The Essential W. P. Kinsella

by W. P. Kinsella

  The first batter in the last of the ninth hit a clean single up the middle. The next sacrificed him to second. The third batter swung very late on a change-up and hit it like a bullet just to the right of first. Our first baseman, Lindy Dean, lunged for the ball and, completely by accident, it ended up in his glove. He threw to Roger from a sitting position for the second out. The runner advanced to third.

  McCracken was at the plate. As he dug in he sent a steady stream of words toward the mound. Though I couldn’t hear, I knew he was baiting Roger. If we lost, there would be at least enough profits from the concessions to pay everyone off, and buy Roger a bus ticket for somewhere not too far away. All I hoped was that the ball wouldn’t be hit to me. I didn’t mind batting in a tight situation, but defense was my weakness.

  McCracken, even though he was right-handed, hammered one to right field on a 2-2 count. Right down the foul line. I actually ran in a step or two before I judged it properly. Then I ran frantically down the line, my back to the plate. I almost overran it. The ball nearly hit me on the head as it plunked onto the soft grass a foot outside the foul line.

  Surely he won’t hit to the opposite field again, I thought.

  Roger gave him a fast ball in the strike zone. It was, of course, the last pitch McCracken was expecting. He swung late, but only late enough to send it to right-center field. I gratefully let the center fielder handle it for the final out.

  At our bench Roger wiped his face and hair with a towel.

  “You get the rest of the gate receipts and the concession money,” he said. “One of McCracken’s men will count it with you.”

  “You didn’t bet against us, did you?” I stammered.

  “Of course not. I bet it all on us.”

  “What if we’d lost?”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve left a town on foot with people throwing things at me.”

  Roger collected his winnings from the president of the university and stuffed the stacks of bills into his equipment bag. He settled his debts and bought the team supper and unlimited ice cream at the Springtime Café. He tipped Mrs. Richards ten dollars. While Stan and I again turned our backs, he opened the safe and stuffed it full of bills.

  “I’ll be on the road before daylight,” he said. He gave Stan and me an extra twenty each.

  Though I was dead tired, I forced myself to only half sleep; I jumped awake every time the old house creaked in the night. I was up and at the window as soon as I heard Roger’s steps on the stairs. As I suspected, he did not leave immediately, but again took the tools from the trunk and hoisted them to his shoulder, being careful not to let them rattle. There had been a heavy thundershower about ten o’clock and the air was still pure and sweet as springwater.

  I was waiting by the Caddy when Roger returned. His clothes were soiled, his shoes ruined by mud.

  “You been in a fight or what?” I said.

  “I think you know where I’ve been,” he said, keeping his voice low.

  “I know a little about distances,” I said.

  “When did you suspect?” he asked.

  “I measured the distance on your practice field out at Barons’,” I said. “Sixty-one feet from the rubber to the plate. No wonder your arm’s big as a telephone pole.”

  “You figure on telling McCracken?”

  “No”

  “I mean, if you feel you have to it’s okay. Just wait until morning.”

  “I’m not going to,” I said.

  Roger deposited the tools in the trunk. He began to fiddle with the combination of the safe.

  “You don’t have to give me anything.”

  “I want to. I’ve been working this scam for ten years. No one ever cottoned onto it before. I must be getting careless.”

  He took about an inch of bills off the top of the pile and handed them to me.

  “You really don’t need to. Money can’t buy what I want.”

  “Which is?”

  “I want this girl I know to like me just the way I am.”

  “No, money can’t do that. But it’ll buy a hell of a lot of ice cream.” His face broke open into that grin of his that could charm a bone out of a hungry dog’s mouth.

  “It’s all a matter of distances,” Roger said from inside the Caddy. “Des Moines to Memphis is 623 miles, less about 110 to Onamata is 513. I’ll have a late breakfast in Memphis.”

  Roger smiled again, reached his right hand up and out the window to shake my hand.

  “Maybe we’ll run into each other again, Gid. Be cool. It’s all a matter of distances. Make them work for you.” The window purred up and the car eased away. The only sound it made was gravel crunching under the wide tires.

  How Manny Embarquadero Overcame and Began His Climb to the Major Leagues

  For me, the baseball season ended on a Tuesday night last August at the exact moment that Manny Embarquadero killed the general manager’s dog.

  In a season scheduled to end August 31, Manny arrived July 15, supposedly the organization’s hottest prospect, an import from some tropical island where the gross national product is revolution, and the per capita income $77 a year. A place where, it is rumored, because of heredity and environment, or a diet heavy in papaya juice, young men move with the agility of panthers and can throw a baseball from Denver to Santa Fe on only one hop.

  According to what I had read in USA Today, there were only two political factions in Courteguay—the government and the insurgents—depending on which one was currently in power. One of the current insurgents was a scout for our organization, reportedly receiving payment in hand grenades and flame-throwers. He spotted Manny Embarquadero in an isolated mountain village (on Manny’s island, a mountain is anything more than fifteen feet above sea level) playing shortstop barefoot, fielding a pseudo-baseball supposedly made from a bull’s testicle stuffed with papaya seeds.

  Even a semi-competent player would have been an improvement over our shortstop, who was batting .211, and was always late covering second base on double-play balls.

  “The organization’s sending us a phenom,” Dave “The Deer” Dearly told us a few days before Manny’s arrival. Dearly was a competent manager, pleasant and laid-back with his players. A former all-star second baseman with the Orioles, he knew a lot about baseball and was able to impart that knowledge. But on the field during a game, he was something else.

  “Been swallowing Ty Cobb Meanness Pills,” was how Mo Chadwick, our center-fielder, described him. Dearly was developing a reputation as an umpire-baiting bastard, who flew off the handle at a called third strike, screamed like a rock singer, kicked dirt on umpires, punted his cap, and heaved water coolers onto the field with little or no provocation.

  “Got to have a gimmick,” he said out of the side of his mouth one night on the road, as he strutted back to the dugout after arguing a play where a dimwitted pinch runner had been out by thirty feet trying to steal third with two out. Dearly had screamed like a banshee, backed the umpire halfway to the left-field foul pole, and closed out the protest by punting his cap into the third row behind our dugout. The fans love to boo him.

  Before Manny Embarquadero arrived, my guess was that Dave Dearly would be the only one on the squad to make the Bigs.

  I planned on quitting organized baseball at the end of this season. My fastball was too slow and didn’t have enough action; my curve was good when it found the strike zone, which wasn’t often enough. I was being relegated to middle relief way down here in A ball—not a positive situation. I could probably make it as far as Triple-A and be a career minor leaguer, but I wasn’t that in love with minor-league baseball. I’ve got one semester to a degree in social work, and I’d enrolled for the fall.

  I’m a Canadian, from Tecumseh, Ontario, not far from Windsor, which is connected by bridge to Detroit.

  I agreed with Dearly that unless you were Roger Clemens or Ken Griffey, Jr., you needed a gimmick. As it turned out, Manny Embarquadero had a gimmick. If the ball club hadn’t
been so cheap that we had to bunk two-to-a-room on the road, I never would have found out what it was.

  Manny Embarquadero looked like all the rest of those tropical paradise ballplayers, black as a polished bowling ball, head covered in a mass of wet black curls, thin as if he’d only eaten one meal a day all his life, thoroughbred legs, long fingers, buttermilk eyes.

  The day Manny arrived, the general manager, Chuck Manion, made a rare appearance in the clubhouse to introduce the hot new prospect.

  “Want you boys to take good care of Manny here. Make him feel welcome.”

  Manny was standing, head bowed, dressed in ghetto-Goodwill-store style: black dress shoes, cheap black slacks and a purple pimp-shirt with most of the glitter worn off.

  “Manny not only doesn’t speak English,” Chuck Manion announced, “he doesn’t speak anything. He’s mute. But not deaf. He knows no English or Spanish, but follows general instructions in basic sign language.

  “The amazing thing is he’s hardly played baseball at all. He wandered out of the mountains, was able to communicate to our scout that he was seventeen years old and had never played competitive baseball. He truly is a natural. I’ve seen video tapes. The way he plays on one month’s experience, he’ll be in the Bigs after spring training next year.”

  Chuck Manion was a jerk, about forty, a blond, red-faced guy who looked as if he had just stepped out of a barber’s chair, even at eleven o’clock at night. Any time he came to the clubhouse, he wore a fourhundred-dollar monogrammed jogging suit and smelled of fifty-dollaran-ounce aftershave. His family owned a brewery—and our team. Chuck Manion played at being general manager just for fun.

  “I bet he thought he’d get laid a lot, was why he wanted a baseball team as a toy,” said my friend Mo Chadwick, one night when Manion, playing the benevolent, slumming employer, accompanied a bunch of players to a bar after a game. He seemed extremely disappointed that there weren’t dozens of women in various stages of undress and sexual frustration crawling all over.

  “Sucker thought he’d buy one round of drinks and catch the overflow,” said Mo.

  He was right. Manion hung around just long enough for one drink and a few pointed questions about Baseball Sadies. As soon as he discovered that minor-league ballplayers didn’t have to beat off sex-crazed groupies, he vanished into the night.

  “Going down to the airport strip to cruise for hookers in his big BMW,” said Mo. Again I had to agree.

  After we all shook hands with Manny Embarquadero and patted him on the shoulder and welcomed him to the club, Manion made an announcement.

  “We’re gonna make Crease here”—he placed a hand on my shoulder—“Manny’s roommate both at home and on the road. Crease reads all the time so he won’t mind that Manny isn’t much of a conversationalist.” Manion laughed at his own joke.

  I did read some. In fact, I’d been involved in a real brouhaha with my coaches because I read in the bullpen until my dubious expertise was needed on the mound. The coaches insisted that reading would ruin my control. I read anyway. I was threatened with unconditional release. I learned to hide my book more carefully.

  Management rented housekeeping rooms within walking distance of the ballpark. My last roommate had gone on a home-run-hitting binge and had been promoted directly to Triple-A Calgary.

  My nickname, Crease, had come about because ever since Little League I’d creased the bill of my cap right down the middle until it’s ridged like a roof above my face. I always imagined I could draw a straight line from the V in the bill of my cap to the catcher’s mitt.

  “This guy is too good to be true,” Mo Chadwick said to me after we’d watched Manny Embarquadero work out. “Something’s not right. If he’s only played baseball for one month, how come he knows when to back up third base, and how come he knows which way to cheat when the pitcher’s going to throw off-speed?”

  “Ours not to reason why,” I said. “He’s certainly a rough diamond.”

  If Manny Embarquadero hadn’t talked in his sleep, I never would have found out what a rough diamond he really was.

  On our first night together, I woke up in humid blackness on a sagging bed to the sound of loud whispering. The team had reserved the whole second floor of a very old hotel, so at first I assumed the sounds were in the hallway. But as I became wider awake, I realized the whispering was coming from the next bed.

  Apparently no one was certain what language, if any, Manny Embarquadero understood.

  “Our scout says he may understand one of the pidgin dialects from Courteguay,” Chuck Manion had said the day he introduced Manny. The mountains Manny had wandered out of bordered on Haiti, so there was some speculation that Manny might understand French. Needless to say, we didn’t have any French-speaking players on the team.

  I raised the tattered blind a few inches to let a little street light into the room, just enough to determine that Manny was alone in bed. What I was hearing was indeed coming from his mouth, but it wasn’t Spanish, or French, or even some mysterious Courteguayan dialect. It was ghetto American, inner-city street talk pure and simple.

  He mumbled a lot, but also spoke several understandable phrases, as well as the words “Mothah,” and “Dude,” and “Dee-troit.” At one point, he said clearly, “Go ahead girl, it ain’t gonna bite you.”

  At breakfast in the hotel coffee shop, Manny, using basic hand signals and facial expressions, let me know he wanted the same breakfast I was having: eggs, toast, hash browns, large orange juice, large milk, large coffee.

  “I think we should have a talk,” I said to Manny as soon as we got back to the room after breakfast.

  Manny stared at me, his face calm, his eyes defiant.

  “You talk in your sleep,” I said. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to tell anyone, at least not yet. But I think you’d better clue me in on what’s going down.”

  Manny stared a long time, his black-bullet pupils boring right into me, as though he was considering doing me some irreparable physical damage.

  “If I was back home, Mon, that stare would have shrivelled your brain to the size of a pea,” Manny said in a sing-songy Caribbean dialect.

  “Your home, from what I heard, is in Detroit,” I said, “somewhere with a close-up view of the Renaissance Center. So don’t give me this island peasant shit. When I look closely I can tell you’re no more seventeen than I am. You’re older than me, and I just turned twenty-three. I don’t know why you’re running this scam, and I don’t particularly care. But if we’re gonna room together you’re gonna have to play it straight with me.”

  “Fuck! Why couldn’t I draw a roomie who’s a heavy sleeper? I really thought I’d trained myself to stop talking in my sleep.”

  The accent was pure inner-city Detroit, flying past me like debris in the wind.

  “So what’s the scam? Why a mute, hot-shot child prodigy of a shortstop from the hills of Courteguay?”

  “I just want to play baseball.”

  “That’s no explanation.”

  “Yes, it is. I played high-school ball. I didn’t get any invites to play for a college. I went to every tryout camp in the country for three years. Never got a tumble. ‘You’re too slow, you don’t hit for power. Your arm is strong but you don’t have enough range.’ If you ain’t the most talented then you got to play the angles. I seen that all the shortstops were coming from Courteguay, and they’re black, and I’m black, so I figured if I went over there and kept my mouth shut and pretended to be an inexperienced kid from the outback, I’d get me a chance to play.”

  His words went by like bullets, but I’ve captured the gist of what he said.

  “Shows a hell of a lot of desire,” I said.

  “I even tried the Mexican Leagues, but I couldn’t catch on.”

  “But in a month or so, when you don’t improve fast enough, this team is going to send you packing. Back to Courteguay.”

  “I’m gettin’ better every day, man. I’m gonna make it. People perform accordin
g to expectations. Everyone figures I’ll play my way into the Bigs next spring, and I’m not gonna disappoint them.”

  “There’s a little matter of talent.”

  “I have more than you can imagine.”

  “Lots of luck.”

  The next night, when Manny played his first game, the play-by-play people mentioned that Manny was mute but not deaf. By the eighth inning, there were a dozen people behind our dugout shouting to Manny in every language from Portuguese to Indonesian. Manny shrugged and smiled, displaying a faceful of large, white teeth.

  He was a one-hundred-percent improvement on our previous shortstop. I could see what the scouts, believing him to be seventeen and inexperienced, had seen in him. He had an arm that wouldn’t quit. He could go deep in the hole to spear a ball on the edge of the outfield grass, straighten effortlessly, brace his back foot on the grass, and fire a rocket to first in time to get the runner. He covered only as much ground as was necessary, never seeming to extend himself, but covering whatever ground was necessary in order to reach the ball.

  Of course, his name wasn’t Manny Embarquadero.

  “I am one anonymous dude. Jimmy, with two m’s, if you must know, Williams with two l’s. Hell, there must be two thousand guys in Deetroit, Michigan, with the same name. And all us young black guys look alike, right?

  “I had a Gramma, probably my Greatgramma, but she died. I think I was her granddaughter’s kid. But that girl went off to North Carolina when I was just a baby and nobody ever heard from her. Once, Gramma and I lived for three years in an abandoned building. We collected cardboard boxes and made the walls about two feet thick. It gets fucking cold in Dee-troit, Michigan. Gramma always saw to it that I went to school.”

  Two nights later, there was a scout from the Big Show in the stands. Everyone pressed a little, some pressed a lot, and everybody except Manny looked bad at one time or another. Manny was unbelievable. One ball was hit sharply to his right and deep in the hole, a single if there ever was one. The left-fielder had already run in about five steps, expecting to field the grounder, when he saw that Manny had not only fielded the ball, but was directly behind it when he scooped it up and threw the runner out by a step. What he did was humanly impossible.