by Lucas Mann
It is a feeble sound we make, those of us clapping hard. Our cheers echo off the mainly empty metal benches, each of us trying to be the loudest. The other LumberKings pour out of the dugout and run toward him. Danny is in front with big eyes and coltish legs stomping, willing himself to be happy for a teammate who is celebrated enough, who lives life with the kind of constant praise that Danny used to know. Nick faces them all with his head cocked, interested, maybe even happy. He doesn’t move to rush into their arms. He stands, shoulders squared, and waits for them. They jump at him, slap him on his head and his back and his ass. He weathers it all and finally trots away, lets them follow him, still cheering.
Nick is alone in the tangle of bodies as they walk back to the dugout, glancing up at the fans, the ones he sees every day. The other players are still reaching out to touch him, still yelling in his ear, but he is something entirely apart, something that stands out to be preserved, beautiful and so young, moving past one conquest toward another, of course another. And then, so soon, he’s trotting back to the clubhouse before hands can reach at him for a signature, only his back visible, until even that disappears. I look at the sky, and the pelicans are gone.
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The Pzazz!
THE PZAZZ! FunCity is big and it is gaudy. You can’t see it at first when you leave the Burlington Bees’ field, but then you go past the Taco Bell parking lot, and boom: a city of fun. I like the cursive lettering on the sign, packed with z’s. Even the fake word is remarkable, a collection of characters that shouldn’t be together. It makes me think of Phil Rizzuto, the former Yankee shortstop and announcer, because as a boy I’d see his name written in the paper and I’d think it was a typo, z’s pushed together like that. I looked up his minor-league career the other day. I’ve been doing that lately, trying to see who came through Clinton, Iowa, immersing myself in the improbability of their onetime presence in the town. Phil Rizzuto never played in Iowa. His first stop was with the Bassett Furnituremakers in Virginia, one of those Depression-era teams that didn’t even make it to the war before folding.
They were Furnituremakers when Bassett was a center of furniture production. Now Bassett is not a center of anything, and there is no team, a sad fact, but more logical than a baseball rebirth as the FurnitureKings.
I texted my father: Did you know Phil Rizzuto played for the Bassett Furnituremakers?
The LumberKings are still stuck in fourth place, seemingly unable to hit, and that makes everything temporarily heavy—their shoulders, their street clothes as they dress after the game, their giant headphones as they try to slouch past Joyce’s attempted encouragement, notebook out, pen out, Great job! In the clubhouse, Kalian Sams is silent next to Hank Contreras, who is also silent, though not as simmering mad as his friend. Sams plays every game and lately has struggled through most of them, watching his spot in the order dwindle from cleanup to fifth to sixth to eighth. Hank has only played in three games so far this season, so a loss or a poor team performance is something different for him. He has lost nothing. He didn’t fail to do his job well, because he wasn’t allowed to do his job.
I did expect the post-loss malaise to last longer. I think everyone does who isn’t on the team. When we in the stands say, “That was a hard one,” or “They won’t forget that one anytime soon,” we mean us. We mean that we will relive the slow ache of a game where the people we want to win don’t, the injustice of it all. And it is comforting to think that a loss that is significant to the spectators must be way more significant to the actual players. If they don’t care, why would we?
But for the players tonight, there is the Pzazz! There is a city of fun. And what they will tell me, but never the local, loyal fans, is that they look forward to road trips every night they are “home” in Clinton. I have driven Sams and Hank down Camanche Avenue after a home loss, feigning gags as we bounced alongside the factory, stopping at the house where they rent rooms, the landlord barging in to say they’re like her sons and she tries to be good to them, so why don’t they do a little more to drum up business for her restaurant? I have sat on the couch with Hank and Sams and watched major-league highlights, more enthralled than they want to be. I have asked, “What’s your guys’ record now?” and they have not once remembered.
There is a huge pool at the Pzazz! with a triple waterslide and five-hundred-gallon dump buckets and a lazy river. The players don’t go there, because it’s for kids, which they most certainly are not, but it’s still nice that it exists. There are bumper cars, too, and laser tag and mini-golf. A whole arcade. The casino is the biggest draw, though, larger and more glittering than the Wild Rose in Clinton, where Joyce works. A combo sushi restaurant and steak house is adjacent, and a family-style place and a sports bar, all offshoots of the gambling nucleus. I told the LumberKings’ manager, John Tamargo, that I’d buy him a drink after the game so that we could talk. He nodded and gave a smile that frightened me.
Now he limps through the Boogaloo Cafe, and looks important. The blended polyester of the polo shirts that only baseball coaches and golf pros seem to wear does well at night in bars. It catches sparse orange light and reflects it, not too much, not shiny like a woman in a dance club, but still more than the fathers in cotton T-shirts on family vacation, more than the middling businessmen in their dull blues and grays. His Rolex is freshly shined, as is his tanned bald head, as is his championship ring, seventeen years old and impeccable.
He sits down across from me, and the waitress, who is very young and has an inexplicably popular skunkish, half-blond, half-black, hairstyle, asks him what he’d like. He calls her sweetie and looks at her with hunger. I think she’ll mind, but she doesn’t seem to.
He says, “Johnnie Walker Black,” and looks at me to see if I will say no, not on my tab. I say nothing and watch my fingers rip up my cocktail napkin.
“Double,” he says. “Double of Johnnie Walker Black.”
He smiles and runs the tip of his index finger over his championship ring.
John Tamargo is comfortable in this place. Not just the Boogaloo Cafe, its snaking row of flat screens and wax-shined fake-mahogany tables, its staff of eighteen-year-olds and their hopeful, excessive makeup, but any equivalent of it, the kind of place that is in every mid-level hotel in every town. Now they all seem to be attached to casinos. There are hundreds of casinos in the corn states, a casino for any town where the local industry was dwindling, that was promised a gleaming lure and a fresh start. It seems as if every town with a minor-league team also has a casino, and he’s been in them all, or if he hasn’t been in them all, it still feels like it because who can remember which one is which?
“Nice place,” he says and takes his first sip of Johnnie Walker Black.
“Oh yeah, definitely,” I say.
“You hungry?” he says.
“Nah, I’m—”
“You should eat. You should have some sliders.” And then, to the waitress: “We’re gonna have some sliders.”
Everybody from John Tamargo’s world is scattered throughout this restaurant. There are fans who recognize him and smile because he hopped up out of the dugout today to scream at the umpires about some calls. He watches them notice him. The umpires themselves are at the bar holding sweating beers and watching highlights. He trades rueful grins with them. They raise their bottles in our direction. He humors them outwardly and mutters, “Fucking idiots.” BJ, the trainer, is at the bar, too, talking fast as he always does, making dirty jokes that never seem quite right coming from him. And, of course, his players are dotted around the restaurant. They tear into burgers and talk quietly. They look up, see Tamargo, then look away. He points at Sams and Hank, sitting together. Hank holds up his beer and gives a short toast to his boss. Tamargo likes the boldness of the gesture. He raises his eyebrows like he should be mad at such open post-game unwinding, but he will let it slide this time.
John Tamargo is performing for me now, the role of hard-ass manager, exuding wizened charm.
He externalizes what could have been internal monologue when he spots a collarless shirt at one of the tables full of his players. He looks over my shoulder and says, “Is that …?” as though the ending words to his question could be catastrophic. “Is that little shit not wearing a …?”
He pops up and goes to stand over a relief pitcher, leaning in his ear, thick fingers jabbing at his black cotton T-shirt. The boy stands, six feet four and broad, a different breed, almost, from his manager. He nods in penance and trots toward the elevators to change. His teammates laugh. Tamargo lets his finger point around the room at all of them, making sure that everyone has seen this, and then comes back over to me.
“I like when things are done the right way,” he says. “Wear a nice shirt. Look like a goddamn professional.”
I am not the only one who loves this display, though perhaps I’m the most obvious about it. I can feel the grin on the corners of my lips, my face warm, and how babyish and red I must look. But the umpires, too, clearly the kind of men who love both baseball hierarchy and rules in general or they would have found a different, less abused profession, clink their bottles at the bar in celebration of the defense of righteousness and dress shirts. BJ is overjoyed both by what has just transpired and by the fact that he is a colleague of sorts with everyone involved. Even the waitresses smile. And the few suited traveling salesmen here tonight, drunk and paunchy, lean into one another and begin talking excitedly, and I know, just know, as someone who would be doing the exact same thing, that these conversations are about high school coaches who were real ballbusters, and remember when men were men?
John Tamargo is being everything we want him to be.
He asks me if I want to try the Johnnie Walker Black that I’m paying for.
“Go on,” he says. “This is the good stuff.”
“Go on,” he says again, so I take the glass.
He gives an expectant smile, a kindly one, I think, happy to be introducing me to something better than what I’ve known. I sip and I notice how sharp, how white his teeth are. I swallow quick and avoid a cough.
“Good,” I say.
“You gotta drink the right stuff,” he says, and I nod. We are dancing now, lilting through our interactions. He is old and salty and tired in the exact way that I envisioned the older men in the books my father read to me, his voice hardening when speaking their dialogue. I’m soft and still unformed, letting him mold me for the moment, letting him impose on me. That is his job anyway, to be hard, to impose, to be the expert in the one kind of life he has devoted himself to knowing.
John Tamargo has been a lot of places. He tells me about some of them tonight, and I don’t tell him that I already know the basics of where he’s traveled. You can trace his life online at Baseball Reference or the Baseball Cube or any of the other Web sites set up by indefatigable amateurs to chronicle every movement of every man who ever played the game.
His professional life, the bulk of it at least, begins with his release from the Montreal Expos. His playing résumé is short. Before his time with the Expos, there was a rise through the minors and then four years in major-league cities like St. Louis and San Francisco. There was a .242 lifetime major-league average, 244 at bats that were recorded, that nobody can take away.
And then: “April 1, 1981: Released” is all it says.
There must have been a moment then, in April 1981, when he cried. There must have been a moment of upheaval, of the nausea that I can’t imagine not having, one of seismic uncertainty, of the thought of his choices being made invalid. He must have considered selling cars or real estate, going back to school. He must have considered things not baseball. I ask him and he says no, and maybe that’s a lie, but it doesn’t matter, because there is the rest of his life on the Internet, organized by season. Miami, 1982. Then Columbia, South Carolina, 1983. Then Lynchburg. Then some unspecified town on the Gulf Coast. Then Tallahassee. Then Binghamton. Then Kissimmee. Then Houston. Then New Orleans. Then Brevard County and Durham and Everett. Then Clinton. He was a bench coach in some places, a hitting coach, too, and finally a manager.
He’s won a lot of games, over eight hundred, he knows that much. He’s lost over eight hundred as well. He is nearing the minor-league record for both. In a life of trying to win, trying not to lose, he has just about broken even. He could start over now, say that nothing from before counts, and it would be the same. When I Google him and his stats pop up, sometimes there are little annotations written about his life by the nerdiest, most diligent of baseball fans. They always begin with something like “John Tamargo: you may remember from his few years as Gary Carter’s backup.” And people leave comments to say, oh yeah, they do remember that.
The only reason I started talking to Hank Contreras was because he lived with Kalian Sams. When Kalian Sams started the season with the best-hitting two weeks of his life, competing briefly with Nick Franklin for idol status, I tried to be where he was as much as possible. I waited for the right to give Sams a ride home, and when he looked around for something better, saw nothing, pursed his lips, called shotgun, and folded all six feet two inches and 248 pounds of him into the passenger seat of my hatchback, Hank slipped in behind me.
He introduced himself, and I pretended that I knew him, that I’d seen him play or at least found his name in the program each night. He didn’t believe me.
“We don’t know where to put you” is what Pedro Grifol, the Mariners’ minor-league director had told him in Arizona as spring training ended and everybody else had found out where they were going to be.
“We don’t want to cut you,” he said. “You don’t deserve that.”
Hank waited.
“We want to give you a shot, but, I mean, where?”
Hank waited some more.
Pedro sent him to Clinton, saying that he wasn’t a man to mince words, so Hank should know that he wouldn’t play. Pedro said they all liked Hank, they thought he was a fine ballplayer, more important, a good man. The other players, those starting above him, could learn a thing or two from him, especially the newly naturalizing Dominicans and Venezuelans who need extra bilingual care.
Hank bore this quietly, said thanks.
Every time we speak, I try to think of some way to ask without it being cruel: Why? Why be here? Why keep playing when nobody has even taken the time to throw you that kindly lie: you’ve got as good a shot as the next guy? I look over his manager’s shoulder now at Hank, drinking his beer, saying something that makes Sams scrunch his enormous face, purse his lips, and go, “Man, shut up.” He doesn’t swagger or yell or stare past you like some others. He is shorter than I am by two or three inches, a square frame that would be formidable in any other context but among his teammates reads as squat and ordinary. Even his ethnic otherness is muted. The black players are like celebrities here in the Pzazz! and certainly in Clinton, visitors from another world, for sure. And the Dominicans and Venezuelans, too, are so distinctly different, tall mestizo aliens with diamond earrings and confused faces when English is spoken fast. Hank is Mexican, with a tan Aztec face. Everybody has seen a Mexican. And when Betty leans over the railing and says “¡Hola!” he responds with an unaccented “Hi, ma’am, how are you?” and puzzled looks ripple up the bleachers.
“Did you know that Mickey Mantle was five eleven,” my father used to tell me. “Just like I am.”
I would say no way, and he would say yes, maybe even five ten, not a steroided bicep or a cobblestone ab muscle on him. My father would stand over the coffee table, put his chubby fists on his hips, and hold the pose.
“This is how Mickey looked,” he would say.
I sat with my fingers digging into the unformed rolls of my sides, picturing a black-and-white Mickey Mantle head on my father’s familiar body, back to his own, then back to Mickey’s, like a lenticular poster that shows something different depending on the angle you approach it from. That is the way fathers teach baseball to their sons. The democracy of the game. The idea that what m
akes someone exceptional comes from an unquantifiable force within them. There are no absolutes in the game beyond will, and that is the appeal that Hank Contreras draws upon, for me, certainly, as I watch him chew his burger. The fans in Clinton can see him squatting in the bullpen every day, mask on, dirty and underappreciated the way real people are, yet still a player, his uniform that same heavy white fabric that only professional uniforms are made out of.
Hank and Sams finish their dinners and run out of things to say. They stand up together. They smooth the fronts of their required polo shirts, look down, and admire the way the fabric clings to their torsos, Sams especially, but Hank, too, because he worked to lose twenty pounds in the off-season and the team noticed, they told him so. Hank gives a quick salute to Tamargo, who laughs and reciprocates.
“You going to the casino?” he calls out.
It is a joke, I think, because he knows these two and they’re not exactly the big spenders of the team. They can’t afford to be. Some of the players have already been in the casino for hours, along with Dwight, the cowboy pitching coach who beelines to any place where you’re still allowed to smoke indoors, everyone blinking in the fluorescent, windowless cavern, the baseballers towering above the old ladies and obese men on motorized scooters who dominate the slot machines, forgoing the levers to just push the red button and watch the pictures spin. Some players read how-to-win-at-blackjack books on bus rides. They dip into their bonuses to throw down hundreds and sometimes come away with thousands, the toast of the locker room until something more interesting happens. Hank’s bonus was in the thousand-dollar range, a good night’s winnings for his bolder and richer teammates, signed over on the spot when he didn’t yet have an agent.
Tamargo points to Hank’s back as he follows Sams out of the Boogaloo, maybe to swing by the door of the casino, just to peek in over the velvet rope before bed.