Class A

by Lucas Mann

  Everybody gets really drunk in Ohio. After a seventeen-inning game at home, the LumberKings winning on a wild pitch, bringing every player off the bench, falling all over one another at the plate when it was all over, a crazed exhaustion has settled over the team. Every pitcher who has pitched in this series knows he is done for the season, free to turn his attention to the hotel bar. The coaches will be returning home to wives and families soon. To grandkids, for Tamargo. To crosswords in the morning and then all day long nothing, for Pollreisz. To the grain farm and the gun shows for Dwight. No matter what the team does, this season and its frat-house, band-of-brothers conceit, the same one attached to every season, will end, and there will be boredom for five months, a lot of half promises about finally retiring before the inevitable report to spring training come February. So they’re drunk every night. And then there’s Hank, who will not play an inning here and who knows that. Who took a ten-hour bus ride for no reason other than to watch, no better than me and Brad and the other Clinton fans who carpooled from the Alliant Energy Field parking lot. He is alternately sullen and manic, looking to get numb with anyone at any time. Everyone feels a little sorry about how things panned out for him, so plenty of people oblige.

  We stay at the bar until closing, drinking shots alongside middle-aged women with bleached, coarse hair. The women survey the tables with glassy eyes. They have seen ballplayers come through this place before. They don’t admit that they were waiting for some to show, but that is a distinct possibility.

  “Are you pros?” one asks.

  “Fuck yes,” Hank says, fast.

  “Who do you play for?” she asks.

  That’s when the mumbling comes in.

  You wouldn’t have heard of us. Minor-league ball. Still pro, though. Clinton. Iowa. LumberKings. No, not Lumberjacks. LumberKings.

  It’s the usual caveats, spoken all at once, too quick to be a convincing defense of anything and ultimately an indictment. The pros they want to be wouldn’t have to say anything. But these women don’t care. The boys are young and strong and proud enough to defend themselves. The women sit close, and their hands are grazing forearms soon, then foreheads, then legs.

  “Let me tell you all who you are,” one says, slurring a little.

  We let the implied depth fade into the jukebox, and she points around the table. Pitcher. Pitcher. Pitcher. She’s spot-on. She gets to Hank, and I see him flex a little, his white T-shirt stretched thin. She studies him, the calluses of his hands, his pronounced cheekbones and broad body. Catcher, she says, and he smiles. Then she looks over him, back toward the pitchers, elegant, tall even when sitting down. Catcher means the same for her as it does for everyone else. Identifiably middling.

  She gets to me at the end of the table. I let myself think, as she pauses, that I blend in. I realize how important a nod of belief would be from her, validation that I’m better than all those people who buy these guys shots and have their pictures snapped next to them just to prove that their proportions are the same. The validation that I am not like those fish that ride on sharks, valuable to the ecosystem only with my need to be attached.

  “Camera boy,” she says at me and giggles. Everybody giggles. I didn’t even know there were camera boys. I say that out loud, trying to keep my tone from moving into anything but a smirk. Hank shoves me, playful and satisfied. Someone is less than he is.

  The players watch the women watch them. Phones ring, the women look, hit silent, and slide them back into their purses. The players say they’re competing for the championship. They say, Maybe it’s been mentioned in the paper. The women ask if they’re going to win, and the players say, Definitely, without a doubt. Everyone at the table likes that certainty. Bose is the most physically impressive of these guys. As the strength coach, he works out all day. And he is twenty-four, grown, fully filled out. The women think he’s the team’s star power hitter, and the players let him have that. They stifle laughs as one woman, a little too old to be his sister, a little young to be his mom, looks at him with pickled eyes, whispers something, leads him to the men’s room on precarious heels.

  Hank is smiling, and then he isn’t. He says he’s tired. I follow him to the hotel lobby. He sits on a stiff couch that approximates leather. He picks up a newsletter advertising the tourism gems hidden within Lake County, Ohio, highlighting an arboretum, two scenic rivers, and Gildersleeve Mountain, just waiting to be climbed. He makes almost comical expressions, raised eyebrows or down-turned lips, as though considering the merits of each option. As though he is just a salesman in town for a few extra days or a father who wants to show his children everything worth showing as they drive across America. But he will not go to any rivers or mountains or arboretums. He will go to the bar or Chipotle across the street, and the field. He will sit and wait until it feels as if there wasn’t a beginning and there won’t be an end to all his sitting and waiting.

  The glass doors at the front of the hotel slide open. Nick Franklin walks in. The room doesn’t stop at first. It seems as though he should be here. Why not? But then Hank says his name and Nick smiles, and everyone realizes that there’s been no Nick Franklin for almost two weeks.

  His parents are with him, dragging hastily packed suitcases. There’s a high school girl standing next to him with long, curly hair, a tan that isn’t fake like the ones you see in Midwest bars. She is wearing big sunglasses, and she is frowning. It looks like the beginning of a teen movie, the check-in scene before all the hilarious vacation pandemonium, except for the ring that Nick is wearing, from when his team won the rookie ball crown last year. It’s the kind favored by gamblers or grandfathers, meant to be worn on old, gnarled hands, not the smooth digits of the baby of the family. I’ve never seen him wear it before. Nick trots over to Hank, sits down next to him. The girl hovers above the couch and waits.

  “I heard y’all needed me,” Nick says, smiling.

  Hank says yeah.

  Other players wander over, and Nick shares his epic tale. He was down in Florida, just chilling, giving himself a deserved break. He was on the beach with this girl, not his girlfriend, just, whatever. His phone was ringing, but he wasn’t answering. Finally, it rang a few times in a row, and he picked it up out of the sand, saw it was the number of the front office in Seattle.

  He lets the fact that it’s common for him to receive front-office calls sink in. Then he goes on. He was told, We need you back in A-ball. Nick said, Huh? The bosses said, Go help them win a championship. You’ve got a flight booked to Ohio in three hours. They toweled off and ran to his Escalade. He called his father. His father said, No time to bring the girl home, not in traffic. Nick looked at her and said, Yo, wanna fly to Ohio? The team will pay. She thought the whole thing was cool, and so here she is in her flip-flops, sand still between her toes.

  He’s different. No, he can’t be. It’s been eleven days.

  His shiny blue shirt is open down to the middle of his chest, showing off the lines tracing his pectorals. He is rubbing his ring like a cartoon villain or like Gollum or just like John Tamargo. And look at how pressed his jeans are. Look at the shoes, his white Honey Bear loafers that were too much for going out on a Saturday night and are certainly too much for checking into a Comfort Suites with his parents. He sits, space on the cushions between himself and his teammates. A scene begins to unfold the way you would expect it to, the imparting of knowledge from the player who has been where the others want to go. Hold for grizzled wisdom. Hold for youthful reverence.

  But the scene isn’t right. The promised land in this conversation is Double-A. The real promised land isn’t even promised. And Nick isn’t speaking to the myth, the power, of the place—Jackson, Tennessee. The players are nothing special, he says. No different from in the Midwest. Maybe a little more consistent. Otherwise, he’s not sure what the big deal is. He shrugs. It was easy.

  His father interrupts, tells his mother to take the girl upstairs, says, “Why don’t you ladies get settled in?” They oblig
e.

  “Hello, men,” says Mr. Franklin. Everyone says hello.

  Finally, someone non-Franklin speaks.

  “How’d they let you back?”

  Nick shrugs. It is not for the players to discuss, though they know that something odd happened since there isn’t supposed to be any roster adjustment once the play-offs start, unless there are unforeseen injuries. Tomorrow, Kevin Mailloux, twenty-four, a surprise slugger only when playing in rookie ball with fresh-meat teens, will go on injured reserve, and Nick will take his place. Mailloux’s parents will drive down from Canada to pick him up from the last professional baseball locker room he’ll ever inhabit. He is more temporary than he thought.

  It’s not that everybody who isn’t good enough is compelling. Because, man, that’s a lot of people. And to see them walk away is a series of mini-tragedies, each a failure worth honoring at least. I want to say that much. So few will ever know what it is to play in the majors beyond a couple of garbage-time at bats in September for a team long out of contention. Just because I know Kevin Mailloux’s ending, just because he has made the decision to be identified as a ballplayer until eventually his jersey is taken from him, doesn’t mean that something enormous isn’t happening when he walks to his parents’ car, all his clothes and his bats slung over his shoulders like the most muscle-bound, hair-gelled train-hopper you’ve ever seen, nodding a silent good-bye.

  There’s no chance that the LumberKings can lose. That is the consensus. Gone is the bunch of underachievers or lovable try-hards depending on who is talking. Nick Franklin is back. The team re-earned him. And how could they lose with him when they won without him? Now that they’ve overcome so much? I don’t know what has been overcome. But I know that the tingle of group hyperbole is palpable. The clubhouse now is the rollicking, unified Eden that I tell Tim and Tammy it’s always been.

  “How are they?” Tim asks over the phone, all day, all night.

  “They’re good,” I report like a babysitter. “They’re excited. They want to win.”

  I imagine Tim closing his eyes on the other end of the line, seeing their want.

  “Yeah, they want it,” he says, before hanging up.

  Brad, who drove Erin and me nine and a half hours from one end of the Midwest to the other in a groaning red Impala because he would not miss history, confirms that assumption.

  Look at them. Look at how much they want this.

  But what about those other guys, the Lake County Captains? They must want it too.

  No disrespect, but they don’t want it like we do.

  There are many reasons. The Captains only moved here eight years ago. They play in a stadium that is antiseptic in its brightly colored, state-of-the-art functionality. And look at the place, all this shine, all this investment, and there are more empty seats than at a game in Clinton. There is nothing to see in Lake County but easy, fast, smug success and a lack of tradition.

  To come to this conclusion, we must discount the fact that the Lake County, Ohio, economy has plummeted, a real rust-belt bust, not a slow Iowa erosion, something both present and not present at the stadium. Present in the empty seats, not present in the forceful cheer of the huge, furry mascot and the new Jumbotron. There is no tradition of under-doggery here, that’s the issue. No lineage of wanting more, of needing, for once, to win. They are not playing for anything, just playing.

  Brad and Tim have faith not only in the talent of the players who happen to wear their home team jersey. They have faith in their collective character, in their thought process, in the purity of their motivation, one vaguely akin to Clinton’s own. But the enormous valley between the competing perspectives has never been more apparent. No matter how excited the players get in the clubhouse during the championship, it’s excitement born of casual pragmatism—if you make it to the championship, you might as well win. It feels good to win, and I’m sure the Lake County Captains think the exact same thing. The concept of players who want to win not just because of an always honed instinct toward success but for some greater sense of legacy, is a fiction. It’s the type of player that everybody assumed would show up, the same assumption as last year and the year before, and before that. The type I read in books about made-up players chasing made-up crowns. And so a collection of always new faces with no allegiance to one team can meld into a continuous narrative. It is a necessary lie.

  The players, boarding the bus from the hotel, beating on the seats in front of them, giving the bus driver some new Eminem track to play, about overcoming both pill addiction and the haters, include Clinton as one of the things they overcame on the way to earning the title of champion. An empty town that they won in spite of. The fans see Clinton as one of the reasons they made it.

  I’m hanging over the outfield railing before batting practice. Joyce isn’t here. That is all I can think of. This is where she should be. This is the space she has made hers. Her vacation days have run out. She made it to every game before the championship and knew, as she pored over her LumberKings calendar, that she wouldn’t have enough days to give if they made it all the way. It had seemed so improbable. She thought about rooting, secretly at least, for the LumberKings to lose with dignity in the conference series so that she would be a part of the almost and wouldn’t be left out of the end. But that wouldn’t be right.

  The players don’t ask about her. They’re concentrating. The only man standing with me before game four is old and stooped and smells like birdseed. He has a round face that I imagine was once handsome. His jeans are sliding down off narrow hips.

  “You know 46?” he asks me, meaning the man behind the jersey number.

  James Jones. “Yes.”

  “I need him. Hey, 46!” But Jones is already through the door into the outfield, trotting bat in hand. He turns and says, “I’ll get you after.”

  The man doesn’t respond to Jones. Then he says to me, “You know 3? He’s worth getting, right?”

  Nick Franklin. “Yes.”

  Nick Franklin is already through the door, too, and is in no mood to turn.

  “I only have two hours,” the man says to me. “My name’s Cal.”

  Cal doesn’t like baseball. He never cares to watch the games. They take too long. And he doesn’t want to get invested. But the stadium is pretty and smells nice, and it’s walking distance from his house. And he’s one of those people who got laid off—auto parts, bound to happen—and his wife is sick; well, she’s been sick for a while, but now it’s all he can think about because he’s home all day. So he gets two hours, after he tucks her in for a nap, to get signatures, to snag batting practice home run balls, bringing a bagful of souvenirs home every evening. He tells his wife that it’s a matter of persistence, that you’re catching people before their full development, and sometimes, if you wait long enough, the objects they leave behind can make the retriever rich. They probably won’t, he acknowledges that. Still, it’s nice to collect things that might someday have more value than they do now.

  He shakes my hand. He says he hopes this is worth it, and doesn’t explain.

  After he moves off, unwilling to wait until the end of batting practice today, I begin to think that I imagined him. That he was some combination of oracle and ghost. And then I’m stilled by how fictional or necessary or profound anyone can be here, a hologram or an illusion rippling in too-hot air. Part of me thinks that Cal, stooped, maybe-real Cal, is the most honest person I’ve met all season, a man who defines things simply as what they are, braver in the face of the aimlessness of reality than I will ever be. The players are still taking swings. I call Joyce on reflex. I call to tell her that I’m watching Nick Franklin take batting practice again, leaving out the part about how rusty he looks, fouling balls off the cage, like he’s starting over as someone new.

  Faith has begun to waver a little since Nick showed his rust. His first game in Ohio, he batted second, swung hard, never made solid contact. He went hitless with two strikeouts, and the home fans who don’t know any
thing about anything began to laugh and say, “Why’s a scrawny, overmatched kid batting second?” Brad tried to explain to the rival fans what Nick had done this season, but when you looked at him out of context, the embellished facts felt like outright lies. The LumberKings lost that game, down 2–1 in a best-of-five series, one away from elimination yet again.

  Tom Wilhelmsen finally pitched a bad game for that second LumberKings loss. His year is over, and so he’s next in line to drink himself stupid with Hank. And me. We take shots, split pitchers, like friends. A round of good whiskey shows up. The waitress leans in, points down the bar to Ted, the general manager, sitting alone. He raises his glass in tribute.

  “You’ve been fantastic, boys,” he calls out.

  There’s the awkward raising of glasses in return, that too-long silence when Ted could invite the players over or the players could invite Ted. None of them know each other well enough to do that. Everyone looks down. Ted is paying his own way to be here, staying alone. Nate, his assistant general manager, is here, too, with the whole family, wanting to see a championship that belongs to him and doesn’t.

  “Good guy,” Tom says, looking at Ted, not sure if he means it.

  We start talking about Nick Franklin.

  Voices are lowered. I am glanced at. Sentences are ended with sudden silences and jerks of the neck toward me. Even though they are drunk and unhinged, even though we are sharing some basic bar stool camaraderie, the ballplayer is schooled not to talk about any issue that matters enough to get him in trouble. Nick Franklin is that issue.

  Hank’s voice is working to not sound betrayed, just impartial.