, but I’m overwhelmed by the vast sweep of a Dominican benchwarmer who made it all the way to major league baseball and still couldn’t get lucky. I want to believe I’ll sing the full-throated song of Eugenio Velez someday—the fly balls that clanked off his glove, his tendency upon rare moments on base to lose focus and get picked off, the fact that he once wore a uniform with his team’s city spelled incorrectly—­San Francicso—but I know I won’t.

  When you fall to the bottom of the pit, keep digging. This is the lesson of Jean Van de Velde’s moment at the British Open, the lesson of him hitting a strong shot out of the bunker and then sinking a tough putt, those two shots saving him for the moment and coming after a series of devastating misplays and misfortune. This is also the lesson of the career of Eugenio Velez, who, after going hitless throughout 2011, continued swinging all through the following year in the minor leagues, collecting 128 hits for a .280 average with Memphis, and then in 2012, the year my son learned to walk, Eugenio Velez, despite being shuttled to his seventh professional team in a little over two years, was leading the Pacific Coast League in batting average.

  You have to focus on the positive sometimes, such as the hit that preceded Eugenio Velez’s major league record-setting hitless streak. It came in the extra innings of a game in May 2010. It drove in a run—not an important one but a run nonetheless. In the geologic lifespan of the earth, the driving in of runs in a major league baseball game is a precious and cosmically rare event. The hit was Eugenio Velez’s 160th and brought his season average up to .196; one more hit and he’d be over the Mendoza line. Instead, he ended that season at .164 and in the next season, of course, 2011, which, purely speaking, was the worst season anyone has ever had, batted .000. But that hit! A clear ringing affirmation: a victory.

  Victory Formation, the

  We did not live in the same state as any close family. We did not live in the same state as any close friends. We pulled in tight, the three of us, as if we had been brought together by the feeling of imminent victory, as if we were protecting this victory. I’d never been part of anything stronger. And yet there was always this feeling of fragility, that something could go wrong.

  The game-ending ritual that had become codified after the Joe Pisarcik game (see Pisarcik, Joe) became known as the Victory Formation. Before it had fully formulated itself teams generally played out the clock by calling a quarterback sneak, the quarterback performing a pointedly unambitious version of the play used during games to pick up a few inches or feet needed to secure a first down. The Victory Formation reduced the already remote possibility of calamity by having the quarterback kneel down on the turf rather than fall forward toward the line of scrimmage. The play was, in terms of its functionality, the most successful play in the history of any sport. It served its purpose again and again, which was simply to run out the cl
ock.

  This is what parenting often felt like to me, like I was running out the clock. It was now my purpose in life to protect the ball, as it were, and this purpose was often so burdensome that I found myself checking the figurative scoreboard. How much time was left in the day, the week, my life? It’s a huddled, overly protective, joyless way to live, just as the Victory Formation in football is, though overwhelmingly effective and despite its triumphant name, arguably the most joyless moment in all sports.

  And, worse, it has failed. This failure has happened so far just once. It occurred, naturally, the year my son arrived, in 2011, when San Diego Chargers quarterback Philip Rivers fumbled the snap with his team pulled in tight around him in Victory Formation. The Chargers had been poised to kick a game-winning field goal against the Kansas City Chiefs. Instead, the Chiefs seized the fumble and went on to win the game in overtime.

  Don’t play to the clock. Don’t try to protect victory. This is what I try to say. But below such admonitions is an awareness, part gratitude, part terror, of what I have in my arms. He is everything I could have ever wanted.

  von Hofmannstal, Count Manfred

  My son’s arrival in my life has made my life—there’s no other way I can think to say this—holy. But this holiness never manifests with any permanency; instead, it makes me feel as if I’m simultaneously on the brink of some permanent holiness and on the brink of squandering everything. I’m always one strike away. The moment is always too much. So I dwell on losing, ordering it, cataloguing it. I want to put everything into some kind of a hierarchy. With a hierarchy you know where you are, even if you’re at the bottom. The comfort of finding myself at the bottom sustained me through most of my life, all the way up until that life opened to volatile holiness.

  I’ve always thought I needed order, but maybe what I need are new stories.

  A good place to start might be with the worst professional golf score ever recorded. It’s a tale of failure that is paradoxically a tale of triumph. It’s a refusal to recognize hierarchy.

  In the summer of 1976 Maurice Flitcroft decided he wanted to play in the British Open. He had just taken up the game two years earlier. He discovered that to enter as an amateur he would need to provide documented evidence that he was a topflight golfer. This evidence was not required for golf professionals, so Maurice Flitcroft simply declared himself a professional and was allowed entry into a qualifying tournament for the British Open on Friday, July 2, 1976.

  Flitcroft lacked not only professional achievements but even the basic appurtenances of athleticism: he was forty-seven but looked much older, with a slight, stooped frame, bulging eyes, large ears, and ruined teeth. He looked like a butler from an old horror movie, the gaunt, jaundiced greeter of travelers at a dark mansion’s giant door. He would seem out of place simply walking around in the daylight, let alone teeing off in a professional golf tournament. Things only got more preposterous when Flitcroft started to play. Golfer Jim Howard was on hand to witness Flitcroft’s first shot.

  “The club came up vertical and went down vertical,” Howard observed. “It was as though he was trying to murder someone.”

  Flitcroft, as you would imagine from someone capable of attempting such a stunt, saw things a little differently.

  “It was not a total disaster,” he said of his opening drive, noting that the ball traveled “in a forward direction.” This kind of attitude helped Flitcroft to complete the entire round of golf, in which he shot a 121, 49 shots over par, by far the worst score ever recorded in a professional tournament and arguably the worst performance in the history of professional sports. Yet it was a victory simply because of its existence, because Maurice Flitcroft declared himself worthy of entry and walked right in.

  You have to do this as a father. You have to just sign your name and say, Yes, here I am, a pro. You have to just start swinging. You will fuck up completely, but it’s better than not being there at all. And then you have to do it again and again, and each time you do it will be so different from any other time that it is as if you have to be a whole new person or, rather, that you have to enact an entirely new impersonation. This was the victory of Maurice Flitcroft in its entirety. After his fraudulent entry was discovered, he was banned from all future tournaments. He did not bow to this imposition of hierarchy, this notion that there are a select few able to walk the most golden fairways of life. He slipped out of his name and attached himself to a new one. Paychecki, Gene? Yes, that’s me. Jolly, James Beau? Yes, I belong. Hoppy, Gerald? Yes, quite right. Each name would quickly get appended with a link, a list of names growing, each one singing see Flitcroft, Maurice. Whenever his abject unworthiness was discovered he became someone else and, with each imposture, became ever more ridiculously and indestructibly himself. Yes, that’s me. Yes, I belong. Yes, quite right. Yes—or should I say yea? Yea, verily, I am the one and only Count Manfred von Hofmannstal.

  Yea? Verily? Noble, holy? This is the hardest part, overcoming your own accusations of fraud, your unholy remove. You can’t bail, fall, slip out of your name. You have to keep saying yes. Yes, with my sack full of clubs that I don’t know how to use. Yes, again and again, even though I am banned, even though I am forty-nine over par, even though Jack is crying and it’s the middle of the night and we can’t afford this condo. Yes, even though every holy moment with Jack is a moment I won’t see again because I can’t stop time.

  Yes, here I am.

  W

  Webber, Chris

  Time can’t be stopped.

  Whistle Swallowing

  Not long after the last game of my season as a backup to the backup forwards, I rode south for some hours with my team’s leading scorer, Nick, in his rattling Datsun hatchback to Hartford, Connecticut, to see our favorite band, the Grateful Dead. For some reason I was wearing my referee whistle around my neck. I may have imagined I might finally bring the whistle to my lips, that I might add its piercing signal to the joyful roar of the crowd. You want to find someplace where every part of you will be accepted, someplace where you’ll feel whole.

  “Hey,” I said to my wife several years later. The two of us were sitting in our living room. The white noise machine in the bedroom was filtering through a small white monitor on the mantle, confirming one of our son’s rare spells of unconsciousness. It was a little less than a month shy of his first birthday. Abby was staring at her laptop computer. I could tell something was making her angry or sad or some combination of both. This seemed to happen a lot lately in her new role as a breastfeeding advocate. There was always some wrenching drama unfolding.

  “Hey,” I said again. I started to get frustrated that I couldn’t get her attention. It seemed like I would need the piercing report of a referee whistle to make her look up at me.

  I didn’t have a referee whistle anymore. I’d gotten one a few weeks before the Dead show, and by the time of the drive with Nick to Hartford it had already come to represent everything that was wrong with me. I’d needed some money and had noticed that the work-study office had a posting for intramural referees. It was the hardest job of my life. From the opening tap of every game I froze, no longer able to fathom the details of a game that, absent the pressure of being its presiding authority, I saw with the clarity that comes with years of familiarity and love. It all suddenly moved too quickly. It would have been better, thus blinded, to just start making random calls, but I made no calls at all. I never once blew my whistle. A second ref was always working the game, making calls, so my complete passivity would take a little while to register, but you can’t hide for long as a ref, and everyone on both teams would grow increasingly incensed as fouls went uncalled. Eventually every game devolved into several of my fellow college students screaming obscenities at me. One day I just stopped showing up. I didn’t tell anyone, didn’t turn in my whistle.

  “Hey!” I said to Abby. She looked up at me as if I’d shaken her awake from a distu
rbing dream. The thing to do in such a situation would be to talk gently, comfortingly.

  “This is how you’re going to spend your free time?” I said. “Making yourself fucking miserable with Facebook?”

  “I’m not looking at Facebook,” she said. Or who knows? In my memory all fights with my wife are wounds filled with static. So I’m guessing at the exact words. All I know is we snarled back and forth for a while until finally she turned her computer to me. On the screen was the consequence of a decision.

  The ideal version of a game, of life, is of continuous action. My relationship with that ideal has always prompted me to remove myself as much as possible from any action so I can dream. I don’t want to make decisions. But as a father there are times when you have to make a call. There’s no avoiding it. The images on Abby’s computer screen confirmed that the first call to be made had been within an hour or so after Jack was born. I’d been dreading that call. I didn’t want to make it. I made the call that seemed closest to no call, even though it was in truth the direct opposite of no call. This was at the hospital, in the recovery room. My wife was there, and through our life she has been the other ref, the one able to make calls, but this call was mine. Yes, there was another ref on the court, but the action was all in front of me.

  He’s not going to remember it. It happened to me, and I don’t remember it.

  I said this to myself as I recoiled from the gruesome medical procedure displaying on Abby’s computer.