Class A (38 page)

The intimacy is stunning. We are close enough to see the lines stretching
across his dirt-speckled face. We can hear him breathing. We can hear a repressed gasp escape as he reaches down his leg. BJ bounces across the infield toward him, medical fanny pack shaking in rhythm with his steps, and we are silent. BJ prods, nods, like, yeah, that does look painful. After a while, Hank limps off the field, and Ochoa already has his helmet on, ready to replace him. Ochoa’s wife claps and points so their infant son can follow her gaze, see his father. The rest of us muster an ovation to honor Hank’s pain or Ochoa’s presence, depending on who is listening and how they want to hear.

I think I’ve always been drawn to endings like a slow walk off the field. Lou Gehrig and his farewell speech of thanks at Yankee Stadium, the way my father would recite the whole thing and I would be the microphone echo behind him, a tradition that is so morbid in retrospect but that felt so warm then. That last line of
Bang the Drum Slowly
, as the two of us man-blubbered on the couch:
From here on in, I rag nobody
. Tammy and Tim went down to South Clinton for the first round of demolitions, watched with their arms crossed as wrecking balls cleared away homes deemed clutter. Because somebody should at least be a witness. Tammy brought flowers. She told me that the people watching their homes fall said thanks because she was there. They told her it’s a shame that not enough people want to witness things end, and she said, “I always do.”

I’m driving Hank and his new roommates home. Hank has lasted through three different living situations. Now it’s two pitchers and an outfielder. Two of them are new, and so they ask the questions that Hank used to ask as we pass the factory: What is that thing? And then the follow-up questions about the smell and the smoke, the patches of green-gray blankness outside the fence that look as if something was once there.

“It’s open all night,” one player observes. “You can see it shining, always.”

“Maybe that’s why nobody shows up to our fucking games,” another offers. “Everybody’s locked inside there.”

I’m asked nasty questions, as a representative of the civilian population. What is it about these people and this place? Do they know that
the field exists? Do they not even have the extra cash to spend six bucks on a ticket? Also, not to sound like a dick, but are there more, you know, retards in this town than in most? Are the only people in the stadium the people unfit to work?

We pull away from the factory and hit chain-store row. Somebody yells, “Walmart!” and so we stop. I am still trying to think of an answer that doesn’t sound like pleading.

“What about the percentages?” I say. “If a thousand people show up for a game here, that’s one in twenty-six.”

And then, like a grade school teacher: “So think about the math. What if one in twenty-six people in New York showed up to a Yankees game. That would be like half a million people at every game.”

It’s not the best analogy. It stinks of both condescension and desperation, a difficult pairing to achieve. And the math is wrong. I’m reminded that I haven’t gone on the road as far east as Dayton or Bowling Green. In Dayton, eight thousand people show up. Every night. Enough people so you can’t tell individuals apart. You feel like a professional, the way you should.

But what about the underdog?
And suddenly it’s an argument. I am the anti-Dayton side of the argument. Fuck Dayton, a place I’ve never been, a bland and mid-grade semi-urban sprawl, with its burgeoning tech-sector opportunities and its proximity to that great metropolis Cincinnati. Fuck those eight thousand Reds fans who hardly have to travel at all to see the future prospects of their real favorite team. Fuck the lumping together of major-league and minor-league interests. Fuck expansion. Fuck progress. I want to scream
“Fuck progress”
at the players and make them realize that they are included in that fuck. For bleeding-heart romantics like me, and for Joyce and for Tim, and for Tom Bigwood, who none of us in this car has ever met, the existence of these not-quite-talented-enough ones, their constant play in stadiums away from the real spotlight—that is comfort like quiet rain. We can see them small and weathered and doomed and stuck, too, the players. There should be camaraderie in that.

“Don’t you think it’s more meaningful for these one thousand to come see you here?”

I say it at their backs, pushing through the Walmart doors. Hank is limping noticeably. I can hear him groan a little when he puts pressure
on his right knee. He is tired. He is too tired to defend the underdog just because he is one. Why does he have to be the underdog all the time, anyway?

We head to the frozen-food aisle. One game this summer felt intense, the players are saying. It was a Sunday afternoon, hot as hell, but there were packs of guys all around the bleachers, drunk and cheering the way guys should. I think they’re referring to that day when the work floor at ADM got to 137 degrees and workers got off early. “Why can’t people come out like that all the time?” the players ask.

Ryan Royster, new competition in the outfield, says, “Why should a place have a team if nobody wants to play there?”

I don’t say anything else.

In the Indian Village apartment, the only wall decorations are ripped-out magazine workout routines, showing men’s abs with suggestions written on them in red, all capitals. Somebody’s Bible is out on the coffee table. Empty cans are mostly in a garbage bag hanging off a doorknob, but some have spilled over, constellating across the carpet that covers every inch of the floor.

One roommate, a normally gregarious California pitcher who lost today, accepts a jumbo pizza from Domino’s at the door, sifts for singles to pay, and trudges to his room saying that he might be dead by cheese come morning and, if so, fuck it. The rest of us drink a little, throw empty cans in the vicinity of the hung-up trash bag. We go outside to piss in the patch of grass between apartment blocks, face the black of the meager surrounding woods. There is a bathroom in the apartment, but something isn’t quite right with the flusher, and there’s a moldy smell, and, whatever, they’ll be gone soon, better to piss outside into blackness than fix things.

Hank balances a bag of frozen green beans on his knee and asks for someone to remind him when it’s been twenty minutes. He closes his eyes. He will play through the knee injury. I will stand with him after every game, BJ pushing down and asking where it hurts, him nodding at almost every spot. It will feel heroic. I will be proud to stand over him, asking, like everybody, if he’ll be okay.

Yes
, he will say.
I’m fine
.

He will say things that I think even he knows are hyperbolic, that he
got out of a movie.
Just tell me I can walk and I’ll play
, that kind of line. But, damn, it works.

BJ will look severe and say, with more pathos than I’ve ever heard from him,
That’s a man right there
.

Teammates will walk in.
Hank, you all right, brother?

He will say,
Sí, sí, sí
. Or,
You know me, too dumb to quit
.

Everybody will tell him,
We need you
, and what is better than that?

I ask him if this is some homage to his father, and he says, come on, stop reaching, he just wants to play. But it’s hard not to inject a parallel into his set-jawed stoicism. Hank here, playing on a knee that makes noises when he moves, his father, whose knee is shattered, lying on a couch outside L.A. in a full-on metal leg brace. No matter what happens with this season, Hank, limping less than his father, will be climbing trees in Pasadena with a chain saw, doing his part with the kind of resilience that the un-resilient like me inflate toward godliness. And it’s not just me. We all lean out at him from the stands, try to think to ourselves that if faced with similar pain, we too would conquer it. That’s what he’s doing, conquering. And
conquer
is a nice word, full of options, full of power. Hank feels powerful, even as he limps.

In a week when a foul ball cracks his thumb, reaggravating an injury from last year, never properly treated, Hank will again refuse to come out. He will be told that consistent pressure on the thumb means it might never heal right, but then he’ll be asked, what’s the point of full thumb mobility when you’re retired? And he’ll shrug, say he wants to play.

I’m not sure what it takes to throw out the first pitch at a LumberKings game. I think you’re supposed to pay for the privilege but some are given a break. I’ve seen children do it for their birthdays, bouncing the ball over the plate as Brad calls out,
“Curveball, steee-rike on the outside corner!”
I’ve seen the employees of a local insurance company all get a turn, and old men just retired, and the mayor, and eighteen-year-old newly enlisted marines paraded around their hometown before shipping out, while recruiters challenge fresh teenagers to pull-up contests in the parking lot.

Tim is throwing out the first pitch before the final home game of the year. I know he didn’t have to pay. His pitch will be in Tom Bigwood’s memory, a cause deserving a free pass. Tom Bigwood never got to throw out a first pitch. When he finally got up the courage to ask, he looked in the mirror and decided that he didn’t want to be seen unable to get ball to glove, standing ashamed and greenish and ghostly in the place he loved most in the world.

“Why?” I asked his sister-in-law as she showed me pictures from the little shrine in her kitchen. “Why never ask until …?”

“It was one of those things he always wanted to do,” she said. “But time kept passing and he’d get nervous and he wouldn’t ask and then it was too late.”

He wanted to see a major-league game, preferably the Cubs, but by the end he would have accepted the Cardinals. And he didn’t. He wanted to travel somewhere, sometime. The last nights before he died, he was yelling in pain for a while, but in those minutes when he could say real words, he told his family that he never sat in the Lumber Lounge. He just realized that. He sat in the same seat he always sat in, by third base, looked out at the people sitting above the right-field wall, thought,
I bet it’s nice out there
. But he never went. And he couldn’t remember why.

She said when the season started again, he’d sit out there.

He looked at her and shook his head and said no.

Tim has been drinking all day, first to dull the magnitude of the occasion, then at a certain point, I think, to heighten it. I find him wandering between the concession stands and his seat, high-fiving people he knows and people he doesn’t. He’s wearing his old Roadkill Crew tank top and the 1991 Clinton Giants championship cap the same age as his shirt. We hug, and then my shirt is wet because he’s crying. He says he’s sorry for the crying, and then he thinks about it and says, “No I’m not.”

I realize I’ve never seen him throw. I’ve never seen him run. I’ve never seen him swing, not even kidding around with one of those toy bats in the gift shop. And I’ve never heard him talk swinging, either, unlike so many others, Matt and Derek and Ryan and all the guys at away games whose faces blend into one guy who was once great and has since let himself go.

“I’m gonna throw the ball up,” he says. “Like I’m throwing at heaven.”

I say nothing.

He says, “I’m gonna throw it up so Tom can reach down and grab it.”

We stand for a while. He sways and I think about how hot it is, how the air has stopped for the last part of the summer, no current on the river, no drift to the smoke. I look to Tim and try to see if he’s kidding. He’s not a God guy normally. He believes in fate, I think, karma, trying to be good, but this place is the closest thing he has to a church on Sundays. I’ve never heard him say “heaven.” I’ve never heard him speculate about the future, only inflate the past. He cannot actually think that a cancer-ravaged hand will reach down and grab an official Midwest League ball, a call of
“Thanks!”
echoing from the clouds. If it were me, I would be mortified at the thought of thousands of eyes casually on me, throwing a ball so strangely high that it makes people look at their feet and wait for it to be over.

“He’ll get himself one last ball,” Tim says. He hugs me again, weaves away.

I can feel the nerves in the stands with the Baseball Family, watching him. Is he at the point of good drunken openness or the point past it? Is he embarrassing to watch alone, standing, without the support of the voices of the group? And will people know what this is for? Will the players? Danny remembers Tom Bigwood, and maybe Hank, too. They were here when Tom was. Or maybe they don’t remember. But he was so memorable. Still, has anybody reminded them of the man who used to sit in my seat?

From the PA booth, Brad announces Tim as a “great fan,” and those who know him say,
“Woo.”
He says that Tim is here to honor the memory of Tom, another great fan. I see some people nodding. There is a scattered clap. It is so quiet. Tim waves like he’s the queen of England and toes the rubber of the mound. He winds up, long and slow, like a grainy film clip of a greatest-generation star. And then he keeps his word.

It’s an awkward, halting toss, throwing his body forward as hard as he can but angling his arm up toward the sky and the idea of Tom. I want the ball to hang longer than it does. At least it makes it up over the stadium lights for a moment, feels like something out of a bad movie, a guilty pleasure. But it falls fast and hard. Hank is waiting at the plate as the honorary catcher. He’s in his crouch but isn’t sure what to do. He follows the ball as it lands a good fifteen feet in front of him on the
grass. He watches it bounce once, then roll, then stop. He walks to pick it up.

The two meet for a moment, a photo op for Betty and anyone else who cares about this. I imagine that Hank can smell the booze on Tim, in the tears and the sweat that he is not bothering to hide. They shake hands, and Tim steps forward, puts his arm gingerly on Hank’s shoulder. Hank lets him. Tim is ushered away.

“Win for us,” he slurs over his shoulder.