Class A (44 page)

“I heard y’all needed me,” Nick says, smiling.

Hank says yeah.

Other players wander over, and Nick shares his epic tale. He was down in Florida, just chilling, giving himself a deserved break. He was on the beach with this girl, not his girlfriend, just, whatever. His phone was ringing, but he wasn’t answering. Finally, it rang a few times in a row, and he picked it up out of the sand, saw it was the number of the front office in Seattle.

He lets the fact that it’s common for him to receive front-office calls sink in. Then he goes on. He was told, We need you back in A-ball. Nick
said, Huh? The bosses said, Go help them win a championship. You’ve got a flight booked to Ohio in three hours. They toweled off and ran to his Escalade. He called his father. His father said, No time to bring the girl home, not in traffic. Nick looked at her and said, Yo, wanna fly to Ohio? The team will pay. She thought the whole thing was cool, and so here she is in her flip-flops, sand still between her toes.

He’s different. No, he can’t be. It’s been eleven days.

His shiny blue shirt is open down to the middle of his chest, showing off the lines tracing his pectorals. He is rubbing his ring like a cartoon villain or like Gollum or just like John Tamargo. And look at how pressed his jeans are. Look at the shoes, his white Honey Bear loafers that were too much for going out on a Saturday night and are certainly too much for checking into a Comfort Suites with his parents. He sits, space on the cushions between himself and his teammates. A scene begins to unfold the way you would expect it to, the imparting of knowledge from the player who has been where the others want to go. Hold for grizzled wisdom. Hold for youthful reverence.

But the scene isn’t right. The promised land in this conversation is Double-A. The real promised land isn’t even promised. And Nick isn’t speaking to the myth, the power, of the place—Jackson, Tennessee. The players are nothing special, he says. No different from in the Midwest. Maybe a little more consistent. Otherwise, he’s not sure what the big deal is. He shrugs. It was easy.

His father interrupts, tells his mother to take the girl upstairs, says, “Why don’t you ladies get settled in?” They oblige.

“Hello, men,” says Mr. Franklin. Everyone says hello.

Finally, someone non-Franklin speaks.

“How’d they let you back?”

Nick shrugs. It is not for the players to discuss, though they know that something odd happened since there isn’t supposed to be any roster adjustment once the play-offs start, unless there are unforeseen injuries. Tomorrow, Kevin Mailloux, twenty-four, a surprise slugger only when playing in rookie ball with fresh-meat teens, will go on injured reserve, and Nick will take his place. Mailloux’s parents will drive down from Canada to pick him up from the last professional baseball locker room he’ll ever inhabit. He is more temporary than he thought.

It’s not that everybody who isn’t good enough is compelling. Because,
man, that’s a lot of people. And to see them walk away is a series of mini-tragedies, each a failure worth honoring at least. I want to say that much. So few will ever know what it is to play in the majors beyond a couple of garbage-time at bats in September for a team long out of contention. Just because I know Kevin Mailloux’s ending, just because he has made the decision to be identified as a ballplayer until eventually his jersey is taken from him, doesn’t mean that something enormous isn’t happening when he walks to his parents’ car, all his clothes and his bats slung over his shoulders like the most muscle-bound, hair-gelled train-hopper you’ve ever seen, nodding a silent good-bye.

There’s no chance that the LumberKings can lose. That is the consensus. Gone is the bunch of underachievers or lovable try-hards depending on who is talking. Nick Franklin is back. The team re-earned him. And how could they lose with him when they won without him? Now that they’ve overcome so much? I don’t know what has been overcome. But I know that the tingle of group hyperbole is palpable. The clubhouse now is the rollicking, unified Eden that I tell Tim and Tammy it’s always been.

“How are they?” Tim asks over the phone, all day, all night.

“They’re good,” I report like a babysitter. “They’re excited. They want to win.”

I imagine Tim closing his eyes on the other end of the line, seeing their want.

“Yeah, they want it,” he says, before hanging up.

Brad, who drove Erin and me nine and a half hours from one end of the Midwest to the other in a groaning red Impala because he would not miss history, confirms that assumption.

Look at them. Look at how much they want this
.

But what about those other guys, the Lake County Captains? They must want it too.

No disrespect, but they don’t want it like we do
.

There are many reasons. The Captains only moved here eight years ago. They play in a stadium that is antiseptic in its brightly colored, state-of-the-art functionality. And look at the place, all this shine, all this investment, and there are more empty seats than at a game in Clinton.
There is nothing to see in Lake County but easy, fast, smug success and a lack of tradition.

To come to this conclusion, we must discount the fact that the Lake County, Ohio, economy has plummeted, a real rust-belt bust, not a slow Iowa erosion, something both present and not present at the stadium. Present in the empty seats, not present in the forceful cheer of the huge, furry mascot and the new Jumbotron. There is no tradition of under-doggery here, that’s the issue. No lineage of wanting more, of needing, for once, to win. They are not playing for anything, just playing.

Brad and Tim have faith not only in the talent of the players who happen to wear their home team jersey. They have faith in their collective character, in their thought process, in the purity of their motivation, one vaguely akin to Clinton’s own. But the enormous valley between the competing perspectives has never been more apparent. No matter how excited the players get in the clubhouse during the championship, it’s excitement born of casual pragmatism—if you make it to the championship, you might as well win. It feels good to win, and I’m sure the Lake County Captains think the exact same thing. The concept of players who want to win not just because of an always honed instinct toward success but for some greater sense of legacy, is a fiction. It’s the type of player that everybody assumed would show up, the same assumption as last year and the year before, and before that. The type I read in books about made-up players chasing made-up crowns. And so a collection of always new faces with no allegiance to one team can meld into a continuous narrative. It is a necessary lie.

The players, boarding the bus from the hotel, beating on the seats in front of them, giving the bus driver some new Eminem track to play, about overcoming both pill addiction and the haters, include Clinton as one of the things they overcame on the way to earning the title of champion. An empty town that they won in spite of. The fans see Clinton as one of the reasons they made it.

I’m hanging over the outfield railing before batting practice. Joyce isn’t here. That is all I can think of. This is where she should be. This is the space she has made hers. Her vacation days have run out. She made it to every game before the championship and knew, as she pored over
her LumberKings calendar, that she wouldn’t have enough days to give if they made it all the way. It had seemed so improbable. She thought about rooting, secretly at least, for the LumberKings to lose with dignity in the conference series so that she would be a part of the almost and wouldn’t be left out of the end. But that wouldn’t be right.

The players don’t ask about her. They’re concentrating. The only man standing with me before game four is old and stooped and smells like birdseed. He has a round face that I imagine was once handsome. His jeans are sliding down off narrow hips.

“You know 46?” he asks me, meaning the man behind the jersey number.

James Jones. “Yes.”

“I need him. Hey, 46!” But Jones is already through the door into the outfield, trotting bat in hand. He turns and says, “I’ll get you after.”

The man doesn’t respond to Jones. Then he says to me, “You know 3? He’s worth getting, right?”

Nick Franklin. “Yes.”

Nick Franklin is already through the door, too, and is in no mood to turn.

“I only have two hours,” the man says to me. “My name’s Cal.”

Cal doesn’t like baseball. He never cares to watch the games. They take too long. And he doesn’t want to get invested. But the stadium is pretty and smells nice, and it’s walking distance from his house. And he’s one of those people who got laid off—auto parts, bound to happen—and his wife is sick; well, she’s been sick for a while, but now it’s all he can think about because he’s home all day. So he gets two hours, after he tucks her in for a nap, to get signatures, to snag batting practice home run balls, bringing a bagful of souvenirs home every evening. He tells his wife that it’s a matter of persistence, that you’re catching people before their full development, and sometimes, if you wait long enough, the objects they leave behind can make the retriever rich. They probably won’t, he acknowledges that. Still, it’s nice to collect things that might someday have more value than they do now.

He shakes my hand. He says he hopes this is worth it, and doesn’t explain.

After he moves off, unwilling to wait until the end of batting practice
today, I begin to think that I imagined him. That he was some combination of oracle and ghost. And then I’m stilled by how fictional or necessary or profound anyone can be here, a hologram or an illusion rippling in too-hot air. Part of me thinks that Cal, stooped, maybe-real Cal, is the most honest person I’ve met all season, a man who defines things simply as what they are, braver in the face of the aimlessness of reality than I will ever be. The players are still taking swings. I call Joyce on reflex. I call to tell her that I’m watching Nick Franklin take batting practice again, leaving out the part about how rusty he looks, fouling balls off the cage, like he’s starting over as someone new.

Faith has begun to waver a little since Nick showed his rust. His first game in Ohio, he batted second, swung hard, never made solid contact. He went hitless with two strikeouts, and the home fans who don’t know anything about anything began to laugh and say, “Why’s a scrawny, overmatched kid batting second?” Brad tried to explain to the rival fans what Nick had done this season, but when you looked at him out of context, the embellished facts felt like outright lies. The LumberKings lost that game, down 2–1 in a best-of-five series, one away from elimination yet again.

Tom Wilhelmsen finally pitched a bad game for that second LumberKings loss. His year is over, and so he’s next in line to drink himself stupid with Hank. And me. We take shots, split pitchers, like friends. A round of good whiskey shows up. The waitress leans in, points down the bar to Ted, the general manager, sitting alone. He raises his glass in tribute.

“You’ve been fantastic, boys,” he calls out.

There’s the awkward raising of glasses in return, that too-long silence when Ted could invite the players over or the players could invite Ted. None of them know each other well enough to do that. Everyone looks down. Ted is paying his own way to be here, staying alone. Nate, his assistant general manager, is here, too, with the whole family, wanting to see a championship that belongs to him and doesn’t.

“Good guy,” Tom says, looking at Ted, not sure if he means it.

We start talking about Nick Franklin.

Voices are lowered. I am glanced at. Sentences are ended with sudden silences and jerks of the neck toward me. Even though they are drunk
and unhinged, even though we are sharing some basic bar stool camaraderie, the ballplayer is schooled not to talk about any issue that matters enough to get him in trouble. Nick Franklin is that issue.

Hank’s voice is working to not sound betrayed, just impartial.

“He thinks he’s big-league now. Once you leave, you come back and you’re not one of us.”

Is it that tenuous? Well, how could it not be? If the connection, the brotherhood, the shared triumph and despair, is a hurried fabrication, it should end swiftly and arbitrarily as well. What is shared is a sense of wanting and of injustice. Nick wanted to move up, and then he did, so there is no bond left.

I look at Hank. He is both himself and not. Or he is not the person I saw before. He is just there. I have ascribed so much to him. I have rooted for his success because he needed to be rooted for and I needed to feel as if I noticed beauty previously unseen. I have made him tragic because sometimes I think he is, but also because it makes him so worthy of attention. He is bored. Somebody is playing piano. There is a bachelorette party. The bachelorette, in her plastic crown, stumbles past us toward the bathroom and back again.

“I want to get a ring,” he says, down into his beer, a reminder. “That’s what is important. That’s what we’re here for.”

I am tired. I accept the platitude.

Chris, the bus driver, has let me crash in his hotel room, and so I end up sneaking in late, tiptoeing and brushing my teeth to cut the booze, fifteen again. He likes to fall asleep to Fox News at high volume, so that is what I fall asleep to. Pundits are screaming. People are accusing.
Take responsibility
. I hear that phrase clear enough.
I’m sick of you
, voices assert, back and forth in a contest of apportioning blame. There is terrorism in this world. And famine, too. There are godless people with sinister intentions. Chris knows this, worries, talks about it often. I say, “Uh-huh.” I agree with nothing he says, but I think we’re scared in the same way.

Chris worked in restaurants for thirty years, which fed both his type-A personality and his drinking. But about a decade ago, he decided no more drinking, and because he decided, it was done. It’s about personal
responsibility. That’s why he likes driving ballplayers. Bird-watchers and family reunions and tour groups that travel east to see the leaves change, they all tip better, but they are not en route to a job, not working, always working.