“Okay, I’ve got another one. If you were abducted by the Taliban and they told you they would kill you if you didn’t, which guy on the team would you have sex with.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I exhaled.
“What? It’s life or death. This could really happen, man. Terrorists are some serious shit!”
“They’d go to all the trouble of kidnapping a team just so they could make them—Why am I even arguing this?” I turned my head down to the dugout, checking out of the conversation and catching up on the game. The backup catcher, Lisk, was jogging down toward us. His equipment was on, skullcap on his head with a mitt in one hand and a mask in the other. Behind his running form, standing on the lip of the dugout steps, was Webby waving at the pen. A quick glance to the field revealed runs driven in with a few more on base awaiting a ride home. Brent was in a jam.
In the lower levels, most bullpens don’t have phones. This one was lucky to have a mound. Unable to call down instructions, the pitching coaches use hand signals symbolizing each respective pitcher. Mine was the A-frame shape Webby was currently signing to the pen.
“Sorry to leave your life-changing conversation boys, but it looks like I have to go to work.” I tore off my clothes like Superman and bounded to the mound.
Slappy and Pickles hopped up as well. They didn’t have to warm up, but assumed the roles of bodyguards while I warmed with Lisk. The bullpen was set up so that the catcher’s back was to the field when he warmed a reliever. A hitter could line a ball foul and strike him while he caught. Slappy jogged down and stood next to Lisk, defending his back side. Pickles stayed by me.
Though Brent was pumping in strikes, doing his best to grind out the start, the batters were finding holes. He wasn’t getting knocked out of the yard, rather, being bled out slowly, single after single. I wanted to believe he’d make it through the inning, but the bases were loaded now and the hook would come soon if he didn’t get lucky and roll a pair.
I warmed as fast as I could without mindlessly firing, but the cold makes it harder to get the touch of the ball and your arm feels like a blunt club, not the precision instrument you’re used to. I’d be Brent’s replacement, probably inheriting a few base runners when I came in if he didn’t find a way out first. If I was going to help him out of this mess, I needed to be precise, I needed to be hot and ready.
Another single was rapped out to center, two runners scored. When the dust settled, Webby was standing on the lip of the dugout. Looking down toward the pen, he took his hat off, the universal sign for Is he ready?
“You ready?” Slappy asked.
Of course I’m not ready, it’s freezing and I’ve throw ten pitches! “Yeah, I’m good,” I replied.
Slappy took his hat off to signal back. Our manager called time and went out to retrieve Brent.
There’s a surge of adrenaline a reliever feels before he enters a game. A quick jog to a pile of dirt under the lights, and the cold, barren, windswept desert is now your battlefield. You versus the guy with a stick, both trying to carve out a living. Numbers will be accumulated, stats added, careers evaluated in that merciless piecemeal fashion baseball is famous for. All of it, humming along in the background whether you’re loose and ready or not.
The first batter singled off me and two more of Brent’s runs scored. While it may be frustrating to give up my own runs, I absolutely hate giving up other pitchers’ runs—especially those of friends. I covered my face with my mitt and fired off nine or ten F-bombs in response to the single. I got the next hitter to pop out, but the damage was done. I hand delivered Brent’s runs. Some friend I was.
The team ran me out for the sixth, and I promptly punched out the first hitter I faced. The second hitter, the leadoff man, earned another single. I found myself facing the meat of the order with a runner on, one out, and the two hole stepping in.
It’s natural to watch a batter enter the box, because a lot can be learned from observing his setup. Stance, hands, weight, plate proximity—each gives a clue to the type of hitter you’re facing. In the case of this hitter, it was none of the above. He was peeking at the signs. Not blatantly gawking, but his eyes were definitely wandering back to Sanchy’s hands as he telegraphed pitches.
I stepped off. Maybe it was a fluke? I thought, pacing about the mound. I licked my hand, smacked the rosin bag, and reset myself on the rubber. This time I watched the batter and paid no attention to Sanchy at all.
The batter’s head shifted slightly and his eyes bounced back. He was looking at Sanchy’s hand, alright, That motherf—. I stepped off again. Sanchy popped up and called a time-out. He jogged out to the mound to meet me.
“Uh, is you okay?”
“He’s peeking at your signs, Sanchy.”
“He pee-king?”
“He’s looking at your hands.” I said it slower, pantomiming with my hands as I talked.
“Oh, he see my hands!” Sanchy looked back angrily at the batter, but I grabbed his shoulder and pulled him around to me. “You want hit that fucking guy?” he asked, making a fist and pounding his glove. I smiled. He didn’t speak the best English but didn’t need to.
“No,” I said. This wasn’t the time.
If there’s any reason a pitcher can hit a batter, it’s for stealing signs. But then he’s on base. Next thing I know, I’m watching the three-hole hitter lift a fly into the High Desert jet stream. What was a fun bonding experience with Sanchy is now a bloated ERA. “Go back there and set up outside.”
“Fastbol?”
“Yeah, just set up away. Let him see the sign too.”
“What, why jou wanna—”
“Let him see it.”
“Let’s go boys,” the umpire said. He had walked out to the mound now, anxious to keep the game moving.
“Sorry Blue, we’re good,” I said. I nodded at Sanchy, who still looked confused.
Sanchy jogged back to the plate and squatted, the umpire followed. I reset on the mound and the batter stepped in. I watched the batter’s eyes as Sanchy put the sign down. He peeked again, just like before. I nodded to Sanchy, accepting his sign, though I never had any intention of throwing what he called, even though I told him to call it.
Leg back, hands up, rock, pivot, step, just like back at Mazz’s place. Alright asshole, you wanna peek, it’s gonna cost ya. I drove down the mound and snapped my best into flight. The batter squared up, full swing, locked in for the down-and-away fastball. What he got was a hands-high four seamer, inside from the start. A high fastball is too juicy to lay off, but the ones on your hands are like the poison apple. It continued riding in, even as the batter realized it was too late to stop his stroke. White leather bored into the handle of the bat, detonating it on impact. The bat blew up in the hitter’s hands, spraying kindling all over the infield while the ball spun to second, flipped to short, and fired to first—double play.
As the peeker jogged back to the dugout, Sanchy handed him what was left of his bat and said, “No more fucking pee-king!”
You tell ’em Sanchy. You tell ’em.
Chapter Twenty-three
We lost, showered, and packed up. Before we boarded the bus for Modesto, our clubbie served us our final meal in High Desert. It’s called a getaway meal, named because it’s the meal we skip town while eating. In A-ball, players typically don’t eat after the games like Double- and Triple-A players do. And we wouldn’t have been fed were it not for the six-hour trip ahead of us.
Tonight’s meal was barbecue. Pulled pork or chicken sandwiches with baked beans—we got to choose. I opted for the pulled pork—mistake. My sandwich looked like someone fed a grenade to a pig. What did I expect?—the food was just leftovers served from the stadium’s concessions. Minor league stadium food isn’t exactly five-star cuisine. Hell, I’ve had better barbecue from vending machines.
Bad sandwiches were only a short-term issue. Baked beans was the real problem. A bus trip meal simply cannot contain a time bomb like baked beans. It’s
only a matter of hours before stomachs start to explode, and the bus takes on the scent of a barnyard. Inevitably, someone will drop trow in the bus’s poorly ventilated bathroom. That brown torpedo will remain for the next four days of our trip, marinating while we drive, baking when we play. The trip home will be eight hours in a portable septic tank, with the aroma continuously recycled through the bus’s air system.
What can I do? Try explaining the ramifications of poor bus meals to a group of hungry minor leaguers who rarely get a postgame feed. This was a feast! Cold pig flesh and a scoop of turd pills—the team mauled it like lions on a zebra carcass, snapping and clawing when another player got too close.
We left around 11 P.M. The team, fed and sedated, reclined in their seats while the clubbie inserted a movie into the bus’s on-board DVD player.
Nowadays, buses equipped with DVD players and at least six televisions to watch the media on make team trips smoother. The sets are staggered throughout the bus, hanging down from the ceiling above the seat backs. Most players take proximity to a screen into consideration when choosing their seats.
The movies played on team trips can be a welcome distraction or an unceasing annoyance depending on how many times you’ve seen the flick. Usually, during the first trips of the season, the same popular bus-trip movie staples are watched. I can bet, with almost one hundred percent accuracy, the movies most teams watch during this time frame in baseball are Dumb and Dumber, Old School, Wedding Crashers (the unrated edition so more boobies can be seen), The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Gladiator, and 300. Sometimes they watch them more than once in the same season, and sometimes more than once on the same trip.
Dumb and Dumber ate up an hour or so of tonight’s trip, distracting us as the bus made its way north. The next movie was Gladiator, a good action flick to change things up. The third movie was one I had never seen before, Midnight Express.
It was early in the morning when Midnight Express came on. Most of the team was out of it, trying to sleep in the uncomfortable coach bus seats as we went. The movie was older, produced in the later 1970s, with substandard production values compared to the previous two we viewed.
With no promise of perky female nudity, or at least some mindless explosions, none of us had the desire to trade sleep for its viewing. Several of the players’ heads drooped, succumbing to sleep. Headphones went in or over ears; pillows separated craniums from glass-panel bus windows. Things were quiet, peaceful, stinky.
Twenty minutes could not have gone by before the bus came to a complete stop. Instinctively, all players woke up, operating under the assumption we had come to either a rest area or the new town’s hotel. The streaking sounds of horns blaring in our freshly woken ears as cars blew past the bus told us something was amiss. No signs or lights marked the outside areas. We were stopped in the middle of the highway.
At the helm of the bus, the cross-eyed bus driver was whimpering to our trainer. The manager’s voice chimed in and then the radioman. I couldn’t make out what was going on, but news soon trickled back as the grapevine of players passed it along, bus seat to bus seat.
“We’re lost,” came the headlines.
“What? How? It’s this guy’s job to know where we’re going.”
“Have you seen his eyes? I’m surprised we made it this far.”
“Easy, it could happen to anyone; cut him some slack,” I said, trying to act mature.
“Oh yeah, how many times have you been lost on a bus trip before?
“Maybe we just missed our off-ramp. Do we know how far lost we are?”
The question went down the vine, and soon the answer was brought back. Each time this answer traded mouth to ear, it left the person who heard it angry. Finally, it made it back to me.
“We are like an hour and a half in the wrong direction.”
“WHAT! That stupid son of a bitch! It’s his job to know where we’re going!”
The bus’s engine turned over and we started going again, though no one knew where. Information circulated. Ideas were generated. Road times calculated. The bus got off the highway at an exit near a hotel. We hoped we might stop and figure things out in the morning instead of spending all night on the bus. Fingers were crossed, breath was held, and souls were inevitably crushed as the bus sped past the possibility of a comfortable bed and back onto the highway.
Anger, magnified by lack of sleep and the promise of three extra hours on a vehicle that smelled like a horse stall, made sleep-deprived personalities volatile. At the rate we were going, we wouldn’t make it to Modesto until 7 A.M.
Meanwhile, Midnight Express chugged along on the screens above us, with footage of men scrambling about a Turkish prison. We had missed most of the plot and had no idea why they were imprisoned to begin with. We watched anyway, like zombies with no will to live and too irritated to slumber.
No one spoke. The wrong words would set off this powder keg of bush leaguers. As far as we were concerned, this bus was our Turkish prison, purgatory with coach seating. Our last glimmer of hope rested with this grainy, seventies flick. It was now this movie’s responsibility to enrapture us and distract our tortured souls from our present dilemma.
Then as if there was no doubt we might be on the midnight express to hell, the movie ambushed us with a shower scene portraying two male prisoners bathing each other, followed by a passionate make-out session. Time and space stood still as the images washed over us. Then, the spark hit powder and a scream split the night, “WHAT THE FUCK ARE WE WATCHING?”
Chaos ensued. Bottles were thrown at the television screens. Shouts of anarchy, outrage, and frustration mixed with swear words.
“Who picked this fucking movie?”
“Why does it smell so fucking bad in here?”
“Whose fucking hand is on my thigh?”
Oddly, all I could think about was the conversation I missed in the pen, the one about which guy on the team you’d have intercourse with if abducted by terrorists.
The bus came to another stop. The prisoners continued to bathe. You could hear frustrated conversation at the bus’s helm and see sexual frustration on the screen above. The radioman was obviously pissed off now, and we could hear his anger, though not the specifics of it. The prisoners were obviously confused, though we did not understand the specifics of it. The nuts and bolts of the situation trickled back through the bus. Water trickled off nuts and bolts above us.
“We are lost again.”
“Oh my God! Are you kidding me?” It was beyond frustrating; it was now completely ridiculous—absurd even. It was late, the bus smelled like a Turkish prison, and we just saw two dudes go at it—neither one a hot hermaphrodite.
Our anger subsided only when fatigue overcame frustration. The bus turned around and started going in a new direction. The movie finished, and no one dared put anything else in. It was almost five in the morning, and everyone was thoroughly miserable. Exhausted, uncomfortable, we slumped back and wished for any sleep we could get.
The next time the bus stopped, the sun was up. We were at the hotel in Modesto. Somehow, some way, I shambled through the check-in process and made it to my room where I passed out. An hour later, I was woken up by power tools. The room next to mine was being renovated.
Chapter Twenty-four
No batting practice and a late stretch time—the manager was giving us a break for our enduring the sentence we served to get to Modesto. Even with the relaxed schedule, it felt like a blink from departing High Desert to the time I found myself sitting in another bullpen.
Modesto’s stadium was newer. The facilities were good for A-ball: breathing room in the clubhouse, no fly strips, separate rooms for the coaching staff. The stadium itself was situated next to a golf course surrounded by green trees and grassy fairways, a far cry from the barren flats and nosebleed-inducing altitude of High Desert. Though the bullpen was nothing more than a row of chairs stretching down the side of the left field fence, at least there were enough chairs for all of us.
/> Getting up for a game on no sleep requires copious amounts of caffeine. Some of the guys were nursing their second Red Bulls, others suckled strings of coffee cups. Our eyes were bloodshot and our faces washed out. We looked like animated corpses. Having thrown the previous night, I would have tonight off unless we got into a real mess. I refrained from energy drinks in favor of a nap, inconspicuously nodding off, my hat angled down to hide my closed lids from fans and coaches alike.
“Come on, Hayhurst,” Slappy said. “If we have to stay awake, you have to stay awake.”
“Why?”
“We’re a team.”
“You can think of something better than that,” I said, pulling my hat back down. “Good night.”
About the time I reached the weightless point of half sleep, one of the guys screamed heads up, jerking me awake. I tumbled out of my seat and hit the ground as a line shot came screaming into the pen. The ball struck the fencing behind where my head was, bounced off, nicked a chair, and spun in the dirt of the pen.
“Jesus…I almost died,” I said, watching the ball twirl to a stop.
“You angered the baseball gods by not staying awake,” Slappy said.
“Yeah, right. I don’t believe in baseball gods.” An old heretical wives’ tale of supposedly mystical beings who watch over games and act as the ultimate judges of on-field karma—which I don’t believe in either. The baseball gods will humble players who get too confident, exalt players who’ve struggled, and embarrass players who think they’re cooler than they are. Essentially, all the unexplainable, ironic, and coincidental stuff that happens in this game can be blamed on the baseball gods if you try hard enough. Most of their god-worthy events are a combination of stupidity, averages, and ego, but it’s more fun to say some higher power did it.
“Don’t let them hear you say that,” Slap cautioned.
The Bullpen Gospels Page 18