by T. T. Monday
The pit stop with Ruiz’s sister has me confused for several reasons. One is what she said about her brother’s money, that he has plenty, enough not to care about paying the exorbitant fees of smugglers. It’s possible she doesn’t know the details of his finances. Hell, lots of athletes themselves don’t know where their money goes. What’s harder to countenance is that she doesn’t know her family is being held at gunpoint. There are only two explanations for that: either she’s estranged from the family, or she’s lying. I’m leaning toward the latter.
Or maybe Tiff is lying. At any rate, why does Enriqueta want to meet her so badly? I understand that she could be jealous in a protective, older-sister sort of way, but she misunderstood the relationship between Tiff and Ruiz. Tiff may be sleeping with Ruiz, but I doubt she is after his money—at least, no more than her fee.
My phone buzzes with a text message from Tiff. Maybe her ears were burning?
Just heard about Erik Magnusson. You were friends, no?
I thumb back a quick reply: We were teammates. Thanks for your condolences. I suspect she’s trying to tease an update out of me, but I’m not ready. I want to talk to Ruiz at BP first. Gotta go, I tap out. I’m at the park. No phones allowed.
I descend to the visitors’ clubhouse and start racking weights. I like to work out early, before the rest of the team reports for duty, but that’s not always possible. Today I’m alone, so I plug my phone into the stereo system and put on the band Connie played last night. I finally remembered the name: Lucius. The cover of the album is a psychedelic drawing of a woman licking an ice cream cone, but when you look closer, you see that the cone is shaped like a cock. I’m embarrassed to say that I noticed this only after I sent the album to my daughter. Catchy tunez, Dad, Izzy texted back. Not sure about the cover tho :-(
I do my Saturday routine—back and biceps, plus cardio. Mondays and Wednesdays are quads and core; Tuesdays and Thursdays, chest and lats; Fridays, glutes and shoulders. I rest on Sundays, like that other famous setup man. It used to be that players worked out hard in the off season and not much during the year, but the latest thinking among trainers is that year-round conditioning is the key to longevity. It’s counterintuitive, but working out six days a week ensures you have something left to give at the end of the season. This hasn’t been a change for me. I have always worked out during the season, mostly because I can’t sleep and don’t like to watch TV, but it’s been a difficult transition for some players, because now the season never really ends.
After lifting, I take a shower and grab breakfast from the catering table as the rest of the team is filtering in. Everybody is talking about Thick Will, and when he shows up at 9:45 a.m., I realize why: gone are the Dockers and the plaid dress shirt, and in their place is a black velour track suit with yellow stripes and a pair of vintage Nikes. His hair has been bleached and spiked, and he’s got zirconium studs in both ears. He looks like Eminem—or a Russian gangster on vacation.
Chichi Ordoñez, who plays shortstop and still believes in hazing rookies, makes a loud wolf whistle. Thick Will pretends not to hear. He reaches his locker without breaking stride. As he unlaces his shoes, I slide in next to him.
“Something you want to tell me?” I ask cautiously.
“Best night of my life, Adcock. That woman is incredible.”
“What woman?”
“Tiff Tate! You should see what she keeps in her plane.”
“She has a plane?”
“Yeah. I called her yesterday after we talked, and she squeezed me in. I met her out at the airport. She has this little jet, just a couple seats up front and a huge closet in the back, plus a barber’s chair, mirrors, the whole deal. Even a piercing gun.” He touches his earlobes tentatively.
“You know you have to take those out for games.”
Will nods. “She gave me a sheet with all the rules. I’m supposed to put alcohol on them, but if they close up, I can just jam the posts through.” He unzips the track-suit jacket, revealing a tank top made of black mesh. “Want to see the best part?” Under the mesh, on the left side of his chest, is a tattoo of a heart, still slick with ointment. Inside the heart is the name Dee Ann.
“Is Dee Ann your girl?”
“My mom,” he says proudly. “I texted her a photo but I haven’t heard back.”
“Tiff did the ink?”
“She does it all.”
“I’m impressed, Will.”
“Actually, it’s The Fizz.”
“Fizz?”
“The Fizz. That’s my nickname. Like a soda, light and sweet. While the bleach was setting, she gave me this lecture about names. She said ‘Thick Will’ sounds heavy and slow. From now on I’m The Fizz, light as air and sweet as honey.”
I know other players who have had the Tiff Tate treatment, but I’ve never seen a transformation so dramatic. To be honest, I’m a little upset with Tiff. She sold this poor kid everything on the menu. I can only imagine how much she charged. I’m sure Will would tell me if I asked, but this isn’t the time. I’m skeptical that the makeover will have any impact on what really matters, but on the off chance it does, I don’t want to ruin his good run before it starts.
I’m also worried about how the other guys will react. Baseball players aren’t the most tolerant people on earth. Ordoñez’s whistles are nothing. Guys can be vicious when they detect weakness. A couple years ago, it got around that a rookie infielder named Contreras called his girlfriend in Puerto Rico before and after every game. Ordoñez and a couple others got a prepaid cell phone from 7-Eleven and started calling Contreras, pretending to be thugs from a drug cartel. They demanded money, a hundred grand or something, way more than Contreras had in his bank account. “We’re watching your girl’s house,” they told him. “We can see her through the window.” When Contreras called his girlfriend, he would break down in tears, telling her to be safe, to close the blinds. He never told her why—I guess he didn’t want to worry her—but Ordoñez let this go on for a week before telling Contreras that he’d been punked.
Batting practice goes a long way toward shutting up Will’s critics before they have a chance to speak. His first swing lands in the Christmas-tree farm in center field, maybe 425 feet away, a nice hit, but not that unusual. BP is a special environment. For one thing, the pitching is cake: a never-ending feed of weak fastballs served up by our sixty-five-year-old manager and other members of the coaching staff. There’s a school of thought that batting practice is counterproductive, because it builds false confidence in hitters. I’m not sure that’s true; few hitters would tell you that the ability to hit a seventy-five-mile-an-hour fastball is any reason to feel confident at the plate. In fact, they all fear becoming what is known as a “five o’clock hitter.”
That said, an impressive BP session always turns heads. Some players know this and organize their schedules around it. Skipper likes to talk about how, when he was playing for the Yankees in the late seventies, Reggie Jackson used to reserve the last BP slot for himself. He knew that the later he took BP the more fans would be in the stadium to see him hit. That slot, 5:45 p.m. or whatever, became known as “Reggie Time.” On days when Jackson couldn’t make Reggie Time—if he had an injury that required extra time in the trainers’ room, for instance—he would make a show of giving away the slot. It was a form of patronage for lesser-known players.
This morning, Will gives a performance that would have made Mr. October proud. After he’s warmed up, he starts sending baseballs into the upper deck above right field. Will bats left-handed, which means most of his power is to right, his pull side. But today he uses the whole field. Seven or eight pitches in, he starts muscling balls the other way, to left. He has a couple of nice drives, gappers that would have gone for extra bases. Then a ball clears the bleachers, slamming into the giant video board looming above the seats, maybe 475 feet from the plate. Now everybody stops what they’re doing. Will returns to his strong side and pulls the next ball hard down the first-base line, where C
hichi Ordoñez is doing some stretches on the warning track. Will’s drive misses Chichi by twenty feet, but Chichi must have heard something whistling through the air, because he collapses like a folding chair as the ball caroms off the wall.
After Will steps out of the cage, no one congratulates him—it’s just batting practice, after all—but it does take everyone a few seconds to resume their activities. I smile. Maybe The Fizz Cunningham will be okay.
At any rate, score one for Tiff Tate.
10
When the Bay Dogs finish BP, I hang back with Pete Lopez to watch the Rockies hit.
“Gotta say,” Lopez says to me, “I think you dodged a bullet with Yonel Ruiz last night.”
“Why’s that?”
He looks at me. “You threw him junk, and he still made contact. Imagine if you’d missed your location. If you’d been an inch closer to the plate, that would have been a double, not a double play. Two runs in.”
I hate this kind of talk. Everyone hates this kind of talk, fans and players alike, yet we are unable to resist. It’s just too rich, too tempting, to imagine a world where the mechanism of cause and effect is so efficient that tiny adjustments change the course of history. For instance, what if Kirk Gibson had injured only one leg, instead of two, in the 1988 NLCS against the Mets? How might that have changed his famous pinch-hit appearance at the end of Game 1 of the World Series? The way it happened, Eckersley ran the count full, then hung a slider that Gibson muscled over the right-field wall for a walk-off win. The fact that Gibson could barely make it around the bases pretty much iced the hearts of the Oakland players, and the Dodgers went on to win the Series, four games to one. But what if Gibson had been a little healthier? Would he have waited on that slider? He might have made better contact on one of the pitches he fouled off. He might still have launched that shot, but he also might have grounded out.
“But, Petey,” I say, “I didn’t miss my location.”
“I know you didn’t, I’m just saying it could have been bad. I mean, for Christ’s sake, look at that….”
We both watch the spot behind the cage where Ruiz is getting ready. He has a bat yoked over his shoulders, the pose that Bo Jackson made famous, arms bulging like pythons let into the rabbit hutch. He twists left and right, opening his back. No expression on his face. No teammates within six feet. He exists in a cone of silence, a bubble of perfect concentration.
“I’m going to chat him up,” I say to Lopez.
“Seriously?”
“Watch me.”
I walk casually across the apron of green turf behind the plate, approaching Ruiz from behind. For some reason, I wish I had a prop, a bat or a glove to play with, something to absorb my nervous energy. When I’m four or five feet behind him, I hook my thumbs in my belt and just stand there for a minute, watching the batter in the cage. It’s Dan Anglin, the aging first baseman whose swing was consuming Magnusson the night he died. Something is indeed wrong with his approach, that’s pretty clear. Anglin fouls three pitches into the dirt, cursing under his breath. Ruiz stops stretching and watches. I wonder what he makes of Anglin’s struggles. Hard to imagine he’s too sympathetic.
“What do you think?” I say in Spanish. “His timing is off, no?”
Ruiz turns around slowly. He recognizes me but says nothing, and returns his attention to the cage.
“I know you’re being watched,” I say. “Tiff Tate asked me to help you.”
Ruiz lowers his head and swings the bat gently back and forth like a golf club. His lats strain the sides of his pullover BP jersey. “Go away,” he says without turning around.
“She explained the trouble you’re in. I want to help. I need you to put me in touch with the smugglers. Do that, and the problem will go away.”
“You don’t know anything.”
“Not yet. I need to reach the Venezuelans. Can you make that happen?”
Ruiz turns his head to the side, careful not to make eye contact with me, but he wants me to see the grimace on his face. “You want to help me, huh?”
“Yes. It’s bullshit, what they’re doing to you. We have to stop them.”
“Were you helping me last night?”
Does he know about me and his sister? Mea culpa…but, come on, this can’t be the first time that has happened! Like she said, she loves ballplayers.
“Yes, I was trying to help.”
He laughs. “How about you help yourself and fuck off?”
What’s that? I’m out here risking my life for this bastard, and he tells me to fuck off? I’ve had unsatisfied clients before. Pretty much every guy who asks me to investigate his wife gets pissed off when I deliver the dirt. (Here’s a tip, fellas: if you think she’s cheating on you, she probably is. Don’t act surprised.) But this is something else entirely. I’m trying to save his wife—and his daughter, and his parents, and his eight-figure contract. If he wants me to fuck off, he doesn’t have to ask me twice. I’m done.
In front of the visitors’ dugout, Pete Lopez stops me. “So how did it go? Friendly guy?”
“Not really,” I say. “I prefer his sister.”
11
The game is a rare Coors Field squeaker, with good defense supporting solid starting pitching on both sides. The score is tied 3–3 going into the eighth, when I get the call to warm up. Ruiz is due up third, but the two hitters before him are also lefties. I might be asked to pitch to any or all of them. Most likely Skipper will save me for Ruiz, because of my success against him yesterday. Lucky me.
As I limber up, tossing to the bullpen catcher from forty feet, then fifty, and finally from the rubber, I play through what’s going to happen. They call this “visualization.” Phil Sutcliffe, our pitching coach, took a seminar last winter and taught us the technique in spring training. “Make the warm-ups count,” he says. “Pretend you’re in the game already.” All year I’ve been skeptical, and I’ve done the visualizations only reluctantly, but today I can use the help with my focus. I imagine Ruiz crowding the bullpen plate, his folded arms heaving on every breath. I start with a fastball low and away, barely clipping the outside corner. In my visualization, I get a called strike, so I make a note to go there again, but not right away. Then I switch sides, moving inside with a front-door slider. If thrown correctly, the front-door pitch looks inside until the last possible moment, when it jumps out over the plate. You know that kind of slider is working when the hitter pulls his hands back. In my visualization, he does. That’s strike two. Now I imagine that it’s 2-2—I’m still ahead in the count, with a ball to spare—so I try a slider in the dirt, outside. I’m hoping he’ll chase, but in this visualization, he does not, so I return to the outside fastball that worked for strike one: on the black, at the knees. Strike three. I actually feel relief as I imagine the end of the at-bat, seeing Ruiz walk off the field, dejected, inning over, game still tied. He will have left a runner in scoring position against a thirty-six-year-old finesse pitcher who makes a fraction of his salary. Visualization is powerful stuff.
When the call comes, it’s for Ruiz, just as I expected. I jog out to the mound and take my eight warm-up pitches. Then the plate umpire, Joe South, tosses me a new ball. I remove my glove, tuck it under my elbow, and take a walk on the grass next to the mound, rubbing up the fresh ball. I review the plan: fastball away, front-door slider, fastball away. It couldn’t be any more straightforward, but I’m finding it difficult to concentrate on the task at hand. This is what visualization is supposed to help with—Sutcliffe calls it the “monkey mind.” I’m thinking about Magnusson, about how the drink we shared the other night turned out to be his last. Then I’m thinking about Enriqueta, with her bucking pelvis and crazy eyes. Maybe Feldspar is right: maybe I should stop doing investigations. It’s got to be a sign when your clients start telling you to fuck off.
I climb back up the mound, plant my left foot on the rubber. Ruiz strides purposefully toward the plate. When he steps into the box, our eyes meet. He has dark, beady eyes. Nothi
ng like his sister’s. I see the sheen of sweat on his nose, the clean line of his Tiff Tate beard. You ungrateful bastard, I think. You don’t deserve to be here.
This transcends the monkey mind. This is the tiger mind, the white-shark mind. It’s dangerous—not at all what you want your pitcher to be thinking in a high-leverage, late-innings situation. In the abstract, anger is fine. Even motivational. There are plenty of angry pitchers. But I should have used my anger to put another two or three miles per hour on the fastball. Instead, what I do is lean back, gather all my strength, and aim my first pitch—a ninety-mile-per-hour fastball—squarely at Ruiz’s heart. He turns away, and the ball strikes his back with a sickening thud, like an axe on a chopping block. Ruiz collapses in the dirt. The umpire throws his hands up to call time, but you can’t hear his voice over the boos from the crowd. Colorado’s trainers and coaching staff rush toward the fallen man. The rest of the Rockies charge the mound, where they are met by the Bay Dogs, who have leapt off their bench. I throw down my glove, getting ready for battle, and then I feel someone grab my arms. It’s Will Cunningham. He pulls me back into a sea of gray jerseys, away from the pin-striped mob. Everyone is yelling now, in English and Spanish, but nobody is as loud as Joe South, the plate umpire. His mask is off and he’s scampering after me. “You!” South shouts. “You’re gone, buddy!” He jerks his thumb dramatically, eliciting a roar from the crowd.
Skipper totters over and gets in South’s face. “Why the hell are you ejecting him? It was an accident, for Christ’s sake!”
“You call that an accident? He threw right at him!”