The Wax Pack

by Brad Balukjian

  Harvey was there every step of the way, driving the family to Oakland whenever the Angels came up to play the A’s and demanding they arrive two hours before the first pitch just to watch Rance take batting practice. They invested in a satellite dish in the 1980s so they could watch him on TV, long before the advent of cable channels that broadcast every game. And in Rance’s last season, when the team reached the 1992 World Series against the Atlanta Braves and were on the verge of clinching, Harvey and Ganell were so nervous that they got in their car and drove around listening to the game on the radio for the last several innings.

  We huddle around the slab of wood peeking through the grass on the pitcher’s mound, the sun beating down on us, the air a soupy mix of dust and moisture.

  Rance glances at a large tree near the backstop. “Right over there is where he would pitch to me, starting every February through the summer,” he says, his hands tucked in his shorts, his blue eyes watering. “My childhood, growing up out here in Woodville, I wouldn’t trade that for anything.”

  He presses his sneakers into the dry grass of the pitcher’s mound. The leaves of that solitary tree sway behind the backstop.

  “Dad was a very emotional guy, but he wouldn’t necessarily show it. He would hear singing in church and cry,” he says.

  Harvey passed away from liver cancer in 2001 after an otherwise healthy life. It was then that Rance, still living in El Paso and now with his second wife, Lori, heard the call to come home.

  * * *

  *

  I want to get the Wax Packers on the field to see what it feels like to face Doc Gooden or to play catch with Lee Mazzilli. And now, on day 1, that wish has already come true: I’m about to get a hitting lesson from Rance Mulliniks.

  We’re standing in an airplane hangar in Visalia, a space serving as Rance’s new baseball academy. From the outside, nothing indicates this is where a world champion trains the next generation of ballplayers. The closest sign of any kind is located in a lot across the street, a faded Romney/Ryan campaign poster. Inside the hangar, the decor is simple: a sock of black netting to simulate a batting cage, with a carpet of green turf.

  For seventy dollars an hour Rance gives private lessons to local kids. Today’s charge is Jonathan, a senior at Porterville High with college baseball aspirations. Jonathan is short and has limited natural ability, but he’s a hard worker. He nods to the three of us gathered around the sock, probably wondering why he suddenly has an audience.

  They start with some soft toss, Rance crouching a few feet away, lobbing the ball underhand to let Jonathan find his stroke. He struggles, hacking off-balance, and although Rance does not seem pleased, he remains patient, offering a constant patter of advice and encouragement. When he starts throwing overhand and harder to simulate real pitching, Jonathan flails and seems uncomfortable, verbally annotating all of his swings with apologies and explanations.

  Rance throws him a few pitches, struggling to find his location. Jonathan swings wildly and misses.

  “If it’s not a strike, don’t swing at it!” Rance admonishes.

  “You throw pretty well for a guy your age,” Jonathan says, not trying to be funny.

  “Thanks,” Rance replies dryly. “Eye on the ball now.”

  Jonathan starts to find his stroke, and they then move on to fielding. Jonathan’s a second baseman, and while Rance played very little at that position (he was mostly a third baseman), he knows his way around an infield. They specifically work on turning the double play—receiving the throw from the left side of the infield, turning, and firing to first. Rance asks to borrow my glove, the same glove I used in Little League, which I’ve brought just in case there’s an opportunity for some catch. He puts it on his left hand and scowls.

  “You call this a glove?” he teases.

  He straddles second base and asks Jonathan to throw him the ball so he can demonstrate the proper technique.

  “It’s nothing but a dance move, that’s all it is,” he says. “The right foot’s leading the dance.”

  He starts a couple of steps behind the base, charges forward and POP!! receives the ball, right foot down, left foot down, and then throws to first. It’s a spectacular blur of coordination as Rance sheds years with each muscle’s contraction, his legs suddenly appearing nimble below the line of his shorts.

  Switching spots, he throws a few to Jonathan, who, try as he might, has nowhere near the grace of the former Major Leaguer.

  “Just be athletic,” Rance says, trying not to plead.

  After Jonathan leaves, we hang out and take turns hitting off a tee so Rance can critique our swings.

  Rance twirls and half-swings a bat as he talks, explaining his approach to hitting. I look over at Jesse and smile, knowing he appreciates this as much as I do. Rance’s face bristles with concentration, his body taut and attentive.

  “Hal McRae is the one who really taught me a lot,” Rance says of his former Kansas City Royals teammate.

  “It’s a cat-and-mouse game. Some people call it being a guess hitter,” he says, a Jedi with his lightsaber.

  “But it’s not really guessing. I would try to wait for my pitch to hit and predict what he’s [the pitcher] going to throw. Most of the time you look for a fastball. And if they don’t throw the pitch you are looking for, you don’t swing. Unless, of course, there’s two strikes, and then you’ve got to shorten up the swing, go the other way [hit to the opposite field] or up the middle,” he explains.

  “I stood about this far from the plate, slightly open,” he says, lining up his feet a little less than two feet off the plate, his right toes slightly more angled toward first base.

  “I would have been just about like this,” he adds, holding the bat above his left shoulder parallel to the ground. “I would take a little step back like that and then go.” His front foot taps back ever so slightly before striding forward toward third base, his arms violently bringing the bat forward like a helicopter blade slicing the air. It is a swing of pure beauty, the geometric precision of the chunk of wood hurtling forward toward an imaginary ball.

  He hands the weapon over to us, moving the act from gold record to karaoke.

  Jesse has the most experience, having played high school baseball. I peaked in Little League, and the Kid once swung at ball 4 after it had hit the catcher’s glove, forcing a befuddled umpire to change his call to strike 3.

  But it turns out the Kid may be the most natural athlete of us all. While I whiff on my first swing (off a tee!), he connects on several line drives.

  “He’s got some pop!” Rance says.

  * * *

  *

  I’m thirsty.

  I prop my elbows on the bar at Rookies Sports Bar and Grill and lean over to try to get the bartender’s attention.

  “Let me guess. Sex on the beach?” Jesse says, sipping a glass of Jameson on the rocks.

  “Mai tai,” I say proudly, playfully shoving my best friend. Chasing women at a bar is our batting practice, a routine we’ve indulged in since meeting all those years ago in Santa Barbara. Although we now live far apart and rarely have the opportunity, we quickly fall into old habits, posting up on the sidelines and scanning the room, hoping to make eye contact with a prospect. Rance is probably fast asleep next to his wife, Lori, by now, having tucked in their kids. But the day has me fired up, riding high on such a successful mission with the first of the fourteen Wax Packers and craving a release. That hedonistic need to double down on the thrill is something I have a hard time squaring with the careful, methodical aspects of my personality, making me wonder at times which is the “real” me.

  “Where’s the Kid?” I ask.

  “Outside on his phone, talking to his wife,” Jesse says with a slight eye roll.

  Rookies is a sports pub in downtown Visalia, and because the city is equidistant from the nearest major sports markets, Los Angeles and San Francisco, neither city’s team dominates the local fan base. Instead, Rookies has settled on safe, generic
alternatives—John Elway, Dan Marino, and Emmitt Smith jerseys.

  We pay the five-dollar cover charge to see Mr. Rude, who everyone tells us is a “must-see” cover band. The crowd is a diverse mix of Latinx and white, representing the Central Valley’s profile of third-generation Okies and migrant Central Americans.

  Over the croons of Mr. Rude (Oh-oh-oh-oh sweet child of mine), I turn to the girl seated next to me, a fetching Latina, and ask her if the device she’s holding is the world’s largest cell phone or the smallest computer. She laughs at my lame joke and tells me her name is Jasmine and that she grew up in Visalia. I tell her about my book project and hand her Rance’s baseball card to see if she knows the town’s prodigal son. But like everyone else I ask in the bar, I’m disappointed to find that she does not recognize him. She drags me onto the dance floor, where I flail like a plastic bag in a tornado long enough to earn a tongue-filled kiss, despite my half Filipino / quarter Armenian / quarter Euro rhythm, clearly less than the sum of my parts.

  I’m lost in the distraction, all too happy to switch off my brain and indulge. The next morning, when my brain feels like a gong being struck by a frying pan, I will think back to Rance’s discussion of life on the road and how this very scene played out time and again over six long months every baseball season, except unlike me, the players often had wives and toddlers back home.

  The Kid bails from the bar early, walking back to our motel, while I lose track of Jasmine and in my drunken stupor get separated from Jesse and end up wandering in the wrong direction after the bar closes. With my phone dead, my wrist scratched from a fall I barely remember, and my wits dashed, I end up curling up on the side of the freeway in a patch of dewy ice plant whose succulent tendrils suddenly look like thousand-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets. At some point predawn, I manage to stumble my way back toward the motel, collapsing in a fully dressed heap at the foot of my bed, too exhausted to be bothered by Adam and Jesse’s snoring duet.

  I just had one of the most exciting days of my life.

  I am a mess.

  * * *

  *

  Stirring four fitful hours later, I do a quick scan of the room in full shame spiral. Clinging to my drool-drenched pillow, I play back the night’s events, trying to fit and order the fuzzy fragments. It’s like watching a game of Tetris with someone else’s glasses on.

  All traces of the Kid and Jesse are gone, and I remember that they had to leave on an early train to get back to Santa Barbara. At one point we had planned on taking this whole adventure together, but Jesse chose the stability afforded by a new job, and the Kid was settling into his new partnered life with Ali. Neither one had seven weeks to fritter away on thirty-year-old baseball cards.

  I stagger to my feet, grabbing the dresser for support. I dump out the contents of my toiletry bag in search of Advil, take a shower so short I barely get wet, and slug whatever lukewarm coffee is left in the lobby. I’ve got another date with Rance, and I can’t be late.

  Jesus Christ, I might still be drunk. What is Rance going to think?

  I speed over to the baseball academy (which for me means going five miles over the limit), where I find a fresh Rance finishing up with another student, chatting with the boy’s father. The jackhammer in my head is made worse by the pounding of the first-day-of-summer sun, but I do my best to rub the hangover out of my eyes and smile.

  While Rance crouches over a cooler and gathers his equipment, his cell phone starts chiming with text messages.

  “This woman wears me out,” he says with a huge grin as he scrolls through his messages from his wife. “She’s so energetic, I can’t keep up. She runs half marathons,” he says proudly, then pauses to look at me more carefully.

  “Are you okay?” he asks. I show him some of the cuts on my wrist.

  “I woke up with this,” I say meekly.

  “I won’t ask,” he replies.

  We have a list of errands to run—the grocery store, a McDonald’s stop for Lori and the kids, and then a stop at their church rummage sale.

  I glance at my phone—already 84 degrees, with a high today of 101. I offer to help pay for the groceries we’re buying for dinner, but Rance refuses. When I push, he says to give the money to his son, Seth, for his church youth group trip to Kentucky.

  Pulling into the drive-thru under the golden arches, Rance turns to me.

  “If I can remember this order, I’ll be in good shape,” he says.

  Facing Roger Clemens is a piece of cake compared to keeping this straight: two regular hamburgers with pickles and ketchup only, one hamburger with no onions, a four-piece Chicken McNugget Happy Meal with fries and ketchup, and three bottles of water.

  He’s sitting on the fastball, but the voice from the drive-thru throws a curve. “Would you like the Nerf toy or the Rebelle with the Happy Meal?” the voice asks.

  Rance freezes.

  “Jiminy Christmas,” he says, exasperated.

  Sensing his doubt, the voice offers some help: “The Rebelle is more for girls.”

  A look of relief crosses his face. “The Rebella I guess,” he says, mispronouncing the toy’s name.

  The world champ comes through in the clutch, just like old times.

  * * *

  *

  In the hallway of the Mulliniks home, tucked in a suburban development of Visalia, hangs a framed quote from Teddy Roosevelt: “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly . . . and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly.”

  From his struggles early in his career with the Angels and Royals to losing in five postseasons before finally snagging a gold ring, Rance learned the lessons of failure early and often.

  “I saw guys that were bigger, faster, stronger,” he tells me in his living room, sipping a Tanqueray and tonic while the family cat, Thumbs, basks in a corner.

  Always forced to compete for playing time, he was never afforded the luxury of feeling comfortable. But he also never felt resentful of those trying to take his spot.

  “I never really thought about who I was competing against on my team. I said, the one thing I can control is that I can outwork everyone. Control what you can control.”

  Much like Teddy Roosevelt, Rance walked softly and carried a big stick. Several of them are on display in his office, which doubles as a shrine to his career, assembled by Lori (Rance would never be so self-indulgent). His preferred bat, with “Mulliniks” stamped on the barrel, was the Genuine P72 Louisville Slugger. Three racks, each holding six bats, line one wall below several framed pictures, including one of Rance with George H. W. Bush. Various accolades, milestone baseballs (his first hit, his first home run), and even an original seat from Comiskey Park in Chicago (Americans were definitely smaller a hundred years ago) round out the room.

  Perhaps the greatest struggle every professional athlete faces is knowing when to hang it up. Starting the 1992 season two years older than I am now, Rance knew he didn’t have too many more sunsets left on the baseball diamond. But he was excited by what lay ahead—the Blue Jays had added stars Jack Morris and Dave Winfield in the off-season and were poised for a World Series run.

  But before the season even started, his balky back seized up, landing him on the disabled list. It kicked off a miserable season in which he would only come to the plate twice all year. Mentally, he was never better—the student of the game had become the master, able to predict sequences of pitches with ease. But his body was giving out. Ever the loyal soldier, he called a meeting in August with general manager Pat Gillick and team president Paul Beeston.

  “I told them, ‘I’m injured and I’m not gonna really be able to help the club. I’m gonna shut it down and go home,’” he recalls, taking another sip of his drink.

  But the brass would have none of i
t. For eleven seasons Rance had been the model player. He wasn’t big, he wasn’t brash, but he was reliable, and he was smart. The Jays were streaking toward history, and Rance deserved a ticket. They convinced him to fly back to El Paso to think it over; Rance changed his mind and rejoined the team a few days later. He was there when Joe Carter recorded the final out of the World Series.

  The city was planning a giant parade in downtown Toronto, but on the plane ride back, he told the team he wouldn’t be there: his mother-in-law was sick with ALS, and his family needed him.

  Figuring there was nowhere higher to go in his career and badly needing rest, Rance retired. The following spring, Toronto Star writer Dave Perkins caught up with him, asking about his new life on the sidelines.

  “Retirement feels good. I don’t miss baseball at all,” he told Perkins.

  “He’s kind of lost right now,” his wife, Jeannie, said in the same article.2

  The ride over, reality set in, and they divorced two years later.

  And then opportunity knocked. A second chance. He met Lori on a blind date in 1995. She had no clue he was a baseball player, and when she mentioned his name to coworkers following the date, she came back to find her desk plastered with Rance Mulliniks baseball cards. They got married in 1998, adopting Shaylee and Seth soon after.

  The front door swings open.

  “I hear trouble!” Rance says as Shaylee bounds into the room, cradling a fake cell phone that she uses to send and receive pretend texts. She’s all spirit and spunk, her head a riot of brown hair.