The Only Rule Is It Has to Work
Page 32
• Jake Taylor, signed out of the Pecos League; he hits .361/.413/.708 for San Rafael;
• Jordan Brower, signed out of a collegiate summer league; he hits .391/.440/.478;
• Chase Tucker, cut by the Frontier League; he hits .328/.345/.455;
• Celson Polanco, a ten-year veteran with affiliated experience; he posts a 3.30 ERA as a starter for San Rafael;
• Guadalupe Barrera, signed out of the Pecos League; he becomes the Pacifics’ closer, with a 1.00 ERA;
• J. R. Bunda, a college graduate making his pro debut. He has a 2.95 ERA as a starter for San Rafael.
Many of whom are now singing rambunctious karaoke in front of their entire team—and me. I watch Kavanaugh clap and cheer, and I realize that all the stories we’ve been telling each other about him are propaganda. We needed an enemy and he had the stripes. I watch him and I realize he is so obviously a good guy. He and his whole team are content, and I am jealous of what he’s built: a happy group in August.
* * *
One day, I walk into the clubhouse and everybody looks so serious. Somebody makes big “be scared” eyes at me, so I walk right back out. I piece the story together afterward.
A couple of weeks earlier, Matt Walker lost his wallet. Thought it might’ve fallen out of his pocket in Eric Schwieger’s car. Called Schwieg that night to ask if he could look for it. “Sure,” Schwieg said, but shit, he didn’t want to go all the way out and look, so he just texted back, “couldn’t find it.” Couple days later Schwieg does find it; tells himself, cool, gotta remember to give this back to Walker. Tosses it into the center console. Forgets. In the meantime, Walker’s worried. His Canadian passport’s in that wallet. One day, Santos Saldivar, whose locker is next to Walker’s, says, “Hey, ever find your passport?” Walker: “Nah.” Santos: “Bummer.” Walker thinks, Huh. Suspicious. Thinks he remembers Santos snooping around his locker, maybe. Starts telling people he thinks Santos took it. Confronts Santos about it. Accuses Santos. Santos says, “Fuck off.” The next day, by coincidence, Santos takes Walker’s spot in the rotation. Bad timing. So a “veteran” on our team is telling people that a rookie stole his wallet, which isn’t great.
The day before the reckoning, Moch is in Schwieg’s car, looking for something in the center console, finds the wallet. Tells Walker. Gets Walker fired up. Tells Walker, “There was $80 in it when you lost it,” which Walker doesn’t remember but Moch somehow does. Gets Walker more fired up. The next morning, Walker’s telling his teammates he’s going to kick Schwieg’s ass. Goes into the clubhouse, calls a mandatory team meeting. Talks in veiled language that makes it seem like Schwieg stole from him. Screams at him, trying to provoke him. (“There are no dickheads on our team,” Walker had once told Ben.) Everybody on the team is horrified that Walker is making such a big deal over something that should have been handled privately. “Call a team meeting” becomes a punch line for every small slight. Schwieger accepts a couple days’ suspension, convinced by now that he actually has done something awful. He’s heartbroken, and I’m heartbroken for him.
“My iPhone just autocorrected Stompers to stoners,” Theo texts me soon after. “Siri is on top of her shit.”
* * *
At about this time we’re at Steiners, me and Theo and Andrew Parker and Erik Gonsalves, and the R. Kelly song “Ignition (Remix)” comes on. It’s a party song, but with the honeyed groove of more intimate pre- and postparty moments, when the circle around you is self-selected instead of all-inclusive. It’s also preloaded with irony, so that white people can love it and sing it and bounce, bounce to it without embarrassment. It’s the most satisfying pop song of the past quarter century. As always happens when “Ignition (Remix)” comes on, the mood of the bar gets three levels happier—“toot toot; beep beep,” we bunch of losers sing. As always happens, we all discover that it’s not just our favorite song, but also everyone else’s.
That night, we decide to make it everybody’s walk-up song for one game. These days have become so repetitive for the Stompers: the same routines before every game, the same walk-up songs for the same nine batters, the same dispiriting early deficits and lackluster comeback attempts, the same postgame spreads and leftover hot dogs, the same late nights at Steiners flirting with the same four town girls, the same hangovers in the morning. Plus, Connor Jones, our newest right fielder, went hitless in his first two games as a Stomper and is blaming his walk-up music. So, the idea goes, we’re going to make this one game about the team, not the individuals. When a batter walks up to the plate, he’s not going to hear his song; he’s going to hear our song. He’s not Connor Jones walking up there looking to get a hit; he’s a Stomper going up there looking to represent a city.
It’s a stretch. When I try to claim this idea as part of our sabermetric approach to running a team, Ben looks at me with a sort of sad sniffle, that this is what I’ve resorted to in my quest to add meaning. I get it.
But lately I’ve been sitting in silence on the drives to and from Sonoma, dispirited and trying to figure out what the stakes of these games are. I’ve won plenty in my life—board games, Ping-Pong tournaments, hands of poker, etc.—and so I know how little winning changes anything. Winning doesn’t end the quest to win. Winning doesn’t relieve the pressure to win. Winning is fun, and then it’s over. If we win this season—if we finish first in a four-team race for the championship of the fifth-highest independent league—the world will not stop and applaud every time we enter the room. “Oh, you’re the guy who won!” nobody will say. If we win, I will drive home afterward and be as broken and flimsy as I ever was. I will struggle not to eat junk food, I will be a jerk to my family sometimes, I will get angry at people who say bad things about my work, I will get nervous about this cough that won’t go away, and when I remember that I’m going to die and that so are my parents and so is my wife and so is my daughter I’ll survive the existential dread only by convincing myself that none of it really matters, all of it is an illusion. Winning, especially, is an illusion, or at least an exaggeration.
But then what is losing? Losing is the sad inverse of winning, and yet not so easily disregarded as an illusion; losing is ruining me. Why does losing cost me so much more happiness than winning provides? Because, I come to realize, losing is not only the absence of victory but also the expenditure of an opportunity for victory. This feeling gets stronger every day, every time Theo says “summer camp is almost ending.” Ben and I will go home after this and probably never again get the chance to affect our favorite sports team. The Stompers as a franchise may never get another chance to win: The Pacific Association, like all indy leagues, is perpetually on the verge of collapse, and a series of owner meetings in August has caused a panic over the state of next year’s finances.
Meanwhile, we’re watching players retire, right in front of us. We’re watching guys give up. We’re trying to talk them into staying, telling Taylor Eads to cancel his flight back home to Louisiana because this is it, pal, this is the chance. He hangs on for one extra week, gets to play third base in professional baseball’s first five-man infield, has a few hits and eats some gumbo, but he still hasn’t done what he came here for. He still hasn’t hit a home run. So when he steps up to bat in his final game, in the bottom of the ninth with the Stompers trying to rally for a win, and he gets his pitch, a 1-2 fastball dick-high that he absolutely crushes, and the dugout levitates, and … his fly ball dies at the warning track in our 435-foot center field, he turns right and collapses onto the dugout bench. He buries his face in his hands for fifteen minutes while the team packs up around him, a few guys patting him on his shoulder: his last lotto ticket, scratched. “I’m proud of you,” I tell him, and he doesn’t move.
Andrew Parker watches over Taylor in the dugout, and Parker is livid at Moch. In the top of the ninth, Moch had half-assed a ground ball into an error, which led to two runs and might have cost us the game. This doesn’t make sense to Parker: Taylor is playing what might be the last game o
f his life. The last time he’ll have this view. The last time he’ll ever have twenty-one peers waiting after whatever he does to give him five or pat him on the shoulder and tell him they’re proud of him. He’s leaving everything on the field. You can’t run faster than you run on the last ball you hit as a professional baseball player. And then here’s this other guy on your team who looks like he doesn’t give a shit. How can you know that your teammates’ careers are all in the process of dying, that your own career is in the process of dying, and not hustle? At the very least, why not that?
This is why losing is different. There’s a variable here besides the outcome of the game: time. Say you could monetize happiness, perfectly. How much would the happiness of winning a championship go for? Let’s say … $1,800. It’d be pretty excellent to win a championship, to celebrate first on the field and later at Steiners, to collect mementos from the victory, balls signed by the entire team, pictures with the fans, the scorecard you sneak from the dugout, the newspaper with the team on the front page, the handshake concession from Kavanaugh. That’s all worth $1,800. You’d trade a flat-screen TV for it, but not your car for it. Fair?
So now how about the happiness of losing a championship? Why, that’d be $0. I wouldn’t pay a cent for that. That sounds awful. So the difference between the two is $1,800. But there’s another variable in this equation:
Outcome + Opportunity Cost = Net
And how much is the opportunity cost? How much would you pay to have this summer back? In twenty-seven years, when you’re tumbling toward the earth in a skydive gone wrong, how much would you pay for those ninety days of health and happiness and relative youth and the chance to win that celebration on the field? All the money in the world. Everything you ever earned, for the chance to do it again.
If you win, the opportunity cost feels like nothing. You came to do something and you did it. If you had that opportunity back, you couldn’t do better than you did; it doesn’t feel like a lost opportunity at all. But if you lose, it means you came to do something and did nothing. You could have done so much more with that opportunity. So we now have:
$0 − ∞ = −∞
The value of a lost summer is negative infinity. This is the math I settle on. Baseball is a game of failure. Every game fails to forestall death.
Which is why, at the very least, I want these days to be memorable. Which is why I’m proud of “Ignition (Remix)” Day, a day that progressed, based on my observation of our players, from amusement (two batters in) to confusion (three batters in) to annoyance (eight batters in) to boredom (twelve batters in) back to amusement (twenty batters in) to joy (postgame, when the song was played over the loudspeakers in full). We won that game. Connor Jones hit a home run. I remember it. Toot, toot.
“Action feels good,” Theo says after that win.
“So good,” I respond. “I can’t think of a single thing we’ve actually done this year that I regret. Only the things I haven’t done.”
“We should do things.”
“We should do things.”
So we try. Anything to make tomorrow different from today.
We call a mandatory team meeting at Town Square. A year earlier, the manager, Ray Serrano, had “called” a “team meeting” at the bar to celebrate Captain’s birthday. The night was ludicrous; Theo ended up sleeping in Serrano’s garage. This year, Theo stopped by the bar on Captain’s birthday, and it was just Captain, alone. It was too depressing to bear. So, team meeting. Theo spends $200 on cinnamon whiskey shots. We all cheer. A day to remember.
We write letters to every player. Tim writes some, Ben and I write some, and Theo writes some, and Theo prints them out, signs them, puts them in envelopes, and delivers them to each player’s locker before he arrives. We want everybody to remember how good they were—which, by implication, is how good they actually are—so we remind them.
Baps,
In your first season of pro baseball, you’re the best hitter on the best team in the league. You have played in 48 games and you have hits in 41 of them. You’re hitting .357 against lefties, which might be the craziest stat of the entire league; lefties don’t hit .357 against lefties unless they’re named Gwynn, Bonds, or Baptista.
This game is humbling for everybody, and there have been times this year we’ve been humbled to find out that we didn’t know as much as we thought we did. But the flip side, and what keeps us going, is remembering that morning in March when we saw you move, saw you hold a glove and grip a bat, and we knew before we even got to see you take a cut that you were a player. It was obvious then, and it’s undeniable now: You’re a great ballplayer. And we’re a great ballclub. Our record is 40-24.
Let’s finish this, Baps.
Sincerely,
Theo
Yoshi,
You took over a team in July that was disoriented, that had no momentum and was losing control of itself. We had gone 3-7 over the final 10 games before you became manager. But when you took your seat in the dugout, everything changed about the way we viewed ourselves, and in those 32 games that you have managed we have gone 19-13. We have the league’s best on-base percentage and the best OPS; we have the league’s most effective base-stealing team, and we have allowed the fewest unearned runs. Our pitchers have walked the fewest batters, and our hitters have drawn the most walks. We have thrown the fewest wild pitches, and we have committed the fewest errors. We have the most doubles, the most triples, and the second-most home runs, and we have scored the most runs. More importantly, we have the league’s best manager, the only manager that makes the best decisions based on evidence and isn’t afraid to make the right move, even if it’s unusual. This team is, top to bottom, the best in the league, and we are fortunate to have you running it for us. We are 40-24.
Let’s finish this, Yoshi.
Sincerely,
Theo
Moch,
You’re an on-base machine with an intelligent, adaptable approach at the plate. You’ve walked in 15.5 percent of your plate appearances, the second-highest rate in the league for a full-season player. You’ve taken a ton of pitches, and you’ve rarely struck out. You hit the ball where it’s pitched. You’re leading the Stompers in RBI, and we can always count on you to consider the situation and make advancing the runner a priority. When you’ve come to the plate with a runner on 3rd and less than 2 outs, you’ve driven him in exactly two-thirds of the time, which is the best rate of any Stompers regular. And you’ve done this while spending most of the season at the most challenging position on the field, where you’ve made some spectacular plays.
Remember that you belong to the best-hitting team in the league. Not the best-hitting team in June or July, but the best-hitting team today. Even excluding Joel, Isaac, and the other hitters who’ve left for other leagues, the Stompers in the dugout today have by far the best on-base percentage in the Pacific Association, and you’re a big reason why.
We won the first half, and now it’s time to finish what we started. Our record is 40-24.
Sincerely,
Theo
Mr. Sean Conroy,
In your first season of pro baseball, you’re 4-1 with a 1.98 ERA. You pitched a shutout in your first career start. You have 10 saves, which is the second most in the league despite 10 fewer appearances out of the bullpen than the league leader.
Opponents are hitting .182 off you. You’re allowing less than a hit and a walk per inning. You also made history with a courageous step forward that will forever help change the landscape of American pro sports.
We are the best team in the league. Our record is 40-24.
You’re really good. So are we. Let’s finish this.
Sincerely,
Theo
We win that day, too. For the first time in weeks, our team’s self-reported happiness levels spike, to their highest point in a month. “Theo gave me a great letter,” Erik Gonsalves scrawls on his survey, circling the maximum mood rating.
But mostly we keep losin
g. It’s the series in Vallejo that really tests us: We enter the series 20-4 against the Admirals, who are 21-48 overall. Eric Schwieger starts game 1. Schwieger is trying anything to salvage his season: He’s been aiming for so long to get his ERA under 5, and in his previous start he was hit so hard (ten runs, three innings) that there is no chance; indeed, he’s now trying to avoid an ERA over 7. This despite our assurances that he has pitched far better than his ERA, and that sometimes baseball’s luck takes a long time to even out. Our assurances get weaker every day. He allows six runs in five innings, his ERA rises to 7.16, and everything is awful. We lose 9-3.
Santos Saldivar starts game 2. He’s been the best pitcher in the league since he joined us—Sean with better stuff. He cruises through five innings, up 4-0, but in the sixth he allows two hits off our fielders’ gloves and another hit on a pop-up that Santos thinks would have been caught had the right fielder been positioned properly. That brings in four runs, and our bullpen allows five more. The more troubling thing is how fatalistic Santos is in the bullpen afterward, almost amused that he is pitching for a team this bad, a team that (in his view) made him get six outs in an inning. We lose 9-4.
Gregory Paulino starts game 3. He’s capable of dominance, with two complete-game shutouts under his belt, but occasionally he shows up with his mechanics off (or, we suspect, his elbow sore), lacking his usual high-80s velocity. The bad days are always identifiable in the first inning. In this first inning he allows three runs. He leaves the game down 7-3. Jon Rand, relieving for the last time, allows six more. We lose 13-4. We’ve been swept by the cellar dwellers. This is our team. Oh, what a night.