Class A (12 page)

Nick is so young. He looks like that boy from back then who looked like that boy from back then who looked like that boy from back then.

The pelicans have returned, circling, and I point up at a flock of them that has decided to hover over the field. They look so different from the crows that usually dominate. They look different from the vultures, too, that stain the sky, that make you want to look away. The vultures come for the dead because Clinton County has suspended carcass removal due to the cost. They hover over bloody heaps of roadkill, smaller each day, eaten by maggots until they are nothing but pulp that can wash away in the rain. The pelicans are clean. Their bodies are a pure white, slicked with water and shining. Only the tips of their wings are ink-black, and when the sun is behind them, the ends of the black feathers look like fingers waving down at us.

Jason, another fan who loves Nick, walks over with his video camera, looking up, zooming in, watching the pelicans drift and then come back, as though adhering to the dimensions of the stadium. Maybe he’ll put this on his personal YouTube page, documenting everything noteworthy that happens in Clinton and its surrounding rural sprawl, next to the video of an apartment fire, the thick black smoke climbing,
Jason’s voice going “Whoa, whoa” in the background. And next to a two-minute silent close-up of a lime-green Lamborghini parked in the driveway of a rich doctor from across the river. Today’s baseball exploits will be up soon, too, Nick’s home run with an epic, bass-heavy sound track behind it.

When Tim describes 1991, the Roadkill Crew, and the expanse of baseball affection they created, I like to picture thousands of different faces, united, inspired by a collective victory, the most benign of war films. But 1991 came on the heels of Reagan, and things didn’t trickle down to this place, and so began the first decade when the population had dropped under thirty thousand. The first time the census showed Clinton shrinking since when the lumber ran out. Tim doesn’t have to enumerate all the details that I know, but they are encapsulated in his tone. The impending loss of the last train car shops. The loss of Allied Steel, as towns with multiple flourishing factories became an increasing rarity. And worst, the loss of most of the town’s unions when the grain millers’ strike was broken, organized laborers forced to move or go silent, an irreversible change to the feeling of his home. And suddenly it was neighbors and friends and fans gone. Clinton hasn’t gained it back since.

What does Nick Franklin have to do with all that? As little as possible; that’s what is so wonderful. He comes from a place of sun and ruthless optimism, suburban Orlando. He was born in 1991, destined to make that year a significant beginning. The tattoo across his back says so. He doesn’t have a history. Just nights after school in the batting cages, swinging until his hands blistered, running sprints until his father told him he could stop. The stories that he tells me smiling and then looks at me puzzled when I have a worried expression.

Homework can wait until your baseball is done
.

No rest for the best, just nighttime practice when no one else is awake.

And nobody saw those nights, the making of a millionaire child. That’s a good thing. Nick’s exploits can still look easy, preordained. In Clinton, as long as the players are here, they can come from nowhere if you want them to, they can be only a future, and that future can be anything.

Hours later, it’s the eighth inning and I’m sleepy. Since Nick and Mike Trout exploded early, the way everybody anticipated they would, both teams have looked confused and slow, unremarkable at the plate. Cedar Rapids is up 3–2, and already this inning Steve Baron came up, swung late and awkwardly at a high fastball, and hit a pop-up that didn’t even clear the infield. Gabriel Noriega was next, the middle infielder who should be Nick’s greatest competition, but he is still more boy than man, with a concave body and a frightened face. His bat looked too big for him, and he swung as if he regretted the decision the moment he hoisted the wood off his shoulders. A weak grounder to first. Now it’s Nick again.

Nick takes a curveball low and swings over another one, bringing the count to 1-1. Then the pitcher makes a timid mistake and leaves a slider over the inside part of the plate. Nick gives a vicious uppercut of a swing and releases a grunt as bat hits ball. This second home run doesn’t travel as far as the first, but it rises higher. He watches until it looks as though it’s as high as the pelicans, and then it’s gone and he trots again, unsurprised, while we rise again for him and Brad screams even louder into his mic.

“Are you ever worried?” I forced myself to ask Nick in my allotted fifteen minutes. “Do you ever think that maybe things will get different, get really hard, something like that?”

I had been trying to think of a better way to phrase that, not just, “What happens if you fuck up?” Or, “Failure, failure, what about when you fail?” So much of the minors is about things fading until they end, so much of the game is about missing, but those inevitabilities aren’t spoken of here, certainly not with him.

He didn’t pause before saying no.

The answer itself wasn’t any shock. All his teammates would have said something similarly stilted and rehearsed, the kind of irritating optimism that athletes are taught. Danny has said similar things to me, and Sams, and even Hank, who never plays. But there is nothing sure in their eyes when they say it, almost guilt in Danny’s case, as though caught in a lie.

Nick held a bat as we spoke, one of the many that rest bundled in his
locker. He wasn’t lying. I wasn’t sure how to respond, so I stuttered for a moment and waited for him to fill the silence.

“Have
you
ever, like, I don’t know, failed at anything?” he asked me. He likes to redirect questions, and I find that quality charming, proof of his interest.

“Well, yeah,” I said. “Yes. Of course. I mean, that’s what happens.”

He looked past me and shook his head.

“Man,” he said. “I don’t know. That must suck.”

I shrugged. Then sat still. He continued.

“It’s like, I see some of these guys on the team and it’s like, damn, time is passing and they aren’t going anywhere. That would scare me. Do you think they’re scared?”

Of course they are. Baseball is terrifying. So is turning a year older than you were. Everything is terrifying
.

“Probably.”

“Some people think that I’m cocky or whatever,” he said. “But I’m not. It’s just, I’ve never really failed. Why am I supposed to think that can happen when it never does?”

He gave a smile, a small one, a bit impish, but then his face was serious again.

He is, up close, ordinary. He is listed at 175 pounds, and that’s generous. He is just shy of six feet one inch. There are things that he does poorly. The double-play throw. Choosing his spots when he steals bases. He swings too hard often, and so often he misses. These things are all a part of his reality, and I know that, everybody does, everybody has seen evidence of Nick’s flaws over the course of each game, but they don’t resonate. They are talked over and forgotten when he does something that shines because when he shines it is so much, it carries so far, and everything about him is a horizon line. Nick Franklin is all hyperbole.

His teammates, guys like Sams and Danny and Hank, they are fun to hope for, but still you’re aware of the act of hoping, aware of waiting to clap your hands when an underdog wins. They’ve been seen before by these fans, have returned to be seen again. They are grounded in the probability of fading away. They will cease to matter just as everything eventually does.

“Is it cool to be the favorite here?” I asked him. “To have people, you know, love you like that?”

He shrugged.

I wanted to sit even closer to him. I wanted to feel knee on knee. It wasn’t about how he would never fail. It wasn’t that he was the best. That’s not the appeal. He will fail in some way, probably. Definitely. He will never live up to the inflated expectations that have been placed on him. But he doesn’t know any of that yet. That’s what we see when we watch him. Somebody who doesn’t know that things get worse.

The game seems paused after Nick’s second home run. The score stays the same, 3–3, past the ninth, into the tenth, and there is nothing worth watching that happens when he is not at the plate. Then, in the bottom of the tenth, there he is, up on the top step of the dugout, helmet on, bat in hand, waiting. Steve Baron and Gabriel Noriega actually manage hits, and with two outs there are men on base for Nick to knock in to win the game.

“He must be nervous,” I say.

“I would be,” Tim says.

“Kid like that, never nervous,” Matt says with finality.

All of our bodies are tensed. I feel the extra weight of my own torso, the low numb in my legs from sitting for so many hours, standing only to get more food. Matt, who was an athlete in the army in the 1980s, something that he announces freely and often, rests his dimpled hands on his knees, covering the scars of a double surgery that was performed so that he might be able to walk into his fifties. Tim fidgets with his tank top from the 1991 championship season when he looked more like a peer to the players. The shirt is getting too small and he shouldn’t wear tank tops anymore.

Nick doesn’t look nervous, that’s true. But there is the unspoken reality that not one of us has any idea what a boy like Nick Franklin is thinking in a moment like this. As he scrapes at the dirt with his cleats, the only certainty we can muster is that this is
big
, this moment, and that he is right for it.

Nick falls behind, fouling off a fastball with an eager swing and then taking a breaking ball for a called strike. He lets one go by in the dirt. The stadium is silent, rapt. We look only at the field, not at the empty seats around us.

Before the next pitch, I see Nick shuffle forward in the batter’s box, putting himself inches closer to the pitcher, like he has figured something out. I tap Tim on the shoulder and hear the proud, knowing tone in my voice when I say, “Look, he’s moving up,” like I’ve figured something out.

“Sure, yeah,” Tim says.

The pitch is a changeup, slow and dipping down. Nick waits, balanced—there had been no doubt in his mind what was coming. Late, almost too late, it seems, he flicks his wrists in a blur—that trigger, that blast, that whip crack—and the ball carries. Trout is after it in center field, and we watch him with fear and fury, able to work this moment into a narrative of two men facing off for the role of the day’s champion, though Nick just swung as hard as he could, though Trout is just doing his job chasing down a fly ball.

We try to gauge the angle of Trout’s run and the ball, see a second into the future to know if they’ll meet. But Trout slows up as he nears the wall and just watches it. He’s not going to get there. The ball skips away and Steve Baron scores easily. The game is finally over. This long, vital, unimportant contest has been decided. The LumberKings have moved to .500, still squarely in fourth place in the Western Division of the Midwest League. Everybody on the field has stopped running except for Nick, who trots into second base and plants both feet on it, satisfied, momentarily serene before turning and facing his dugout.

It is a feeble sound we make, those of us clapping hard. Our cheers echo off the mainly empty metal benches, each of us trying to be the loudest. The other LumberKings pour out of the dugout and run toward him. Danny is in front with big eyes and coltish legs stomping, willing himself to be happy for a teammate who is celebrated enough, who lives life with the kind of constant praise that Danny used to know. Nick faces them all with his head cocked, interested, maybe even happy. He doesn’t move to rush into their arms. He stands, shoulders squared, and waits for them. They jump at him, slap him on his head and his back and his ass. He weathers it all and finally trots away, lets them follow him, still cheering.

Nick is alone in the tangle of bodies as they walk back to the dugout, glancing up at the fans, the ones he sees every day. The other players are still reaching out to touch him, still yelling in his ear, but he is something
entirely apart, something that stands out to be preserved, beautiful and so young, moving past one conquest toward another, of course another. And then, so soon, he’s trotting back to the clubhouse before hands can reach at him for a signature, only his back visible, until even that disappears. I look at the sky, and the pelicans are gone.

T
HE
P
ZAZZ
! FunCity is big and it is gaudy. You can’t see it at first when you leave the Burlington Bees’ field, but then you go past the Taco Bell parking lot, and boom: a city of fun. I like the cursive lettering on the sign, packed with z’s. Even the fake word is remarkable, a collection of characters that shouldn’t be together. It makes me think of Phil Rizzuto, the former Yankee shortstop and announcer, because as a boy I’d see his name written in the paper and I’d think it was a typo, z’s pushed together like that. I looked up his minor-league career the other day. I’ve been doing that lately, trying to see who came through Clinton, Iowa, immersing myself in the improbability of their onetime presence in the town. Phil Rizzuto never played in Iowa. His first stop was with the Bassett Furnituremakers in Virginia, one of those Depression-era teams that didn’t even make it to the war before folding.

They were Furnituremakers when Bassett was a center of furniture production. Now Bassett is not a center of anything, and there is no team, a sad fact, but more logical than a baseball rebirth as the FurnitureKings.

I texted my father:
Did you know Phil Rizzuto played for the Bassett Furnituremakers?

The LumberKings are still stuck in fourth place, seemingly unable to hit, and that makes everything temporarily heavy—their shoulders, their street clothes as they dress after the game, their giant headphones as they try to slouch past Joyce’s attempted encouragement, notebook out, pen out,
Great job!
In the clubhouse, Kalian Sams is silent next to Hank Contreras, who is also silent, though not as simmering mad as his
friend. Sams plays every game and lately has struggled through most of them, watching his spot in the order dwindle from cleanup to fifth to sixth to eighth. Hank has only played in three games so far this season, so a loss or a poor team performance is something different for him.
He
has lost nothing. He didn’t fail to do his job well, because he wasn’t allowed to do his job.