by Lucas Mann
“Oh, I wish he would slow down,” Joyce said above me in the bleachers. “It’s a nice night.”
Everyone agreed that Joyce was insane. It was not a nice night. It was choking and humid, bearable only by those who tally weeks toward the end of the season and begin wincing come August, because this will soon be over.
Even as the LumberKings pummeled the Timber Rattlers’ pitching, with Matt Cerione hitting a towering home run into the Lumber Lounge, putting the game seven runs out of reach and finally rousing the fans to stand in the heat, Erasmo did not relax or slow down. He didn’t even take Betty up on a personalized candy offer.
“He seems like one of the real religious ones,” Betty said, as though there were a connection between anti-candy and pro-God. “He has a churchgoing face.”
“Remember Salomon Torres?” Tammy said. “He was religious. He became a minister. Good guy.”
“We used to barbecue for him,” Tim said. “He was on the championship team in ’91. We were with him before the last game, remember?”
Salomon Torres was the best pitcher in Clinton in 1991. He went on to play in the majors, kept at it until 2008. Now he focuses on his faith and his daughters. He hasn’t been back to Clinton since, but he is a type here—sincere, brown, funny name, kindly relatable and exotic all at once. He, or the memory of him, is Erasmo, and Erasmo, the moment he did well here, became interchangeable with Torres, though he isn’t aware of it. We watch his back as he returns to the clubhouse to ice, another number 50.
It is the next day, and we’re stuck in the clubhouse before the ninetieth game of the season. Erasmo is dripping sweat, working the soreness out of his body, grunting his stats as he lifts, dips, squats. He knows every numerical way he can be quantified. He recites his wins and his losses, his strikeouts and his walks, how few he surrendered. He hasn’t learned to lie and say that the only thing he cares about is team. He is upset because he hasn’t been allowed to pitch a complete game, not yesterday, not ever. Never mind that the Mariners are trying to protect his young arm, complete games are recorded, and they show durability, both mental and physical. It is a blemish on the master list that he is sure someone important somewhere possesses.
I’m tucked out of the way, perched on a medicine ball, watching him dominate the weight room on his own, as usual. The strength coach should be looking at people’s conditioning charts, and if he were, he might find names that are supposed to be in here and aren’t, as well as proof that Erasmo should be resting by now. But he is looking at a used paintball-gun auction online. Erasmo has free rein to overwork. He looks in the mirror.
“Eight wins, four losses,” he tells me again as he hoists and exhales.
People are looking over and listening, but he doesn’t realize it.
“Not bad,” he continues.
“It’s great,” I say.
“No, not great. It should be better. If we score more runs, I win more.”
He says it not as an attack on the teammates sprawled around him. I don’t think they or their potential reactions enter his thought process. They haven’t done their jobs, and it reflects poorly upon Erasmo. That is just true and there’s nothing he can do about it and that’s frustrating.
“I mean, come on,” he says with finality. “Come on,” spoken quick and flat, is the English phrase that Erasmo has gravitated toward to express shame, derision, fury, the same way all the American players have taken to maricón to supplement their own native homophobia.
“I could be 12-2,” he says.
“Well, I’m sure they know that,” I say, too paternally maybe. “I’m sure they don’t blame you or anything.”
He says, “The numbers are what they see.”
As though to emphasize the importance of numbers, he grabs a heavier weight. I watch his knuckles whitening against his skin as he strains. His hands are still a boy’s, like mine, fingers short and chubby, knuckles indented when he is not straining, and that makes me feel good. That was the first thing I noticed when I met him and he shook my hand. Baby palms, dimpled knuckles. I thought it was charming in that moment of quiescence. But now he is always straining, and the stillness has rarely reappeared. There’s always been some reason to grip.
Erasmo lived and played in Venezuela for two years, never anywhere you’d find easily on a map. A year from now, I will try to retrace his steps, which won’t be easy. First, it’s a plane from Chicago to Miami to Caracas, the capital. From there, it’s a bus to Valencia, exiting the station past military police who stand near where the taxis wait, machine guns cradled like babies. I meet John Tamargo at his hotel in Valencia. He’s been demoted, even though his new title sounds better. He is now director of Latin American operations for the Mariners, but all that means is that he is farther from home, farther from the majors, too, overseeing those with the most outside chance at success. To get to the Mariners complex, we drive an hour and a half, winding up hills, pushing farther into the jungle. We stop only at random police checkpoints, roll down the window, say “baseball,” and are treated as unsuspicious, almost royal. Ilich is our driver, a former player, now a scout. He is one of the thousands who scour fields in every Venezuelan province, a network that ensures that if a player is nearing puberty and decent, he’ll be noticed. On the drive all we notice are the girls, eighteen, I try to convince myself, who hop out of the brush by the side of the road with thermoses full of coffee and miniature plastic cups. They put their chests up against the windows and pretend it’s an accident, and so we buy coffee.
Tamargo makes a low moan, says something about the bodies on Venezuelan women, I mean, Jesus Christ, the bodies.
“Everything is beautiful here,” he says.
And he’s right.
I have never been to a jungle before. The leaves are a different kind of green, and bigger, too. It gets cooler as we drive farther, a hallucinatory, horror-film mist over everything, and Ilich has to run his wipers, even though it isn’t raining. It helps if I ignore the shacks dotting the hillside next to us, wood-bodied with recycled-aluminum tops. Though I find the blight romantic and expected, I cannot reconcile the size and newness of the satellite dishes perched atop the aluminum roofs. Or Ilich’s casual comments about how the poor don’t want to get themselves running water; they just want to steal electricity to watch MTV.
Incidentally, there’s a small TV in Ilich’s dashboard blasting reggaeton music videos. We watch polished, glitter-doused women smushing their breasts together as we climb into the mountains. Erasmo made this drive, I know, as alone and unknowing as I am now, but he was seventeen and joyous, fresh off being signed, feeling impossibly rich and validated. He’d packed his two suitcases that he’d been living out of at the academy in El Salvador and moved again, heading to be the only Nicaraguan on this team of thirty-five prospects, not knowing how long he’d be allowed to stay. I try to think of him maybe in this same car, looking out the windows, the farthest he’d ever been from home, but far from done, farther still from where he wanted to be.
Agua Linda is the name of the complex the Mariners rent. It’s maybe twenty acres of manicured grass and a dorm fronted by a brick wall, so much more solid than anything else around it. Ilich gets out and bangs on an iron door painted bright blue to evoke water. The gatekeeper and his son wave as we drive in. We hear the sound of heavy hooves on wet grass, and to our right horses are trotting. The baseball farm occupies only half these grounds, sharing space with a horse farm, the stables facing the windows of the dorm so the players can make out the shadows of the beasts as they fall asleep.
I think Erasmo told me once that he liked the horses. That one day he would buy one. In the mornings here, after his runs, he would stroke their noses, and they would lick the salt off his sweaty arms.
Tamargo and I agree that the horses are beautiful, another beautiful thing.
“That’s a fucking horse,” Tamargo says. “Look at the size of that thing.”
“Mmm,” I say. And then, to welcome Ilich i
nto this mood of wonder, “¿Bonito, sí?”
“Sí,” Ilich says.
Tamargo says it wouldn’t be so bad to get a piece of land out here, huh? A hundred acres with nothing around but jungle and mountains. Buy some horses. Let them run. You wouldn’t even know what year it was; that’s the kind of life to want. Of course, Chávez might take the fucking thing at any time, so this isn’t the best buyer’s market, but still, someday.
Hugo Chávez, president of Venezuela, is a reviled figure in professional baseball. He is, at least nominally, a socialist in the face of an industry that is as purely profit-driven and as top-down as any on earth. Less than a decade ago, there were eighteen major-league teams with academies in Venezuela. Now, as Chávez’s term has extended twelve years, there are eight. The Houston Astros were the first organization to invest as much infrastructure in Venezuela as in the Dominican Republic. Andrés Reiner, the Astros scout who first defined Venezuela as a place worth investing in, has since moved on to Colombia and then to Brazil, predicting that with a combination of poverty, love of sport, and a pliable, U.S.-friendly government, Venezuela’s neighbors could become baseball’s next El Dorado.
“Fucking Chávez,” Tamargo says, still looking at the horses.
“Sí,” Ilich says.
These are, of course, issues that the players like Erasmo are not aware of. No, that’s an unfair conclusion. They’re issues not openly discussed. An apolitical life seems almost a necessity among athletes, especially those athletes who haven’t reached any semblance of security, especially when the game becomes a life-dominating specialization from a very young age. Rationally, I can take all of this in and know that perhaps it is not the greatest help to the development of a human being, the single-minded drive with which these boys play. In this way, Erasmo is a forced innocent. When I first met him, it was all pity that I felt, as if he were some lost pup, agreeable, exploitable. But more and more, and especially when I’m standing where he once did, part of me is jealous. It’s a monastic life, with fidelity to one thing. And so to watch Erasmo play baseball is to watch more perfection, more focused thought, than I will ever achieve in a lifetime of critical thinking.
A horse whinnies, and in the distance there is the sound of cleats on dirt, and Tamargo smiles at indistinguishable bodies. The Venezuelan Summer League Mariners are training before a game against the Venezuelan Summer League Pirates. At first, it looks like the scene before a Little League game—the baby faces, the small crowds consisting mostly of overzealous family members, the anonymous players cavorting in replica major-league jerseys. The main differences, of course, are in the thick Amazon tree line just beyond the outfield fence and the sometimes-stunning collection of raw talent on the field. There is something fierce in the concentrated eyes of the players, something that, in retrospect, I’m sure was noticeable in Erasmo and his Latin American teammates in Iowa, so different from those around them. Or maybe I just want Erasmo to represent everyone who comes to America from afar to play. It is easier to valorize and pity an unsubtle idea.
Either way, it’s impossible to ignore how the VSL Mariners look at coaches as if they’re deified, Tamargo in particular, who arrives every few months with those brightly colored index cards, the gatekeeper to the United States. He returns their worship with kindness. He roots for them, and I see on display the very best in his baseball knowledge, his ability to break down the smallest movements, to watch a swing over and over again and know when it has transformed into something worth praising.
“This is the way baseball was meant to be,” Tamargo says to me, making these players signify what he wants them to. “These boys are playing for their lives.”
“I’m hungry,” Erasmo tells me, which is nothing new. He’s done lifting for now, still soaked in sweat, needing to replenish.
“McDonald’s?” he asks. “You drive?”
Of course I will. He is learning who will do what for him. He is learning that he’s someone worthy of having things done for him. It’s a parched Sunday afternoon that has followed immediately on the heels of a morning filled with lightning sheets over the Mississippi and street-flooding rain. It’s one of those days when no player wants to play, when the idea of risking injury on a slippery infield in an A-ball stadium is a reasonable expectation only for brainwashed coaches’ sons or crash-test dummies. But there is no way this game will not be played. A weekend matinee always draws fans, and right now Ted Tornow has put on his Wellingtons and manned the John Deere, plowing the soupy mud of the bullpen himself. Tamargo has already been to his office saying the game should be canceled and then wandered back muttering. As Erasmo and I leave, the other players are busy parroting their manager, exchanging monologues of discontent.
There is no discontent in the McDonald’s. It’s just us and the after-church crowd. We are the youngest customers in here by two generations. Erasmo puffs out his already puffed chest as we walk into the air-conditioning, pushing his team logo toward the crowd, but he gets no response from anybody. We sit and I hardly see his face as he hunches over a stack of three cheeseburgers, an order of large fries, two apple pies.
Around us, people sit in groups, each with close ties, all connected. Men with thin white hair and pressed white shirts shake hands and remember things from before we were born. I watch the hands of a couple to my right, brittle fingers entwined as though they would be uncomfortable unattached, his free hand tapping on her knee with no rhythm. Erasmo follows my eyes, notices the people around him for the first time, and looks momentarily surprised.
“Old,” he says. “Very old. Like my grandmother.”
“You miss her?” I ask.
He shrugs. “Sometimes.”
“You must miss a lot of people,” I say.
He shrugs. “Sometimes.”
We sit in silence for a little while. He isn’t as pleasant to me anymore. That’s not necessarily a fair expectation, I know. But we spend a lot of time together, and at first he was happy to have the attention, and now he’s busy. When I first drove him home in the rain, he was willing, smiling, and I set myself the task of finding the reality behind the rehearsed answers, as though I could free him from the fate of being blandly, productively likable. The first time I saw him, he walked onto the bus to go to Quad Cities in his striped polo and his too-long jean shorts. He smiled at me, a stranger, and pounded my fist. He walked down the aisle, and Chris, the bus driver, said with a strange pride, “Nicest boy you’ll ever meet. Don’t think he understands a word we’re saying, but damned if he ain’t happy to be here.”
Chris is an overbearing man who treats the players with a concerned care, and though he tried to bar me from entering the bus at first because of my bearded terrorist potential, I’ve never found any malice in him. Erasmo was always his favorite, perhaps because he lets him believe that he smiles through an inability to understand, even though he understands everything. Chris gets off the bus when Erasmo pitches, finds himself a seat in the front row, cheers hard. But I can’t ignore the heavy condescension in the way he speaks about Erasmo and his dutifulness, that adorably eager quality of a Sunday-school standout. And I don’t like it when people talk about him that way, because it often so closely echoes how I sound when I describe him to others—a story worth telling because of the shit that he’s mucked through, his silent perseverance, even though he is a goddamn professional baseball player, that identity that I still see as the pinnacle of awesomeness, and he has never once described any sense of having to persevere through anything.
The fact that he’s from somewhere far away and needs to be in Clinton, that’s the appeal. So the specifics of where he’s from don’t matter. On the first LumberKings trading card night, the Clinton fans got an Erasmo Ramírez card that claimed he was from El Salvador. He went to a sports academy there and was discovered there by scouts, but his only nationality is Nicaraguan. He was, of course, annoyed by the mislabeling and did, of course, nothing to correct it, fearing the reputation of someone who g
ets difficult—read clubhouse cancer, read not worth it—over inconsequential things. I still can’t be sure who is aware of the mistake, since, when I sat playing cards with the white pitchers in the Quad Cities clubhouse, they nodded at him and called him, with confidence, Dominican.
“Are you excited to see your family once the season is over?”
“Maybe I will.”
“Why wouldn’t you?”
He raises one eyebrow at me and smiles over a cheeseburger.
“Who do I train with in Nicaragua?” he says. “I have my one friend; he goes to the field and catches for me. He asks me to help him, too. He’s no good, though. He’s just around. There’s nothing for me.”
“So no home?”
“Maybe. Maybe a month. I’m going to ask the team if I can go to Venezuela instead. Stay at the academy. That’s good. That’s where I need to be.”
I don’t know what the academy means yet, so the intensity of what he wants doesn’t register fully. Later, when I’m snooping around the academy dorms, counting ten steps by eight across each shared cubicle, only a body’s length between iron bunk beds, I will think of Erasmo and how intensely he wanted to return here. When the Agua Linda gates close at nine every night, no danger coming in, no prospect of exiting, I will think of Erasmo again. And when I see players feeding continuous coins into the two pay phones outside the mess hall, I will see Erasmo’s face, his chubby hand cradling the receiver.