The hallway to the right, with its big print of the Indians’ 1920 World Series team, looked familiar. They weren’t steering her wrong, at least. “Thanks,” she murmured and tried to walk away with some measure of dignity, although they had done their best to make her feel like an idiot. She felt like more of an idiot when she opened the door to her little locker room. At least one hundred tampons were hanging from the ceiling on extra-long strings. Her Fountain ad was taped to the mirror above the sink. The text was doctored to read, “Make a fountain on my face!” About the only positive thing she could say was that the tampons were clean.
The jokers (although she used that term lightly) had taped the tampons to the concrete ceiling. It should have been an easy enough task simply to stand on the one chair in the room and pull them down. She managed to get most of them, but there were a few hanging just inches from the ceiling that she was too short to reach.
“Ingrates,” she muttered. There wasn’t anything in the locker room suitable for breaking, and kicking a cinderblock wall was just asking for trouble. Brenda let fly a few curses, then tried to figure out an appropriate response.
This had to be the work of Pasquela and Cipriani. Getting mad or saying anything about it would just feed their stupid little fire. She couldn’t let them see any reaction. Besides, everyone plays jokes on the rookies, right? she thought. By the time she was done picking them off the ceiling, it was almost game time.
With the Captains and Clippers, she had only ventured into the locker room in the few minutes right before game time because the manager always had a quick pep talk for the team. Figuring the routine was similar, Brenda braced herself to enter the Indians’ locker room for the first time. She walked back down the corridor, past the print of the 1920 World Series team, and stopped in front of the beige double doors that led to the locker room. She could hear conversation and some laughter—the sound of a bunch of guys staying loose before a game. The Yankees were in town for a four-game series, which always meant sellout crowds and a lot of energy in the park. With twenty minutes to first pitch, every player in there had to be dressed.
She waited by the doors for a minute, hoping someone would come in or out and give her some indication as to whether it was all right for her to enter. Finally, she just said, “Oh what the hell” and walked in.
The Indians’ locker room was huge and comfortable—like a surprisingly clean frat house. A few round tables with chairs were near the doors; a circular leather couch and a couple of leather-upholstered easy chairs sat in front of a wide-screen TV in the middle of the room. Around all four walls were multiple clones of her locker. Each one had a player’s name on the top and was filled with clothes, shoes, maybe an extra glove. Some players had pictures or other personal items hanging in their lockers. She could hear the voices of other players on the other side of the two wide pillars connected by a low counter that cut the room in half.
Brenda took a seat at one of the round tables just inside the double doors. A few players glanced over at her. Doug Stone, the veteran left fielder, had the locker just opposite her table. He was sitting in the chair in front of his locker, fixing the laces on his cleats just so. Stone had always struck her as a decent guy—one of those non-marquee players who just comes in and does his job and doesn’t get involved in off-field drama. He looked up and his large brown eyes regarded her. It wasn’t just his eyes—everything about him seemed large. These were the grown-up, filled-out versions of the kids she’d spent the last couple weeks playing with. Finally he said, “Hey, rookie.”
“Hi,” she said, trying not to sound weak or intimidated. Stone went back to what he was doing, not rudely but simply in a manner that said this was his ritual and he was going to follow it. A couple other players nodded when she made eye contact with them, but no one else seemed to acknowledge her. She didn’t count Cipriani and Pasquela, who glanced over at her a couple times and didn’t bother to hide their snickering.
The buzz of conversation in the room settled down when Mark Munson came in to give his pre-game manager pep talk. Brenda had been correct in her initial assessment of him as a no-nonsense straight shooter—he walked in, said “Hey guys,” and stood in front of the wide-screen TV where a few players were playing Grand Theft Auto to loosen up before game time. His presence was such that his players just naturally paid attention to him. “Just a couple of things before we start this series. This is the last time we’ll see the Yankees this season.” (He was interrupted by a couple of subdued “Yays.”) “They are always contenders, and they will capitalize on your mistakes. I need you to focus on attention to detail, to doing the little things that win ball games. We’ve got a sellout crowd tonight, so this should be a lot of fun. Oh, and if you haven’t met our newest rookie, Brenda Haversham was just called up from the Clippers.” As Munson said her name, he sort of pointed in her general direction. It seemed kind of funny for him to point her out when she was the only female in the room—how hard could it be to spot her? “Have a great game tonight. We need the W. Let’s go.”
Munson walked purposefully to the red double doors at the far end of the room, pushed them open, and headed to what Brenda presumed was the dugout, followed by the rest of the team. Brenda instinctively held back before following Ryan Teeset, the huge rookie first baseman, out the doors. She was pretty sure her feet were touching the ground, but she was so nervous she wasn’t even sure if her limbs were still attached. She wanted to be mindful of everything that was happening but was so overwhelmed by the noise of the sold-out crowd screaming at the top of their lungs as the Indians were introduced and the hyper-stimulation of being at the center of all the action, that the first few minutes went by in a blur. Before she knew it, she was in the dugout watching Jimmy Panidopolous throw the first pitch.
Panidopolous starting meant that the ballpark had more than the usual share of Panidopo-Nuts—members of the Jimmy Panidopolous fan club. They were mostly young, always female, and typically wore T-shirts reading, “Mrs. Panidopolous” or “Marry me, Jimmy.” Having been treated to the sight of Panidopolous jumping in front of the TV playing Grand Theft Auto and yelping for joy like a kid every time he gained points, she found the hoopla over his most-eligible-bachelor status more than a little amusing.
As she had in the minors, Brenda tried to take her cues from the rest of the relief pitchers. Francisco Jimenez, the closer, seemed friendly but quiet. He spent the first inning in the dugout and then retreated to the bullpen at the top of the second inning. Brenda followed.
The home bullpen at Progressive Field looked as though someone had taken a cake knife and cut a large slice out of the green left field wall. The screened-in dugout was at field level and sat in front of the little rectangular area where pitchers warmed up. Jimenez sat down on the dugout bench about three-quarters of the way down from the single entrance. Earl was already out there. Before Brenda sat down, Earl said quietly to her, “Don’t sit too close to Jimenez’s left side. That’s where Roberto Pena always sat. Francisco says he’s keeping the spot open until Pena is off the DL.”
Brenda nodded her understanding. She remembered reading that Pena had had Tommy John surgery and would be out for the season. Having Jimenez save his friend’s spot on the bullpen bench was poignant and seemed almost feminine in its thoughtfulness. He nodded to Brenda and said, “Hola,” as she sat down in the middle of the bench.
The rest of the relief pitchers came out to the bullpen around the fourth inning. They all seemed to have their own favorite spot. Cipriani sat as close to the end of the bench as possible while still leaving room for Earl to do his sit-stand-pace-sit-stand-pace routine. The far end of the bench was empty and Brenda moved down and claimed it as hers, using Jimenez and Anderson Sparks as a buffer between her and Cipriani, who was sprawled over the middle of the bench. Sparks was a little shorter and more compact. He was a left-handed long reliever, and his broad chest and arms made him look as though he could
go in and give you ten good innings if you needed it. They didn’t look like bad guys. With his close-cut, curly black hair, blue eyes, and square jaw, Sparks was actually a good-looking guy. If he weren’t a ball player, he might even have been able to make it as a model.
She liked the view from the bullpen. It was expansive and immediate. And she liked being close enough to the field that she could smell the grass. Brenda held a baseball in her hand during most of the game; just holding it, feeling the slightly rough bump of stitches that curved over its surface like a never-ending Möbius strip. Even from her spot at the end of the bench, she could hear Cipriani spouting his mouth off to Anderson Sparks. It was very obvious he was talking about her. Cipriani wasn’t the team captain—that honor went to Art “Pepper” Groggins, the veteran centerfielder—but the others in the bullpen seemed to listen to him anyway. Brenda figured it was only because he did a lot of talking.
“You gotta have three things to succeed in this game,” Cipriani said. “Heart, brains, and balls. From what I can see, she doesn’t have any of those.”
“I knew we were in bad shape this year, but this is ridiculous . . .” Anderson Sparks’ voice trailed off into half a laugh.
“I just can’t believe they sent Robinson down to make room for her.”
Brenda had never met Ed Robinson, but this was the third time she had heard his name mentioned. It hadn’t occurred to her before that someone had lost his job so that she might have one. She felt for Robinson. No one wants to get demoted. At the same time, she couldn’t imagine Robinson feeling all that bad if she lost her job. She wondered what the other players’ lives were like outside of baseball, if they even had lives outside of baseball. It was likely that she was the only one on the team who had actually had a non-baseball career. Design and drawing had always been her great love. Why was it that art seemed to have stalled, while this newly discovered talent had already brought her so far and so fast?
In the top of the seventh, with one out and the Yankees up by two, Panidopolous walked two in a row. The call to the bullpen came after the first walk. Earl told Brenda to start warming up. Brenda never really warmed up so much as started seething—it wasn’t her body that needed to get hot, it was her emotions. She sat on the bullpen bench for a moment, willing the anger to begin to rise.
“Move it, meat,” Earl said.
Brenda’s heart dropped somewhere into the vicinity of her stomach, and she took a few deep breaths, trying to conjure the flood of angry adrenaline she needed in order to pitch.
“I am warming up,” Brenda said.
“Warm up off your ass. Start throwing, princess.”
She picked up her glove and quickly walked through the bullpen dugout, past the other relievers (making sure to avoid Cipriani’s evil eye, which she could practically feel boring a hole in her back), and went out behind the dugout where Roy was waiting for her to take her warm-up throws. For the first time, instead of Ed’s face in the catcher’s mitt, she saw Earl’s leathery old mug as it spit out the word “princess.”
“Shove it, Earl,” she muttered as she threw her first warm-up pitch. Roy looked a little surprised.
“Save something for the field,” he said as he threw it back.
She threw a few more pitches and began to be aware that the fans whose seats were nearest the bullpen were watching her warm up. She tried to focus on the catcher’s mitt, but then she heard a male voice yell, “Hey, they’re gonna let the fat chick pitch” and the sound of other men laughing. Earl had been walking back and forth behind her as she warmed up, and he muttered “Look at them, and you’re running thirty laps a day for the next month,” just loudly enough for her and no one else to hear.
Brenda stopped but didn’t move her focus from the catcher’s mitt in front of her. She nodded slowly, just once, and threw another pitch. It went wild, and she could hear more laughter from the fans sitting nearby.
Stupid armchair quarterbacking, fantasy baseball playing yahoos, she thought. It occurred to her that there were more things in life to be angry with than just Ed. There were sexist, loudmouth idiots like the ones heckling her right now. There were obnoxious jerks like Pasquela and Cipriani. There were troglodyte sports radio hosts and their callers who thought no woman should even be given the chance to play pro ball. There was the piece she saw on the news last week about women and girls—little girls nine years old—being sold to brothels in Thailand. What kind of sick bastard would have sex with a nine-year-old? There were child pornography rings. There were AIDS orphans and genocide and mass rapes in Darfur and those young women factory workers in Juarez who kept getting murdered and violence in the Middle East and serial killers and just a hell of a lot to be angry about. The thought of so many horrible, horrible things, of so much suffering—and so often women and children suffering at the hands of men—infuriated her.
She was a reasonably well-informed adult. She knew the ways of the world and, like most people, had always shaken her head at the news of the world’s latest atrocities, said “what a shame,” maybe whispered a small prayer, and went about her daily life. But suddenly these things angered her in a way they never had before. She felt the anger more palpably than ever before, as though every other time she had ever thrown a ball was just practice for this moment. She let the anger fill her up. It prickled—she could almost feel it coursing through her body. She heard the sold-out crowd roar.
Earl patted her on the back and said, “Haversham. Get out there.”
She expected to feel nervous, but she didn’t. The anger had her now. She finally understood what people meant when they said they were in the zone. She looked Earl in the face and was tempted to tell him to go fuck himself. He just gave her a little smile and said, “Go get ’em.” Brenda nodded.
As she left the bullpen and started the long, solitary walk across left-center field to the pitcher’s mound, she heard the stadium sound system start playing Tom Jones’ “She’s A Lady.” She hated that song. She had been asked for a couple of songs that she might want played when she went into a game, but couldn’t decide and so she chose nothing. It hadn’t seemed that important. Now, walking across the seemingly endless expanse of outfield grass, she wished she had picked something. Anything. The idea of perfectly sensible women throwing their underwear and hotel room keys onstage to some smarmy guy in pants that were purposely two sizes too small just irked her. She broke into a trot. The sooner she got to the mound, the sooner they’d shut off that insipid song.
After Panidopolous walked two, he had given up a double, which scored two, and then another walk. The Indians were now down by four with men on the corners and only one out. She just had to get out of the inning without giving up any more runs. Two outs, she thought. Six strikes. That’s all.
“She’s a Lady” was still playing as she took the mound. Johnny Gonzalez, the catcher, nodded to her as he squatted down for her warm-up pitches. She threw, aware that this might be the first time in history everyone in the stands actually watched a relief pitcher take warm-up throws. She knew she was being watched, had known she was being watched since the first time she picked up a baseball in front of anyone besides her kids. She wasn’t supposed to be playing baseball; her presence, her arm, her power threw all sorts of masculine certainties into doubt and made her an object of derision, even hatred. She could most definitely hear boos and jeers as she took her pitches. The only thing that would silence those boos were strikes and outs.
She didn’t even look at the first batter or the mob of cameras that ringed the infield. She just focused on Gonzalez’s glove. He signaled for a sinker. She resisted the urge to shake him off—she wanted to throw the heat. She could feel the anger churning away inside her—anger at Ed, at injustice and racism and sexism and cellulite that wouldn’t budge despite eight weeks on a low-carb diet and stupid jokes at her expense and people who booed before she even had the chance to prove herself. “Fucking ass
holes,” she muttered and threw. The sinker sank. Indeed, it hit the ground and only Gonzalez’ quick reflexes kept it from being a passed ball. If the runner on first had taken a bigger lead, he could have stolen second.
More jeers. More boos.
“You know, if I were a guy, you’d all be rooting for the rookie, wouldn’t you?” Brenda muttered. She remembered watching Mark Fidrych pitch when she was a little kid and how he was famous for talking to the ball. She didn’t want to be known as the chick pitcher who talked to herself. She just wanted to earn her paycheck so Andy and Jon would continue to have a roof over their heads and a secure future.
Gonzalez signaled for the fastball, bless his heart. She focused on his mitt. Without looking, her fingers found the grip for the four-seamer—index and middle finger perpendicular to the widest part of the seams, thumb underneath. “Like you are holding the wings of the bird,” her father always said. “Look at the shape of the cover. When they make a baseball, they sew the bird’s wings down. Hold it gently, like an egg. Then let it fly.”
Brenda let it fly and swore she could feel the breeze as the batter swung and missed. She was told later that the speed clock tracked the pitch at 96 mph. Brenda didn’t look. All she knew was that she needed five more strikes to get out of the inning.
The batter took the next pitch, a curve, for a ball, then grounded into a double play on the fourth pitch. And that was it. That was Brenda’s major league debut. They sent Sparks in for the eighth and Jimenez for the ninth. The Indians didn’t manage to come back with enough runs to win, but that wasn’t Brenda’s fault. She had done what they paid her to do.
•◊•
Excerpt from the transcript for Today in Sports with Charlie Bannister, ESPN, August 6:
Throw Like a Woman Page 17