Chapter Eight
“Alright men, let’s bring it in.” Wyatt Earp, so everyone called him, was our high-voiced field coordinator. His order to group up meant our first morning meeting was ready to start. The players stopped loitering by the field six fencing and crowded in on Earp’s command, forming a semicircle around him. He told us to take a seat, which we did Indian style in the morning dew atop manicured Arizona sod. The coaches and trainers remained standing, spread out before us like they were going to read to us like kindergarteners. Today would mark day one of camp, a day of intros and rules.
Earp led things off, reintroducing himself, though he needed no introduction. He was already infamous. He was a decision maker, like Grady, which meant he held our futures in his hands. The slope to the top of the game is so steep, it’s hard to like the folks who decide who makes it there. Statistically speaking, the decisions they make you probably won’t like. You learn fast who they are and pander accordingly.
Though Grady was hard to read, Earp was obviously biased. Everyone who’d been around him for any length of time knew he was obsessed with high numbers on the radar gun. He carried said gun with him everywhere, hence his nickname. Since the vast majority of pitchers didn’t generate the kind of numbers that turned him on, it was generally assumed Earp didn’t like anyone. Even if you pitched a great game, he’d bring up that you weren’t throwing hard enough. He always touted this character trait as honesty, but it was a blunt, unhelpful kind of honesty that made you wish he’d just lie to you for a change.
He gave the floor over to Grady, who choked out a greeting to us in his raspy, two-pack-a-day voice. “Gentlemen, welcome to camp. If you take a look around you’ll notice there are a lot more of you than we have roster spots for. I’m sure I don’t have to explain what that means.”
“Way to kick things off on a hopeful note,” I murmured to Brent, sitting next to me alongside Frenchy.
“Yeah, seriously. There are like a million new faces here this year.”
“I’d like to introduce some of our coaching staff,” Grady continued. He turned to face the line of coaches and trainers behind him. The coaches had on their baseball uniforms. Aside from their uniforms, the one thing they all had in common were stopwatches hanging out of their back pockets. The watches weren’t for timing sprints, but to keep track of groups between station rotations. Everything in spring training ran on a tight schedule. Beyond that, some coaches had fungo bats for hitting ground balls, gloves for fielding, clipboards for clipping. Most of the coaches stood in clumps with their friends, just like we players sat in clumps with ours.
A few decision-making individuals sat on golf carts: the “Brass,” as we called them. You could usually find Grady and Earp sitting comfortably in one. It was easier to make rounds on the complex’s seven fields via cart than it was to hoof it in the hot sun. Over the years, golf carts became a symbol of disdain with the players, since a cart was always occupied by some member of the Brass who didn’t talk to you, but could make or break your career.
Grady asked the coaches and trainers to introduce themselves, which they did, in no particular order. They broke ranks and explained their title and previous year’s coaching locations, then fell back in line. I knew some staff better than others, Randy Ready, Rick Renteria, Wally Whitehurst, Tom Tornincasa, and several others whose names weren’t alliterated. I knew almost all the pitching coaches, including Steve Webber, at whom Brent and I giggled like school kids when he spoke, and Glenn Abbott, who labored to teach me a slider for half a season in Double-A.
The trainers introduced themselves next, followed by some front-office staffers whom we’d most likely never see again after today and ending with the clubbies. It was all very quaint, if not boring, and I spent most of my time picking up loose wads of grass and tossing them on other nearby players, pretending Frenchy was responsible.
Grady ended his portion of the morning with, “We have high expectations for this camp, and your job is to make our decisions at the end of it as hard as possible.”
Earp took the floor again, pulling a sheet of paper from his pocket. “Alright men, let’s go over some rules for camp. First, if you’re late for anything, it’s fifty bucks plus a dollar for each minute after that. If you don’t tie your shoes in the weight room, you’ll be thrown out. Don’t be in there without the proper gear on. Don’t be jack’n around when you are in there….”
I looked over at Frenchy who was trying his best to act as if it were as serious as Earp made it out to be, “Hold on, it gets better,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“The hotel hot tub is not a washing machine,” continued Earp. “Don’t try to wash your laundry in the hotel whirlpool or you’ll pay for it to be cleaned.”
“What? Is he kidding?” Frenchy asked, smiling as if it were one of those jokes speakers mix in just to see if you’re still paying attention.
“No. About two years back, we had a guy in camp who honestly tried to wash his clothes in the hot tub. He took detergent and his dirty drawers and threw them in. I think he was trying to hand wash them when he was busted. They had to drain the whirlpool and clean out the jets. The hotel billed the Padres, and they were pissed.”
“Was this guy retarded?”
“No, but he was from a very undeveloped part of the world.”
“Wow, that’s unbelievable.”
“Oh, just wait—”
“No cooking in the hotel bathrooms. In fact, no cooking in the rooms at all.”
“What does he mean no cooking? If you got a suite, can’t you use your microwave?”
“You got a suite? How the hell did you get a suite? It’s your first year!”
Frenchy shrugged. “So can I cook or not?”
“The microwave is fine,” I resumed. “He’s talking about something that happened when a couple of guys tried to make food in the bathtub. They almost set the place on fire, and the heat melted some of the plastic in the tub.”
“The room caught on fire?”
“No, just part of it.”
“What were they making?”
“Rat, or something. Hell, I don’t know. They were making it in a damn bathtub.”
“Stay off the hotel computer. Every year we have problems with this, so this year we are just banning it from the start. Stay off the hotel computer, or else it’s a two hundred and fifty dollar fine. No excuses.” Earp was referring to the hotel lobby’s computer. There was only one computer in the hotel that guests could use for free. It was located by the front desk, next to the entrance, and was a common gathering site for players to look up things they shouldn’t.
“That won’t last,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“Every year, fine or no fine, there are people on it. And every year, someone gets caught looking up porn and leaving the links open for other guests to stumble on. It’s never your standard porn, either. It’s always make-you-gag fetishes with barn animals and stuff. Honestly, I don’t want to know who is looking that stuff up because I gotta shower with the dude. Maybe I already have?”
“Barn animals? That’s disgusting,” Brent said.
“It was you, wasn’t it?” Frenchy accused, nudging Brent.
“Yeah, right. Even if I did look at porn, I wouldn’t do it in the hotel lobby, and I wouldn’t look up that crap.”
“I’d say that too, if I was doing it, Brent,” I said.
“It’s probably one of you guys,” he countered.
I sighed heavily, “It’s me; I admit it. Nothing like a little barnyard love to get me ready for a day at Padres Spring Training 2007!”
“No beef in the team hotel,” Earp said, not referring to either burgers or barn animals. He was talking about minor league groupies or random encounters at the bar. “You get caught bringing beef back to your room, it’s gonna cost you five hundred dollars. Go to her place instead.”
“Or just do it in the lobby, I guess,” Frenchy said.
> “No, seriously, go back to her place because it’s cheaper that way. If you get busted for curfew it’s only two hundred and fifty dollars—half the price.”
“Where’s Hayhurst at?” Earp shouted suddenly.
“Jesus, they caught me!” I said, winking at the boys. I put my hand up.
“Stand up, Hay!” Earp commanded. I got up as ordered and stood awkwardly in front of the entire Padres minor league troupe as well as its coaches, trainers, and staff.
“Did you wear your cup today Hayhurst?”
“Sure did,” I said, knocking on it.
“You ever think about not wearing it anymore?”
“No chance.”
“You can all thank Hayhurst here for a fifty-dollar fine if we catch you not wearing a cup out here. How hard was that line drive that almost knocked your beans off?”
“Ninety-four they said.” There was a collective groan by the audience.
“Damn.” Earp adjusted himself uncomfortably. He laughed in that strained way a person does when confronted by something really painful but still funny. The coaches just shook their heads, obviously believing my choice not to wear a cup was well beyond stupid—which it was.
Earp turned back to us. “Alright, fifty dollars if you don’t wear a cup, got it?”
I sat back down while he was putting the price on the threat. I didn’t want to relive that experience any more than I had to, but thanks to Earp’s callout, I’d be explaining it for the rest of the day. Yes, I got hit in the nuts with a ninety-four miles per hour line drive while not wearing a cup. I just didn’t like the way a cup felt when I pitched, so I didn’t wear one. Never did, not even in college. People would always joke it was going to catch up to me, but I didn’t buy it. Turns out, I was wrong. Now one of my nads has a seam mark on it. It was the worst pain I’d ever felt in my life, ripping through my body like a chainsaw, not letting up for twenty-four hours.
“Did you lose one?” Frenchy asked.
“No, but I was dangerously close. I remember praying I would never think another impure thought if God would just let me keep them!”
“So does everything work down there?”
“I think so. I haven’t tried to have kids yet, but everything seems to function like it’s supposed to.”
“Well, you should be ashamed of yourself, if you ask me,” Brent said.
“Why is that?”
“Promising God no more impure thoughts and then looking up sheep porn on the lobby computer, it’s just wrong.”
“Alright,” Earp said, resuming his lecture. He had folded up his notes and was about to end the meeting but was looking to go out on a bang. “Anyone got any good jokes?” He looked over the crowd, but no one felt courageous. “Lars, I know you got something.”
Lars Maynard, a right-handed closer drafted the same year as I was, may best be introduced as the one person in the organization who could walk up to Grady and tell him to go fuck himself without batting an eye. He was, without a doubt, the most interesting person I ever played the game with, and thanks to his eccentric personality, he stood out among peers and coaches. Sometimes it almost seemed as if he were from another world.
To give you an idea of what kind of guy Lars was, you need to know what Tommy John surgery is, which Lars underwent a little over a year before. Named after the pitcher who the surgery was tested on, Tommy John is the reconstruction of the ulnar collateral ligament, or UCL, located in a pitcher’s throwing arm. It’s major surgery requiring holes to be drilled in bones and the harvesting of a replacement ligament sewn through said holes. The goal is to repair the damaged throwing arm and save the career of the pitcher who receives it.
Normal recovery time for the operation is about a year. It takes months to get the necessary range of motion back in your elbow, fighting through layers of scar tissue. But that was just too long for Lars.
After surgery, Lars walked into the doctor’s office for a consultation and he asked the doctor how long it would take to get full mobility back in his arm. The doctor told him the usual, months of rehab. Lars asked why, a question most people would hold off on, content to take the doctor’s word, considering their arm just had holes drilled in it. But Lars had done a lot of homework on the surgery before he went under the knife—a lot. In fact, it wasn’t uncommon to catch Lars reading books on pharmacology or medical journals in the locker room.
The doctor explained the process of recovery—how breaking up all the scar tissue is excruciating and how the body has to go about it slowly to build up its tolerance. Lars looked the doctor in the face and bluntly asked, “Pain is the only thing? There are no other repercussions?”
“The kind of pain I’m talking about is enough of a repercussion.”
“So, I could get it back now if I could take the pain?”
The doctor laughed. “Sure, but you don’t want to do that.”
Lars stood up right then and there, pulled off his sling, placed his arm in the frame of the office door, and jerked his arm straight. He swooned and passed out. When he came to, despite the chastisement of his doctor, he could extend his arm straight.
Of course, this story didn’t shock me that much. Before he had Tommy John, he chose to have open-back surgery with no anesthetic. He said that, at the time, he believed experiencing the farthest reaches of pain would serve to expand his ability to appreciate life more fully. It was part of his metaphysical period, in which he also got high and traced his out-of-body experiences in spiral patterns, hoping to capture thoughts created by brain activity usually operating in the subconscious.
You can’t see the scar on his back. It’s covered by a tattoo of Atlas, the mythological god who carried the world on his own back. The variation depicted on Lars’s body was slightly different though because his Atlas let the world fall and splatter all over the ground like an egg and is walking away from it. When I asked Lars what it meant, he said, “Atlas is basically saying, I don’t give a fuck about the world, and I’m going to do my own thing.”
Lars and I actually lived together for part of a season. A very nice, well-adjusted, Catholic host family with three kids, a cat, and a dog put us up. Lars, despite all my expectations, did not kill any of them. In fact, they loved him. He was a charmer and a gentleman, and never missed a chance to TiVo Grey’s Anatomy. To Lars, there were no set ways to do things, no rules of operation, no expectations but his own.
Lars stood up and walked to the front of the group. Earp, who simply thought Lars was batshit crazy, was giddy at the thought of what might come out of Lars’s mouth.
“Got a good one for us?” Earp asked.
“I like it,” Lars replied in a way that conveyed he didn’t care if anyone else did.
“Alright, lay it on us.”
Dryly and completely void of emotion, Lars looked to us and spoke, “What’s the hardest thing about rollerblading?”
“I don’t know. What?” Earp asked.
“Telling your parents you’re gay.”
Chapter Nine
After that, Lars was elected to tell jokes at most of the morning meetings. A few days later, he led the day off with one about an octopus who could play the bagpipes. The punch line was something along the lines of this: “Play ’em? Once I get these fancy pajamas off, I’m gonna fuck ’em!”
We’ve heard funnier jokes, but the situation Lars told it in made all the difference. A film crew was on location to document the life of another camper, Cooper Brannan. Cooper was a former soldier injured in the War on Terror, when a flashbang grenade exploded in his left hand, costing him a digit. Before he joined the service, he was a pitcher with aspirations of going pro. In what was sure to become the feel-good story of the season, the Padres signed Cooper to a spring-training deal, stirring up a media frenzy.
Everyone from Jim Rome to Deal or No Deal was in, asking Coop what it felt like to go from active duty to pro athlete in America’s greatest pastime. To Coop’s credit, his answers were always humble, respectful, an
d genuine. He was a media darling, and the cameras seemed to appear at his command. Unfortunately, they did not disappear at his whim, or maybe they would have opted out of videotaping Lars’s morning joke.
Rather than toning things down, the first thing Lars did was walk up to the panoramic lens of the film crew and put two middle fingers into view, causing his peers to erupt with laughter. Then, after taking his place in front of the group, he proceeded to stretch the joke into a five-minute, Andrew Dice Clay swearfest, dropping lines like “Holy fucking shit, that octopus is the most fucking amazing musician I’ve ever seen, he’s like Prince.” Before he reached his conclusion, the camera crew had to stop recording, as none of the material was usable in Coop’s daily in-the-life-of documentary. The entire camp tittered like naughty little kids each time Lars used a swear word, including Earp, who had no one but himself to blame.
Along with Lars’s jokes, Coop’s film crew became a normal camp occurrence. On the cover of many magazines and television screens, Coop was a sensation, while Lars’s humor was a centerpiece for player discussion. Coop, it could be said, represented the side of the game most people wished it to be, which is why it was such good television material. Lars, on the other hand, represented what baseball life was really like, raw and unrefined. I found it odd that both could exist in the presence of one another without canceling each other out.
Evidence of Coop’s mass appeal was apparent thanks to the stream of letters from well-wishers and supporters, which came pouring into his locker daily, not to mention the many boxes of complimentary equipment that showed up with his name on it.
Before he was signed on, there were reports of Coop’s ability to gas the ball into the low nineties from the left side. Maybe it was this particular spring, maybe it was always this way, but all the hype surrounding his ability to bring lefty heat looked like make-believe because most of the time he labored in the low eighties, scuffling for outs.
The Bullpen Gospels Page 7