Class A (4 page)

I agreed. It was.

We talked about longevity, about Mariano Rivera, our favorite current Yankee, and about fables. He read me
The Old Man and the Sea
when I was too old to be read to. I perked up for the “great DiMaggio” parts, when fishing is no longer just fishing. Because when the old man fails, there’s the great DiMaggio, who would have held the fish longer.
“How long?”
I wanted to know, and my father told me there was no way of knowing. Just as long as was needed.

I knew I was too old to be read to. Thirteen? Fourteen? I lied to friends who said,
Come out, let’s go do something wrong
, after Friday night baseball games. I never said,
I’m too scared to do anything but listen to stories
. I kept my dirty uniform on until right before bedtime and then fell asleep to my father’s voice conjuring grown men who cared for nothing but play and honor. We read the same books over and over. Or he read them and I listened. Sure, there was Hemingway and Malamud and Steinbeck, the famous men with all their postwar swagger. But mostly he read from crumbling, yellowed pulp books, the equivalent of romance lit for lonely boys with macho aspirations. Our favorites were John R. Tunis books, popular during his postwar childhood, nearly unheard of in mine. They featured black-and-white morality, nail-biting play-off races, characters with nicknames like Razzle, the Keystone brothers, the Kid. I didn’t think about panic, unplaced and unending. I didn’t think about my brother the addict buried months before, our last conversation a promise for him to come watch me play. Or how newly small and quiet my father was in front of the TV except for in these moments, regurgitating the books that he read as a boy, one son still willingly enthralled.

When we talk now, my father and I say, “
The great Rivera
.” We both watched a TV special that said Rivera’s father was a fisherman and he was a fisherman, too, before he was discovered for his greatness. We watched separately, called the next day
—Did you see?
—and laughed.

My father is a proud man, and I am becoming one, too. We do not like to say out loud that fandom is so important, the most important thing, maybe, because it feels like the filling of a void too maudlin to try to define. To admit its importance is to acknowledge the absence of something else that should be there.

I drove into Clinton for the first time before the players did, early February, when there was black ice on the interstate, upturned vans dotting the shoulder, having skidded and then been abandoned, wheels up in the cold. I drove in along Highway 30, through the sprawl where
I would later be told that the heart of the town had moved to, the row of discount shopping where everything happened—Arby’s, Wendy’s, McDonald’s, Burger King, Target, Applebee’s, Lowe’s, Kohl’s, Walmart. It wasn’t a mall, just miles of four-lane sameness, each streetlight a new turnoff to another store. I stared up at how big and gray it all was, muted even under those recognizable signs making promises. You could imagine a baseball field sticking out here. You could imagine driving up to it, the lights bright but never harsh, high above all the unimportant details surrounding them.

I came here because of the parameters that the town and the team had already set up, the heightened phrasing right there on the team’s Web site, full of tradition-hearkening and old-timey optimism. I came here because it best fit the stereotype I was looking for. I came to find a place that felt almost unreal, a lovable jock time warp out of a predictable story, the kind that placates. And that was the commodity being sold. LumberKings, first of all. What a name. And then the promises on the Web site: The oldest stadium in the Midwest League, one of the oldest in the country. The only town that was a charter member of the Midwest League that still has a team. Community owned for twice my lifetime. And that final assertion
Professional baseball in Clinton is as much of a given commodity as the mighty Mississippi River
.

I walked into the team’s front office, revealing four men in hoodie sweatshirts with one-syllable names—Ted, Nate, Mitch, Dave. I was told that it’s a bit of a locker room in here and that I’d love it, the bobble-heads everywhere, the fridge full of Mountain Dew, guys calling out memories and farting at each other across the room. Ted, the general manager, told me he had a boy named Lucas, eleven years old. That sometimes he called him Luke, but mostly just Butch or Wiseass.

Dave, the radio voice, took me on a tour. I followed him with care that felt obtrusive, sticking close.

Touch the stadium facade, granite and cold.

Touch the scratched cement floor of the dugout.

Touch the poles and then look up at the lights.

Touch the foul ball net, touch the metal railing and peel off a chip of paint to reveal the paint that was there before. And then another layer.

Touch the wood of the outfield fence and pull out an authentic splinter.

Walk where the game has been played and will be.

A baseball field in the winter is beautiful, all potential. We stepped out into the snow that covered the infield. I listened to the crunch of our boots. We walked the baselines without exactly meaning to. He gave me the whole spiel, and I loved that it seemed like he meant it. He smiled because he could tell I believed him.

We rely on nothing fancy here. He told me that twice.

Other places have more promotions, gimmicks, scoreboards with little games on them. We’re not really a bells-and-whistles operation. I noted my disdain for both bells and whistles.

We are about baseball the way it should be for people who appreciate it. He frowned for some reason.

I told him that’s why I had shown up, hungering for a place with an unabashed moral code, an ever-strict emphasis on
“should be”
and
“appreciate it.”
And I think it was true.

We went to the wall with the plaque holding 230 names of men who played at least one game on this field and then at least one in the major leagues. We began to read the names out loud, or I did. Dave smiled and listened to my breathy intonations when I recognized somebody. I imagined that he stood by this wall plenty, would do it when I left. I imagined that he had the wall memorized, a periodic table for a different kind of nerd, the kind I wanted him to be.

George Cisar. John Gaddy. Bert Haas. Stanley Klopp. Lou Johnson. Elmo Plaskett. Most were names that I did not recognize, names that played here before my father ever watched a game, that died before I was born, leaving behind maybe Wikipedia stubs all these years later, saying when they made it to the majors, when they left. And this, these names here in wood, imprinted so that when the red and white paint fades, you’ll still be able to run your fingers over them.

“Steve Sax,” I said and pointed. Steve Sax: slugging second baseman, onetime member of the Dodgers, Yankees, White Sox, Athletics, .281 lifetime average, featured voice on my favorite
Simpsons
episode ever. When my father broke the news to me that the Yankees had traded Steve Sax, I locked myself in a closet, sat down in a pile of used Little League balls, and wept. It was a memory instantly vivid in front of his name, a clear feeling of hurt and importance that, at the time, was the most I had ever felt anything.

·   ·   ·

In the office, we all drank Mountain Dew and shared stories.

Mitch, the director of operations, goatee and backward cap, unnecessary sunglasses resting on his forehead, was the only person with a story like what I imagined it would be, the only one homegrown. He was twenty-three, still lived with his parents five minutes away, had dated half the girls who worked the concession stands. He stayed home for college, Ashford University, part of the 1 percent of students who actually attended the Clinton campus and didn’t get their degrees online. This was his first job after graduation; maybe it would be his last. He bartends and disinfects shoes at a local bowling alley, too, but that’s only because he has to, not fit to mention as his profession.

Ted Tornow, the LumberKings’ general manager, never wanted to be in Clinton. He delivered this information with the hurried reassurance of his absolute contentment in this place, but, yes, he was only here because his old team closed, the stadium instantly reused for junior college football. And traveling carnivals. And country music shows. Butte, Montana, was where he wanted home to be. He liked mountains, had no hankering for corn. He liked the sky out there and confirmed to everyone who asked that everything people said about that western sky, the life-affirming bigness of it, was true.

When Butte lost its team, the local paper ran a scathing editorial about big business and coddled millionaires and the dissolution of the American way.

“Major League baseball demands we provide not just an acceptable place, but a frilly, fancy shrine for its entry-level prospects to perform,” the paper wrote. And then, “Phooey.”

So the team packed up, and Ted Tornow packed up and left to try again in a place where the sky is also big, but only because there is nothing rising into it. Sky that starts right above your head. In his office now there are pictures of mountains, of his old ballpark, team pictures from all the different little places where he’s lived and worked, across the South, out west, now in the middle.

Mostly, we talked about the players who would be Clinton’s stars in a few months. I was told things about them, entirely hypothetical. There was no way of knowing who would show up, what familiar faces, what
new ones. But no matter. They stay basically the same, just what you want them to be, nice boys, special, yeah, but
real
, too, relatable. I was told that I would be grabbed up like a little brother, though I was older than most of the players. I would get into trouble, but not too much, living out my first, my greatest fantasy in a suspended haze of awesomeness. Ted reckoned that he would walk into the clubhouse some mornings, find me passed out, still drunk, smiling in my sleep, deposited there by giggling players on their way home. There was a happy, nodding silence as we imagined what hadn’t yet come, but would, but had to.

“Any other questions?” he asked me, finally. “What else did you notice around here?”

“What’s the factory?” I asked. “That one I passed on the way in, by all the messed-up streets? It’s huge.”

Archer Daniels Midland, I was told. The savior, stretched along the banks of the Mississippi at the south end of town. Or, if not the savior, a damn good start. That sweetener in my Mountain Dew, that federally subsidized 10 percent ethanol in my gas tank, and now that experimental biodegradable plastic bag that sheathes my SunChips—all of it is made right here because of ADM. The roads being all torn up has to do with the rebranding of the area around the factory. The town and the company wanted to project uncluttered industry as the first thing that a hypothetical important somebody sees when Highway 30 turns into Camanche Avenue and enters what is left of downtown. There was a lot of clutter there, Ted told me. A lot of squalor and embarrassment. A neighborhood of old, ramshackle wooden houses with narrow streets weaving in between. Those houses, for the most part, have been bought up, razed. The neighborhood between the factory and the river was bought up by the company so that it could expand. The streets are cracked and potholed, now, nearly deserted. Camanche Avenue, running between the factory and the rest of the town, was cleared of homes by federal and state funding, converted into six wide, straight lanes of traffic running parallel to the train tracks, so that trucks, like trains, could take material in, ship product out, and how could more industry not flock to such a place?

A metal statue of a steamboat rudder, painted bright blue, was dropped onto newly planted grass over newly evacuated land, signifying
power, somehow past and future and progress at the same time. And the factory did expand. It is a mile long now, the entire southern tip of a town that is only eight miles long. There are gray box buildings taller than everything around them, one after another, no windows, tanks in between and metal tubes running from one identical section to the next, a smokestack for each section, so that if you stand at the middle of the factory you can’t be sure that it ends. And there’s a glowing golden storage dome, the largest of its kind in the world, maybe sinister, maybe beautiful, holding sixty thousand pounds of coal waiting to be burned in the service of making things.

“It’s sort of like,” Ted began and smiled before he got the sentence out. I was acutely aware of the fact that I knew what he was going to say before he said it. The metaphor had been waiting, naked and obvious.

“It’s sort of like,” Ted began,
“if you build it, they will come.”

I didn’t see the players come into town, but I know they came in the way I did because that’s pretty much the only way. Clinton is the easternmost point in Iowa and too small for an airport, so there is only one drive, the drive from Quad Cities International Airport, along Highway 30, through the corn, past the towns of five thousand that make Clinton the largest city in the county, past the factory in the middle of nowhere that makes air fresheners that look like pine trees, past the Wild Rose Casino on the edge of town, where the players are not allowed to go but where some of them will. Mostly they passed cornfields, freshly planted. Later, in August, when the corn is almost as tall as they are, impossible to ignore, some players will say they’ve never seen so much of one thing. But at the beginning of the season, the crop is just an idea. If the bus had stopped for nature exploration, the boys could have taken pictures of fledgling green stalks barely up to their ankles.

After a night in a hotel, players followed each other to the kinds of apartments that pop up on the edges of any small town. The Venezuelans went to the Lafayette, left a space on the floor of their apartment that Erasmo Ramírez would occupy if he got called up from extended spring training in Arizona. Most of the players ended up in Indian Village, a collection of identical apartments that offered low rent and catalogs for getting TVs on layaway, where they would snicker with one
another, as hard young men like to do, at the sight of their stooped neighbors cooking hot dogs on portable grills in the parking lot.