Class A

by Lucas Mann

  He is thorough. “Speaking of my digital recorder,” he writes, “it’s a TASCAM DR-07 that I purchased from Guitar Center. Yes, that sounds off the beaten path for sports broadcasters, but the mini recorders that you buy at office supply stores just don’t have the audio clarity that my TASCAM does.”

  He lets us know that he is not a snob or a trend whore. He does not use Apple products just because they’re fashionable, and his HP has worked just fine for two seasons. His headset is “rugged” compared with the things you’ll see other guys shelling out for. But he doesn’t mind being old school. Neither should we.

  If we have questions, his e-mail address is there, and he welcomes any and all. We’re free to comment on the post, too, an instant missive for the public to read. If we comment, he’ll respond.

  The radioman is the world creator. The radioman interprets moments that almost nobody else sees, and maybe sometimes he invents them. Because everything else is blank. On television, for the fractional percent of announcers who make that leap to the screen, their art becomes ornamentation to the images of the players that everyone cares about and the graphics that can exactly quantify a player’s habits, trends, worth. Some of the larger A-ball markets have occasional TV coverage of their games. It’s a terrible idea, primarily because it removes the opportunity to imagine beyond the confines of ever-dull reality. One camera peeking over the wall in center field reduces the game to specific borders, a distance that is neither bird’s-eye in scope nor close enough to reveal emotion. It’s like watching a recently exhumed video of a child’s talent show, the triumph instantly exposed for how small it really was.

  But nothing is celebrated until it is lost, and world creation is no exception, trumpeted in the human interest columns of sports sections only now that it can be referred to as a dying art. After this season, when Dave Niehaus dies and thus vacates his longtime position as the Mariners’ broadcaster, the job that Dave and every other man in the lower rungs of the Mariners organization daily, silently fantasizes himself doing, tributes will be written full of weighty quotes. Niehaus will be remembered as saying, “[Radio] is where the creativity is.” Vin Scully is still alive, but only that kind of alive that leaves everyone waiting in anticipation of the explosion of legacy-defining that will follow his death. He says that the radioman is “the eyes and the ears, and the imagination, as well.” Former baseball commissioner Bart Giamatti, the most eloquent of the game’s suits, put it best, calling a major-league radio broadcast “the enclosed green fields of the mind.”

  When the LumberKings are doing poorly, I think I can hear Dave’s mind, but the fields aren’t green. I hear only mounting negativity in his pauses and occasional sighs. Players’ girlfriends, who have to listen to the weak KCLN streaming feed on their computers to track their boyfriends, complain, when they come into town, that his voice can make them think that nothing is ever going to be okay, certainly not the career prospects of the itinerant men they plan to marry.

  When I can no longer hear him, I imagine his night. I imagine him in the booth, staying longer than he has to. The visiting announcer will have already packed up his things, may already be a couple of beers deep. Brad will have already knocked on the window that separates the PA man’s side of the wooden cubicle from the announcer’s, silently gesturing that Dave should leave with him. He will have already been waved off.

  Often a player is commended for the things he does when nobody is watching. This speaks to his better-than-ours motivation, even at a young age, the “intangibles” that bring a player favor and are always referenced, though never satisfactorily explained. Of course there is the unspoken reality that since the player is commended for doing things when nobody’s watching, somebody is, in fact, watching. Dave is watching, for one. And Dave will report, faithfully, that a kid like Erasmo is always diligent, always doing extra work alone and unprovoked, a quality that seems so important in the morality by which Dave lives. But nobody will ever say it about him.

  A broadcaster, especially at this level, where no team would think of paying for two of them, is almost always surrounded and almost always alone. He rides the bus with the players, but he sits in the front with his laptop and organizes stats that he will announce about the boys who lounge behind him, screaming until it all sounds like one voice. When I leave the park early and I listen to Dave, Joyce is there, too, and Kevin and the rest of the white noise, and I know that he is perched atop a thousand people, that they are all experiencing the same thing. But Dave is talking out beyond the stadium, to anyone, to a collection of people with no faces, a group of indeterminate size.

  · · ·

  I talk to myself on these nighttime car rides.

  “That’s a motherfucking dead deer,” I say, when I pass exploded carcasses on the side of the road, trying not to look at the eyes, if they’re still there.

  “Yeah,” I scream, when I pass a semi and duck in front of it because we’ve been racing and I just won the race, though the trucker, who I can never see, doesn’t know it.

  Sometimes I imagine eye contact when a car comes up behind me after minutes of nobody. There is just enough light for me to see the shape of a face through the rearview mirror. I imagine that she is young, heading back home from college, something like that. She is tired and she wants contact. Through her windshield, bouncing off my mirror, we see each other.

  It’s too late to call home, which is what I still call my parents’ home. If it were earlier, I would call my father, and he would listen as I described the field. He would give off low wows as I told him about the slope of the outfield fence again, the splinters on the wood, the chalk mixed in the dirt. He likes the details. He likes the way the seats clump in a semicircle around the infield and how everything else is empty space, how open that must look. He likes the notion of the river beyond the fence, and the train tracks, these enormous tropes clustered around a game unchanged in my retelling. He will talk to me still with a patience that is embarrassing because it means that he senses I need it. The stories I tell him mimic the ones that he told me to make me fall asleep as a boy.

  Imagine it. Imagine it until you can’t imagine anything bad, and then you will close your eyes, and then you will wake up okay.

  I want to talk to Dave about fear in those moments when we do talk, whether we’re sitting by Joyce watching batting practice or on the bus, at the front, turning our necks to look for inclusion when there is a burst of laughter. It’s something that mounts over the course of a season. When there is so much watching, so many moments in which you are not the primary actor, thoughts become louder. We are close to the same age, Dave and I, though I hardly ever remember that. Despite his self-imposed responsibilities and the distinguished grays in his hair, we’re in the same space in our lives, out of college and not yet thirty, old enough to worry, young enough to try to look at the players as peers even as they’re treated as part baby, part full-on adult, never equal.

  We talk about the players when we talk.

  We share anecdotes, and if something I say sounds too personal or juicy, too much of a brag or a challenge to his authority, I feel sorry for it.

  “Sams needs to start hitting curveballs,” I said to him at a recent batting practice.

  “Obviously,” he said. “Some guys, you know, it’s just those little adjustments that need to be made holding them back.”

  “Mmm,” I said.

  “Who knows what’ll happen,” he said.

  “I’ve noticed that if you throw him a first-pitch strike, it’s a guaranteed out,” I said. I was proud of that one.

  “Oh, you’ve noticed that, too?” he said.

  We turned to watch Sams together, and together we analyzed his failures. We were far enough away not to see his face as he fouled off easy batting practice lobs and saw Tamargo turn his back with some combination of boredom and disgust. We glanced at each other and exchanged a knowing, worried look. We did not say what I know I was thinking and what I hope and guess
that Dave was thinking, too: that it would be painful and somehow wildly unjust for Kalian Sams to fail here. This man flown in all the way from Holland, with shoulders that look like a pair of bowling balls resting on a seesaw, who can hit a ball far enough to make you giggle for lack of a better response. And still he is tenuous. He could soon become past tense, a few pictures on baseball cards sold on eBay for thirty-three cents, a stat line that no longer changes. And what does that say about those of us who follow him?

  Sometimes, Dave, I wake up right after I fall asleep because it feels like a hand that’s even bigger than the hand of Kalian Sams is choking me. I drive to minor-league baseball games to find something remarkable. Or maybe I just want to watch because watching slows time, removes rush and responsibility from those of us not playing. Sometimes it feels like I’m trying too hard, I’m reaching for meaning, and I want to be remarkable, or at least validated in what I think is worthwhile, and that feels like pulling at a fishing line that doesn’t end and is always weighted, yanking it toward myself until red tracks of blood run across my palms.

  I want to ask Dave if he thinks that his voice stands out.

  Overlooking the field, he got personal for a moment without me asking anything. He told me that he was searched for three times on his blog, by name. He can track every hit he gets and does so in the morning, slouched in his desk chair, drinking Diet Mountain Dew. Sometimes people are searching “Mariners” or “Iowa baseball” or, often, “Nick Franklin shortstop,” but three of them typed in his name.

  I thought Delilah was only an Iowa phenomenon, but I was wrong. She is everywhere. As I exit onto I-80, past the largest truck stop in the world with a population near a thousand on any given night, then a new thousand the next night, she is talking to me, here, and she is saying the same words to people in Boston and Seattle and Jacksonville and Palm Springs. After a commercial break we all hear her drums, her guitar, her soprano sax, then “De-Li-Lah,” as usual. Her voice intones with a question.

  “Have a long shift at the—” There is a pause, not long and ungraceful like when the LumberKings fail and Dave’s sighs linger. Then: “John Deere factory?” It’s been prerecorded from a list that she must be given by her producers, the most iconic employers of every region where she is syndicated. And the Quad Cities survive off tractors. “Kick your boots off and relax with me,” she invites her laborer fans. Clinton isn’t big enough for Delilah to speak directly to it, and “Archer Daniels Midland corn-processing and polymer plastics plant” doesn’t have the “John Deere” ring to it.

  A caller tells Delilah that she used to be full of doubt and now she isn’t. She tells her that her boyfriend never wanted to commit, he just wasn’t ready, but then one day he was. It was a miracle. And now he’s perfect. Things worked out.

  “Isn’t that amazing?” the woman says. “Isn’t it amazing the way life works. I just thought I should tell you.”

  Delilah is no fool and she seems dubious, but she congratulates the woman and calls her sweetie. I can hear the woman smiling. There are the sounds of a child who should be asleep in the background. Delilah plays a song just for this woman and her perseverance, her final, maybe delusional happiness. It’s Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful,” a perfect song for the moments when Delilah isn’t quite sure how to handle a vapid caller but still wants to be nice. Anything can be remarkable when Delilah plays the right song.

  I look down to turn up the volume. I look up to see the eyes of something. It’s too small to be a deer, bigger than a rabbit, though. Whatever it is, it’s alive for a last second and its eyes are wet and black and I am the last thing it sees before the squelch that is louder than Delilah, louder than my engine. And then I am past it, and it makes no more noise. Delilah says that music is the language of angels. When you are listening to her, you are eavesdropping on something holy.

  The truck stop by exit 271 is lit up in a harsh, alien glow. I stop here when I have to pee, mostly, but tonight I stop because I want to stop. I want to stand still and look at the blood on my bumper and then close my eyes. The semis are strewn along the grounds, not parked in distinct rows, just wherever. Nobody is in the hallway at the truck stop. One of the lights that run horizontally across the ceiling is broken. It makes a sound like a radio with no signal. I look out at all the trucks, and I know men are in them, sleeping or masturbating or just staring ahead, but there are no lights, and I let myself think, for the moment, that I’m the only person inert and off the highway for miles.

  In the bathroom, a man is bending down over the sink to splash water on his face and then looking up at his reflection in the mirror, beads of water hanging off the edges of his beard. He does it a few times, slowly, and doesn’t look at me. I wonder who he listens to as he drives, how many times stations fade out and change with voices like Delilah’s extending across state lines, linking places and days.

  Tammy goes to most games with her family still, but her husband doesn’t anymore. Dan was part of the Roadkill Crew, the wheelman a lot of the time, with Tammy riding shotgun and Tim howling in the back. He drove to Arizona for spring training for a few years, watching the sunrise on the fire-orange hills as they got close while everyone else slept. He organized all his vacation days at ADM around Clinton’s away games. But he’s quit ADM now. He hated it there for twenty-five years, the hours, the way his lungs hurt, the burn on his shoulders and arms after an afternoon inside the vats with a jackhammer, getting sludge off steel. He had been a complainer, or at least he had complained to Tammy about the stuff he saw poured into the river and the way things were inside the factory, and she had made a stink until the plant manager told Dan to shut her up. Dan is a truck driver now, finally. Before the heart attack, and again right after the doctors cleared him, he lived a life hopping between places like this rest stop, no longer stationary, looking forward to the next game’s beginning. He is, Tammy says, who he always wanted to be, nobody’s employee, unmoored.

  I try to think of myself as that kind of man, my face drawn and tired from staring down the whole country as I hurtle through it. I try to think of how many people I would see and nod to, exchange a word with, that I would never have to speak to again. That is all I think of these days—I could be that. I have the capacity to be that. The sound of an engine starting comes from outside, the whining chug until finally the clutch catches and then a roar.

  It is a beautiful act to put language to the game, making it better than it really is. I want to think that for sure, and I want to tell Dave that, too. It is a noble thing. It is making something, even if it doesn’t last. Dave’s earliest precursors narrated games before they could produce clean, live audio from the stadium. Before teams sent radiomen to away games, they would get transcripts and sit in a windowless booth, overlooking nothing, and they would call the thing with urgency. They held miniature bats in one hand during broadcasts, and when a batter made contact, they voiced it, slapping their wood against the thick cardboard of empty teletape rolls. They simulated crowd noise and then pitched their own words above it, heightening the ambience that they’d created, yelling behind the fabrications to make you feel it. There were the facts—the ball was caught in right field, the score is tied at one—and everything else was theirs. They had the power to make people imagine what they knew to be true.

  Ted told me that at the winter baseball meetings in Orlando, the LumberKings got 650 résumés and tapes from men looking for Dave’s job, a job that wasn’t vacated and might not be any time soon. Voices with names quickly forgotten, hoping that something in the timbre of their home run call would give them the right to move to Clinton, Iowa. All Dave wants to do is leave. This was supposed to be a springboard, an entrance leading right to an exit. He is in his fifth year now. This past winter was the first when he didn’t return home to his parents’ house in Wisconsin and spend the off-season doing ticket sales for the Milwaukee Brewers, his voice clean and precise over the phone, wasted on repeating package deals to one listener at a time.
Instead, he stayed in Clinton and called high school football games, tried to dramatize the stumbling movements of pimply sophomores to their grandmothers sitting at home.

  Dave and I pretend to each other. We feign assurance. Dave knows everything. And he tells me everything he knows as though I should know it, too, as though anyone should. He has shaped a life around memorizing and interpreting players who can do things that he can’t. I look for that certainty. For talent that is certain, for scores that are official. For images that live up to what I expect them to be.

  I tell myself again that the idea is to transcend, a word that does not gain clarity as I overuse it, but in fact grows more obscure. Still, to transcend. That vagary is what to reach for, found maybe in the clubhouse, the stadium, all of it. The broadcast. I’ve read quotations of men who said that watching baseball live for the first time was a disappointment after having listened to Harry Caray for years, because his version was so much more. And then they got to the park and everything had limits and the players were mortal men, maybe a little taller, a little faster than the average. That seems impossible, here and now, that sense of awe. Dave just wants more people to hear what he knows. I think we both want to look down on each other.

  Brad and Dave, the local voices, go out after the games sometimes. They go to Manning’s Whistle Stop, across the street from the stadium. Brad has been going to Manning’s for a long time, it being the closest bar to the public address booth that he has manned since he was seventeen. Brad will tell me months from now, when we’re driving together across three states because the LumberKings are still alive when nobody expected them to be, that he could have ended up at various places along the route. South Bend, in particular, offered him a job to be their public address man, and they would have set him up with other duties as well—stats, maybe some radio. But who knows? Sure, they promised him things, but what does that mean? We will pass the South Bend exit on our way to Ohio, and Brad will point.