Throw Like a Woman

by Susan Petrone

  Charlie: Good evening, America, and welcome to Today in Sports. I’m joined tonight, as I am every Friday, by the great Howie Wojinski. Howie, let’s talk baseball.

  Howie: [pause] Okay, let’s talk baseball.

  Charlie: Okay. You start.

  Howie: Why are you waiting for me? Everybody knows you’re dying to talk about Haversham’s major league debut.

  Charlie: I want you to start. I want to hear you talk about how history was made this week and how the nice lady from Cleveland did not disappoint.

  Howie: [sighs] Okay, fine. Haversham pitched a good inning last night.

  Charlie: And tonight . . .

  Howie: And tonight.

  Charlie: Like it or not, this woman has changed the face of the game forever. Just like Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby added a bit of melanin to the lineup, Haversham adds the X factor.

  Howie: X factor?

  Charlie: X chromosome, buddy.

  Howie: I still don’t see how a woman can throw that hard. And a lot of other people don’t either. There are already allegations floating around the blogosphere that she’s doping.

  Charlie: All reports say that she’s passed every drug test they’ve given her. She has been watched more closely in both the minors and the majors than any pitcher in recent memory.

  Howie: Then how does she do it? How does this short housewife from Cleveland, Ohio, who didn’t play college ball, who didn’t even play in high school and isn’t particularly muscular throw a baseball ninety-six miles an hour?

  Charlie: Well correct me if I’m wrong, but a lot of pitching power comes from the lower body, right?

  Howie: I was an outfielder, but yeah, that’s what I’ve always heard.

  Charlie: So Haversham’s got those big, powerful thighs and hips . . .

  Howie: Are you allowed to say that?

  Charlie: I said the same thing about Carlos Velasquez last year, and you didn’t say anything.

  Howie: True.

  Charlie: Some of those sabermetric guys have looked at the overall statistics of tall and short pitchers and big and little pitchers and found that it’s the smaller, heavier ones who seem to have slightly better numbers overall and who seem to have longer, better careers.

  Howie: Is that true?

  Charlie: You could look it up.

  Howie: I still don’t know what to think about this. I find it hard to believe that this is anything more than a misguided effort to sell tickets. I mean, the Indians have already gone from thirtieth in major league attendance to fifteenth just since they signed Haversham.

  Charlie: You just wait, Howie. The times, they are a changing. In other American League news, White Sox outfielder Jorge Racino has started the second half on a hot streak, getting seventeen hits in his last twenty at bats and . . .

  Howie: Diomedes Olivo.

  Charlie: What was that, Howie?

  Howie: Diomedes Olivo. Yesterday you said Haversham is the second-oldest rookie ever. But she’s not. Olivo was forty-one years and eight months when he made his debut.

  Charlie: I stand corrected. This makes Haversham the third-oldest rookie ever and still the first woman to play at the major league level. Say Howie, you’re looking a little pale over there. Are you okay?

  Howie: I still can’t believe she’s doing this.

  Charlie: That’s okay. Denial is but the first step on the road to acceptance. We’ll got to a commercial while you get used to the idea.

  Chapter Fourteen

  •◊•

  The hallway outside Brenda’s locker room was deluged with reporters because there wasn’t room inside the locker room for more than three people. It was as though the entire press box had emptied directly outside her door. Brenda’s stomach was in knots and she felt like she was going to throw up, but she forced herself to stand and talk to reporters for nearly twenty minutes. She was only rescued by the arrival of her mother, Andy, and Jon, the former cutting her way through the crowd with the intensity of a snowplow in a blizzard and the latter scurrying in her wake.

  The shot of Brenda hugging Jon and Adele appeared in just about every paper in the country the next morning, with accompanying editorials on the nature of her accomplishment, the women’s movement, the nature of feminism, the future of baseball, the history of baseball, and whether a thoroughly respectable performance by a woman in the major leagues was a sign of the impending apocalypse.

  She tried to keep an air of normalcy around the house, but it was almost impossible. She had changed their phone number twice already that summer, but somebody was sharing it, because the phone still rang constantly the next morning with old friends and neighbors and people she hadn’t talked to in twenty years calling to congratulate her or, in some cases, ask for tickets.

  Jon was enjoying all of the attention. He was only too happy to answer the phone and talk the ear off of anyone. Brenda gave him a note pad and a pen and appointed him her new secretary. He could take messages from anyone who called provided he didn’t give them any vital information or make any promises.

  “While I’m at it,” she said. “Here. Set this up for me,” and handed him the box with the new phone.

  “Cool! Sweet phone, Mom!” Jon said as he ripped the plastic wrapping off the phone. “Can I do the ring tone? And your voice mail?”

  “Sure. And speed dial the house and Grandma and Robin.”

  “What about Dad?” Jon asked.

  Ed. The boys still had their weekends with their father, but being out of town had kept Brenda from seeing her ex since the weekend before the tryout with the Indians. Even so, Ed’s presence in the house, in her life, still hung around.

  “Um . . . sure, you can put Dad into speed dial too.”

  “Excellent!” Jon said and happily went to work on her new phone.

  Jon was persistently cheerful. He remained her sweet little Jon who would still allow himself to be hugged and occasionally cuddled and who wanted to talk all the time, while Andy kept to his room and to one-word answers.

  The entire family’s life now revolved around the ballpark and Brenda’s schedule. There were night games Friday and Saturday and an afternoon game on Sunday (in which Brenda faced two batters, struck out one, and got the other to fly out). Then the team would leave for a road trip as soon as Sunday’s game was over. There wasn’t a lot of time to think or plan. Brenda packed her suitcase, kissed the boys and her mom good-bye, and that was it. Directly after the end of the afternoon game, she went to the airport and got on an airplane with twenty-four other players, five coaches, three trainers, and one equipment manager. She was the only female.

  The team was shuttled through security in a private line and walked down to a little-used, cordoned-off gate at Cleveland Hopkins Airport. Brenda had never traveled like a VIP before, and it felt a little odd to have the rest of the world treat her as something special just because she could throw a baseball very fast. It was a far cry from the crowded, dirty bus in the minor leagues. As the team walked through the airport, she noticed heads turning and murmurs of recognition. She didn’t say anything beyond “Hello” and “Fine, thanks, and you?” to anyone until they were hanging out by the gate, waiting for their plane. Earl came over to where Brenda was sitting with a book.

  “How’re you doing, Brenda?” he asked.

  “I’m fine, thanks,” she replied. “And you?”

  “Good, good. You looked good in your first couple games. Mark’s not going to use you every game, so make sure you throw a little bit every day or every other day—Roy or Eric or Johnny will be happy to catch you. Just watch that lead shoulder.”

  She wanted to tell him that she would keep watching her lead shoulder but pitching was too new, the movements too involuntary for her to start breaking down what she was doing. The biggest help would probably be having him change his name to “Ed” and start lyin
g to her, but that wasn’t a realistic option. So she just said, “Will do.”

  “What are you reading?” he asked.

  “Northanger Abbey,” she said, holding the paperback up for him to see. “It’s always nice to come back to Jane Austen once in a while,” she added.

  “Haven’t read it,” he said. “Keep reading your scouting reports and watching video.”

  “Will do,” Brenda said. Shorter answers seemed to be the norm among her teammates and coaches. The last thing she needed was to be looked at as the gabby female. She put Northanger Abbey away in her carry-on bag, a cotton monstrosity designed to look like a carpetbag, and pulled out the iPad the team had given her.

  On The Ball showed the starting lineup for every major league team. Each player had a page that listed career and current stats and brief comments like, “Good against right handers; almost always hits in fair territory, can be gotten out with breaking balls.” Each report included diagrams showing the frequency of that particular player hitting to a particular area and where in the strike zone a player got most of his hits. All of this information and more was also available through the On the Ball app. The amount of data was staggering.

  As the team was boarding the plane, Brenda held back a bit, noticing that the other rookies on the team gave deference to the veteran players. She did the same and ended up being the last player on the plane. Mark Munson was just behind her in line.

  “Hi Brenda,” he said with a wide grin. “Welcome to your first road trip.”

  “Thanks,” she replied, and tried to look like the relaxed, well-adjusted player he needed her to be.

  When she got on the plane, just about every seat was taken. The coaches all seemed to congregate near the front of the plane, and the first row on the left was empty. Brenda figured that must be reserved for Mark and edged her way down the aisle. The veteran-rookie dichotomy played out in the seating arrangements too, as it seemed that most of the veterans were near the front of the plane—typically sitting two to a row with an empty seat in between them—and most of the rookies and younger players were farther back. Just about everyone was already seated or stowing his bags in the overhead compartment. Brenda felt a quick pang of panic, wondering if there was a seat left for her. That would figure—on her way to her first game with the team and she had no place to sit.

  Most of the other players avoided her eyes as she walked down the airplane aisle. A few, like Francisco Jimenez and Josh Bandkins, the right fielder who had been traded from Texas at the beginning of the season, gave her a polite nod, but they were already sitting down. It seemed they all wanted an empty seat next to them. She honestly didn’t see any place to sit. She took a deep breath and willed herself to stay cool and not read too much into the moment.

  Don’t let it upset you, she thought to herself. Let it make you mad, but don’t let it upset you.

  Through the chatter of other voices, she heard someone say, “Hey, Haversham!” She looked around and saw Doug Stone half-standing up in his seat. “Come and have a seat, rookie,” he said. As a veteran, Doug was sitting near the front, and Brenda had to walk back past several rows of seats to get to him. She tried to ignore the fact that half the plane went silent when Doug called her name.

  Doug was sitting in the window seat and miraculously had two empty seats next to him. The middle seat held his jacket and a book—she noticed he was reading a graphic novel. She sat down in the aisle seat.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Not a problem,” he said with a smile that showed he heard more than she said. “It takes everybody a while to figure out the, uh, social hierarchy,” he added in a quieter voice.

  Brenda grinned and tried not to look as lost as she felt. “It feels a little like the high school cafeteria,” she said quietly.

  When Doug laughed, he smiled so broadly that his eyes seemed to disappear. It seemed like the mark of a good guy. “That’s exactly what I thought my rookie season. Don’t worry—you’ll get used to it.” He paused just long enough to take a breath or possibly to decide if he should keep talking. “And they’ll get used to you.”

  “Thanks,” Brenda replied.

  She and Doug didn’t talk again until after the plane was in the air and on its way to Kansas City.

  “What are you reading?” she asked.

  Doug gave a little laugh. “The Umbrella Academy. Superheroes and stuff. It’s really good. I wanted to read it before my kids did, just to make sure there isn’t anything in there they shouldn’t be reading.”

  They talked about children for a while—Doug’s older daughter was Jon’s age. She asked if he had ever read Art Speigelman’s work (he hadn’t yet). He asked if she had read Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor (“I’m a native Clevelander. It’s required reading,” she replied). As they talked, the flight attendant came by to ask if they wanted anything to drink.

  “Just some juice, please,” Doug said.

  “Ice water, please,” Brenda said. She had never been on a charter flight before and was pleased to see that there were more flight attendants than on a commercial flight. And the service was better.

  As the flight attendant handed Brenda her water, she asked, “Who do you know that you’re on this flight?”

  “I beg your pardon?” Brenda asked.

  “Who do you know that you’re on this flight?” the attendant asked, her blue eye-shadowed eyes growing wider as she asked the question. “Do you work for the team? Or are you married to one of the players?”

  Brenda took a deep breath and remembered the conversation she had had with Mark. She had to play nice. “No, I’m not a player’s wife. I’m one of the players,” Brenda replied with what she hoped was a friendly rather than an annoyed tone.

  The flight attendant laughed as though Brenda had just told the punchline to a great joke. “No, seriously, who are you?” she asked.

  “I’m one of the players,” Brenda said, a bit more earnestly but still trying not to sound snippy.

  “She’s our newest relief pitcher,” Doug said. “And a damn good one.”

  “Wow. Really?” The flight attendant asked. “I thought women didn’t play in the majors.”

  “They do now,” Doug said.

  •◊•

  The team played a three-game series in Kansas City and then took a red-eye flight to Dallas for another three games. Brenda pitched in two of the Kansas City games, facing a total of six batters and giving up a couple of hits but no runs. She managed to sleep for an hour or two before the plane landed. In a daze, she filed along with the other players through the airport, to the bus, through the hotel lobby where she got her room key, and finally collapsed on her bed for a few hours until it was time to meet the team bus in front of the hotel and do it all over again.

  This was something she wasn’t prepared for. Growing up and watching games on TV or occasionally going to the ballpark, the players looked like they had a pretty easy life. And in many ways, they did. After all, when the rest of the world was getting up and going to work, Brenda and her teammates were playing a game and making far more money at it than most people would ever earn. And traveling long distances by plane sure beat the minor league team bus. But she had already discovered the monotony to the whole routine of living out of a suitcase and being away from her family. Doing all this in the public eye just made it worse. Brenda kept telling herself that losing her privacy and time with Andy and Jon in exchange for loneliness, financial stability, and a secure future for the boys was a fair trade.

  The other guys on the team clearly felt the same pressure she did. She noticed this on the bus and in the clubhouse. Someone was always pulling a prank or telling jokes or engaging in an insult contest, but most of it seemed good natured. The number of pranks played on her during her first week in the majors went far beyond what she had seen. The tampons in her locker room and the graffitied Fountain
ads had just been the tip of the iceberg. She routinely found hardcore pornography in whatever room was designated as her locker room, and before the last game in Kansas City, she found a used condom and a case of douches in her locker room.

  Still, she didn’t say anything to Earl or Mark. She didn’t retaliate. Then in Arlington, she was the last one on the bus to the ballpark. Just like on the airplane, the veterans had first pick of seats, then the rookies. As she walked down the aisle, searching for a place to sit, Cipriani looked up at her and said, “Hey, Pork.”

  Brenda glared at him but kept moving down the aisle. The online comments that referred to her as “Pork” were one of the reasons she had stopped reading the news online. It was a variation on calling rookies meat—she was “the other white meat.” She could avoid the Internet idiots, she could try and tune out hecklers, but having a teammate say it to her face put her over the edge.

  Brenda could feel the adrenaline start coursing through her veins, could feel the anger ignite as she found a seat next to Ryan Teeset. She didn’t even bother to say anything to him as she sat down. She was tired of this crap. Change the dynamic, she thought.

  The trip to the ballpark was only a few miles through downtown. As the bus merged onto the freeway, she heard Cipriani talking about how he had grown up in a suburb of nearby Fort Worth and how they were now on “his” turf. “You take 30 out to 820 and that loops right down to Echo Heights,” he said to no one in particular. “I love the 820!”

  Brenda hadn’t planned on saying anything. She never said anything on the bus or on the plane or in the clubhouse, but she heard herself loudly say back, “Why? Because it matches your ERA?”

  Cipriani half stood in his seat and turned to where Brenda was sitting four rows back. The laughter of everyone else on the bus felt like a flak jacket, protecting her from anything Cipriani might say or do. She glanced out the window and saw they were approaching Exit 115.