Class A (37 page)

As Hank’s season is beginning, his teammates are exhausted and scowling.

“I feel like shittiness is contagious,” Vinnie Catricala says over the card table in the locker room. “So, like, if we’re in this really shitty place for half a year, we’re bound to catch it.”

As a very literal example, he describes an effort to move out into
the community, hitting the local pool before practice. A kid shit himself, and Vinnie was forced to swim away from the turd like everyone else, the current of his flailing only pulling the loaf closer. He refused to go back, ever. Pool-shitting happens in everyone’s hometown, but here, in an August that feels drab and endless, the anecdote becomes unforgivable.

“You know, it would be one thing if anyone gave a fuck,” another player chimes in. “Pack the fucking stadium one time. Watch me play. You don’t have anything else to do. We’re the main draw.”

I wince and put a card down, look around to see if anyone is silently deriding my move. There are levels of acceptance that one strives for around a team, some proof of deserving to be attached to the core group and its unified purpose. Anyone who serves a function is accepted, and who doesn’t want to be functional? The Jimmy John’s sandwich delivery staff has, with their punctuality, earned universal acceptance and can walk into the locker room at any time, face a wall of unabashed, enormous, nude bodies, and be welcomed with thanks, even a tip. Dave can come in, look at the lineup card, ask politely for pregame interviews, wave his hand awkwardly in hello and good-bye, then retreat back into the world of the watchers. Any Mariners employee in town for a progress report is, of course, welcomed with a respect merging into fear. And there are two reverends who enter each Sunday, one with an approved English sermon, the other with the exact same sermon in Spanish. They’re trained volunteers with Baseball Chapel, serving an almost uniformly Christian population of players, so they are perhaps the most necessary of all. Indeed, many fans saw me popping in and out of the clubhouse early in the season and, before Betty set them straight, assumed I was some sort of junior minister. Why else would I occasionally wear collared shirts? Why else would I deserve a place in the sweaty, cement-walled inner sanctum? I never tried to explain my place inside, because it felt like all I did was show up, tolerate being stared at, stay so insignificant that nobody could find cause to kick me out. And I know that my only qualification to make me different from the longtime fans is living outside of Clinton—not a player, not a coach, just an alien allowed in for being unfamiliar.

It’s hard to defend fans to players who have no real reason to know them. Because sometimes I think that as much as anything the players’
most prized possession is their sense of exclusivity. When you haven’t reached the identity that you want, that you need, when every failed at bat is a reminder that you probably never will, when
Baseball America
identifies the Seattle Mariners as a team that has only managed to produce one legitimate big leaguer out of their farm system in seven years, it has to be nice to occupy a space where most people aren’t worthy to trespass. Anybody they see should be either in service of their improvement or unworthy of their acknowledgment.

For most of the season, I assumed that all the white-haired guys who showed up in Clinton for a day, watched, spoke with a few players, and left in rented Buicks with Illinois plates were scouts. That they shared a purpose, that of the critical observer. I hadn’t seen an older man who moved with any sort of authority do anything except judge. But one man stood out despite the snowy hair, warm-up pants, clipboard. I saw him hold Danny’s shoulder tenderly after a bad game, promise him with feeling that they’d talk soon.

His name is Jack. He is a grandpa, and when he leaves Clinton, he heads up to his lake house in Wisconsin. His grandkids join him, and they go tubing. That’s the kind of story that he likes to tell the players, the kind that makes them smile and say,
“Man, tubing.”
Jack is a sports psychologist, one of a tiny wave of innovators who slowly gained acceptance in locker rooms during the 1990s, despite the unmistakable New Agey whiff of their philosophies. Still, he seems out of place, and his acceptance is an uneasy one. All the coaches played at a time when there were no Jacks, when nobody patted their shoulders, made them promises. Jack brings kindness, something akin to weakness. Jack does the thing that everybody who watches wants to do.

When Jack leaves, Danny goes through his mantras of self-care.

I am a good hitter
, he tells himself.

I am going to succeed at what I can control and not worry about what I cannot control
.

I am in a calm, settled place, and good things happen in that place
.

He can get more specific:

I will hit a double today
.

I will feel good each time I step to the plate
.

Even if yesterday was a bad day, I am not a bad player, nor am I a bad person
.

Sams is doing the same in Everett, Washington, both tagged as guys with potential, getting into their own heads and stalling their own progress. This is the kind of fragility and resulting gentleness that makes the clubhouse so off-limits. This sweet man, this hand on that shoulder, these quiet, hopeful repetitions of mantras to make a young boy calm down—all of it is completely unexpected. Unwanted. It’s disturbing, far more wrong, I think, than the steroids I’ve never seen but everyone figures I’m looking for. Everything else I see daily is a confirmation of what I’ve assumed. The sometimes focused, sometimes jocular, often homoerotic lives of athletes. Boredom and weight lifting and porn and tobacco and makeshift contests of strength and Bibles with Post-its in them. It’s vivid, all of it, but unsurprising. Not as disconcerting as a shaved and muscled stud scheduling time to remind himself that he has some worth in the world.

Today, I stand with Hank while he suits up, and we watch Danny from a short distance as he whispers good things. Hank is talking about Sams, calling him sensitive, not as a direct insult, but kind of. Hank always seems proud of himself when he talks about Sams now. They are no longer roommates, and Hank is no longer a sidekick, because Hank has won, still relevant in this place, in this moment. And all the while, since the day he was drafted, he has had to supply his own belief.

According to his doctors, Tom Bigwood was the most pathologically hopeful person they’d ever treated. These weren’t local doctors who knew Tom well. By the end, he had to be driven to Iowa City, where I live, and given experimental, aggressive treatment in the state’s biggest hospital. There he would wait his turn, doubled in pain, smiling at the strangers who seemed frightened of him. And then the doctors would call him and say,
Tom, this isn’t good
. Or,
Tom, there won’t be any stopping the pain
. Or, finally,
Tom, you will not live. No, nothing is for certain, but it would be a miracle if you weren’t dead next year
.

He smiled like someone who didn’t know better than to smile. That’s why, his sister-in-law thinks, they took her aside and asked her,
Does he
know what we said? Does he realize? Does he understand?
If he didn’t, it was because he chose not to. They left the hospital with Tom making bright announcements in the waiting room that he would be healthy soon, that the next time these strangers saw him, he would be cured.

Everything clicked in at a certain point, of course. It made his death like a flash fire, like a trip-wire boom, because he refused to build up any glum, nihilistic shell, preferred to not be dying until he un-ignorably was. That’s when he started asking about the bricks he’d been promised. Those to be purchased in his name and placed by the stadium entrance.
How long does it take for brick to fade away? How long does it take? When will my brick be gone?
He couldn’t walk much at that point and it was winter and there was still ice everywhere. His sister-in-law couldn’t take him around the empty downtown as a reminder, point out all the brick that was there when he was born and would be there, it was certain now, when he died.

She reassured him. Brick is one of those things that if you leave it, if you are content with it, it will stay. And in front of the entrance at Alliant Energy Field, there is proof of that—low-maintenance permanence. There are so few rules. Just don’t clean the brick too often, that will begin to chip away at it. If you take a powerful pressure washer and force the clean, the brick will start to disappear. But that’s not hard to not do. Don’t let too many feet kick at the brick, if it can be helped. Brick is better looked at than stepped on. There will be snow on the brick, yes, and then there will be plows scraping the snow off. But, still, Tom’s brick will last. The only real way to destroy brick is to do so intentionally. To pull it from the ground and haul it to the dump. To blow it up to get to the dirt below.

Tom wanted to know if his brick would be safe if the team was sold, if the stadium was remodeled for something newer. That answer, probably, was no.

Hank still fields questions from me and everyone else who is not too intimidated to ask him:
When do you think you’ll quit? What do you want to do for a living someday? Will it be cool to say that you were once roommates with Nick Franklin?
On paper, or actually on a computer screen, his own career is almost untraceable, just a couple of links to his name and his stats, no pictures, no comments below discussing his progress.
The smallest of athletic footprints, followed by tabs about an amateur boxer named Henry Contreras, a high school wrestler, an immigration lawyer.

But in the real and present mid-August, Clinton, Iowa, Hank is hitting well above .300, the only LumberKing with that kind of productivity to his name. Sure, he hasn’t had many opportunities to fail, but numbers are irrefutable. On the other hand, Nick has been scouted and sort of exposed. I haven’t seen him get a fastball for a strike in a month. I’ve seen him get frustrated, jumping out at changeups, pounding curves into the ground. His average in the .270s now. And his chase of the franchise home run record, which had a month ago seemed almost too easy, has stalled at twenty-two, one away. He is upset about it. He is just generally upset. Fans tell him he can do it, tell him they’re sure he will make this season something memorable, but that doesn’t make him feel better. Quite the opposite. As Nick stays furious, as the fans want him to know that they believe he will win, an inevitable question keeps pushing through the tension: Why should anybody give a shit?

The corn is starting to bust from its husks. Combines like giant spiders have already started to pluck and grind. Soon nothing will be growing. Soon this season will be over. Soon some of the splotchy teens who work the concession stands at the park will be suited up playing high school football, slipping through an early snow on a Friday night, and plenty of people will find just as much a cause to root for them as they did for Nick.

And for the players, what’s winning in Low-A compared with going home? The Latinos, for the most part, rarely stop playing. They might get Christmas with their families, but Erasmo is already preparing for the Liga Paralela, a season of games throughout the fall in Venezuela. The best American players, like Nick, are beginning to find out about fall ball assignments. They will go to the Mariners’ Arizona complex for a tournament that lasts a month. If the LumberKings don’t make the play-offs, they’ll get a few weeks off to go to the beach in whatever sunny place they’re from, to have all the sex they promise they’ll be having, to see all the friends they sometimes tell each other about. They have already hit the calendar, pointed out that if they make it to the championship series, a laughable idea, they’ll get two days between seasons, not enough time to go home, maybe not even enough time
to get over the happy hangover. To win here, in this town, at this level, wouldn’t be worth the sore legs.

It’s almost sweet, the
I-wanna-go-home
sentiment of the players. It sounds like sleepaway camp, me and the other coddled boys waiting in line to call our parents and mewl with protest. But these players are meant to care, that’s the whole idea, the simplest foundation of this place they inhabit. They are the select few people whose job it is to want to win, not in the metaphorical sense, but really to score more than someone else. Reminders of the importance of this role are rained down on them daily from the front rows of the stands, from people the players don’t know but who seem proud to know them.

I feel good about this, boys. We’re gonna do it this time
.

The players can only nod or ignore it, pretend five feet of distance is insurmountable as long as they are on the field and we aren’t. It seems as if, now that there’s a play-off race, they hurry to the dugout faster, sign less of what is reached out to them. But then there’s Hank, strutting in his catcher’s gear, giving a thumbs-up or sometimes even a verbal response. Oh, the things I let myself think about him. He is, by virtue of his patience and work ethic, a part of this town. Having seen so much, having lost some, he appreciates the value of a win. And if the LumberKings keep winning, if they win out, he will stand with Tim on the pitcher’s mound holding up the momentarily gigantic wooden trophy like it could be twenty years ago.

With the game scoreless in the second, Hank cracks a skidding rocket down the third-base line. He takes off in his sped-up slow motion, ballooning out around first and not stopping, determined to get double. We rise, of course, and cheer him on. But he pulls up lame somewhere between first and second. He keeps trying and still slides in safe, though his slide is more of a wincing belly flop. There is a collective groan, for him and what he must be feeling and for us having to lose him. He pulls his face out of the dirt, contorted, sees everybody watching him.

In the grand expanse of a fully realized athletic career, Hank’s injury is not worth mentioning. It’s a tweak, for sure, not a break or a tear. It means maybe a couple weeks of limitation. But this isn’t a career. This is an extended audition. And these couple weeks might be Hank’s last. This season could be over by Labor Day, and it only just started for him.