Out of My League (11 page)
Authors: Dirk Hayhurst
Chapter Eighteen
Before the buses left for Tucson, they let us JiCs inside the big league portion of the spring training facility where snacks and goodies were set out for those going on the road. The big league side of camp was a thing of beauty. Every locker had a large, leather rolling office chair parked in front of it. There were refrigerators filled with sports drinks and tables covered with snacks. Clubhouse personnel zipped around wearing latex gloves to pick up the clothes the big leaguers wantonly cast on the floor. Most of the guys in the place wouldn’t be on the team when the spring ended—they were expendable—and yet they were still treated like kings. Seeing it all made me feel stupid for ever being awestruck by the minor league side of the operation where I once thought it was cool that each stool had the Padres logo painted on the part where your butt goes.
There were two buses taking us to Tucson, and both were virtually unoccupied. I was told that the big-name players got out of traveling altogether, and the few who didn’t usually drove by themselves in their own cars. This boggled my minor league mind. We plebeians were forbidden to drive to any games, spring training or otherwise. We always had to travel with the club and, if we brought our cars to spring training, we weren’t allowed to drive them to the city we played in unless it was Lake Elsinore.
I also learned big leaguers always got two buses for travel whenever they didn’t go by plane—part of their union agreement or something. I didn’t understand the particulars; I just knew it was awesome. Something about riding on a barely occupied tour bus after years of being stuffed like cattle into a trailer made me giddy. The bus, the snacks, the lack of player congestion, these little niceties were paltry compared to some of the stories I’d heard about what it was like to actually be a big leaguer, but I relished them nonetheless.
Just before we pulled out of the gate, a few other JiCs boarded, including two players from big league camp: Manrique and Dallas. Manrique sat near me while Dallas, who was screaming on his cell phone, was oblivious to me, consumed by the fight he was having on the phone.
“That money isn’t for you to buy goddamn Gucci purses with. That’s for my daughter,” shouted Dallas. Though no one on the bus was looking at Dallas directly, they weren’t talking to one another either, indicating they were listening in on the drama. Dallas’s face scrunched tighter and tighter as whoever was on the other line spoke. Then, he blasted, “Goddammit, Mandy, I am being a part of her fucking life, quit throwing all this shit on me!”
Dallas made his way to the back of the bus, went into the lavatory compartment, and shut the door. There was a long series of pounding and muffled shouts. Everyone on the bus looked at one another, wondering if we were all seeing the same scandal.
“Reek. What’s up with Dallas?” I whispered to Manrique.
Manrique shook his head. “That guy, all the time fighting with his girl. I don’t know why, but they”—he banged his fist together—“all the time.”
Discretion was not Dallas’s strong suit. Going to the back of the bus so he could scream was about as undercover as he got. When something went wrong in his life, you knew it because he’d talk to anyone about anything at anytime. His mouth had no filter, one of the reasons everyone around camp knew his circumstances. Generally, it’s nice to have some wild man around because wildness usually makes for good entertainment during a long season. Dallas knew this role well and enjoyed playing it, doing his best to soak up the attention that living like a rock star won him. However, as players got older and more and more of Dallas’s shenanigans caught up with him off the field, his need for attention became more pathetic than iconic.
Dallas kicked his way out of the bus lavatory and came back to a seat near Manrique and me. Manrique hustled to put on some headphones and look occupied, but I made eye contact with Dallas, which was just as good as saying, “Go ahead and tell me what’s on your mind, son.”
“Fuck!”—conversations that start this way are never good—“You give a woman money to feed your kid with and you’d think she’d fucking feed your kid, right?”
I looked to Manrique, who pretended I was invisible. “Right,” I said, not really knowing what else to say.
“I know.” Dallas shook his head and punched the seat back. “God, she can be such a bitch sometimes. Don’t get me wrong, I love my daughter, but I hate her mom. I mean, yeah, I know, I got her knocked up, but I’m trying to do right and shit, taking care of my girl. But then her mom takes that money and spends it on purses and goes to parties. I want to know who’s taking care of my fucking kid. I should just cut her ass off, that’s what I should do.”
I opened my mouth to say something, but Dallas spun on me. “But I can’t, Dirk. Don’t even tell me I can because if I did, the court would be all over my ass. That’s what’s fucked up about our legal system, ya know. A guy gets bent over for child support but nobody’s watching how the girl spends it. It’s like if you’re a dude, you should just get used to getting screwed over every time you make a mistake, you know.” Dallas finished his statement by staring at me, anxiously waiting for me to agree.
I wasn’t sure if Dallas was done ranting or not. I didn’t want to speak up and then get yelled at for possibly saying something that he wasn’t imagining. I chose to stay quiet, which turned out to be a bad choice because it pissed him off.
“Fuck, Dirk. I thought you were a Christian, man. I thought you’d for sure have something encouraging to say to me.”
“Well, uh, Jesus loves you.”
“Doesn’t feel like it right now,” he said.
He’d just backed a dump truck of too much information up on me and was asking me to wrap it up with a word from God? I wanted to slap him in the head, but I knew that if I told him something he didn’t want to hear, I’d most likely be the one getting blows to the skull.
“The Lord works in mysterious ways.” I offered another cliché.
“You know what the worst is? Every time I talk to my wife about this, she gets pissed. It’s like she doesn’t understand how hard it is for me to deal with all this shit. Like I wanted it to be this way. She doesn’t understand the environment we’re in.”
I tilted my head at Dallas, wondering how he could use the same language I used to talk about baseball with my girl but with a completely different meaning. Then I wondered if he could even hear the words coming out of his mouth. This was probably not a good time to point out that he had cheated on his wife before they were married a full year, which, generally speaking, tends to upset wives.
“What, dude?” he asked, observing my expression.
“Oh, nothing, my neck hurts.” I rubbed it. “Sucks when people don’t understand what you are going through.”
“Hell yeah, it does. And on top of that, I’m here, fighting for my life to make it in the game. Trying to make money to feed them kids. Shit, this can be a real grind sometimes, you know. It’s like they don’t understand that.”
His complete lack of self-awareness disgusted me. He made his money up front, never had to scrounge a day in his professional life if he didn’t want to, and now he was complaining about how hard this was because he made stupid choices? I wanted to scream how wrong he was, but he nodded his head at me, indicating what response I was supposed to give him.
“Totally,” I said.
“Fucking, you know. You’ve been beating around longer than I have.”
“We got drafted the same year,” I said dryly.
“Shit, that’s right. I forgot ’cause we’re never on the same team very long. Hey, I heard you were getting married?” He changed subjects.
“Yes, I am,” I said.
“Oh snap. Well, don’t let me ruin it for you. You probably love your girl and shit.”
“Yeah, I really do,” I said.
“She understands how hard this shit is, right? That’s how you know she’s a keeper, when she understands how this shit makes you do crazy stuff.”
“Yeah, she understands shit,” I placated.
Dallas’s phone rang. “Hold on,” he said to me, then picked up the phone. “What?” A pause was followed by a dramatic increase in volume. “Go ahead and call them! I’m going to tell them you’re not spending what you’re getting now the way you’re supposed to.” Another pause. “No. No, you ain’t!” Dallas got up and went back to the bathroom. “Do it! Do it and see what happens!” The door slammed.
I turned to face Manrique, my eyes wide as saucers.
“I know, bro. I know. He’s
loco
. All the time. It’s sad, bro.”
loco
. All the time. It’s sad, bro.”
“It’s something,” I said, looking at the back of the bus.
It was a long trip down to Tuscon to be part of a game I didn’t play in. There were very few actual big leaguers present. As it turned out, most of the big leaguers were in China. At first I thought it was a joke, but the Padres had actually sent a team’s worth of players to China to play in some type of international exhibition series marking the MLB’s first games in that country. I could imagine it, Trevor Hoffman standing on the Great Wall of China while I sat in the bullpen at a game I couldn’t play in, wishing I could build a great wall between myself and Dallas’s never-shutting mouth.
Chapter Nineteen
I got called over to big league camp nearly every other day of the next week, until the players sent to China made it home. Dallas dumped on me whenever he could, and I found myself praying he would pitch just so I wouldn’t have to listen to him anymore. My prayers were answered in bittersweet irony as Dallas pitched fairly often while I didn’t pitch at all. I did, however, get very good at convincing myself that my constant presence around the big club meant my name was known to them, and that had to count for something.
When first cuts were made at the big league level, things got crowded in the Triple A group. There were more pitchers than available roster spots, which meant the fringe guys, Rosco, Slappy, Dalton, and a few others, were sent down. On the bright side, the San Antonio Championship crew was reassembled. Frenchy, Ox, Moreno, Reek, Anto, and the rest were now back in Triple A with me.
The days got longer too. With more minor leaguers who needed to get work, we played anywhere from ten to fourteen innings so every pitcher who needed to throw could get live mound time. On the big league side of things, rotations were being set and many big league pitchers were coming down to the minor league side of camp to get work in so they could avoid traveling—passing that privilege off on the minor league JiCs. When I was younger, I thought they did this because they wanted extra practice, not because they didn’t want to miss their tee time.
Today, Ox, Frenchy, and I stood behind the backstop of field four watching High A intersquad against Low A. Ox had been a friend of mine since my first full season five years ago. He’d more than earned his big league camp invite. Frenchy, however, had just joined the team last year. He was a super prospect with the seal of both Grady and Earp, which was why he was in big league camp in only his second full season of play. He dominated both High and Double A, and was on the fast track to the Bigs courtesy of his Bugs Bunny change and left-handed finesse.
None of us were scheduled to pitch for the day, but we still had to stick around and watch. It’s organizational policy that all players have to watch five innings of their fellow players’ games before they are allowed to leave minor league camp for the day. This rule, commonly referred to as the “Five and Fly Rule,” is the reason why players flock from field to field in search of the game moving the fastest. Today, the crowd was at field four for two reasons. One, it was moving the fastest, which probably had something to do with the second reason: Greg Maddux was pitching for the Low A team.
“I’ve been watching him since I was a little kid,” I said to Ox and Frenchy as we watched the Professor of Pitching himself lob sinkers down and away to hitters who hadn’t been alive as long as the guy they were facing had been playing professionally.
“This is completely unfair,” said Frenchy. On cue, the umpire called a strike on a pitch that looked to be a foot off the plate. “See what I mean?” Frenchy pointed at the umpire’s call as if citing evidence. “First, if you’re a hitter, you know you’re facing a guy with a reputation for throwing strikes that spans decades, so you have to know you’re going to get screwed on anything close. Second, if you’re the umpire, you know you have to call anything close a strike because it’s Greg Maddux. What are you going to do, tell Maddux he just missed after twenty years of never missing, in a minor league game no less? He could throw shit over the backstop and they’d call it a strike.”
“I wouldn’t put it past this guy to throw shit at you just because. That fucking savage.” Ox shook his head.
“Who, Maddux?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Frenchy and Ox said in unison before sharing a knowing laugh over the subject.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Don’t let the professor shtick fool you. Maddux is high king savage,” said Ox.
“This guy?” I flipped a thumb at Maddux as he waited for a ball to be tossed back from the infielders. Granted, he didn’t look like the Maddux of my youth. More like a guy who played beer league softball on the weekends and attended the occasional cycling class in between. But that was part of his legendary character stream. He got you out with his mind and with his sniper-like control. He was the one guy who gave hope to everyone who believed pitching was more than rearing back and throwing as hard as you could, like Captain Curls did back during the off-season. Furthermore, Maddux was a dying breed, a guy who knew how to get bunches of outs in the big leagues but didn’t have good enough “stuff” to get drafted in the modern age of baseball. He was testament to the craft of pitching. He was an icon, one of the few in this game whose name was synonymous with pitching mastery. And, maybe most important, he was one of my heroes.
“He peed on me in the shower,” Frenchy said.
“What?” I gasped.
“I saw this guy wipe his ass on a shower towel and then put it back in the stack for someone else to dry off with,” Ox said.
“I saw him wipe his ass on a sanitary sock, and put it back in the bin,” Frenchy volleyed back.
“I heard he wiped his ass with a towel and buried it in some poor bastard’s locker so they wouldn’t be able to pinpoint the smell until it was too late,” said Ox.
“
That’s
what that smell was,” Frenchy said.
That’s
what that smell was,” Frenchy said.
“This guy? Maddux?” I said, pointing out to the field. “Him?”
“Yup,” they both said with admiration.
“He’s old-school. Guys in his generation really mess with rookies hard,” Ox said. “Crapping on other people’s stuff. Now that’s how you do it.”
“Yeah. Think of how many people will ever get to say they got peed on by Greg Maddux,” said Frenchy.
I tilted my head at the thought of it. “You’re right, that is pretty cool.”
Ox slapped Frenchy on the shoulder as if congratulating him on his good fortune. I looked away from them both, slightly jealous. The thought of Bonnie saying, “Boys are so stupid” flashed through my mind.
“Well, I didn’t get invited to big league camp but,” I said proudly, “I’ve had a lot of big league backup opportunities this year. I haven’t gotten to pitch any, but people know my name, though none of them peed on me.”
“That sucks,” Frenchy said.
“I’m sure I’ll get peed on eventually, if I play my cards right,” I said.
“No, the pitching part.”
“Yeah,” said Ox. “It’s a waste of time, especially at this point of camp.”
“Why do you say that? I thought JiC’ing was a great opportunity.”
“It would be if you weren’t trying to make the Triple A squad,” said Frenchy. I had to take a moment to digest the fact that Frenchy, who had less than a third of the time in pro ball as I did, was giving me inside information on the value and meaning of camp proceedings. Behold the power of the big league camp invite.
“You’re not going to make that team, so helping them out just gets you out of the sight of the people deciding who is going to be on this team,” Ox said. “Triple A is your path to the Bigs. You need to be pitching well here. Sitting on the fucking bench on a team you’re not going to be a part of doesn’t help.”
Maddux wheeled-and-dealed an absolute turd of a changeup that splintered the cap of a bat belonging to a youngster who couldn’t keep his weight back.
“Jesus, I can’t make hitters do that on my heater and he makes ’em do it on his 45 mph diarrhea,” said Frenchy.
I suddenly lost interest in all of Maddux’s bowel movement incarnations in favor of the direction my career was headed. “So you’re telling me all the time I’ve spent up there has been hurting me?”
“Hard to say,” Frenchy said. “I mean, maybe they think you’re going to make the Triple A squad for sure, which is why they’re comfortable juggling you around. Maybe it means they think you’re expendable. Who knows? I wouldn’t worry about it, nothing you can do.”
“Ya, bud.” Ox grabbed my shoulder and gave it a shake. “Who knows what these bastards are thinking, right? Fuck ’em.”
“Right,” I said weakly.
Maddux finished his inning. Opposing him was a young Latin kid who threw a million miles per hour with zero control. Consequently, the crowd of minor leaguers fled to another field where things moved more swiftly.
I stayed behind. Standing there alone, I thought of dominos, minor league dominos, all of them standing in a row about to be knocked over. No matter how they rationalized why or how they would fall, they were still going to fall, and there was absolutely nothing they could do about it.
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