by Lucas Mann
The Midwest League championship trophy is a humble one, intentionally so, I think. A thick, polished, dark wood base, a square plaque embedded in it with the logo of each team. On top of the base is a bronze man the size of a deluxe GI Joe, gloved hand on hip, throwing hand hidden behind his belt. He is nothing like any of the young men who have held the trophy for the last half century. His carved pants are ballooning, with pleats in them, the kind that can only appear in pressed wool. Nine inches’ worth of old-time ballplayer.
“It felt huge” is how Tim describes it to me. “It felt life-sized. It felt like I was holding me over my head, made of metal.
“And then I remember walking into the office that winter and seeing it and it was nothing,” he tells me. “And I thought, my God, what was I thinking? How did it feel so big?”
The giant-trophy moment happened in Madison on a cold night in September, on the pitcher’s mound after storming the field without anyone telling him he couldn’t, in the middle of a team of winners, before following the bus on dark highways home for three and a half hours, banging the side of Betty’s old Dodge and howling.
Tim has, of course, seen more than a few stadium sideshows since that last championship night. The racing mascots—Charlie the Tuna, that inexplicable stork that hawks pickles, and other famous felt faces—who swing by midwestern minor-league stadiums after performing in Milwaukee or St. Louis. Also, those creepy guys in blow-up suits that are meant to be half animal, half sports legend—Monkey Mantle, Harry Canary, Ken Giraffey Jr. The Coors Light Girls came last year, and Tom Bigwood was ready. He walked down the aisle to his seat in slacks and a button-up shirt, his hair soaking with mousse and combed to the side. And he was pretty trim because of the racking pain that his tumors caused him every time he ate, so it was like looking at some new person. It was the only time Tim had ever seen him like that, so obstinately fancy.
Tom Bigwood always wanted to be a player, I know that. Which shouldn’t be surprising, a guy watching baseball while wishing, dreaming, of playing. All of us are him to some extent. But Tom was never good, never played schoolyard ball or Little League or high school, never bar-league softball with friends on Sundays. And maybe that’s why his fandom was so unfiltered and endless, because it was cut with no jealousy, no illusions.
“He was so big,” his sister-in-law told me in her living room three blocks from the stadium. “So he never had to think, Oh, maybe I could, and then find out, no.” She asked him, right before he died, trying to get him to talk over the noise of his labored breathing, “Tom, if you could be whatever you wanted to be right now, what would it be?”
And he said baseball player. Or maybe race-car driver. But probably baseball player. He couldn’t fit in those cars. He’d laughed at that, she told me.
Tim doesn’t know about all that. But he does know that Tom knew how lucky these boys are. These ones, he points to the LumberKings on the field trying to warm up, Hank and Sams right in front of us, watching.
“Wouldn’t you be them right now if you could?” he asks me.
Yes, the answer is yes. If, right now, I was given the chance to drop out of graduate school, tell my girlfriend I would be gone for a while, plan ahead for a five-year cushion of poverty and probable failure into my thirties, I would, without hesitation, abandon any other potential life I’ve worked toward. I would justify it, without a second thought, as the ultimate dream. In the face of such hyperbole, everything else becomes bland and heavy and unnecessary. But just because these players have done what many of us also once wanted to, because they’ve taken ownership of a collective dream, do they deserve to sacrifice for that privilege? The common answer is yes.
Sometimes, at bars in my liberal college town west of Clinton, I play pool with white people with dreadlocks, and they ask me how bad the shithole is and I laugh. I say, “I wouldn’t want to live where those guys live,” not talking about Clinton, talking about sleeping in tiny apartments, packed so close to other bodies, and the hardness of half-deflated air mattresses on tile floors. Every time they say things like “yeah” or “must be smelly” or even “cuuuute,” like how you call grandparents cute, or mom-and-pop shops, anything that’s dead or dying. And then sometimes they say, “Lucky,” or the ones who were mistreated by athletes in high school say, “Maybe they should try something new. Like adulthood.”
I am sending texts now, to three friends.
“Monkeys on dogs. Minor-league rodeo.”
I’m trying to take a picture with my phone to send, but there is too much movement. Tim glances down at me and says, “Watch the dang thing,” and I am ashamed.
Chuck and Mailman Matt are saying that those monkeys are strapped onto the dogs. Betty is saying, “Hush,” the point is that the monkeys can really do this. Tim is agreeing with his mom. It’s like the fireworks on the Fourth of July. The sputtering and fizzling were laughed at by some, but Tim and Betty ignored those misfires. They pointed to the beautiful, arcing shots, the ones that exploded the way they were supposed to and drifted through the sky until embers touched their reflections on the river. It was beautiful, Betty reminded all of us, and Tim agreed, yes, it was, it was worth waiting for. It was a proper explosion. We were lucky to have seen it.
When the sheep are all herded, it is time for the origin tale.
“These dogs began over on the border of England and Scotland.”
Wild Thang is stroking a pup’s head with one hand, holding the mic in the other, breathing hard.
“They’ve got words over there that you ain’t never heard before.”
We wait for those words.
“Koombai,” he says. He nods, somber. He offers no definition, but the dogs and the monkeys spring into action.
Terry Pollreisz pops out to stand next to Hank and Sams, puts a liver-spotted hand on the center of Hank’s back, as usual. He leans in and says things into Hank’s ear and Hank smiles, laughs with effort. I imagine that Pollreisz is telling him something cattle related. He looks to be pantomiming a lasso. He likes to tell stories, and his players like to half listen, hearing only the age in his voice, the general weathered, tame tone that his words always seem to take, boring but calming, too.
Pollreisz got to be a professional baseball player for one year, in 1969, and has since lived a fulfilling, accomplished life in service of trying to revise that failed moment. He played nineteen games in the minors, couldn’t hit, began to doubt himself as a player and a man, was of legal draft age and unmarried, was deemed not worth waiting through Vietnam for by the organization, was cut, and then felt worse than he ever had, felt a panic that spread over him.
He told me about it once, though, standing in the batting cage as men a third his age hit. His blood pressure spiked so high that the army wouldn’t take him, and at twenty-two, in a family of high school superstar athletes and veterans, he was washed up and useless to his country. It made him, he told me, doubt everything about himself, made him come to the conclusion that he was not worthy as a person, so quickly and quietly rejected from the only things he had ever equated with success. Eventually, he righted himself and got a master’s degree in education, taught U.S. history and coached high school baseball in a rainy green town in Oregon, won a state baseball championship, was hired to coach the University of Portland baseball team, did so for twenty years, had an office with lots of pictures in it, had a wife and children and grandchildren, had a house near a creek with decent fish, was, by his own account, a settled and satisfied man. All of which makes his willingness to quit, sell his home, uproot his wife from her job as an administrative nurse, move to the suburban sprawl next to a spring-training complex outside Phoenix, and spend six months a year on the road, back seizing after long bus trips, seem so inexplicable.
“Do you miss your life?” I asked him.
I think of how quickly he answered me as I watch him watching animals dressed as ranchers getting more applause than he ever did.
“God, never.” He was so sure. “All
of that was nice, but it wasn’t this.”
He is as stooped as many of the Baseball Family’s aged, though you can tell that what was once there was exceptional—long legs, broad back, hands that even with their arthritic contortions are substantial and imply a capacity for the endurance of pain. He shuffles out to coach first base only slightly faster than Bill shuffles into the stadium, trailing little Betty by a good four yards. It is a wholly different dynamic when he approaches the fans before games, not bright and improving like the players, but something closer to them, a face and a body ebbing. It’s difficult to know whether he is someone to be envied.
“In 1962, a little boy was born,” Wild Thang tells us. “And that little boy’s only dream was to own one of these here dogs.”
He is kneeling now behind home plate, where Hank should be crouching. Two exhausted border collies flank him. Also, one of the monkeys, finally off his saddle, has scampered up to sit on his shoulder, staring at the crowd, too panicked to move.
“And that little boy,” Wild Thang continues. “That boy, he loved a monkey by the name of Curious George. It all started there.”
He stops to let us absorb that.
“This has been my life,” he says. “These animals are my … life.”
It is a good pause. And in it I am able to realize that the music has changed seamlessly away from the honky-tonk rock that worked so well with small, galloping animals. The second movement in Wild Thang’s symphony is something like taps. Also a little like a stripped-down version of the theme from Independence Day. The scene is absurd, but we are all hushed, I think because Wild Thang has so fully embraced the meaning of this moment. Into the microphone, panting but resolute, he sounds as if he may be starting to cry, and even if he isn’t near tears, the tone is so intimate, this man kneeling as though in prayer, wearing the home team’s jersey and a cowboy hat that must be older than I am, surrounded by his animals, his life, giving thanks.
He sounds almost mournful when he continues.
“God has given me a talent, I know that he has.”
What a thing to know.
“I’m here with y’all tonight,” he says, and waits a moment for the appreciative smattering of cheers. “Tomorrow night I’m in, um, Davenport. Come Tuesday, I’m in Oregon. And the next week, Montana. And the next week, Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. And for me to do that, to be this man, to drive all these places, it takes people like y’all. Y’all, in your town, coming out to these games.”
It sounds as though he has more to say, and we are waiting for it, but he holds back, just enough to seem as stoic as we wanted him to be.
“I just want to thank y’all. May God bless you in the way he has blessed me.”
He stands, stiff, and walks with his animals to begin a circle of the field, stopping so that everyone in the crowd can take a last picture of monkeys sitting on dogs.
You can argue that one comes to every sporting event to see something new, each game unpredictable. But most sports have a clock ticking down, a beginning and then a set amount of minutes until it is over. Baseball is untimed and languid. Though this is no great revelation, it’s still satisfying in an existential way to know that the game will never constrain you with a predetermined end.
When will you be done? friends ask everyone here. When is it over? my girlfriend will text. And I can answer honestly: I have no idea. I have no idea what might happen with two on and two outs in the top of the eighth, a wild pickoff move to score the tying run or a walk to load the bases and a pitching change because the manager saw something scared on his boy’s face. If anything feels honestly dreamlike in baseball, in the action, the team, the crowd, the field, the itinerant entertainers, it is that we don’t know when it will be over while we’re in it.
And even when there is a final score, we can be stubborn, we can keep the game from ending. No wonder baseball is so weighted with literature and film versions. There are always stories left that we can tell, myths we can make, myths to fill in the spaces, observations that soon become hyperbole that then become outright lies, but so what? We can surprise ourselves by how we remember it, never exactly as what it was, a dream retold in the morning, boring probably, but at least open to interpretation.
With the invention of cell phones and the Internet, then the relationship between the two, Wild Thang has become famous. He is on his way to YouTube superstardom. It feels good to believe in a bayou boy who always wanted a life like the Man with the Yellow Hat. But also just his confidence that this was preordained, always an end point, an unquestionably substantive life to live. And if he says it with enough certainty, it is true. His wife is back in Mississippi. She is a good, no, a great woman, staying with his son and all of the things he has given up nobly not only to provide for them but to commune with a worthwhile existence, sleeping some nights at truck stops, nestled in the straw in his trailer, warmed by the body heat of three species that he dreamed of as a boy.
Variations of tonight’s speech have been spoken in places that look exactly like this one in Illinois, Delaware, Montana, and have gotten hundreds of thousands of hits with titles like: “Cowboy with Monkey Gives Crazy Inspirational Speech!!!!” And now people know ahead of time what is coming to town, and he surprises nobody with his entrance or his sentiment. But he still speaks every time and for longer, a whole life’s story about struggle and triumph and dogs and monkey training and the gulf oil spill and triumph again. I see Jason, the guy who videos everything in Clinton, leaning over the opposing team’s dugout, smiling, turning his left wrist to zoom the lens. This will be his all-time most viewed video, the only video that brings thousands of visitors to his YouTube page, more than Nick Franklin’s home runs or Kalian Sams’s home runs or Danny Carroll’s, or Hank’s two-run bloop single to right, which got 147 views, two likes, and zero comments.
Tim is a dreamer, he has told me so. But I think that he is using the word differently, the John Lennon way, though without that cheeky venom that colored Lennon’s free love. “Dream,” in the stands, with Tim, means something kind. He is a gentle, sedentary man, and so he prefers to dream.
He tells me a story from thirty years ago, right around the time that a young Wild Thang, just a humble rodeo clown then, began his pilgrimage to find the animals that would become his life. It’s from the strike, that year of loud, angry stagnancy. Tim and his friends were of a younger, hungry generation in Clinton, coming into adulthood in a deep recession, jealous of the union men who had some and still wanted more. And the company had ways of being more persuasive than a group of old guys holding signs could ever be. The strike began at midnight on August 1, 1979. By August 2, the Clinton Herald, as well as local papers in other Iowa counties, in Illinois, in Missouri, ran a full-page ad listing every new position that had opened up at the Clinton plant, along with its hourly salary, and at the bottom of the page an extra bonus, forty-six cents per hour for out-of-towners to cover cost of living.
Tim had plenty of friends who were scabs out of necessity. Because they were making $5.00 an hour doing part-time shit as everything began to close, and $8.79 an hour, as was advertised, is the start of a life, and how is it bad to want that? Tim looked me in the eye in a way that seemed important when he said that he couldn’t do it because he knew some of those striking men and he knew their families and he felt the collective deflation of his home that the losing effort was beginning to create. Or at least that is what he tells me, and so I believe it, and I look at Tim with melancholy reverence. He appreciates the things that deserve appreciation. He never worked a steady job at ADM, has never made what those guys make, but he does not want to be complicit in a corporation that would so happily crush people who were there first. All of it was a choice. It’s important I know that. He did the right thing, stupid maybe, but sacrificial, and why shouldn’t he be proud of that? Why can’t that be an achievement?
“At times,” Dan Peltier told Congress, “the minors seem to be a series of acts of desperation.”
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br /> There is a bluntness to these words that, when I read them out loud to myself, I realize I never hear, day after day after day in the clubhouse.
Of course, then he ends with “Despite these observations, I would not give up my experience in playing baseball for anything. There is no greater feeling in the world than the first time you get called up to the majors, and there is also no greater low than the day that you get sent back down. Knowing what I know, I would still do it all over again.”
I want to feel that certain about anything, but I don’t trust that I can. Who can? What real person that I know, that I love, has ever been that certain? I was brought up on doubt, the expectation of failure eventually validated because failure always happens. The only time that reality wasn’t discussed was during televised baseball games. And after my father told me that my brother’s problem was delusions of grandeur, that he actually thought he could be somebody amazing and that chasing a high was just an extension of incorrect logic, we turned on a baseball game. And he predicted a home run because his favorite player was due and had that look in his eyes.
Dan Peltier, the lucky one, the college graduate, the man who made the majors, and who now lives in the St. Paul suburbs with his wife and kids, got the chance to speak out, and he was still ignored. And a week before this season started, an article ran in Baseball America, the only reading material delivered to the clubhouse: “Playing for Peanuts: Many Minor Leagues Scrimp and Save to Survive.” It must have seemed a bit obvious to the players as they read it. It skimmed through difficult realities—the 2006 collective bargaining agreement that had no minor-league players in attendance, the fact that most minor leaguers interviewed said they would not unionize, fearing punishment and eventual release. But it ended on high redemption: “Their air mattresses will sit in rooms decorated only by mold. And they’ll gladly accept this sacrifice. They’re chasing a dream.”