by Lucas Mann
It’s hard to defend fans to players who have no real reason to know them. Because sometimes I think that as much as anything the players’ most prized possession is their sense of exclusivity. When you haven’t reached the identity that you want, that you need, when every failed at bat is a reminder that you probably never will, when Baseball America identifies the Seattle Mariners as a team that has only managed to produce one legitimate big leaguer out of their farm system in seven years, it has to be nice to occupy a space where most people aren’t worthy to trespass. Anybody they see should be either in service of their improvement or unworthy of their acknowledgment.
For most of the season, I assumed that all the white-haired guys who showed up in Clinton for a day, watched, spoke with a few players, and left in rented Buicks with Illinois plates were scouts. That they shared a purpose, that of the critical observer. I hadn’t seen an older man who moved with any sort of authority do anything except judge. But one man stood out despite the snowy hair, warm-up pants, clipboard. I saw him hold Danny’s shoulder tenderly after a bad game, promise him with feeling that they’d talk soon.
His name is Jack. He is a grandpa, and when he leaves Clinton, he heads up to his lake house in Wisconsin. His grandkids join him, and they go tubing. That’s the kind of story that he likes to tell the players, the kind that makes them smile and say, “Man, tubing.” Jack is a sports psychologist, one of a tiny wave of innovators who slowly gained acceptance in locker rooms during the 1990s, despite the unmistakable New Agey whiff of their philosophies. Still, he seems out of place, and his acceptance is an uneasy one. All the coaches played at a time when there were no Jacks, when nobody patted their shoulders, made them promises. Jack brings kindness, something akin to weakness. Jack does the thing that everybody who watches wants to do.
When Jack leaves, Danny goes through his mantras of self-care.
I am a good hitter, he tells himself.
I am going to succeed at what I can control and not worry about what I cannot control.
I am in a calm, settled place, and good things happen in that place.
He can get more specific:
I will hit a double today.
I will feel good each time I step to the plate.
Even if yesterday was a bad day, I am not a bad player, nor am I a bad person.
Sams is doing the same in Everett, Washington, both tagged as guys with potential, getting into their own heads and stalling their own progress. This is the kind of fragility and resulting gentleness that makes the clubhouse so off-limits. This sweet man, this hand on that shoulder, these quiet, hopeful repetitions of mantras to make a young boy calm down—all of it is completely unexpected. Unwanted. It’s disturbing, far more wrong, I think, than the steroids I’ve never seen but everyone figures I’m looking for. Everything else I see daily is a confirmation of what I’ve assumed. The sometimes focused, sometimes jocular, often homoerotic lives of athletes. Boredom and weight lifting and porn and tobacco and makeshift contests of strength and Bibles with Post-its in them. It’s vivid, all of it, but unsurprising. Not as disconcerting as a shaved and muscled stud scheduling time to remind himself that he has some worth in the world.
Today, I stand with Hank while he suits up, and we watch Danny from a short distance as he whispers good things. Hank is talking about Sams, calling him sensitive, not as a direct insult, but kind of. Hank always seems proud of himself when he talks about Sams now. They are no longer roommates, and Hank is no longer a sidekick, because Hank has won, still relevant in this place, in this moment. And all the while, since the day he was drafted, he has had to supply his own belief.
According to his doctors, Tom Bigwood was the most pathologically hopeful person they’d ever treated. These weren’t local doctors who knew Tom well. By the end, he had to be driven to Iowa City, where I live, and given experimental, aggressive treatment in the state’s biggest hospital. There he would wait his turn, doubled in pain, smiling at the strangers who seemed frightened of him. And then the doctors would call him and say, Tom, this isn’t good. Or, Tom, there won’t be any stopping the pain. Or, finally, Tom, you will not live. No, nothing is for certain, but it would be a miracle if you weren’t dead next year.
He smiled like someone who didn’t know better than to smile. That’s why, his sister-in-law thinks, they took her aside and asked her, Does he know what we said? Does he realize? Does he understand? If he didn’t, it was because he chose not to. They left the hospital with Tom making bright announcements in the waiting room that he would be healthy soon, that the next time these strangers saw him, he would be cured.
Everything clicked in at a certain point, of course. It made his death like a flash fire, like a trip-wire boom, because he refused to build up any glum, nihilistic shell, preferred to not be dying until he un-ignorably was. That’s when he started asking about the bricks he’d been promised. Those to be purchased in his name and placed by the stadium entrance. How long does it take for brick to fade away? How long does it take? When will my brick be gone? He couldn’t walk much at that point and it was winter and there was still ice everywhere. His sister-in-law couldn’t take him around the empty downtown as a reminder, point out all the brick that was there when he was born and would be there, it was certain now, when he died.
She reassured him. Brick is one of those things that if you leave it, if you are content with it, it will stay. And in front of the entrance at Alliant Energy Field, there is proof of that—low-maintenance permanence. There are so few rules. Just don’t clean the brick too often, that will begin to chip away at it. If you take a powerful pressure washer and force the clean, the brick will start to disappear. But that’s not hard to not do. Don’t let too many feet kick at the brick, if it can be helped. Brick is better looked at than stepped on. There will be snow on the brick, yes, and then there will be plows scraping the snow off. But, still, Tom’s brick will last. The only real way to destroy brick is to do so intentionally. To pull it from the ground and haul it to the dump. To blow it up to get to the dirt below.
Tom wanted to know if his brick would be safe if the team was sold, if the stadium was remodeled for something newer. That answer, probably, was no.
Hank still fields questions from me and everyone else who is not too intimidated to ask him: When do you think you’ll quit? What do you want to do for a living someday? Will it be cool to say that you were once roommates with Nick Franklin? On paper, or actually on a computer screen, his own career is almost untraceable, just a couple of links to his name and his stats, no pictures, no comments below discussing his progress. The smallest of athletic footprints, followed by tabs about an amateur boxer named Henry Contreras, a high school wrestler, an immigration lawyer.
But in the real and present mid-August, Clinton, Iowa, Hank is hitting well above .300, the only LumberKing with that kind of productivity to his name. Sure, he hasn’t had many opportunities to fail, but numbers are irrefutable. On the other hand, Nick has been scouted and sort of exposed. I haven’t seen him get a fastball for a strike in a month. I’ve seen him get frustrated, jumping out at changeups, pounding curves into the ground. His average in the .270s now. And his chase of the franchise home run record, which had a month ago seemed almost too easy, has stalled at twenty-two, one away. He is upset about it. He is just generally upset. Fans tell him he can do it, tell him they’re sure he will make this season something memorable, but that doesn’t make him feel better. Quite the opposite. As Nick stays furious, as the fans want him to know that they believe he will win, an inevitable question keeps pushing through the tension: Why should anybody give a shit?
The corn is starting to bust from its husks. Combines like giant spiders have already started to pluck and grind. Soon nothing will be growing. Soon this season will be over. Soon some of the splotchy teens who work the concession stands at the park will be suited up playing high school football, slipping through an early snow on a Friday night, and plenty of people will find just as much a cau
se to root for them as they did for Nick.
And for the players, what’s winning in Low-A compared with going home? The Latinos, for the most part, rarely stop playing. They might get Christmas with their families, but Erasmo is already preparing for the Liga Paralela, a season of games throughout the fall in Venezuela. The best American players, like Nick, are beginning to find out about fall ball assignments. They will go to the Mariners’ Arizona complex for a tournament that lasts a month. If the LumberKings don’t make the play-offs, they’ll get a few weeks off to go to the beach in whatever sunny place they’re from, to have all the sex they promise they’ll be having, to see all the friends they sometimes tell each other about. They have already hit the calendar, pointed out that if they make it to the championship series, a laughable idea, they’ll get two days between seasons, not enough time to go home, maybe not even enough time to get over the happy hangover. To win here, in this town, at this level, wouldn’t be worth the sore legs.
It’s almost sweet, the I-wanna-go-home sentiment of the players. It sounds like sleepaway camp, me and the other coddled boys waiting in line to call our parents and mewl with protest. But these players are meant to care, that’s the whole idea, the simplest foundation of this place they inhabit. They are the select few people whose job it is to want to win, not in the metaphorical sense, but really to score more than someone else. Reminders of the importance of this role are rained down on them daily from the front rows of the stands, from people the players don’t know but who seem proud to know them.
I feel good about this, boys. We’re gonna do it this time.
The players can only nod or ignore it, pretend five feet of distance is insurmountable as long as they are on the field and we aren’t. It seems as if, now that there’s a play-off race, they hurry to the dugout faster, sign less of what is reached out to them. But then there’s Hank, strutting in his catcher’s gear, giving a thumbs-up or sometimes even a verbal response. Oh, the things I let myself think about him. He is, by virtue of his patience and work ethic, a part of this town. Having seen so much, having lost some, he appreciates the value of a win. And if the LumberKings keep winning, if they win out, he will stand with Tim on the pitcher’s mound holding up the momentarily gigantic wooden trophy like it could be twenty years ago.
With the game scoreless in the second, Hank cracks a skidding rocket down the third-base line. He takes off in his sped-up slow motion, ballooning out around first and not stopping, determined to get double. We rise, of course, and cheer him on. But he pulls up lame somewhere between first and second. He keeps trying and still slides in safe, though his slide is more of a wincing belly flop. There is a collective groan, for him and what he must be feeling and for us having to lose him. He pulls his face out of the dirt, contorted, sees everybody watching him.
In the grand expanse of a fully realized athletic career, Hank’s injury is not worth mentioning. It’s a tweak, for sure, not a break or a tear. It means maybe a couple weeks of limitation. But this isn’t a career. This is an extended audition. And these couple weeks might be Hank’s last. This season could be over by Labor Day, and it only just started for him.
The intimacy is stunning. We are close enough to see the lines stretching across his dirt-speckled face. We can hear him breathing. We can hear a repressed gasp escape as he reaches down his leg. BJ bounces across the infield toward him, medical fanny pack shaking in rhythm with his steps, and we are silent. BJ prods, nods, like, yeah, that does look painful. After a while, Hank limps off the field, and Ochoa already has his helmet on, ready to replace him. Ochoa’s wife claps and points so their infant son can follow her gaze, see his father. The rest of us muster an ovation to honor Hank’s pain or Ochoa’s presence, depending on who is listening and how they want to hear.
I think I’ve always been drawn to endings like a slow walk off the field. Lou Gehrig and his farewell speech of thanks at Yankee Stadium, the way my father would recite the whole thing and I would be the microphone echo behind him, a tradition that is so morbid in retrospect but that felt so warm then. That last line of Bang the Drum Slowly, as the two of us man-blubbered on the couch: From here on in, I rag nobody. Tammy and Tim went down to South Clinton for the first round of demolitions, watched with their arms crossed as wrecking balls cleared away homes deemed clutter. Because somebody should at least be a witness. Tammy brought flowers. She told me that the people watching their homes fall said thanks because she was there. They told her it’s a shame that not enough people want to witness things end, and she said, “I always do.”
I’m driving Hank and his new roommates home. Hank has lasted through three different living situations. Now it’s two pitchers and an outfielder. Two of them are new, and so they ask the questions that Hank used to ask as we pass the factory: What is that thing? And then the follow-up questions about the smell and the smoke, the patches of green-gray blankness outside the fence that look as if something was once there.
“It’s open all night,” one player observes. “You can see it shining, always.”
“Maybe that’s why nobody shows up to our fucking games,” another offers. “Everybody’s locked inside there.”
I’m asked nasty questions, as a representative of the civilian population. What is it about these people and this place? Do they know that the field exists? Do they not even have the extra cash to spend six bucks on a ticket? Also, not to sound like a dick, but are there more, you know, retards in this town than in most? Are the only people in the stadium the people unfit to work?
We pull away from the factory and hit chain-store row. Somebody yells, “Walmart!” and so we stop. I am still trying to think of an answer that doesn’t sound like pleading.
“What about the percentages?” I say. “If a thousand people show up for a game here, that’s one in twenty-six.”
And then, like a grade school teacher: “So think about the math. What if one in twenty-six people in New York showed up to a Yankees game. That would be like half a million people at every game.”
It’s not the best analogy. It stinks of both condescension and desperation, a difficult pairing to achieve. And the math is wrong. I’m reminded that I haven’t gone on the road as far east as Dayton or Bowling Green. In Dayton, eight thousand people show up. Every night. Enough people so you can’t tell individuals apart. You feel like a professional, the way you should.
But what about the underdog? And suddenly it’s an argument. I am the anti-Dayton side of the argument. Fuck Dayton, a place I’ve never been, a bland and mid-grade semi-urban sprawl, with its burgeoning tech-sector opportunities and its proximity to that great metropolis Cincinnati. Fuck those eight thousand Reds fans who hardly have to travel at all to see the future prospects of their real favorite team. Fuck the lumping together of major-league and minor-league interests. Fuck expansion. Fuck progress. I want to scream “Fuck progress” at the players and make them realize that they are included in that fuck. For bleeding-heart romantics like me, and for Joyce and for Tim, and for Tom Bigwood, who none of us in this car has ever met, the existence of these not-quite-talented-enough ones, their constant play in stadiums away from the real spotlight—that is comfort like quiet rain. We can see them small and weathered and doomed and stuck, too, the players. There should be camaraderie in that.
“Don’t you think it’s more meaningful for these one thousand to come see you here?”
I say it at their backs, pushing through the Walmart doors. Hank is limping noticeably. I can hear him groan a little when he puts pressure on his right knee. He is tired. He is too tired to defend the underdog just because he is one. Why does he have to be the underdog all the time, anyway?
We head to the frozen-food aisle. One game this summer felt intense, the players are saying. It was a Sunday afternoon, hot as hell, but there were packs of guys all around the bleachers, drunk and cheering the way guys should. I think they’re referring to that day when the work floor at ADM got to 137 degrees and workers got off early
. “Why can’t people come out like that all the time?” the players ask.
Ryan Royster, new competition in the outfield, says, “Why should a place have a team if nobody wants to play there?”
I don’t say anything else.
In the Indian Village apartment, the only wall decorations are ripped-out magazine workout routines, showing men’s abs with suggestions written on them in red, all capitals. Somebody’s Bible is out on the coffee table. Empty cans are mostly in a garbage bag hanging off a doorknob, but some have spilled over, constellating across the carpet that covers every inch of the floor.
One roommate, a normally gregarious California pitcher who lost today, accepts a jumbo pizza from Domino’s at the door, sifts for singles to pay, and trudges to his room saying that he might be dead by cheese come morning and, if so, fuck it. The rest of us drink a little, throw empty cans in the vicinity of the hung-up trash bag. We go outside to piss in the patch of grass between apartment blocks, face the black of the meager surrounding woods. There is a bathroom in the apartment, but something isn’t quite right with the flusher, and there’s a moldy smell, and, whatever, they’ll be gone soon, better to piss outside into blackness than fix things.