GPS (11 page)

While he battled to follow Sandy’s easy-going, yet somehow manic pace and do so with two open eyes, Jeff was dying to dive into that California king back at the Vistana Beach Club on Jensen Beach, with the Atlantic Ocean outside providing the lullaby free of charge.

Jeff wondered, as the man pacing in front of him searched aloud for a bottom line he could draw underneath the Mets’ fiasco of a start, if Sandy ever even thought about sleep. He must have slept, surely, but to a true baseball man like Morino, sleep was little more than a daily interruption in life’s long walk. To Sandy, it was a few hours here and there when his body forced him to shut down and recharge, to save and store the day’s masses of information for future use.

On this morning in Florida, it was hard for Jeff to imagine his baseball superior having been jump-started awake in his own hotel bed by the shrill sound of a 5 a.m. wake-up call. Instead, he found it much easier to picture Sandy already sitting up in his bed when that call came. In that scene, the room was only as bright as the early sun sneaking through the window, the laptop whirring in front of him and the TV flashing across the room. ESPN would already be providing Sandy his normal morning rations of badly played-out highlight calls —
“and that’s a sacks-packed jack”
— and even worse music as their backdrop.

But that dawn serenade was the soundtrack to Sandy Morino’s life, and today probably hadn’t started any differently. When the phone chimed its triple-ring at 5, Sandy likely never even peeled his eyes away from his laptop — which had become just a large, glowing growth on his chest in the last decade or so. Instead, he probably picked up the receiver on the night stand and dropped it right back in its cradle without even a hint of a balk in his delivery.

The information flow never stopped in baseball and that was part of its design. A professional baseball organization was a beehive, a massive unit made possible by hundreds of individuals all seemingly doing an equal part. Even with perfect player health through an entire six-month regular season, sheer progress and unavoidable human aging meant there would always be steady flux from rookie ball to the majors.

The unexpected, naturally, was what made it baseball. The torn hamstrings and the constant undertow of human error on the field — and the slacking off by people away from the field like Jeff, who no longer worked as hard as the other bees — were what caused impromptu trips to the lonely extended spring training camps of major league clubs that have long since departed for their summer homes. It was baseball’s unpredictability and its imperfect people that made Sandy great at his job. He not only expected the ups and downs of the individual workers in the hive, he relied on them. Making the workers keep working and finding newer, better ones was his most basic job description.

Sandy embodied what Jeff could have become in the baseball business. In fact, with Jeff’s interest waning almost daily, Sandy represented something that had passed Jeff by, even at 38 and even though Sandy was only 41. Sandy likely saw the Mets’ big board in his sleep, if he did sleep, and he could be stirred awake in the middle of the night and tell you, in order, the Mets’ opening day lineup for the last 30 years. If he’d worked for the Reds it would be true for them too.

To further accentuate their differences, Sandy spent a large portion of his days on his cell phone, meticulously fine-tuning the Mets’ personnel from the Major leagues to the Venezuelan League, all while trudging steadily on his office treadmill. He swigged coffee like a cop, and even on this humid morning, Sandy was pounding away on a paper cup full. He was the kind of coffee man who was willing to drink anything served out of a coffee pot, any color and any thickness.

“Well, I didn’t hear anything from you out of Savannah after the Augusta series, so I figured that’s what you thought,” Sandy said, swirling his cup and frowning down at it like he’d spotted a foreign object, mulling over the Sand Gnats’ right fielder to whom Jeff had given the cold shoulder after four innings. “He struggled with the knee all spring, for sure, and he’s still too much of a free swinger, but Jeff my boy, I’m hearing all kinds of chirps about him since we left camp. Lots of those little birdies think he’s outgrowing the Sally in a hurry.”

Even when it came to the development of 21-year old Felix Ascondo down in the South Atlantic League, there were a few things Sandy knew that Jeff did not. They were simple things he knew and things Jeff should have known too, but clearly did not. Sandy’s greatest flaw was trust, and he trusted Jeff, so as troubling as his scout’s seeming indifference was, Sandy was trying to cut him some slack. He gazed inquisitively at Jeff, who this morning looked thin, tired and hollow sitting there in a busted-down chair in the Mets’ spring training clubhouse.

Both the High-A St. Lucie Mets and the short-season Gulf Coast League Mets had nicely cushioned, air-conditioned offices and clubhouses at Tradition Field, but Sandy loved the humid, blue collar feel of the dim Extended Spring clubhouse, and always seemed to prefer to do his business in its murky confines when in Florida. SportsCenter was blaring through the surround-sound in the adjacent players lounge, where the guys unlucky enough to still be in camp while the season roared to life across the country were collecting themselves for another day of wishing they were at least in the minors. That was a bad thing to be rooting for this early in the spring.

One thing Sandy knew that Jeff didn’t was that Ascondo — who had been drafted at the age of 17 into the Houston system out of the Dominican by none other than Jeff Delaney himself — had proceeded to dismantle the Augusta GreenJackets for pretty much all but the four innings Jeff had bothered to watch in that Thursday-to-Sunday series.

While Ascondo still probably wasn’t the player Jeff had initially purported him to be when he had pushed for the Mets to unload a pitching prospect and acquire him from the Astros the previous spring, Sandy found it odd that Jeff wasn’t pushing for Ascondo now. Jeff was just sitting there, shrugging his shoulders at the mention of a touted prospect he’d brought to the club, yet not providing a shred of detail as to why.

Ascondo had made himself tough to ignore. The fleet-footed outfielder had gone 10-for-18 in the four-game set with Augusta. In that stretch, he had displayed almost everything the Mets were hoping to see. He stole six bases and swung at almost no bad pitches, and he’d managed to catch the eye of scouts from Baltimore and Texas in doing so. Unlike Jeff, those guys had gotten word back to their personnel directors about the rise of Ascondo — and about his dissatisfaction with the Mets.

Apparently, the Orioles and Rangers had scouts that were into baseball, in it for the full nine innings of it, unlike the Mets’ scout, who was currently fighting off sleep and having trouble remembering what day it was, and who also hadn’t done a lick of baseball-related work for almost four days now. Other teams’ scouts weren’t just out there watching one or two guys a night, either. They were watching everyone, thinking about where or how they might all fit into their own team’s beehive.

The one important thing Sandy didn’t know, however, and the thing that would have made this morning much different if he had known it was that the man sinking deeper and deeper into the chair across from his desk was wrong. Jeff’s frazzled look was troubling, as was his recent refusal to communicate, but it didn’t give Sandy reason to think Jeff was cashing out on him. He still thought Jeff knew better than the other guys, despite what he was hearing from every other direction.

Sandy’s unwavering trust was always veiled beneath his questioning but kind eyes, and in the case of Jeff, it was almost a fatherly trust. Sandy had admired Jeff’s insights and instincts long before he’d urged the Mets to hire him to monitor the corner infielders and outfielders throughout the southern and southwestern United States as a roving scout. Sandy wasn’t there last Thursday night in Albuquerque, didn’t know about Jeff’s otherworldly end to the week and therefore mistakenly assumed Jeff really was seeing something in Ascondo’s fine print that wasn’t working.

“Outgrow it? The guy gets hypnotized by the breaking ball he can’t hit, almost invites it while he stares at the fastball he
might
hit if he ever swung at one,” Jeff suddenly blurted out, aware at once he might be trying to sell damaged merchandise back to the shopkeeper at this point. After all, he was trying to play down one of his own guys just to defend the fact he’d pretty much blown off Savannah entirely.

Usually Jeff really scored points when he talked player progress with Sandy, who would start to nod and smile at the things he agreed with, and Jeff was just good at pushing the right buttons. He would start speaking the language Sandy wanted to hear, and Sandy would start hanging on his every word, sometimes chuckling to himself while poking his nose in and out of whatever coffee cup he was attached to at the moment.

Right now, Sandy didn’t have that look. Nothing like it. Now he had the look of a teenager whose plus-sized prom date has just arrived and has asked if her dress makes her look fat. Jeff thought he could just hit the switch and turn on his baseball authority, only this time nothing happened.

“Let’s say it like this, Jeff, dear sir. I want you to have a nice long look at Ascondo. Tonight. One more time. Just to be sure.”

For the first time since Jeff sat down in the chair across from his boss, Sandy had his complete attention. Jeff smartly ran through a few different versions of what he was going to say next before he said it. Sandy said he wanted Jeff to see Ascondo again. Tonight? Then, stupidly, he blurted his most recent thought.

“Tonight?”

“Yep. Tonight, but don’t worry. You’re in the right place for all the action. You don’t have to go to Savannah this time. I’m flying back to New York at 3 so I can watch our slow, 162-game death in person. A couple of your guys are in the mix right now, like I keep telling you. Ascondo is right in the middle of it. It’s pretty simple. You’re my corner man, Jeff, and I want you to put your brain around this one and be honest about it. If he really is shit then he’s gonna be a steal on the market for us at a time when we need some nice bait in the water. If he’s as good as what I’m hearing on the other end of my phone the last 10 days, he’s either gonna spend the season right here in the FSL or maybe even up in Binghamton. This injury on Thursday night was pretty much the ‘K’ in oh, fuck, Jeff my boy. And I just so happen to know that Texas would love a Felix Ascondo-Tanner Grace package to arrive in Arlington next week in return for Tyler Mack, and I don’t have to tell you that would be a hell of a nice little trick under the circumstances.”

Sandy was spelling it out, not that Jeff needed him to. In the back of his mind for basically the last 48 hours, even through the haunting image of a little girl and her dead mother and all the off-route, recalculating madness he’d seen and heard in New Mexico, he knew the Mets’ crisis affected him directly. In fact, it drove a stake right into any hope he had of a low key start to the season. His understanding of the development of a hitter and base-runner kept him employed, even at a time when he mostly tuned out as much of the work detail as possible.

“The bottom line is we had to call up Ascondo,” Sandy droned on, apparently thinking Jeff would feel insulted the transaction of moving the right fielder from Low-A Savannah to High-A St. Lucie had happened above and beyond his authority. He didn’t. “That asshole Martinez left here for Bingo today, so we’re gonna see if he can prop his fat ass up at first base and actually hit the ball in the Eastern League this time around. And
that
means we’re also going to see if Gibbie can live up to his hype with your beloved Zephyrs, so you’ll get to enjoy that. And Ainsley’s back at the top, for now. But it all starts with your buddy Felix, “El Gobernador.” If we go the trade route with him, so be it. Everyone will come right back down a peg — Martinez’ll be back here in a week, pissed off and hitting the shit out of the ball like usual. If Felix manages to stick around, he becomes even more valuable to us and we can still dump him before the deadline if we want to. I just need to know were we stand. You know the deal, Jeff — movin’ up or movin’ out.”

So they had called up Ascondo. Pretty bold, Jeff thought, immediately hating the scouts from the Rangers and Orioles on general principle for messing up his developing new routine. In truth, Jeff should have called and thanked them. Because of them, he would be given no choice but to concentrate on the most immediate concern of baseball again.

He thought back to the last moments of what he once considered peace and order, to the events he could actually remember from the previous Thursday night in Albuquerque. He had been in a rehabilitative state of mind that night, though he still hadn’t enjoyed the game, and he had apparently emailed some good stuff to Sandy before walking out of the stadium. Ainsley undoubtedly would flop with the Mets now that it counted, but Jeff felt like he was dead-on in his account of both Ainsley and Ricard. Dead-on. Ironic that when things were still normal a few nights before that, it was Ascondo that he’d managed to screw up.

“Anyway, I guess once we solve the Felix issue, we can send you on up the list, dear friend, up the long highway again,” Sandy said, now spinning his empty Styrofoam cup and watching little brown dots of coffee dot the old desktop. “If anything, this is like being forced to look at all the clothes in the closet again, maybe get rid of some, and this time do it without any of that sentimental bullshit that follows us out of spring training about this player or that player. We still want to see more of the Cintron kid out in Utah, so he’ll be a new buddy for you. If he becomes a new one for us, you know it’s probably going to mean your pal Riley will be heading out…”

Sandy went on, but Jeff stopped right there. It might have been juvenile, but Jeff had already pleaded with Sandy a couple of times over the winter for obvious personal reasons to get in the habit of calling Riley — the oft-injured Mets outfielder-turned-occasional-relief pitcher Teddie Riley, that was — by his first name, or any other name but his last name.