by Lucas Mann
Guys like Derek and Matt and Ryan, they are more of the competitive fan. They root to win. They are focused in their watching, as unrelenting as the players are when they wrestle each other to the ground in the locker room, holding until one guy has to give in. They will yell for the players, but also at them. As though they have some power here, and not just the power to make a star feel loved, but the power to affect the outcome on the field. The power to improve things. Dive, they will say, as though Danny Carroll out in center will go, Ah, that’s what I forgot to do. Sometimes they will not discuss the players at all and instead monologue about themselves over the game—a triumph in bar-league softball or a long-time-coming “fuck off” to the boss made greater when spoken of in the context of another’s athletic majesty.
There will always be more types to find, further examples of how much a fan can care. Next March, when I follow Nick and the others to Arizona for spring training, I will stand for a week by the fence near the practice fields where 165 players compete all morning to keep their jobs. I will stand with other fans who made the trip to suburban Phoenix for some puzzling, burning reason. There will be a Japanese family who purchased plane tickets only to wait in the parking lot outside the clubhouse for Ichiro Suzuki, sitting on heated asphalt for two hours until he drives by with just a slight nod through tinted windows. They will take pictures of his back license plate and hold their camera up as a prize. I will think, why, and then I will see Nick Franklin appear, will sprint toward his Escalade with the monogrammed leather cushion interior, hoping that he might just turn.
The LumberKings are playing Cedar Rapids today, and Cedar Rapids features a boy named Mike Trout who is Nick Franklin’s age and Nick Franklin’s size and got drafted even higher than Nick Franklin with an even better signing bonus. The fat men with bulging binders full of baseball cards crowded by the visitors’ dugout after the national anthem to get his signature. Nick would never say out loud that this displeases him, but it does.
Before the game, he talked about Team USA, the tryouts in Jupiter, Florida, how only twenty-five high schoolers from the whole country made it, one of them being Nick Franklin and none of them being Mike Trout.
“Yeah, I kind of know him,” Nick said, as though he were speaking about some obscure annotation from his past, not a frightening combination of speed and power mentioned on every baseball blog in America, featured, text and picture, in this month’s Baseball America currently lying in Nick’s locker. “I saw him, and I was like, yeah, he’s one of those guys that didn’t make Team USA.”
Everybody here wants Nick to be the better one. It is important that he is better, recognized as such. He is Clinton’s best, and Clinton’s best should be the best. He has, since first displaying his gifts in April, been a snug fit into the role that every town must fill, that best reflection of us, no matter if he wasn’t us two months ago. Mike Trout hit his own homer this game, and it was followed by an immediate consensus that the wind was blowing out to right field and the ball only just dipped over the wall anyway, a lazy line drive that happened to get lucky. He must be beloved in Cedar Rapids, known and cheered by more than Clinton can muster because there are 125,000 people there and even after the massive, tragic flood of 2008 the population has grown and continues to, not like Clinton. Young, white-collar professionals and University of Iowa law students cheer for Mike Trout. Somehow the arrogance of his home run trot falls in line with the arrogance of his temporary home.
But Trout is too good for that place and this level, anyway. Everyone knows it. Cedar Rapids has a new stadium with a Jacuzzi in left field and a scoreboard that runs special graphics dedicated only to Trout, comparing him favorably to Superman. Still, you can dress it up all you want—Low-A is Low-A, Cedar Rapids is Cedar Rapids, and he’ll be gone before the hottest days of summer. Two months from now, after his all-star selection, he’ll be playing in Rancho Cucamonga and then Arkansas. His name will be spoken of by major-league analysts, his face on TV, not a pixilated mini-Jumbotron. People from all over the country who do not care about Nick Franklin, do not care about Iowa, will ask me, Did you ever get to see Mike Trout up close?
In the stands today, there is already speculation about the impending loss of Nick Franklin. The best thing, I’m told, from a low-level minor-league standpoint, is a boring beginning and a good ending. If a player’s value is quiet enough to only register here, he might stick around. He can be appreciated in this town, hidden. If he starts out terribly, well, then he’s probably back to rookie ball or he’s cut, and good riddance, really, it’s not as if he had endeared himself. But if he’s an instant star, pops up all over the Internet next to captions saying, look out for this kid, next to a picture where you know you’re just a few feet out of frame in the stands, then you probably will never see him again.
“We’re fucked if he leaves,” Derek says, loud enough, I imagine, for Nick’s teammates at the top step of the dugout to hear. “That would just fuck us.”
But people aren’t meant to stay here. Nick Franklin wouldn’t be the first to go. And next year, a shortstop will be drafted in the second round, and another teenager will light it up in the Venezuelan Summer League, each waiting to star in Clinton, but we do not know that now. And even if we can assume its probability, we still ignore it. Nick Franklin is irreplaceable.
“He’s young,” Tim says, hopeful always.
“Yep,” says Matt.
“Sometimes with a young guy they want to keep him around, they don’t want to rush things,” Tim says, dropping the we when referring to those with decision-making power. “I mean, what’s the rush?”
“If I was them, I’d let him stay,” Matt says. “A boy’s got to learn how to succeed. This place is good for him.”
It is a quality of optimism that I have never seen before coming to this town, one that is repeated in the stands every day. It is warm, womblike. It makes me feel a deep, developed, familial care for things that are new to me. Nothing ever really ends here. Nothing will. Or at least it doesn’t feel ridiculous to think that, even though Ryan and I stand out, in our twenties at the game when most of the men who watch every day have done so for longer than we’ve been alive and the fans who are talked about as best, the exemplars of loyalty, are dead.
Nick is so young. He looks like that boy from back then who looked like that boy from back then who looked like that boy from back then.
The pelicans have returned, circling, and I point up at a flock of them that has decided to hover over the field. They look so different from the crows that usually dominate. They look different from the vultures, too, that stain the sky, that make you want to look away. The vultures come for the dead because Clinton County has suspended carcass removal due to the cost. They hover over bloody heaps of roadkill, smaller each day, eaten by maggots until they are nothing but pulp that can wash away in the rain. The pelicans are clean. Their bodies are a pure white, slicked with water and shining. Only the tips of their wings are ink-black, and when the sun is behind them, the ends of the black feathers look like fingers waving down at us.
Jason, another fan who loves Nick, walks over with his video camera, looking up, zooming in, watching the pelicans drift and then come back, as though adhering to the dimensions of the stadium. Maybe he’ll put this on his personal YouTube page, documenting everything noteworthy that happens in Clinton and its surrounding rural sprawl, next to the video of an apartment fire, the thick black smoke climbing, Jason’s voice going “Whoa, whoa” in the background. And next to a two-minute silent close-up of a lime-green Lamborghini parked in the driveway of a rich doctor from across the river. Today’s baseball exploits will be up soon, too, Nick’s home run with an epic, bass-heavy sound track behind it.
When Tim describes 1991, the Roadkill Crew, and the expanse of baseball affection they created, I like to picture thousands of different faces, united, inspired by a collective victory, the most benign of war films. But 1991 came on the heels of Reagan, and things didn’
t trickle down to this place, and so began the first decade when the population had dropped under thirty thousand. The first time the census showed Clinton shrinking since when the lumber ran out. Tim doesn’t have to enumerate all the details that I know, but they are encapsulated in his tone. The impending loss of the last train car shops. The loss of Allied Steel, as towns with multiple flourishing factories became an increasing rarity. And worst, the loss of most of the town’s unions when the grain millers’ strike was broken, organized laborers forced to move or go silent, an irreversible change to the feeling of his home. And suddenly it was neighbors and friends and fans gone. Clinton hasn’t gained it back since.
What does Nick Franklin have to do with all that? As little as possible; that’s what is so wonderful. He comes from a place of sun and ruthless optimism, suburban Orlando. He was born in 1991, destined to make that year a significant beginning. The tattoo across his back says so. He doesn’t have a history. Just nights after school in the batting cages, swinging until his hands blistered, running sprints until his father told him he could stop. The stories that he tells me smiling and then looks at me puzzled when I have a worried expression.
Homework can wait until your baseball is done.
No rest for the best, just nighttime practice when no one else is awake.
And nobody saw those nights, the making of a millionaire child. That’s a good thing. Nick’s exploits can still look easy, preordained. In Clinton, as long as the players are here, they can come from nowhere if you want them to, they can be only a future, and that future can be anything.
Hours later, it’s the eighth inning and I’m sleepy. Since Nick and Mike Trout exploded early, the way everybody anticipated they would, both teams have looked confused and slow, unremarkable at the plate. Cedar Rapids is up 3–2, and already this inning Steve Baron came up, swung late and awkwardly at a high fastball, and hit a pop-up that didn’t even clear the infield. Gabriel Noriega was next, the middle infielder who should be Nick’s greatest competition, but he is still more boy than man, with a concave body and a frightened face. His bat looked too big for him, and he swung as if he regretted the decision the moment he hoisted the wood off his shoulders. A weak grounder to first. Now it’s Nick again.
Nick takes a curveball low and swings over another one, bringing the count to 1-1. Then the pitcher makes a timid mistake and leaves a slider over the inside part of the plate. Nick gives a vicious uppercut of a swing and releases a grunt as bat hits ball. This second home run doesn’t travel as far as the first, but it rises higher. He watches until it looks as though it’s as high as the pelicans, and then it’s gone and he trots again, unsurprised, while we rise again for him and Brad screams even louder into his mic.
“Are you ever worried?” I forced myself to ask Nick in my allotted fifteen minutes. “Do you ever think that maybe things will get different, get really hard, something like that?”
I had been trying to think of a better way to phrase that, not just, “What happens if you fuck up?” Or, “Failure, failure, what about when you fail?” So much of the minors is about things fading until they end, so much of the game is about missing, but those inevitabilities aren’t spoken of here, certainly not with him.
He didn’t pause before saying no.
The answer itself wasn’t any shock. All his teammates would have said something similarly stilted and rehearsed, the kind of irritating optimism that athletes are taught. Danny has said similar things to me, and Sams, and even Hank, who never plays. But there is nothing sure in their eyes when they say it, almost guilt in Danny’s case, as though caught in a lie.
Nick held a bat as we spoke, one of the many that rest bundled in his locker. He wasn’t lying. I wasn’t sure how to respond, so I stuttered for a moment and waited for him to fill the silence.
“Have you ever, like, I don’t know, failed at anything?” he asked me. He likes to redirect questions, and I find that quality charming, proof of his interest.
“Well, yeah,” I said. “Yes. Of course. I mean, that’s what happens.”
He looked past me and shook his head.
“Man,” he said. “I don’t know. That must suck.”
I shrugged. Then sat still. He continued.
“It’s like, I see some of these guys on the team and it’s like, damn, time is passing and they aren’t going anywhere. That would scare me. Do you think they’re scared?”
Of course they are. Baseball is terrifying. So is turning a year older than you were. Everything is terrifying.
“Probably.”
“Some people think that I’m cocky or whatever,” he said. “But I’m not. It’s just, I’ve never really failed. Why am I supposed to think that can happen when it never does?”
He gave a smile, a small one, a bit impish, but then his face was serious again.
He is, up close, ordinary. He is listed at 175 pounds, and that’s generous. He is just shy of six feet one inch. There are things that he does poorly. The double-play throw. Choosing his spots when he steals bases. He swings too hard often, and so often he misses. These things are all a part of his reality, and I know that, everybody does, everybody has seen evidence of Nick’s flaws over the course of each game, but they don’t resonate. They are talked over and forgotten when he does something that shines because when he shines it is so much, it carries so far, and everything about him is a horizon line. Nick Franklin is all hyperbole.
His teammates, guys like Sams and Danny and Hank, they are fun to hope for, but still you’re aware of the act of hoping, aware of waiting to clap your hands when an underdog wins. They’ve been seen before by these fans, have returned to be seen again. They are grounded in the probability of fading away. They will cease to matter just as everything eventually does.
“Is it cool to be the favorite here?” I asked him. “To have people, you know, love you like that?”
He shrugged.
I wanted to sit even closer to him. I wanted to feel knee on knee. It wasn’t about how he would never fail. It wasn’t that he was the best. That’s not the appeal. He will fail in some way, probably. Definitely. He will never live up to the inflated expectations that have been placed on him. But he doesn’t know any of that yet. That’s what we see when we watch him. Somebody who doesn’t know that things get worse.
The game seems paused after Nick’s second home run. The score stays the same, 3–3, past the ninth, into the tenth, and there is nothing worth watching that happens when he is not at the plate. Then, in the bottom of the tenth, there he is, up on the top step of the dugout, helmet on, bat in hand, waiting. Steve Baron and Gabriel Noriega actually manage hits, and with two outs there are men on base for Nick to knock in to win the game.
“He must be nervous,” I say.
“I would be,” Tim says.
“Kid like that, never nervous,” Matt says with finality.
All of our bodies are tensed. I feel the extra weight of my own torso, the low numb in my legs from sitting for so many hours, standing only to get more food. Matt, who was an athlete in the army in the 1980s, something that he announces freely and often, rests his dimpled hands on his knees, covering the scars of a double surgery that was performed so that he might be able to walk into his fifties. Tim fidgets with his tank top from the 1991 championship season when he looked more like a peer to the players. The shirt is getting too small and he shouldn’t wear tank tops anymore.
Nick doesn’t look nervous, that’s true. But there is the unspoken reality that not one of us has any idea what a boy like Nick Franklin is thinking in a moment like this. As he scrapes at the dirt with his cleats, the only certainty we can muster is that this is big, this moment, and that he is right for it.
Nick falls behind, fouling off a fastball with an eager swing and then taking a breaking ball for a called strike. He lets one go by in the dirt. The stadium is silent, rapt. We look only at the field, not at the empty seats around us.
Before the next pitch, I see Nick shuffle f
orward in the batter’s box, putting himself inches closer to the pitcher, like he has figured something out. I tap Tim on the shoulder and hear the proud, knowing tone in my voice when I say, “Look, he’s moving up,” like I’ve figured something out.
“Sure, yeah,” Tim says.
The pitch is a changeup, slow and dipping down. Nick waits, balanced—there had been no doubt in his mind what was coming. Late, almost too late, it seems, he flicks his wrists in a blur—that trigger, that blast, that whip crack—and the ball carries. Trout is after it in center field, and we watch him with fear and fury, able to work this moment into a narrative of two men facing off for the role of the day’s champion, though Nick just swung as hard as he could, though Trout is just doing his job chasing down a fly ball.
We try to gauge the angle of Trout’s run and the ball, see a second into the future to know if they’ll meet. But Trout slows up as he nears the wall and just watches it. He’s not going to get there. The ball skips away and Steve Baron scores easily. The game is finally over. This long, vital, unimportant contest has been decided. The LumberKings have moved to .500, still squarely in fourth place in the Western Division of the Midwest League. Everybody on the field has stopped running except for Nick, who trots into second base and plants both feet on it, satisfied, momentarily serene before turning and facing his dugout.