by Lucas Mann
I can’t think of fans of film or literature who are anything other than harmless jokes or harmful monsters, nothing in between the lovable drunks in Major League and a murderous De Niro watching Wesley Snipes with a loaded pistol in his lap. When I tell people about Joyce, they inevitably think of Susan Sarandon’s character in Bull Durham. They say, “Is she beautiful? Does she give them a good time?” As though the only role she could possibly occupy in the minor-league ecosystem is that of a warm, wet, willing place to land for the night. Beyond that, what can she be? Plotting something, maybe. Or just lonely. All I know is that I don’t want this season to end in a few days. And it’s not just for narrative reasons. It is the feel of being swaddled in a collective compulsion. It is a haze, a high; it is an attempt at beauty. I like to say “we.” We need to win this one. We have got a shot. We deserve this. I feel not lonely next to Joyce. That’s what I know.
I miss Danny, too. I do. And I have saved his texts, along with Hank’s, along with Erasmo’s. They make up the only digital correspondence that I keep when I clean out my in-box full of my mother’s “How’s the anxiety?” and my girlfriend’s “Why don’t you just come home?”
I wrote to Danny, “Good luck in High-A! You deserve it!” He wrote back, “Thanks! God bless!” That was at 12:13 p.m. yesterday, stored and verifiable. I showed it off in the bleachers, let the coos lap over me. What a nice boy. We will miss him.
Joyce has Danny cataloged on her index cards under year 2009, also year 2010, a ball for each season. If he “retires,” the nice way to say he’s been released, and Joyce hears about it and has the time for editing, he will be reclassified, officially finished, no longer something to highlight, still on display, of course, but annotated with disappointment. If Danny makes it to the majors, he’ll be prized with the other elite, like Mitch Moreland, a 2008 LumberKing just moved up to the majors. He’s Joyce’s former favorite player, only a few years older than Danny. They played against each other in the Midwest League, paths crossing for half a season before Moreland was promoted. Joyce cheered them both at once.
I ask Joyce if she thinks Danny will ever be a ball to show off, one asked about.
“No, probably not. Almost definitely not. It’s not his fault, it’s just—”
There’s no nice way or even a definitive way to end that sentence.
We sit on the floor, and Joyce explains her organization to me. I notice an old IBM word processor in the corner, collecting dust. There’s a printer next to it with the perforated sheets of paper that you need to rip apart. She follows my eyes.
“Oh, it’s a computer,” she says. “Do you want one? No, you probably have one. Do you know somebody who wants one? I got it for free.”
It has to be twenty years old. She got it for free because some office closed or finally upgraded to a machine that didn’t rely on floppy disks. She got it because somebody was going to cart it off to the Clinton County Landfill, but thought, Joyce might keep this; there’s no point in discarding something that may still have some function for someone. And she won’t get rid of it without being sure that somebody will take it up. Still, she can’t use it. She won’t. How could something that plugs in and can thus be unplugged, its fancy blinking cursor disappearing, have a place here in this museum where nothing is deleted, nothing turned on or off? I glare at the blameless machine, then realize the absurdity of it, then realize the powerful contagion of Joyce’s perspective, her ability to make an out-of-date computer feel both useless and futuristic.
We stay sitting cross-legged on the thick brown carpet for what feels like a long time. I scrape my heel back and forth, watch how the groove I’m making stays in place, how it will linger until another foot walks over it. The conversation moves back to Nick, of course, who has now tied the home run record. If he breaks it, Joyce says, hands fidgeting, fingers gripping thick carpet, ungripping, gripping again, it will be history.
“Well, of course,” I say. Anything that’s over, after all, is history. At monthly Baseball Family meetings at the local Pizza Ranch buffet, in the off-season, the talk will be all, I saw Nick, never, I see him.
She grins, a pretty, symmetrical flash save for the one dead tooth off to the left, a detail that I omit when I describe her to anyone who hasn’t seen her, because it means rotting, because there is no connotation to rot other than the obvious ones. She knows I’m just messing with her. She means history with a capital H, as in one for the History Books. And she has assumed the task of writing this history as it happens. In her red notebook that she keeps next to the balls and pens in her red bag, she has begun the myth of Nick Franklin. It’s the story she told me about months ago, but now Joyce is bringing in all of the other figures from her wall who are also a part of it. Mitch Moreland is important because he got to eighteen home runs two years ago. Joyce thought he would break the record, or at least she says she did. It’s fun to throw Moreland into any storyline because it adds a certain optimism. Moreland is part of a major-league play-off race now. I just dealt for him in my fantasy league, giving up a relief pitcher and a middle infielder for the power of his bat. He is beyond this place, but still available. That’s what Joyce likes and I do, too, looking at her. She’s claimed a piece of whatever Mitch Moreland was and is and will be.
“Do you think he knows about Nick?” she asks. “And the record?”
“I dunno.”
It’s difficult to try to weigh Nick’s presence outside this place. It’s difficult to remember that before I started coming to every game, I had no idea who he was. That when I first looked him up, I got a bunch of blogs saying, Decent potential, solid all-around skill set, but they overpaid for somebody untested and unseen. Of all the names read by scouts and coaches and nerds and hopeful players and hopeful fathers, how much does his name stick out if you’re not looking for it? There’s another guy in the story whose name I don’t remember. He got to nineteen home runs in Clinton, before being sent up, so Joyce and Tammy and Tim say his name to me as if they were old friends, but he hasn’t done anything since. Gac, it’s Gac. Ian Gac. She points me to his name, second row of the back wall, not yet retired, not yet made it. He’s a backup in North Carolina somewhere, she thinks. He’ll retire soon.
It’s the last series of the season, on the road in Burlington, and Joyce isn’t here. She’s at the Wild Rose, on blackjack duty, hands moving mechanically through the deal. She never has a moment to cross her fingers the way she’d like to, to close her eyes and hope. She took a risk and used her last vacation days for 2010 betting on as many play-off games as possible. But now the LumberKings have lost two in a row, making last-place Burlington look like a team to fear, shrouding what seemed to be an almost certain play-off bid in doubt. Now there are two games left, and the LumberKings need to reconfirm that they want more. If Joyce were somebody else, she would feel betrayed. Nick has been hitting miserably, has been sulking about it. After every game, Joyce has leaned over the railing and yelled, “Next game is the one, Nick,” occasionally followed by “Nice butt!” to cheer him, which never works.
She needs to get to him one last time, but she hasn’t been able to. Nick’s parents arrived here for the last games, strolling through the stadium, recognized but aloof, intimidating to all of us who chase their son. When all the games are over, they will drive with him to the airport and fly him home, and he will become all theirs again, a bored teenager under his parents’ old roof, never mind the remodeling of the home under that roof, making his new bedroom so big that the old one became a walk-in closet.
His parents are in the front row in Burlington as Nick stands in lefty for his first at bat, twisting his hips, getting comfortable in the box, the same way we’ve seen him do it hundreds of times. We go silent in the bleachers and watch him. Burlington fans haven’t shown up to this penultimate game, because it’s cruelly hot and the Bees are the worst team in the league. It’s just some kids, a few old couples who put players up in their spare bedrooms, and Dancing Bobby, standin
g in his same spot above third base, gyrating violently to every hitter’s walk-up music. The Clinton voices—Brad, Derek, Tim, Erin, Matt, the mailman, his wife—drown out the hometown fans.
We watch a pitch delivered low and outside, but it’s a fastball and Nick swings, a bit late. The crack of the bat is weak and hollow, lost in the breeze, but the ball rises toward the fence. The left fielder trots back after it, glove up, and our eyes follow him. The wind is blowing out. The ball hangs for a moment, as if indecisive.
Then it disappears. Then the left fielder is looking in his glove, finding nothing. Then the umpire is running out toward the fence looking for evidence of a baseball in play. Then he’s windmilling his right arm as if he were riding a mechanical bull, the motion that means home run.
There’s Nick Franklin, somewhere between first and second, stopping for a moment, confused, before flashing a quick grin, then returning to a face that suggests none of this is that big of a deal. There’s his fist up in the air, the way he’s seen people do it on TV. There’s his father, standing up in the front row, pointing at him in a manner that would seem accusatory if he weren’t so proud. There’s his mother, waiting to see his father’s reaction and copying it.
There are Brad’s thick, damp arms around me, and there are our torsos, jumping, or more bobbing, along with the six other Clinton fans who somehow coalesce to feel like a mob. There are the screams of “Finally,” of “He did it,” of “We did it.” There are Brad’s words over all others, “The wait is over,” and even though it wasn’t a wait that most people knew was there until it ended, those words feel true.
There are the teammates, realizing soon enough what they need to do, spilling out of the dugout to embrace Nick. There’s Hank at the front of the pack, grabbing his roommate around the torso, lifting him off the ground. There’s my mind focused on the shot of Yogi Berra and Don Larsen from the 1956 World Series, the one my father used to show me, or Crash and Meat from Bull Durham, or Dave and the Kid from Tomkinsville, the way I imagined them as he read aloud, the squat one supporting the graceful one, an instinctive and unforced intimacy that I always wanted so badly.
There’s the mob dispersing too quickly, Nick waving once at his parents.
There’s Hank, trailing the crowd back into the dugout, face returning to blank. This might be the last professional baseball game he ever plays. And then what? Hank disappears into the dugout. Some country rock starts up from the speakers. Dancing Bobby begins to dance again.
There is the moment ended.
Nick’s father calls his agent, and I hear him: “Yeah, it happened.” And I hear the fuzz of the agent’s happy yells, the quick hang up to facilitate the spreading of this achievement. I call Joyce, reflexively, though I know she isn’t home to answer and doesn’t own a cell phone. It rings twelve times and disconnects. I call again and it’s the same. Her answering machine is full. She doesn’t like to delete.
The first record breaker I ever read about was a Transylvanian man who created a machine that looked like a tommy gun and allowed him to smoke eight hundred cigarettes at once. There was a picture of him, mid-achievement, in a Guinness book that my brother bought me as a birthday present. I was aware, even then, that he looked like a stereotype, angular and oily, black pants, black leather jacket. But I stared at his face. It was ill, pale, depleted. You could see the sweat on him, even through the mass of people surrounding him, congratulating or asking why. He was gaunt, frightening, but he was proud. He stood the way I wanted to stand, exhausted in the pursuit of something worthwhile, certain of an achievement that could not be taken away until someone even crazier broke his record.
And when my brother snuck me a hit off his poseur cigar, I sucked it down with the eagerness with which one begins a marathon, a first burst toward ecstatic pain. And the nausea that came instantly with no ecstasy attached only made me look at my brother as more amazing, capable of achieving something I couldn’t, even though that thing was awful. That was a small moment, one with no real heroes, nothing to make it important. And yet I think of the Transylvanian stranger, of my brother smiling, because it is my foundation for hanging importance on something so arbitrary. I think of myself, the strikeout record holder of the twelve-and-under division of a tiny Little League, the plaque that came with such an honor, the row of gold plastic trophies that I never let my mother throw out. For the last time, Nick has allowed me to inflate his moment, snatch it, mold it, make it connect to me somehow, and extend far beyond the thirty seconds that transpired between when the ball hit his bat and the team all wandered back to the dugout. Brad is leaning forward and calling to Nick’s parents: “We haven’t seen someone like this since Dick Kenworthy set the record back in 1961. Kenworthy is a legend, and Nick will be, too. I didn’t know if I’d see it in my lifetime. Your son is in the books, sir.”
Steve Franklin gives him a short handshake, looks past him.
Dick Kenworthy got a decent amount of space in the paid obits section of The Kansas City Star in April. Facts were established to define the triumph of his life and the details of his death. He went to a better place, obviously. While in this lesser place, he was a high school sports star, then he won a AAA MVP in Indianapolis, then he played six seasons on and off in the majors. He had three sons. His father, Roscoe, a farmer, outlived him. There was no mention of Dick Kenworthy as the fifty-year home run record holder in Clinton, though in the online version of the obit a Clinton fan has added that detail in the comments section.
Joyce was a toddler when Dick Kenworthy hit those home runs, and I imagine her chubby, sunburned body, her face with no dead tooth, perched up on the tar roof of the shed across from the stadium, pulling an oversized T-shirt down to cover her knees. Or maybe the team was on the road, who knows? Maybe she wasn’t aware of what she missed, not like now. Last year a guy named Kyle Russell hit twenty-six home runs playing for Great Lakes. And a couple years before that, there was Juan Francisco, who hit twenty-five for Dayton. They just happened to not be LumberKings. Who are these people? I don’t think they’ve made it yet. I’ve never heard of them. And nobody ever cared this much about young Kyle’s home runs in Great Lakes, a fifteen-year-old team catering to a tri-city area of 400,000.
The more you care about something, the more you are set up to look foolish. I have tried to live by this basic truth, pushing toward nonchalance and irony. Because there are always others, less invested, who will look at you with withering contempt. That’s why the players never express empathy. Or even excitement. That’s why the culture of baseball is still Tamargo speaking in low, unsurprised tones, speaking as though ready to be disappointed. Tamargo is nearing sixty and has been disappointed. Disappointment is his routine. His quiet refusal of joy is earned. He has a limp to go with his tone, and a failing heart. But his players simulate his tone, even as their bodies are all youth, all hope. The gruff quiet is stifling now.
The game lulls, just as every baseball game ever has lulled. Matt fills the silence with his excoriations of the team’s lack of effort. Brad looks nervous and agrees as if he wishes he didn’t have to. Everybody is so fucking serious. Everybody wants more than what is happening. Especially me. It’s a minor-league baseball game, for Christ’s sake, and even Dancing Bobby’s face looks grim while his hips thrust. I walk up to the Franklins, put my hand on Steve’s shoulder.
“Congratulations,” I say.
Nick’s father gives a clipped nod and says, “Thanks. It was good to see him take that pitch the other way. He’s been pressing a little. But I knew he’d do it.”
“We’re proud,” Nick’s mother reiterates. There’s nothing else. They look at me long enough to let me know it’s my cue to leave.
Hank hits a single in the third inning to give the LumberKings a lead. But then, in the seventh, he tries to force his way into the play that will be remembered as the difference. He gets a throw in from the outfield and tries to catch an advancing runner he has no chance at, skidding the ball past Mario at third
, letting another run score, giving Burlington a lead that they won’t relinquish.
He sits in the dugout and stares out at the field, that most romantic pose of failure.
Two men are sitting silently in the bleachers, black sneakers, khaki pants, white hair, clipboard. These are talent evaluators from the Mariners, in Iowa to take what may be their last look of the season. One is called Toughy. He is expressionless, writes a lot. After games, he shakes players’ hands, tells them, “Good job, son,” often regardless of what transpired on the field. The players say thank you, wary, and that is the end of the interaction. On another day, in the bleachers of another stadium, Toughy told me that it’s hard to evaluate a player’s character in a place like Burlington or Clinton because what you’re seeing is so far from being a simulation of the conditions that he’ll face at higher levels. When he takes notes here, he has to focus his eyes on just the body. Arm angle, hip rotation, the power pushing out from a boy’s thighs. Because you cannot judge his relationship to pressure, his immunity to being overwhelmed, when nothing around him is overwhelming.
“We want it,” Brad says sometime around the eighth inning. “We want it more.”
He looks to me for agreement.
“Yeah,” I say, surprised at how easy I say it. “Looks like we do.”
But whether or not the want was ever there, the results aren’t. Six to four Burlington. Nick Franklin strikes out to end the game, walks off, and doesn’t look up at us.