Class A (11 page)

For nearly a month, I vacated the batting cage during Nick’s personal practice time, adhering to an unspoken rule. There’s something about his eyes when he doesn’t want you there. Nothing cruel or aggressive, but worse, disinterested. Bored by you. You are slowing him down, standing there being boring.

When I finally joined him, he didn’t look at me. He took a swing at the tee he’d set up, watched the ball push through the mesh at the back of the cage, watched it hit the cinder-block wall, watched the red laces fray and spin off it like a blood spurt. He leaned his weight on his bat, glanced finally in my direction but over me. He smiled.

“So,” he said. “You came for a look.”

It wasn’t a question. And he was right.

He kept on hitting until his bucket was empty. He spoke to himself in whispers after each swing, a common habit of his, reanimating the words that his father had spoken to him throughout Nick’s whole, short lifetime. A staccato code.

When he finished, he was happy with the day’s output. He felt like talking, and I was there. He told me that this place—the field and the town, too—was like high school, which was a good thing. High school was fun. And here it was like being in the hallways, leaning against a locker with your girlfriend, not really knowing the people around you, but knowing who was who, kind of, recognizing faces as they recognized you. It has always been this way. Nick Franklin has never not had something to do. If people wanted to look in at him, they could. But how could he be expected to look back?

He went silent for a moment, and it was my cue to do the same. I wanted to ask him how somebody who made himself so sought after
could want so much to be alone. But that would remind him that there was company, and he would turn off, giving one-word answers behind plastic smiles until I left and no longer felt special through proximity. I have, after all, watched his face during team batting practice, with his coaches in his ear, doing the jobs for which they have nearly a century of combined experience, pretending that they don’t notice how little this kid listens and how little that lack of listening affects his performance. He nods just to mark the beginning and the end of their voices, the point at which he can return to himself. Then they stand and watch him swing, listen to the sound of the ball on his bat. They make eyes at each other, each planning the story he will be telling soon, that of a skinny kid whom they helped make, just as I will tell people that we became fast friends, that sometimes I put my hand on his shoulder and sometimes he put his on mine. Nick is right. This is high school. And he is that girl that you love forever because she won’t remember your name.

I was numb-assed and daydreaming about high-school embarrassments on my overturned bucket when Nick attacked. He left the cage, tossed his bat aside, saw me open and vulnerable. He sprang. He snaked his right arm around my shoulder blades and pushed into my chest with his left. He tipped me back, as if we were dancing and I were the woman. I felt the coarse lines of muscle that ran across his arms, so much of it in such a wiry frame, but probably not as much as I let myself feel. I looked up at him, saw no strain in his face, just a slight smile as he looked past me at the floor.

He held me there.

I heard my breathing, loud and labored compared with his.

“What would you do,” he said, “if I felt like dropping you?”

It wasn’t a taunting tone of voice, or angry in any way, just flat.

“For real,” he said. “What would you do?”

I would do nothing to him. I wouldn’t know where to begin.

And I said it. “Nothing,” I said, and I heard my voice catch on the spit that had pooled in the back of my throat.

“True,” he said.

He hauled me up and then bounced away from me, hands in the air, bobbing from one foot to the other, simulating the roar of a crowd that would have cheered at such a mismatch.

When he sat back down across from me, he actually looked at my
face for a moment, into my eyes. I thought he might have been looking for a reaction, for anger. He is suspicious of all the people who watch him. People are fake sometimes, he has told me. People want something. People like to muddle and distract you—maybe it’s just their own weakness, maybe it’s on purpose. Like sabotage.

This moment was a test that I was failing. Or maybe not. Maybe I was acing the test with my inaction, with how limp I felt, even though I knew my body was rigid with giddy fear. I would not push back. I would not say anything to upset Nick Franklin, the way nobody said things to upset him, and at least I wasn’t pretending to be somebody who could affect him the way he could affect me.

He offered me fifteen more minutes of his concentrated time.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Bro,” he said, genuinely tender. “Don’t worry about it. I got you.”

He sat up straight and still. I kept looking.

Sociologists and psychologists write often about the phenomenon of fandom, trying to define the specific makeup of sports fans.

Sports fans are:

“The emotionally committed consumers of sports events.”

Or:

“Enthusiastic devotees of some particular sports consumptive object.”

Or, more specifically:

“[Those who] know about techniques, guidelines and rules associated with the sport they follow; many are walking compendiums of the current status of particular players and teams. Wild applause, cheers, catcalls and groans seem reasonable manifestations of effective involvement.”

So the motivation has been acknowledged as powerful and has been tied to commerce. The fan is, of course, the loyal customer, even if some of the wares are out of his price range. And fandom is spoken of as separate from spectatorship. A spectator is anyone who watches, and a fan is more. A spectator retains the dignity of detachment, while the fan is somehow dependent. The fan is participating, and noisily. The fan is searching, in someone else’s play, for so many things. Relaxation and also passion. Self-esteem and also companionship. Emotional release
and emotional content. Every goal word that I have ever spoken doubtfully to a shrink distilled into watching.

But to be here every day reveals peculiar and diverse subsets of devotion, beyond buzzwords. In Clinton, in all of minor-league baseball, every reward is less, so distinctions become more obvious. You are consuming what fewer people clamor to consume, consuming a product that often does not turn a profit. Yet there is still greater desire to be a part of something that shouldn’t be desirable. And there are enough spaces in sparse crowds to distinguish the look on one man’s face, enough intimacy to see the way individual fans react when a player is close enough to touch.

Do they lean in slowly from the front row of the stands? Do they snatch at hands or jerseys? Are they unable to move at all?

I look around here and I recognize the category of fan that I fall into, the way I was taught to by my father, not a man who hung out with other sports fans, a man who kept his obsessions quiet, a family trait. We, the overeducated and overindulged, are defensive fans. We are hyperaware of the absurdity of our devotion in every moment except those spent enthralled with the action. We find long, defensible, metaphorical reasons for the love we feel for strangers, the allegiance we feel to a uniform we’ll never wear. I see myself, watching the men who sit on the fringes of the Baseball Family, who come to every game, who betray care on their faces but who never yell or plead, who make quick jokes in disappointing moments that lay heavy over the stands before hopping up for another beer.

Guys like Derek and Matt and Ryan, they are more of the competitive fan. They root to win. They are focused in their watching, as unrelenting as the players are when they wrestle each other to the ground in the locker room, holding until one guy has to give in. They will yell for the players, but also
at
them. As though they have some power here, and not just the power to make a star feel loved, but the power to affect the outcome on the field. The power to improve things.
Dive
, they will say, as though Danny Carroll out in center will go,
Ah, that’s what I forgot to do
. Sometimes they will not discuss the players at all and instead monologue about themselves over the game—a triumph in bar-league softball or a long-time-coming “fuck off” to the boss made greater when spoken of in the context of another’s athletic majesty.

There will always be more types to find, further examples of how much a fan can care. Next March, when I follow Nick and the others to Arizona for spring training, I will stand for a week by the fence near the practice fields where 165 players compete all morning to keep their jobs. I will stand with other fans who made the trip to suburban Phoenix for some puzzling, burning reason. There will be a Japanese family who purchased plane tickets only to wait in the parking lot outside the clubhouse for Ichiro Suzuki, sitting on heated asphalt for two hours until he drives by with just a slight nod through tinted windows. They will take pictures of his back license plate and hold their camera up as a prize. I will think,
why
, and then I will see Nick Franklin appear, will sprint toward his Escalade with the monogrammed leather cushion interior, hoping that he might just turn.

The LumberKings are playing Cedar Rapids today, and Cedar Rapids features a boy named Mike Trout who is Nick Franklin’s age and Nick Franklin’s size and got drafted even higher than Nick Franklin with an even better signing bonus. The fat men with bulging binders full of baseball cards crowded by the visitors’ dugout after the national anthem to get his signature. Nick would never say out loud that this displeases him, but it does.

Before the game, he talked about Team USA, the tryouts in Jupiter, Florida, how only twenty-five high schoolers from the whole country made it, one of them being Nick Franklin and none of them being Mike Trout.

“Yeah, I kind of know him,” Nick said, as though he were speaking about some obscure annotation from his past, not a frightening combination of speed and power mentioned on every baseball blog in America, featured, text and picture, in this month’s
Baseball America
currently lying in Nick’s locker. “I saw him, and I was like, yeah, he’s one of those guys that didn’t make Team USA.”

Everybody here wants Nick to be the better one. It is important that he is better, recognized as such. He is Clinton’s best, and Clinton’s best should be
the
best. He has, since first displaying his gifts in April, been a snug fit into the role that every town must fill, that best reflection of us, no matter if he wasn’t
us
two months ago. Mike Trout hit his own
homer this game, and it was followed by an immediate consensus that the wind was blowing out to right field and the ball only just dipped over the wall anyway, a lazy line drive that happened to get lucky. He must be beloved in Cedar Rapids, known and cheered by more than Clinton can muster because there are 125,000 people there and even after the massive, tragic flood of 2008 the population has grown and continues to, not like Clinton. Young, white-collar professionals and University of Iowa law students cheer for Mike Trout. Somehow the arrogance of his home run trot falls in line with the arrogance of his temporary home.

But Trout is too good for that place and this level, anyway. Everyone knows it. Cedar Rapids has a new stadium with a Jacuzzi in left field and a scoreboard that runs special graphics dedicated only to Trout, comparing him favorably to Superman. Still, you can dress it up all you want—Low-A is Low-A, Cedar Rapids is Cedar Rapids, and he’ll be gone before the hottest days of summer. Two months from now, after his all-star selection, he’ll be playing in Rancho Cucamonga and then Arkansas. His name will be spoken of by major-league analysts, his face on TV, not a pixilated mini-Jumbotron. People from all over the country who do not care about Nick Franklin, do not care about Iowa, will ask me,
Did you ever get to see Mike Trout up close?

In the stands today, there is already speculation about the impending loss of Nick Franklin. The best thing, I’m told, from a low-level minor-league standpoint, is a boring beginning and a good ending. If a player’s value is quiet enough to only register here, he might stick around. He can be appreciated in this town, hidden. If he starts out terribly, well, then he’s probably back to rookie ball or he’s cut, and good riddance, really, it’s not as if he had endeared himself. But if he’s an instant star, pops up all over the Internet next to captions saying,
look out for this kid
, next to a picture where you know you’re just a few feet out of frame in the stands, then you probably will never see him again.

“We’re fucked if he leaves,” Derek says, loud enough, I imagine, for Nick’s teammates at the top step of the dugout to hear. “That would just fuck us.”

But people aren’t meant to stay here. Nick Franklin wouldn’t be the first to go. And next year, a shortstop will be drafted in the second round, and another teenager will light it up in the Venezuelan Summer
League, each waiting to star in Clinton, but we do not know that now. And even if we can assume its probability, we still ignore it. Nick Franklin is irreplaceable.

“He’s young,” Tim says, hopeful always.

“Yep,” says Matt.

“Sometimes with a young guy they want to keep him around, they don’t want to rush things,” Tim says, dropping the
we
when referring to those with decision-making power. “I mean, what’s the rush?”

“If I was them, I’d let him stay,” Matt says. “A boy’s got to learn how to succeed. This place is good for him.”

It is a quality of optimism that I have never seen before coming to this town, one that is repeated in the stands every day. It is warm, womblike. It makes me feel a deep, developed, familial care for things that are new to me. Nothing ever really ends here. Nothing will. Or at least it doesn’t feel ridiculous to think that, even though Ryan and I stand out, in our twenties at the game when most of the men who watch every day have done so for longer than we’ve been alive and the fans who are talked about as best, the exemplars of loyalty, are dead.