The Might Have Been (2 page)

“You Yates?” asked the equipment man distributing towels. “That’s you.” He pointed at the back corner to a locker nearly blocked by a stack of cases of Coke. A white home jersey hung there, his name sewn across the yoke in all capitals; number 66. Edward Everett felt suddenly dizzy and sat down hard on a bench in the middle of the room to keep from passing out.

“A fainter,” the equipment man said, laughing. “You’re not the first.”

Dressed, he rushed down the tunnel to the dugout but hesitated at the entrance. Beyond, the stadium blazed with color—the patriotic bunting draped against the blue outfield walls, the green of the artificial turf, the red and white shirts of the fans rustling in their seats. On the field, the Cardinals worked through their pre-inning warm-ups, outfielders throwing high arcing balls that spun against a nearly cloudless sky, infielders taking ground balls.

“No tourists,” snapped a player on the bench, someone Edward Everett recognized as a relief pitcher, a squat man tightening an ace bandage around his left knee. Edward Everett was going to say he belonged, but the pitcher laughed. “Hey, Skip,” he called. “New blood.”

The manager glanced briefly at him and mumbled something he couldn’t make out but which he took to mean that it wasn’t the time for formal introductions to a rookie.

Not certain of the etiquette, Edward Everett sat at the edge of the bench beside the water cooler and bat rack, trying to form his face into a mask that didn’t reveal his absolute awe at finally being here, his sense that someone was, at any moment, going to tell him it was all an elaborate joke; but once the game began, he might as
well have been invisible. Time after time, not paying attention, the other players—
my teammates
, he thought—tromped on his spikes as they fetched a bat for their turns at the plate. Once, getting something to drink, one of them, distracted by another player whistling and pointing to a blond woman leaning over the railing of the box seats to peer into the dugout, fell over Edward Everett’s feet, landing half in his lap. “Mother fuck,” the player snapped, “watch out,” as if Edward Everett had been the one tripping and falling and not sitting as he was on the bench, squeezed into the corner, trying to take up as little room as possible, his feet trod upon, players not paying attention when they tossed aside their paper drink cups, flinging them at his shoulder, his lap and once his face instead of the trash can.

The game, as some did, became contagiously static, neither team hitting much at all, through three innings, four, five, easy ground balls, shallow flies, players on the bench seeming to sag as the innings passed, eight, nine, ten, fans growing bored, the crowd shrinking, inning by inning, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, fans pushing their way out of the ballpark for their barbecues, family dinners, horseshoes and backyard sparklers. In the top of the seventeenth, however, the Pirates threatened to score, putting two runners on with only one out. The next hitter stroked a line drive to deep left field, where Lou Brock was playing. He dashed across the turf and, just as the drive seemed destined to fall in, leaped for it, his body parallel to the earth, snagging the ball in the webbing of the glove, and then slammed to the hard ground, bouncing slightly but holding on. So quickly that Edward Everett didn’t see him get up, he was on his feet and throwing a strike to the second baseman standing on the bag, doubling off the runner who’d left too soon.

When Brock reached the dugout, his teammates clapped him on the shoulder but he was hurt—his slide on the turf had ripped his uniform pants at the left knee, raising a strawberry that oozed blood, and he limped to the bench, grimacing.

“You, Whosis,” the manager said, pointing to Edward Everett. “You’re hitting for Lou. Get out on deck.”

He didn’t move at first, unsure the manager meant him, but the player beside him elbowed him. “I wanna get home before my boy starts shaving. And he just turned one.”

Edward Everett realized he’d left his bats in Omaha and searched the rack for one to hit with. He found one engraved “Dan Vandiveer,” a catcher Edward Everett had played with at Grand Rapids five years earlier and who’d spent ten days with the Cardinals the previous season, someone who was out of baseball already, thirty-four and doing God only knew what. When he stepped onto the field, the heat assaulted him. In the shade of the dugout, he hadn’t realized how warm the day was, but in the open, under the late afternoon sun on a cloudless day, the temperature attacked him with a force that made him gasp. That evening, watching the news in his hotel room, he saw that it had been 99 degrees during the day; by the time he went to the plate, it was still near 90, but the radiant effect of the Astroturf and the concrete beneath it must have added another twenty degrees.

The stadium came into his consciousness slowly: bending to pick up the weighted donut for his bat, he became aware of the washed-out green of the turf; on television, it appeared a seamless piece but, bending there, he noticed the warp and woof of the thick fabric. He saw, too, the scaling white paint that described the on-deck circle and noticed his red cleats, which, although they had been freshly polished when the equipment man had given them to him, were scuffed and gouged from being stepped on.

He had no time to warm up. As soon as he dropped the donut onto his bat, Ron Fairly, leading off, laced a drive just inside the first base line, a ball that skipped to the right field wall, Fairly on with a leadoff double, the potential winning run in scoring position.

Edward Everett walked to the plate, suddenly aware of an incredible amount of activity around him. In the stands, the fans began a rhythmic clapping, some stomping on the concrete decking, a thunderous sound that it seemed could bring down the stadium around them. In the third row behind first base, a small girl wearing a too-large red T-shirt snatched a handful of cotton candy off a stick her mother held. A row behind her, a fat man in a gray suit and
blue-and-silver striped tie yelled through a popcorn megaphone, “Let’s go, Birds!”

The stadium announcer said, “Now batting for Lou Brock, Ed-dee Yates,” although no one had called him Eddie since the second grade. He could feel the crowd’s enthusiasm sag as their clapping and stomping quieted. It was not the reception he expected but if he were among them, expecting an All-Star and getting instead a player he’d never heard of, he would have been disappointed as well. A sudden vision came to him: his redemption in their eyes. Not a home run—that was something for the movies—but his slicing a base hit into an outfield gap to score Fairly, the fans jubilant, his new teammates leaping up the steps from the dugout onto the field, surrounding him at first base after Fairly was in with the win.

Edward Everett stepped into the batter’s box, trying to shut it all out, his imagined heroics, the movement of the crowd like a field of red and white grain stirred by the wind, the noise that was starting to build again, the organ playing a cadence,
bum bum bum bum bum bum
, Fairly at second base, taking a cautious lead, one, two, three steps.

Down the third base line, the coach was going through the signals, swiping his shirt, tugging the brim of his cap, tapping his thigh. Edward Everett realized no one had taught him what the signals meant.

“Time,” he said, stepping out of the batter’s box when the umpire gave him the time-out and trotting down the line to meet the coach halfway.

“What you need?” the coach said, standing close to him. His breath smelled of cigarettes and something else that was sour.

“Signals,” Edward Everett said. “I don’t know what you want. No one—”

The coach laughed. “You’re the only guy in the fucking area code who don’t know. Pop quiz. Runner on second, none out, bottom of the seventeenth, no score. What would you do?”

“Bunt,” Edward Everett said, deflated. “Bunt.”

He went back to the plate, trying not to show his disappointment.
True enough, even the Pirates knew what he was going to do. The entire infield edged closer, the first baseman and third baseman playing well in front of the bases, the second baseman edging toward first, the shortstop playing behind Fairly to hold him close. For a moment, Edward Everett thought about changing them all up, swinging away, lining a hit to right field, the crowd erupting in joy. But he knew he wouldn’t do that; he would sacrifice.

At the plate, he took his stance and looked out at the pitcher, who was rubbing the ball between his palms. He was a rookie himself, younger than Edward Everett, maybe only twenty, a stocky, round-faced kid who seemed more like a fast-food fry cook than a professional athlete. The thought pushed into Edward Everett’s head: five or six years ago, the pitcher might have been in junior high. Edward Everett saw him as a boy in a white oxford shirt and blue slacks, sitting in a … but he shoved the thought aside. The past meant nothing. There was only this moment: the pitcher nodding to the catcher’s signal, holding his stretch for a scant second, as Edward Everett slid his right hand along the barrel of the bat, noticing and then dismissing a rough spot in the wood, cradling the bat partway over the plate.

The pitch came in on the outside corner, and Edward Everett caught it with the meat of the bat, dropping a slow ground ball that trickled toward first base.
Stay fair
, he thought, dashing down the baseline for the bag, wanting to make it more than a sacrifice, thinking, if this were grass instead of artificial turf, it would die in the grass and he could beat it out, but this was not grass but turf. He willed himself to go faster, leaping for the base, urging his body to take off, hearing the
ssszzz
of the first baseman’s throw from behind him, hearing the slap of the ball into leather at perhaps the instant his foot met the bag, just a touch off-stride, making him stumble slightly as he took his turn into foul ground, thinking he was on with a single, but the umpire was throwing his right fist into the air, and grunting, “Out.”

Edward Everett waited for the coach to argue but he just clapped his hands and shouted, “Good sac, good sac.” And indeed, Fairly stood on third. Edward Everett had done his job.

He jogged off the field. In the stands, fans gave him polite applause before resuming their roaring and stomping as the announcer introduced the next hitter.

Then it was over. With the infielders drawn in for a play at home on a ground ball, the hitter punched a flare over the second baseman’s head that fell just at the edge of the outfield grass, and Fairly was in, the game won.

Later, in the hotel room the team had rented for him across the street from the stadium, Edward Everett stood in the dark, looking eight stories below at the ballpark. The game had been over for hours by then, and the infield was covered by a blue tarp that glinted under the stadium lights. In the bleachers, workers moved through the aisles, bending to pick up trash. From some blocks away, where the city was staging a fireworks show on the riverfront, Edward Everett could hear the muted explosions celebrating the holiday. Every once in a while, a red or blue trail streaked across the sky within his field of vision. He stood there until the finale lit the sky in brilliant yellows, oranges and greens, and as the last flares faded, as the lights went out in Busch Stadium below him and all he could make out was the great dark gaping bowl of it, he thought about calling someone.

His mother would be at his aunt’s house for the barbecue she had every year. If he called there to tell her about what he’d done, she would pass the telephone around, to uncles, aunts, cousins, and he would have to repeat his story over and over for everyone. His mother would say,
Oh, if only your father were still alive to see this
, and then she’d cry and he didn’t want that, not tonight, not when he’d finally made it this far, the beginning of what he knew would be his years in the major leagues. He thought of the girl he had been seeing in Springfield, Julie, but whom he had stopped calling for no reason he could think of, just made a decision one day when he got back from a road trip that he didn’t want to see her again. For the first time since then, he regretted it, because she was someone he could call to tell, but now he couldn’t.

Stepping away from the window, he caught his dim mirrored image in it, and he actually seemed to be outside, hovering in an incomplete,
ghostlike room. There was the reflection of a bedside lamp, a slash of the bed, the table where he’d laid his suitcase. He pressed his face against the window again. Below, knots of people leaving the fireworks show moved up the street toward their cars and, he knew, eventually home. He felt suddenly the fact of his being a stranger in a city of two million people where he knew no one.

He turned from the window and switched on the television, flipping channels until he found a sportscast. The announcer was talking about the game and Edward Everett sat on the edge of the king-sized bed, wondering if he’d be mentioned.

The account of the final inning showed Brock’s catch and throw for the double play, twice—once at full speed, and once in slow motion. Then it cut to Fairly’s double to start the home half of the inning, but then it jumped ahead, and Fairly was taking his lead off third.

“Then with one out,” the sportscaster said, “and Fairly on third, Hernandez singles over the drawn-in infield and the Cards get the win.”

It was, Edward Everett thought, like a baseball miracle—there is Fairly on second and then abruptly on third, through no human agency.
Poof
. In a way, he might never have even been there. Indeed, he knew what his line would be in the box score the next day, all zeros—no at-bats, no hits, no runs, no RBI, just “Yates PH 0000”—a miracle of nothing.

Still, he thought, he was here. There was a uniform in a locker across the street with his name on it and only six hundred men out of how many tens of millions of men in America could say that. Tomorrow was another game and the day after another still. He would have his chance and he would do something with it.

T
he end of Edward Everett’s season came with such abruptness that, even years later, it could nearly take away his breath to think about it: in the latter part of July, three weeks after he was called up. The Cardinals were in Montreal for a three-game weekend series and on Saturday, he came to the park and found he was in the starting lineup. It surprised him: since his sacrifice bunt on Independence Day, he had ridden the bench—game after game in St. Louis, then Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia—suppressing a dread that his single plate appearance would be the sum of his major league career. Perry would heal and Edward Everett would go back to Springfield to resume a sad march toward thirty, when even he would have to realize that his faith had been pointless, that he had crossed the line between hope and delusion, and would have no choice but to return to the World.