Class A (15 page)

I leaned on the batting cage and watched Hank take his swings before today’s game. For him, it
was
the game; these would be his only swings of the day. Hank kept his knees slightly bent, bat slightly raised, ready. He produced grounders that hissed over third, low line drives that two-hopped the wall in left. I found myself clapping my hands together when he hit what might have been a double in a game that mattered, happy to see it and then instantly embarrassed about such a show of favoritism, such a reminder to all that I was there. But I wasn’t the only one. His teammates called out to him.
“Vamos, Hanky”
from the Venezuelans, “Hanky Panky” from the Americans. Terry Pollreisz, the hitting coach who is the gentlest, most paternal of the staff, entered his own “Attaboy, Hankster” to the chorus.

He is the one who’s easiest to root for, maybe because the expectations are low or because he isn’t a threat to the careers that his teammates feel promised. Watching his swing, his good but not seismic line drives, I let myself fall into absurd thoughts about how, with a little more hard work, I could totally have been a pro ballplayer. Which is so insulting and delusional. There is no room for personal fantasy when I see a ball leap off Nick Franklin’s bat and clear the high wooden wall in center by fifteen feet.

“Coming out,” Hank said before his last swing of the day. He got an easy pitch and he swung up, unloading on the ball. The field erupted in “Ooooohs,” which always happens when a hitter really tags one, as though everyone were worried about the abuse that poor ball just took. Mine and Hank’s and thirty-odd other heads followed the ball, arcing high toward scattered clouds, its stitches still barely visible. Hank took a couple of steps down the first-base line and craned his neck forward as if that could have some effect.

The ball hit off the bottom of the fence in left center, rolled for a moment, and stopped. Tamargo called out, “Little man hit it,” one of his standard punch lines any time a player comes up just short of a home run, but the words felt more loaded right then. Everyone still laughed.

·   ·   ·

Phil Plantier is displeased, sitting at the bar of the Boogaloo Cafe, and his ire returns Tamargo to the mood he’d been in immediately after today’s loss.

“I’m so goddamn frustrated,” Plantier says. “It’s so goddamn pathetic.”

“Well, shit,” Tamargo says.

They both swig whiskey.

My drunkenness becomes acute and unavoidable when balancing on a bar stool and remembering Phil Plantier’s name at the same time proves difficult.

“Mr. Liambeer,” I say and then realize that Bill Laimbeer is a former Detroit Piston’s basketball player and is not anywhere near Pzazz! FunCity tonight. “I mean, Mr. Plantier. What’s frustrating?”

“Who the fuck is this?” Plantier says, and Tamargo tells him again. It doesn’t improve his mood. He glares at me and spits again.

“What’s frustrating?” he says. “We go find and overpay these children who can’t put the bat on the ball. That’s fucking frustrating.”

He looks past me to Tamargo and continues. “I mean, you see it every fucking day with this guy. How do you deal with it? You tell him, ‘Hey, maybe don’t watch the first two pitches and then swing as hard as you can at a fucking curveball you can’t hit.’ He doesn’t listen. It’s not that hard.”

He’s talking about Sams, whose series of ugly swinging strikeouts was perhaps the most entertaining part of tonight’s game.

“Are you talking about Sams?” I ask.

“Mind your own fucking business,” Plantier says, and then, “What the fuck do you think?”

He and Tamargo fall into a conversation that feels so worn, so common for them that it’s almost rehearsed. I imagine it repeated, honed in a lot of bars like this one, drunken agreement, commiseration, Plantier glowering, nasty yet proud, at the strangers who stare at him because they know they’ve seen him somewhere but they’re not sure where. These two men have seen so much of the same thing. They are both still here. They don’t know how to do anything else, really, how to be any other kind of person. Tamargo will freely admit that with a mixture of pride and wistfulness. It is so obvious. What would their conversation be other than what is wrong with this modern game, these players who are not them, whose careers they now have to serve? They remember
themselves suffering more, playing harder and better,
earning
it, unlike how these boys under their care never have to.

“It’s ridiculous the way it is now,” Plantier says, like a parent at a PTA meeting. “We go to these countries, we watch these motherfuckers hit one good ball and watch them run fast, and, boom, we give them a million fucking American dollars.”

Tamargo is quiet. He half nods and drinks. He is the son of Cuban immigrants, and both his childhood in Tampa and his life as a ballplayer were bilingual. He is acutely aware that after all his years playing, his major-league career and half century of baseball knowledge, his best professional asset is the fact that his Spanish is fluent and he can tell a Dominican prospect how to shorten his swing without translation. He is kind to foreign players, more than any old-guard guy I’ve come across. Sometimes I hear him make quiet jokes in Spanish that only they can laugh at, small intimacies that are tender and necessary. But he won’t argue with Plantier, maybe because the solidarity is nice, maybe because Plantier was a better baseball player than he was and, even all these years later, that is the most important thing.

The bartender is a young woman with blue eyes and a small mouth whose work shirt is too tight and was probably given to her that way intentionally. She watches us because there’s nobody else to watch. The baseball men call her sweetheart and ask her how old she is. They tell her she’s too slow when she brings things. I wonder if she knows they’re baseball men just by the confidence, the watches, the rings. How many Midwest League vets have been to the Boogaloo Cafe this season, staring at her body and telling her everything that she’s doing wrong?

“JT, how old were you when you made the bigs?” Plantier asks.

“Twenty-two,” Tamargo says. “And I was a catcher, remember. We take a little while. We’ve got a lot of things to learn.”

“I was nineteen,” Plantier says. “Some of these guys here are twenty-three, twenty-four, and they can’t hit A-ball pitching?”

“It’s true,” Tamargo says.

“I got a seventeen-year-old son who could track that eighty-seven-mile-an-hour heater the guy had tonight, and our professional players can’t,” Plantier says and spits. “These aren’t men. You can’t call these men. These are fucking pussies.”

This is the kind of conversation I always fantasized about hearing,
even taking part in, though I could never figure out how. Voices hoarse from a lifetime of cigars and yelling commands, guys who’ve been around long enough to pine for better, purer days. But these aren’t wistful words; they are biting and spoken too easily. In Plantier’s nostalgia, there is an equal dose of xenophobia, so I focus my gaze on my fingers ripping apart yet another Budweiser label and try not to make an expression that suggests that I don’t want to be around the great Phil Plantier anymore, that I’m shocked that he wouldn’t care how loud or to whom he said these things, as though he’s not saying anything wrong, as though nobody could think to disagree.

Once, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Phil Plantier was Kalian Sams, the white American version. The better version, too. He was a big swinger who struck out too much, but in the major leagues, not in fucking Iowa. He was worth more. It seems so important to him that I know that, even though everyone already knows. I remember his batting stance, crouched so low he could touch the dirt with his fingers, how especially menacing a player he always seemed because of the torque of such a big body pressed in on itself, waiting to explode. But he is coaching Kalian Sams because he got injured and then he got old and nobody would pay him to play anymore. And, like almost everybody coaching these players, he didn’t plan to spend his life developing others’ talents while forgetting his own.

Phil Plantier probably has no idea who Hank Contreras is. He is paid to make the big investments pan out. He rages in bars about the likes of Sams and the infielders Gabriel Noriega and Mario Martinez because the team went to Venezuela and, in Sams’s case, all the way to Holland and paid them market value. So every time Noriega grounds weakly to second because that body he was paid $800,000 for at sixteen hasn’t filled out by nineteen the way people thought it would, those failures are both Plantier’s job to fix and a slap in his underpaid American face. Hank fits into Plantier’s general scorn, twenty-four, still here in Clinton, on this mediocre team, but he has done nothing to disappoint. He has done nothing.

“When I was in the minors, I knew I’d make it,” Plantier says and finishes his drink. “Everybody knew I would. That was it. This team. You look around and see maybe one guy who has a shot to make it in the bigs. And we’re still paying all these other pussies the bonuses.”

Tamargo changes the subject to something happy, to the happiest thing.

“Man, you had a
swing,
” he says.

“I had a fucking swing,” Plantier agrees, and then he is finally silent for a moment. I see him stretching his fingers to their full length on the bar in front of him, as though preparing to do something.

“Tamargo,” he says finally. “I’m gonna take a piss. Then, casino.”

The Catfish Bend Casino at the heart of the Pzazz! FunCity is still bright as everything around it closes. I follow them over, but I don’t go in, content to stand at the entrance and squint into the lights, listen to the babble of programmed video poker chatter. Tamargo surveys the room and lights a cigar. He sees some of his players and points at them in mock threat. He sees Dwight, his pitching coach, cowboy hat on, sucking down a cigarette at the blackjack table, looking as if he can’t be real. He smiles.

His team is 21-20, almost as if the season never existed, the same way nearly three decades’ worth of managing has been. He is in the Pzazz! FunCity, and some of the dealers are looking at the shine of his ring. Hank Contreras is upstairs, probably sleeping. In a week and a half, he will play again, go 1-4, but hit the ball hard each time. I will wonder if those four swings were worth it.

I have no money to gamble with, and I leave, begging that young bartender in her too-tight shirt for coffee in a to-go cup as she wipes down her station. I sip and try to sober up in the front seat of my hatchback, parked next to the team bus, the only evidence of the visitors who should theoretically flock to the Pzazz!, its never-ending expanse of fun bigger than everything else in this town other than the ammunitions factory. Gamblers make their way to their cars, all with Iowa plates like mine, most from this county. One woman is on a cell phone hollering, “I won, I won,” and some other people are glaring in her direction because tonight it wasn’t them. But they will be back tomorrow and their time will come and they will win.

H
OW MANY PEOPLE COME
to a Class A minor-league baseball game? Say it averages out to a thousand. Multiply that by the hundred-plus games a year that Joyce attends at least for a few innings before she has to go to the casino, most at home in Clinton, some on the road at stadiums dotted around four landlocked states. Multiply that by fifteen, twenty years. And how many players? Twenty-five on a team at any given time, the rosters always shuffling, new bodies in old uniforms. The exact sum doesn’t matter. The point is its huge, and that Joyce has seen all these people. She tries to greet them all, give them something, take something from them. She cannot be ignored. If you leave a Clinton LumberKings game early and you turn on 1390 KCLN, you will hear her if you know to listen, a little louder than the rest of the ambient noise, her hollered encouragement as much a part of the nightly soundscape as the bat crack and the commercial for the Clinton County Landfill.

Sometimes, I admit, I slouch in my chair when she yells, letting my shoulder blades dip below the top of stiff, plastic seats, bringing my hat brim to an exclusionary, acute angle, hiding my eyes and my nose, everything but my chin. No matter how many games I spend next to Joyce, I can’t quite shake the self-consciousness I feel when half the stadium hears her and turns to look in our direction. But she, at least, doesn’t seem to judge me for that. She responds not to action or inaction but to care. If you show up, then you care, and if you care, then it is unquestionable that you deserve to belong.

Joyce likes to wait until the rest of the crowd is silent before she yells—why waste needed energy on a cheer that will get swallowed up in a collective roar? And she yells phrases meant to be distinct. To Vinnie Catricala, the LumberKings’ power-hitting left fielder, she yells, “Go,
Cat, go!” a reference to the nickname bestowed upon him by his teammates
and
a rockabilly song released thirty-three years before his birth. He always hears her, looks over amused or terrified or angry, depending on the kind of game he’s been having. But he always looks. And Joyce waves, and I slide down in my chair. The same goes for Tim “Timber” Morris and Mario “Go, Go, Mario” Martinez and, of course, Nick “Nick Franklin, You’re
Hot
” Franklin.

Often, we are the only Clinton representatives to make the trip to away games, and so, Joyce says, it is up to us to make the rival fans remember. I pull my little blue Ford in to the lot in Burlington or Cedar Rapids or Davenport or Peoria or Appleton, and Joyce is there before me, always, smoking a Pall Mall, drinking a cherry Pepsi sheathed in a Louie the LumberKing cozy, smiling as she watches my air-conditioning fluid puddle on the hot asphalt beneath the car. She waves.

She’s in her early fifties now, with long, graying hair and thin-rimmed glasses. Her face is round and her body compact, and she shouldn’t be particularly noticeable. I wonder if she knows that. I wonder if she used to be the kind of toned, achingly hot groupie who made summer feel worthwhile. I squirm as I think it, because it is wrong to think. She doesn’t have to have been a sexy stereotype to be allowed a personality here. But sometimes I hope that she was and imagine such a former version, because maybe a lineage of attention would give a clear reason to be at the games, calling out.