Class A (28 page)

She chuckles. She says, “Oh,” and then lets it trail off into contented nothingness. She plays the
Dawson’s Creek
theme song, the one that promises a lot. She likes that song. It is kind and inoffensive and evocative. I’ve heard it a dozen times by now, at various intervals on the highway, the easy music stroking the blackness. I sing along, loud, until the song ends. She will be with us from seven until midnight.

I make sure to tell people about these moments over drinks. They are less uncomfortable when not secret. If spoken about, preemptively joked about, they’re no longer overpowering, embarrassing intimacies, the thing that I wait for and must experience alone. I can nod to the fact that I know how ridiculous Delilah is and, thus, the whole scene of me and her and the car and the loneliness is the hilarious construction of
a self-aware mind. I don’t acknowledge to anyone that her patronizing soothes me. That it is the exact level of communication I want. That I am relieved when I hear her in the in-between, taking me home.

Linked to the LumberKings’ Web site is the LumberBlog, an addition initiated and run entirely by Dave, a platform that he thought out thoroughly and that I imagine him presenting to the rest of the front office using phrases like youth culture and mixed-media presence, concepts entirely antithetical to untelevised minor-league baseball played in a Depression-era stadium. “Well, all right,” Ted told him. “David, if you want to do it, just do it.”

He did and he did it well. It looks sharp. Not just A-ball sharp, either. Slicker and far more up-to-date than any other blog in the Midwest League. He is holding steady at the forty-sixth spot on the list of top fifty baseball blogs in the country that another blogger has unofficially compiled, a commendation that he notes when he thanks us readers and listeners for the support. Tonight, after he signs off the postgame show, rereads his notes, and slips them into his computer bag, after he drives three blocks to his apartment, where he will look out the window at the McDonald’s across the street and then the stadium lights powering down just beyond it, he will blog.

Sometimes he live blogs the world. When it’s raining and a game is delayed, he tells us, “It’s raining, folks.”

When it’s windy, “It’s windy,” and maybe he’ll throw in a picture of the flag contorted above the right-field fence.

Sometimes he lets himself go. He blogs not about baseball, not about Walmart’s super savings or the after-game karaoke services of DJ Dawg or the limited-edition pink home jerseys auctioned off for breast cancer awareness. Sometimes he gives us something of himself, outright. Take, “Behind the Scenes: Tools of the Trade.” It’s for all those out there who hear him and want to be heard the way he’s heard.

He is thorough. “Speaking of my digital recorder,” he writes, “it’s a TASCAM DR-07 that I purchased from Guitar Center. Yes, that sounds off the beaten path for sports broadcasters, but the mini recorders that you buy at office supply stores just don’t have the audio clarity that my TASCAM does.”

He lets us know that he is not a snob or a trend whore. He does not use Apple products just because they’re fashionable, and his HP has worked just fine for two seasons. His headset is “rugged” compared with the things you’ll see other guys shelling out for. But he doesn’t mind being old school. Neither should we.

If we have questions, his e-mail address is there, and he welcomes any and all. We’re free to comment on the post, too, an instant missive for the public to read. If we comment, he’ll respond.

The radioman is the world creator. The radioman interprets moments that almost nobody else sees, and maybe sometimes he invents them. Because everything else is blank. On television, for the fractional percent of announcers who make that leap to the screen, their art becomes ornamentation to the images of the players that everyone cares about and the graphics that can exactly quantify a player’s habits, trends, worth. Some of the larger A-ball markets have occasional TV coverage of their games. It’s a terrible idea, primarily because it removes the opportunity to imagine beyond the confines of ever-dull reality. One camera peeking over the wall in center field reduces the game to specific borders, a distance that is neither bird’s-eye in scope nor close enough to reveal emotion. It’s like watching a recently exhumed video of a child’s talent show, the triumph instantly exposed for how small it really was.

But nothing is celebrated until it is lost, and world creation is no exception, trumpeted in the human interest columns of sports sections only now that it can be referred to as a dying art. After this season, when Dave Niehaus dies and thus vacates his longtime position as the Mariners’ broadcaster, the job that Dave and every other man in the lower rungs of the Mariners organization daily, silently fantasizes himself doing, tributes will be written full of weighty quotes. Niehaus will be remembered as saying, “[Radio] is where the creativity is.” Vin Scully is still alive, but only that kind of alive that leaves everyone waiting in anticipation of the explosion of legacy-defining that will follow his death. He says that the radioman is “the eyes and the ears, and the imagination, as well.” Former baseball commissioner Bart Giamatti, the most eloquent of the game’s suits, put it best, calling a major-league radio broadcast “the enclosed green fields of the mind.”

When the LumberKings are doing poorly, I think I can hear Dave’s mind, but the fields aren’t green. I hear only mounting negativity in his pauses and occasional sighs. Players’ girlfriends, who have to listen to the weak KCLN streaming feed on their computers to track their boyfriends, complain, when they come into town, that his voice can make them think that nothing is ever going to be okay, certainly not the career prospects of the itinerant men they plan to marry.

When I can no longer hear him, I imagine his night. I imagine him in the booth, staying longer than he has to. The visiting announcer will have already packed up his things, may already be a couple of beers deep. Brad will have already knocked on the window that separates the PA man’s side of the wooden cubicle from the announcer’s, silently gesturing that Dave should leave with him. He will have already been waved off.

Often a player is commended for the things he does when nobody is watching. This speaks to his better-than-ours motivation, even at a young age, the “intangibles” that bring a player favor and are always referenced, though never satisfactorily explained. Of course there is the unspoken reality that since the player is commended for doing things when nobody’s watching, somebody is, in fact, watching. Dave is watching, for one. And Dave will report, faithfully, that a kid like Erasmo is always diligent, always doing extra work alone and unprovoked, a quality that seems so important in the morality by which Dave lives. But nobody will ever say it about him.

A broadcaster, especially at this level, where no team would think of paying for two of them, is almost always surrounded and almost always alone. He rides the bus with the players, but he sits in the front with his laptop and organizes stats that he will announce about the boys who lounge behind him, screaming until it all sounds like one voice. When I leave the park early and I listen to Dave, Joyce is there, too, and Kevin and the rest of the white noise, and I know that he is perched atop a thousand people, that they are all experiencing the same thing. But Dave is talking out beyond the stadium, to anyone, to a collection of people with no faces, a group of indeterminate size.

·   ·   ·

I talk to myself on these nighttime car rides.

“That’s a motherfucking dead deer,” I say, when I pass exploded carcasses on the side of the road, trying not to look at the eyes, if they’re still there.

“Yeah,”
I scream, when I pass a semi and duck in front of it because we’ve been racing and I just won the race, though the trucker, who I can never see, doesn’t know it.

Sometimes I imagine eye contact when a car comes up behind me after minutes of nobody. There is just enough light for me to see the shape of a face through the rearview mirror. I imagine that she is young, heading back home from college, something like that. She is tired and she wants contact. Through her windshield, bouncing off my mirror, we see each other.

It’s too late to call home, which is what I still call my parents’ home. If it were earlier, I would call my father, and he would listen as I described the field. He would give off low
wows
as I told him about the slope of the outfield fence again, the splinters on the wood, the chalk mixed in the dirt. He likes the details. He likes the way the seats clump in a semicircle around the infield and how everything else is empty space, how open that must look. He likes the notion of the river beyond the fence, and the train tracks, these enormous tropes clustered around a game unchanged in my retelling. He will talk to me still with a patience that is embarrassing because it means that he senses I need it. The stories I tell him mimic the ones that he told me to make me fall asleep as a boy.

Imagine it. Imagine it until you can’t imagine anything bad, and then you will close your eyes, and then you will wake up okay
.

I want to talk to Dave about fear in those moments when we do talk, whether we’re sitting by Joyce watching batting practice or on the bus, at the front, turning our necks to look for inclusion when there is a burst of laughter. It’s something that mounts over the course of a season. When there is so much watching, so many moments in which you are not the primary actor, thoughts become louder. We are close to the same age, Dave and I, though I hardly ever remember that. Despite his self-imposed responsibilities and the distinguished grays in his hair, we’re in the same space in our lives, out of college and not yet thirty,
old enough to worry, young enough to try to look at the players as peers even as they’re treated as part baby, part full-on adult, never equal.

We talk about the players when we talk.

We share anecdotes, and if something I say sounds too personal or juicy, too much of a brag or a challenge to his authority, I feel sorry for it.

“Sams needs to start hitting curveballs,” I said to him at a recent batting practice.

“Obviously,” he said. “Some guys, you know, it’s just those little adjustments that need to be made holding them back.”

“Mmm,” I said.

“Who knows what’ll happen,” he said.

“I’ve noticed that if you throw him a first-pitch strike, it’s a guaranteed out,” I said. I was proud of that one.

“Oh, you’ve noticed that, too?” he said.

We turned to watch Sams together, and together we analyzed his failures. We were far enough away not to see his face as he fouled off easy batting practice lobs and saw Tamargo turn his back with some combination of boredom and disgust. We glanced at each other and exchanged a knowing, worried look. We did not say what I know I was thinking and what I hope and guess that Dave was thinking, too: that it would be painful and somehow wildly unjust for Kalian Sams to fail here. This man flown in all the way from Holland, with shoulders that look like a pair of bowling balls resting on a seesaw, who can hit a ball far enough to make you giggle for lack of a better response. And still he is tenuous. He could soon become past tense, a few pictures on baseball cards sold on eBay for thirty-three cents, a stat line that no longer changes. And what does that say about those of us who follow him?

Sometimes, Dave, I wake up right after I fall asleep because it feels like a hand that’s even bigger than the hand of Kalian Sams is choking me. I drive to minor-league baseball games to find something remarkable. Or maybe I just want to watch because watching slows time, removes rush and responsibility from those of us not playing. Sometimes it feels like I’m trying too hard, I’m reaching for meaning, and I want to be remarkable, or at least validated in what I think is worthwhile, and that feels like pulling at a fishing line that doesn’t end and is always weighted, yanking it toward myself until red tracks of blood run across my palms.

I want to ask Dave if he thinks that his voice stands out.

Overlooking the field, he got personal for a moment without me asking anything. He told me that he was searched for three times on his blog, by name. He can track every hit he gets and does so in the morning, slouched in his desk chair, drinking Diet Mountain Dew. Sometimes people are searching “Mariners” or “Iowa baseball” or, often, “Nick Franklin shortstop,” but three of them typed in his name.

I thought Delilah was only an Iowa phenomenon, but I was wrong. She is everywhere. As I exit onto I-80, past the largest truck stop in the world with a population near a thousand on any given night, then a new thousand the next night, she is talking to me, here, and she is saying the same words to people in Boston and Seattle and Jacksonville and Palm Springs. After a commercial break we all hear her drums, her guitar, her soprano sax, then “De-Li-Lah,” as usual. Her voice intones with a question.

“Have a long shift at the—” There is a pause, not long and ungraceful like when the LumberKings fail and Dave’s sighs linger. Then: “John Deere factory?” It’s been prerecorded from a list that she must be given by her producers, the most iconic employers of every region where she is syndicated. And the Quad Cities survive off tractors. “Kick your boots off and relax with me,” she invites her laborer fans. Clinton isn’t big enough for Delilah to speak directly to it, and “Archer Daniels Midland corn-processing and polymer plastics plant” doesn’t have the “John Deere” ring to it.

A caller tells Delilah that she used to be full of doubt and now she isn’t. She tells her that her boyfriend never wanted to commit, he just wasn’t ready, but then one day he was. It was a miracle. And now he’s perfect. Things worked out.

“Isn’t that
amazing
?” the woman says. “Isn’t it
amazing
the way life works. I just thought I should tell you.”

Delilah is no fool and she seems dubious, but she congratulates the woman and calls her sweetie. I can hear the woman smiling. There are the sounds of a child who should be asleep in the background. Delilah plays a song just for this woman and her perseverance, her final, maybe delusional happiness. It’s Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful,” a perfect song
for the moments when Delilah isn’t quite sure how to handle a vapid caller but still wants to be nice. Anything can be remarkable when Delilah plays the right song.