Now the team needs him, and, from his first pitch, we can see that we’ve gotten the good Gregory. On the days when he’s bad, his right leg doesn’t kick all the way around on his follow-through, and he relies so much on his arm that the 89s on the radar gun become 84s, and the sliders spin slowly. Today he has the full punctuation kick. He and DeBarr both go six scoreless innings, neither pitching through more than one or two threats.
In the seventh, we have our chance: Baps singles to lead off the inning. Moch, aggressive on the first pitch, singles right after. Then it’s time for Yoshi to be the genius. Almost every time the Stompers are in an obvious bunt situation, Yoshi calls for the same thing: a fake bunt on the first pitch, then swing away on the second. It’s a small ploy, but without advance scouts taking notes on every game, as we have, no other team has figured this out yet. Every time, the third baseman responds by coming way in. The rest of the infield adjusts its positioning as necessary. The pitcher grooves a fastball. And our hitter whacks it, often past the drawn-in infield. And so it is that Mark Hurley shows bunt on the first pitch and pulls it back for a called strike one. Then he shows bunt early, and I can’t help but yell, “The Yoshi!” The pitch comes in and Hurley whacks it, past the drawn-in infield. Baps scores with a slide and we take the lead.
We still have runners on first and second. Chad Bunting pops out. Kristian Gayday, again left in to face a right-hander, pops out. Matt Rubino, the catcher we got in “trade” for Isaac Wenrich, grounds to the first baseman. DeBarr goes over to cover, and the throw is wild! It’s off his glove! Mochizuki charges around third, he’s going to score easily, when …
… the catcher has the ball and tags him out. It’s the most improbable moment of our season: The ball deflected off DeBarr’s glove at a 110-degree angle straight to the catcher at home, so directly and with so much momentum that he didn’t have to chase it, didn’t have to corral it, didn’t even have to leave his position, as if the first baseman had called “bank” and sunk the ball in the corner pocket. Moch, in shock, tries to scissor out of the way, but he’s helpless. The inning is over, the rally is dead, the lead is one run.
Paulino keeps his shutout going. Through seven, through eight. He goes to the ninth, and we leave him in. We discuss bringing in Dylan Stoops. We stay with the guy throwing the shutout, the right-hander to face the right-handed heart of San Rafael’s order.
The first batter is Jake Taylor. His sleeves are too short. His muscles are imposing. He can’t hit fastballs. Gregory has thrown him fastballs all game, and he has been popping balls to right field, or fouling balls off toward the first-base side, or swinging and missing, or taking strike three. Paulino throws him a first-pitch slider. His leg doesn’t kick on the follow-through.
When that slider reaches the middle of the zone, Taylor squares it up and hits a fly ball to deep left field. Gregory leaps up before he even turns around to watch. Then he turns around to watch. He puts his hands on his knees and he grits his teeth, hoping that something might somehow get in the way of a baseball that has a clear path to Nevada. As it clears the fence, he puts his hands on his head. Behind him, in perfect synchronization, the catcher, Rubino, drops his arms to his sides. Tie game.
Erik Gonsalves comes in to relieve him. It probably should be Stoops, but what happens next has nothing to do with that decision. Gonzo gets the first batter, Jeremy Williams, to hit a ground ball right to second base. The bat breaks, and the eyes of our second baseman, Yuki Yasuda, track the bat instead of the ball. He doesn’t move at first, then suddenly sees it, too late. The runner is on first.
And then Chase Tucker squares to bunt, and he pushes one toward first. Gonzo jumps off the mound to field it, but just as he reaches down, the ball takes an odd hop and goes past him; he scrambles, picks it up, and throws to first, but too late and too wildly. The runners advance to second and third.
After an intentional walk to load the bases, Gonzo throws a pitch eight inches off the ground and about two inches off the plate. A good pitch. Almost a strike. With that hard, two-seam movement that makes Gonzo so hard to hit on his good days and, according to his catchers, so hard to catch, too. Rubino has never caught Gonzo. The pitch hits off the thumb of his glove, goes to the backstop, and the winning run scores. We will not be returning to Arnold Field this season.
* * *
The day of my prepracticed speech, before the weekend series, I picked up Dylan Stoops at the airport. He’d flown home for a funeral. I had to honk to get him to my car—he didn’t recognize me without the beard or the shaggy hair. His flight had landed late, and as we drove up from the city we checked the clocks on our phones and rooted for smooth traffic. I was scheduled to speak in the clubhouse at 5:00 p.m. We got through the city and onto the Golden Gate Bridge (the first choke point), and then down past San Rafael (the second choke point), and onto the side highways that lead into Sonoma Valley. We cheered each pass. But the last threat was the scariest, a four-mile stretch that gets backed up daily behind a stoplight where the road to Sonoma and the road to San Rafael and the road to Vallejo all meet. I’d been in this four-mile stretch for ninety minutes on the worst days. But as we came over the hill that drops down toward the choke point, we saw clear black asphalt all the way. We were going to make it.
I texted Theo: “37.” (The highway we were on.) “Probably 35 minutes out.” It was 4:12 p.m.
Theo replied: “Yoshi and I addressed the team.” Yoshi had misunderstood and called everybody together at two. When I wasn’t there, Captain started agitating for Theo and Yoshi to say something instead. “These guys need to hear something,” he said. “You can’t make them wait.” So they spoke. Everybody, including Theo, agreed it was … restrained. A few days later, while walking for pizza at 2:00 a.m., I deliver the speech to Theo. He’s the only Stomper who ever hears it, though four months later the rest of the team can see Leonardo DiCaprio playing Hugh Glass in The Revenant.
15
IT IS HIGH, IT IS FAR …
If momentum is a real force in sports, the Stompers might as well forfeit the title game and save themselves a trip to San Rafael. The Pacifics couldn’t be coming in hotter: They’ve won seven in a row and seventeen of their last twenty, including eight of their last nine against us. The Stompers couldn’t be coming in colder: We’ve lost three in a row and seven of our last nine.
Our players believe in momentum. In the same June game against the Pacifics when Isaac called our lineup “the gauntlet,” Jon Rand asked me, “Can you feel the momentum? It’s a good feeling.” And I could feel it—how could I not, when our team was in the midst of starting the season 18-3?—but I didn’t trust what I felt, not even when we came back to win. Russell Carleton’s Baseball Prospectus studies show that momentum depends on selective memory, on forgetting games like a 14-13 loss to San Rafael on July 22, when Mike Jackson followed a string of strong starts with a complete ERA killer, allowing eleven runs in four innings. (It was a hard-luck eleven-run outing, if there is such a thing.) Halfway through, the Stompers were trailing 13-6. But we scored one in the fifth, two in the sixth, and four in the seventh, and suddenly we were tied, with the entire bench believing there was no way we could lose. But we did, by one run, when Maikel Jova singled off Santos and drove in the go-ahead run in the top of the ninth, and the Stompers stranded the tying run in the bottom of the inning. The Pacifics had the momentum, and then we had the momentum, and then they took it again. And if it switches sides that easily, it’s probably not worth worrying about.
The Stompers had more momentum in the first half than we knew how to handle. Objects in motion tend to stay in motion unless acted on by an external force, but baseball teams are always acted on by external forces: their opponents and, in our case, the higher independent leagues who poached many of our best players. But if baseball supplies the belief in momentum, it also supplies the response: Earl Weaver’s old saying “Momentum is the next day’s starting pitcher.” The next day’s starting pitchers are the reason why, w
hen Sam asks for my thoughts on the title game, I tell him I think we’re slightly favored to win, even on the road, even after a spirit-crushing sweep.
My moderate optimism stems almost as much from who isn’t starting for the Pacifics as it does from who’s starting for the Stompers. Max Beatty, the best pitcher in the Pacific Association, is not on San Rafael’s roster, and it’s all because we’ve done something a major league general manager would never dream of doing. For weeks, Sam and I have been corresponding with Kevin Hooper, manager of the Wichita Wingnuts of the American Association, who reached out to Yoshi for player recommendations in late July. We’ve tried to persuade him to sign some of our pitchers, but we’ve also sent him extensive evidences about Beatty and Matt Chavez, hoping he’d get them out of the league. At first, Hooper wouldn’t bite, but on August 24 he sends Sam an email asking about the best available Pacific Association starters. Sam, who’s already sent Hooper a scouting report on Beatty that was much more glowing than the one on the whiteboard Joel Carranza erased, now tells him that Beatty is “a mile better than everybody else available in this league,” going so far as to give Hooper the phone numbers for Mike Shapiro and Matt Kavanaugh. When Sam follows up the next day, Hooper tells him, “We got Beatty! Thanks for all your help.” Oh, nothing in it for us, Hoop. Just a couple of selfless citizens hoping to help out a young man who just happens to pitch for the team we’re about to play in a winner-take-all title game.
After this exchange, Sam and I are certain we’ve seen the last of Beatty, so we get the scare of the season before Sunday’s regular-season finale when the Albert Park PA man announces that “El Diablo, Max Beatty” is throwing out the first pitch. It’s a nickname, and a surprise entrance, worthy of a professional wrestler: My expression mirrors the stunned disbelief on Kane’s face when The Undertaker’s gong sounded unexpectedly at Royal Rumble 2004. But the gong was a fake-out, and so is Beatty’s return. Like Santos in River City, Beatty was signed to substitute for an injured pitcher, made one ineffective start, and was released when the pitcher he’d replaced decided to make a comeback. The Pacific Association’s rosters are frozen, and because Beatty left the league, he’s no longer eligible to pitch for the Pacifics—although I still worry that they’ll find a loophole and somehow sneak him in.
Celson Polanco is scheduled to start instead. Yoshi, Sam, and I agree that the Pacifics have done us a favor: We’re relieved that they’ve already burned Nick DeBarr, whom our stats had neck and neck with Beatty. But Polanco, a Dominican righty, isn’t an easy assignment: He had a shaky first start against Pittsburg on August 4, but since then he’s gone at least seven innings in four consecutive starts, including a nine-inning, thirteen-strikeout performance in his title-game tune-up (against the Admirals, but still). Polanco has an imposing mound presence—earringed and dreadlocked, he’s listed at (and looks) 6-foot-4, 250, and he releases the ball from 6.6 feet off the ground, the highest of anyone in our database—but he’s more of a soft tosser than his stature would suggest. The Pacifics picked him up on a tip from Maikel Jova, who played against him in the North American League in 2012. (I try not to be bitter about the fact that the best tip we got from our players in August gave us .160-batting Peter Bowles.) At thirty-one, Polanco is in his tenth pro season and his sixth independent league, after four years in the Houston Astros and Toronto Blue Jays systems.
There’s zero debate about who’s starting for the Stompers: Santos. In mid-August, we almost lost Santos to the same enemy that took T. J., Taylor, and Paul: higher education. Although his last semester at Southern University doesn’t start until after the championship game, he had to enroll in person, and the deadline was during our season. Rather than lose his remaining starts—especially this one—the Stompers paid to fly him to Louisiana and bring him back to Sonoma the following week. This is why: Since July 15, the day Santos debuted, the four best pitchers in the Pacific Association (minimum 20 innings pitched) by wOBA allowed have been Santos, Beatty, DeBarr, and Dylan Stoops. (The worst: our Opening Day starter, Matt Walker, who allowed a home run to Pacifics reliever Cory Bostjancic—making his first professional plate appearance—in his swan song on Sunday.)
Beatty and DeBarr aren’t available, so advantage Sonoma (although Polanco—who outdueled Santos, Dylan, and Sean Conroy in a game on August 15—would rank sixth on the list). Other than Santos and Dylan, there are only two Stompers pitchers who could conceivably pitch again: Sean Conroy and Mike Jackson, who last started five days ago but hasn’t worked out of the bullpen since the first half of the season. Whatever else Sam and I may have failed to do right this season—and there’s a long list of failures—we’ll always have this: We signed the three Stompers pitchers most likely to appear in the championship game, and we talked another team into signing the stud who would have started for the Pacifics. Since the playoff will decide the champion of the Pacific Association’s season, any swing in the odds of winning this single game has a huge impact on our championship probability. The upgrade from whoever would have started for the Stompers in the absence of Santos, Dylan, and Sean and the drop-off from Beatty to Polanco have to be worth a big bump in win expectancy, so I’m mentally awarding myself and Sam some fraction of a championship regardless of whether we win. Process matters more than results, right?
For analytical purposes, probably: This game won’t tell us much about which of these two teams is better, let alone which was better before we had to fill holes with whomever we had on hand. The problem with “process” is that whatever we might tell ourselves about the analytical insignificance of a single game, our emotional state and sense of self-worth hinge on this one win. Before the weekend series in San Rafael started, Sam told me he didn’t care about the championship; he just wanted to finish with the best record in the league, since that would be a more meaningful achievement. I understand the sentiment, but I want the title. And so does Sam, now that it’s what we have left. Theo, who may want to win more than we do, suggests that we collect the players’ ring sizes to remind them what’s at stake. I borrow a ring sizer from a local jeweler, but the plan feels too hokey to put into practice. Plus, this is the Pacific Association: Even if we won, we could only pay for Ring Pops.
The night before the game, I stay up late with my laptop and hard drive cutting together clips, the Thelma Schoonmaker of the Pacific Association. I make videos of Santos, Dylan, Sean, and Mike facing current Pacifics hitters, upload them to YouTube, and send them around. “You guys are great,” I write. “Go make more highlights.” Then I make videos of every probable Pacifics pitcher from games against the Stompers, upload those, and send them to our hitters. “Know your enemies,” I add. The only response to either email I receive from a Stomper, other than a “Thanks Ben!!” from Yoshi, comes after the game, when Keith Kandel contacts me to ask if I can make a highlight video of Keith Kandel. Later, Moch also mentions that he wants one of himself.
I expected as much. My time in the clubhouse has taught me that players at this level are lukewarm on preparing for opponents. When they’re watching video of themselves, though, they’re like the dudes on CSI who frown at satellite footage and ask the nerds next to them, “Can we clean that up at all?” So in the spirit of making every moment memorable, and in the interest of distracting our players from how much apparent momentum San Rafael has, and also because Yoshi asked me to, I make the mother of all highlight packages, a six-minute, season-spanning reel of every uplifting moment the still-active Stompers have had against the Pacifics all season. I set up the TV from my living room in the tiny visitors’ clubhouse in San Rafael, connect it to my computer, and crank up the volume. Yoshi calls the team together just before the players take the field to warm up, and I press PLAY.
The sweet sounds of “Ignition (Remix)” fill the room, and instantly everyone in the standing-room-only crowd is smiling, very much in the mood to watch themselves be good at baseball. The hitter clips play first, solid swing after solid swing, drawing oohs and ahhs and whistl
es and insults. Then the pitchers are up, throwing pitch after pitch past Pacifics bats, each whiff generating jeers like it’s the end of a round in a rap battle. The reel wraps up, after two times through “Ignition,” with a view from center of Mark Hurley’s walk-off homer against Pittsburg on July 8, the whole team waiting for him at home plate, holding each other back, and finally enveloping him. If it’s not quite as inspirational as the “important moment” montage you’ve seen at every stadium, with Bluto yelling in Animal House and Howard Beale yelling in Network and Rocky running up the steps, it’s pretty darn close—and maybe better, because it’s us on the screen, and after all those mistake pitches and weak swings the Pacifics seem terrible. The players thank me and stream out to the field. Sam says “nice job,” and his smile dissolves any lingering friction between us caused by the difficult decisions we’ve made (or not made) about a baseball team neither of us had heard of a year ago. We haven’t always agreed on how to get here, but we both desperately want to win tonight.
We’ll have to do it with a lineup that includes four newcomers—Kandel, Bunting, Rubino, and Mora-Loera—who’ve combined for 83 plate appearances as Stompers.
Kandel batting second in a must-win game is like something out of Sam’s and my nightmares: He’s the old-school idea of a number-two hitter, the speedy, slappy type, not the Hurley or Baps who belongs there (as we’ve been trying to impress upon Yoshi all year). But Kandel is hitting .385/.467/.692 in his four games for Sonoma, and he supposedly “steals the bases,” so second hitter he is. The one consolation is that the Pacifics also have a singles hitter, Danny Gonzalez, in that spot. Matt Chavez, He Who Must Not Be Pitched To, has belatedly left the league, signed by the San Diego Padres in late August and assigned to their high-A affiliate in Lake Elsinore, where he’s three and a half years older than the league-average player. He’s the first Pacific Association product plucked directly out of the league by an MLB team.
The Only Rule Is It Has to Work Page 34