The Might-Have-Been

by Joe Schuster

  “Is that unreasonable?” he’d asked.

  She’d sat up, pushed the blankets to the foot of the bed, plucked her glasses off the bedside table and gone out to the kitchen. When he heard her banging cupboard doors, he’d gone to the garage to get the puppy he’d bought the night before and left there, a quaking ball of fur no bigger than his fist, bedded down on two towels he’d laid in a cardboard box. He hadn’t counted on the towels being soaked with urine, three tiny turds the size of little smokie sausages scattered in the box, or that there’d be feces stuck to the dog’s fur. By the time he got the dog cleaned up and wrapped in yet another towel, Renee was already back in bed, the coffeemaker hissing. He’d taken the dog and sat on the side of the bed but she lay there with her back to him, clearly fuming.

  “Renee,” he said.

  “Maybe by the time you get back, I’ll be speaking to you again.”

  He laid the dog against her neck, where it tried to nestle against her for the body heat. Renee swatted at it.

  “No. Just go.”

  The dog whimpered and Renee turned over. Edward Everett snatched it away so she wouldn’t roll over onto it.

  “Don’t kill it,” he said. “It’s not the dog’s fault that your husband is a jerk who asks you to make coffee at three fifty-eight.”

  “What dog?” she said, sitting up. He held it out to her. “You bought me a dog?” she said, taking it and pressing her nose against the dog’s.

  For some reason, however, the dog didn’t understand that he was Renee’s, or that Edward Everett, in fact, didn’t like dogs. When Edward Everett was home, Grizzly followed him from room to room. When he sat at the kitchen table, writing up the reports he sent to the big club, the dog lay at his feet. At night, he wanted to sleep at the foot of the bed on Edward Everett’s side. When he and Renee made love, they had to close the dog in the kitchen with a baby gate because, in the same room with them, he pawed furiously at the box spring. In the kitchen, he would whine and bark the entire time. “I swear he’s your father’s agent,” Edward Everett once said when they sat in the kitchen, having eggs at midnight. “It’s not enough that your father is next door, thinking, ‘What’s he doing to my little girl?’ He has to have the dog spy on me, too.”

  Cracking an egg into a bowl, she’d laughed. “Daddy’s girl is past forty, been married once before and lived in sin twice. He doesn’t give us a thought.”

  Now the dog finished his meager dinner quickly and began pushing the dish across the floor, lapping at it furiously, obviously still hungry. “Sorry,” Edward Everett said. “I guess I’m a lousy husband and a lousy dog owner.” Grizzly looked up at him, his face seeming to express a canine disappointment that mirrored, in a way, Renee’s, cocking his head to one side and blinking at him slowly.

  Later that evening, Edward Everett went out to the grocery store to buy dog food, a dozen roses wrapped in cellophane and a card he addressed to Renee, writing inside it simply . The previous time she left him, not long after last Thanksgiving, he had courted her to win her back, tucking flowers under her windshield wiper at work, bringing chocolate to her office, emailing articles he found online that he thought she would find interesting. A few days before Christmas, she agreed to meet him for dinner. “But only dinner,” she had said. “We’ll take it slow.” Dinner had ended with them in bed. “You laid successful siege at the gates to my heart,” she said in a drowsy voice just before she fell to sleep. Perhaps that was what she needed again: his attention, when he hadn’t been giving it to her, preoccupied as he became in-season.

  He waited until the Duboises’ house next door was dark, then carried the roses between the two backyards, creeping up the steps to the deck, and leaned the bouquet against their door. As he placed it, the wrapper crinkled and he froze, wondering if anyone had heard. A possum rustled leaves in one of Renee’s mother’s flower beds. In the distance, a car with a broken muffler accelerated. But nothing in the house stirred.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The next morning, Edward Everett as usual got to the ballpark before anyone else, seven-forty, long before his two coaches or the trainer or clubhouse assistant would appear.

  As he let himself in and entered the code to disarm the security system, he nearly stumbled over a pallet of unopened boxes marked “Programs.” They had been delivered since the last time he’d been there and were already out of date, he knew, more than four weeks late, one of the consequences of the team owner Bob Collier’s budget-cutting—acting as his own general manager after the previous GM had taken a job with the Marlins organization, using a college intern in the public relations staff at his meat company to do the team’s publicity. A nearly anorexic blonde, she had confessed to Edward Everett in a voice that squeaked that, while she had played soccer in high school, she knew little about baseball and would he mind terribly reading the bios of the players she had tried to write before the yearbook went to press? Three of the players in the yearbook were already gone, one traded to the St. Louis organization, one promoted to double-A and one out of baseball—Tom Packer, an infielder who had left in the second week of the season to join a church group volunteering in Kenya. Sitting in Edward Everett’s office to tell him, Packer wouldn’t meet his eye. “My girlfriend showed me this documentary on YouTube,” he said in explanation, his neck coloring as if he were admitting to some great wrong rather than a decision to help the poor. “I feel real bad, letting you guys down like this. I hope you can forgive me, Skip.” His team was, in fact, still a man short on the roster as, while the big club had replaced the first two players, it had yet to replace Packer. Wryly, Edward Everett thought of it as punishment for Packer’s skewed priorities, at least in the eye of the organization, feeding the hungry and tending the sick instead of working to improve his pivot on double plays and his sense of the strike zone.

  In his office, Edward Everett switched on his computer and, while it booted up, took the coffeepot to a sink in the shower room and filled it with water. By the time he got back to his office, put in a new filter, spooned out coffee and poured the water into the reservoir, the box on the computer screen was asking for his log-in and password. The big club had sent him an email not long ago, reminding him that he was supposed to change his password every month, but he had a hard enough time remembering any of his passwords. His entire life was a password: his debit card PIN number, the password for his bank account online, his log-in for baseballamerica.com, and so he hadn’t changed it in four years. It was still Renee’s birthday, 112363.

  While the computer went through its start-up sequence, and water began dripping through the filter, he opened the scorebook from the last game they had gotten in before the rains shut everything down so he could enter the stats onto his game log cards; it was a five–four win in the ninth inning, his kind of ball when he was a player; David Martinez, his leadoff hitter, bunting down the third base line with the fielder playing back, a stolen base, a wild throw into center field by the catcher, trying to nab him at second, sending him to third and then scoring on a ground ball to first. Transcribing his players’ cards was tedious, senseless work—at least according to the big club. Last fall, not long after they hired a new director of player development—a thirty-something-year-old who seemed proud that he had never played a day of professional ball and who signed his emails “Marc Johansen, MS, MBA”—the team had sent him to a ten-week course at the junior college to learn a suite of statistical computer programs. “You’ve got a lot of what I call ‘Old World’ knowledge,” Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, said when he told Edward Everett he was asking him to learn the programs. “Just think of how valuable you’ll be if you can marry that ‘Old World’ to the twenty-first century.” Although Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, had phrased it as a request, Edward Everett knew he had no choice: shortly after Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, took his job, he’d sent an email to the organization. “I know that when changes occur at the top, everyone gets nervous. I want to assure you that we won’t make any personnel moves
for at least sixty days.” The subtext was clear: starting on the sixty-first day, no one had a guaranteed job.

  So, grudgingly, every Tuesday night from early October to just before Christmas, Edward Everett sat in a computer lab with kids less than a third his age and hunted-and-pecked his way through the exercises the instructor gave, making spreadsheets of fictitious daily sales of fictitious products of a fictitious company. He was slow, and so, after the instructor explained an assignment and the other students were attacking it with verve—keyboards clattering away—he would sit beside Edward Everett and go over and over the exercises, reaching over his shoulder and hitting computer keys and clicking the mouse, often so quickly that Edward Everett couldn’t follow what he was doing.

  “Here,” the instructor would say. Click: a mathematical function occurred on the screen, a sum appearing at the end of a column. “See?” he would ask. Edward Everett didn’t see but nodded like a dumb mule anyway, thinking he just had to get through the class, because Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, said he had to, wanting the instructor just to leave him on his own, because he knew the special attention reinforced the notion that the other students had, that he belonged to a sub-class of human beings: people too old to live.

  In time, Edward Everett did learn to use the programs well enough that he could finish the reports he needed to upload every day so that Mark Johansen, MS, MBA, could do what he called “massaging the data.” Nonetheless, he could not stop first doing it the way he had done it for twenty years—it was easier for him to slide a ruler from row to row on a card to see how much more patient Martinez was at the plate, or how his catcher Sean Vila was hitting against left-handers or how deep into a game his starter Pete Sandford went before he started giving up hits and walks to batters who had no business getting on base against him.

  On some mornings, he was late uploading his spreadsheets. Then, he would get a scolding phone call from the assistant in the PD department, Mike Renz, his voice high-pitched and nasal: “We can’t do much with numbers we don’t have.” Edward Everett had met him at last year’s annual meeting for the organization’s managers and coaches. Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, was in Lucerne for his honeymoon and bad weather delayed his return flight so Renz stood in for him. He was a skinny kid, his hair spiked with gel that glistened under the lights, and he droned on for an hour with a lecture he titled, “The Future Was Yesterday,” in which he outlined an alphabet soup of statistical tools: VORP, DIPS, WHIP, and what he called a “proprietary metric,” which allowed the team to predict how a minor league player might perform in the major leagues. “Of course,” he said when he clicked on the projector for his PowerPoint, “I don’t expect you to understand any of this.”

  By eleven-thirty, when Edward Everett took a break to make himself a sandwich from the cold cuts he kept in the small refrigerator in his office, he had uploaded his stats and was ready for that night’s game: his lineup card, his notes about the order in which he would use his bullpen staff when Sandford faltered. The big club wanted him to begin stretching Sandford out, having him get into the seventh inning, although he hadn’t been much more than a five-inning pitcher. Off the mound, Sandford seemed a comic exaggeration of a human being: six-foot-six and not much more than bone thin, with a gaunt face and ears that protruded so much that opposing teams taunted him with “Dumbo.” When Edward Everett talked to him, he blinked so slowly that Edward Everett wondered if his mind was able to process anything he was told. Despite all that, until he hit the inevitable barrier after five innings, he had such control that he seemed capable of threading a needle with a baseball. Beyond that, his speed was deceptive. His arm motion was fluid, seemingly effortless, but his fastball came in at more than 95 miles an hour, according to the radar gun Biggie Vincent aimed at him from a seat behind the plate in the stands. Several times a game, the gun registered triple digits. A month earlier, after one of Sandford’s starts, Edward Everett and Vincent had gone for a beer and Vincent slipped the pitching chart across the table to him, the notations of the pitches that had hit 100 or more circled in red. Vincent had had four or five beers by then and as he passed the card across the table, he was teary-eyed. “Don’t get the idea I’m turning faggot, but I love this boy.” Sandford’s curve, which he threw with the same motion as his fastball, hit 83 and his change had come in as slow as 71. Routinely, even going but five innings, he tallied seven or eight strikeouts, often with only a single walk. Then, when he reached his Achilles’ heel sixth inning, he pitched as if he had never held a baseball in his life to that point.

  Edward Everett wasn’t sure what would help him become the pitcher that Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, wanted, but he needed to figure it out. The grace period Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, had promised everyone had expired months before. While he hadn’t yet, eventually he would begin firing people and there wasn’t much room in baseball for minor league managers who were approaching sixty.

  Chapter Sixteen

  An hour and a half before game time, there was a crisis. Brett Webber, his shortstop, was missing. Webber was a moody kid from a small town in Ohio near where Edward Everett was raised; Edward Everett had sometimes gone to high school dances there after he and his friends decided that it would be easier to get girls who didn’t know them than the ones who did. Three years earlier, when Webber was a high school senior, Baltimore took him in the first round of the draft but then let him go in a trade after his second year, even though the team had given him a two-million-dollar bonus just to sign his contract and Webber had led the Florida State League in hitting. With his talent, he should be at least in double-A ball by now but it was clear that unless he matured, he would never get beyond single-A. He had been undependable all season: he was a week late for training camp and then had missed two games when he went to Chicago for a concert. When Edward Everett benched him as punishment, Webber had said, “It was The National, dude. So worth it.” Edward Everett told the big club it should just cut him loose, but Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, talked about his superlative zone rating, his similarity scores—arcane statistics that Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, derived when he massaged the spreadsheets that Edward Everett sent him—and wrote, “Talent carries a price. Have confidence you can smooth out rough edges in BW.”

  Today, irrespective of his dislike of Webber, Edward Everett needed him to show up because they were short yet another player: Jim Rausch, his remaining backup middle infielder, had gone back to Alabama three days earlier to bury his father and to figure out what to do with his fifteen-year-old brother. Their mother had died four years earlier and they were, in Rausch’s own words, “orphan boys now.”

  Edward Everett felt bad for him: nineteen and a surrogate father to a boy who, Edward Everett knew, had responded to his father’s illness by drinking a six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon one night and cracking up the pickup truck Rausch had bought their father with his bonus money. Still, it was tough running a team with twenty-three players, especially when only four of them were natural infielders. With Packer’s spot empty and without Rausch and Webber, it would mean moving Minnie Rojas from second base to short and bringing in either Ross Nelson or Josh Singer from the outfield to play second, and that wouldn’t be pretty, especially since, when he wasn’t striking hitters out, Sandford tended to induce ground balls. At least until the sixth inning, when the other team started banging hits off the wall.

  An hour before game time, Edward Everett was on the field, hitting fungos to Nelson at second base—ground ball after ground ball, starting him off easy to let him begin to gain confidence. Through the stands, some of the high school boys and girls that Bob Collier hired for next to nothing—team T-shirts and a chance for one of the thousand-dollar college scholarships Collier awarded to the kids who worked for him—were moving among the seats, swiping at them with towels that were clearly soaked. As they worked, Edward Everett could see the spray of water their towels flung up. For them, the point seemed not to dry the seats but to get one another wet. Their laughter echoed amid the othe
r pre-game sounds: Edward Everett hitting ground balls to Nelson, the splash of the footfalls of his outfielders running in the wet grass, the happy tunes of Phantom Frank Fitzgerald on the organ, old Broadway songs, mostly, something from soundtracks of thirty-year-old movies: Star Wars, Rocky, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Phantom Frank thought of them as new—he was beyond eighty, his eyesight so bad he couldn’t read music anymore, could only play by feel and memory, and sometimes his fingers started out on the wrong spot on the keyboard and until he found his place again, what he played seemed as if it were a song Edward Everett felt certain he knew but couldn’t quite name and then, when Phantom Frank stopped, found his place and continued, Edward Everett would realize it was “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head,” but three notes off. But he had played the organ in P. City for forty-two years and Collier couldn’t let him go.

  “It would mean some kind of hex,” he once confided to Edward Everett.

  After two dozen easy ground balls to Nelson, Edward Everett gave him a sign that he was going to start working him a bit harder. Nelson nodded and pounded his glove with his bare hand and got into his stance: hands on his knees, weight forward. Edward Everett hit a hard three-hopper to Nelson’s left and it ticked off his glove. He set again and Edward Everett sent another one-hop line drive to his left, and again it glanced off his glove. It was going to be a long night, Edward Everett thought as he tossed another ball into the air and again hit a hard line drive, this time to Nelson’s right. Crossing leg over leg, his feet got tangled and he hit the turf. But Nelson was game: back up, gesturing at Edward Everett, Hit it again.

  Edward Everett liked Nelson, wished that he could hit with more power, had a stronger arm or more speed—anything that would suggest he could move up the line. But it wasn’t to be. While Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, often emailed Edward Everett asking for more data about some of his players, he had never asked about Nelson—a sign that he had decided already that Nelson had no future with the organization. But he asked and asked about Webber. Webber who showed up late to training camp because he wanted to stay longer in Jamaica; Webber who went AWOL so he could go to a concert. Webber who wasn’t there.