The Cactus League

by Emily Nemens

  But the new team couldn’t get too comfortable with that 1-0 advantage. Change was upon them, not fast but disconcertingly steady. It was in the warming air and the drying up of the new lakes—these in turn sent the megafauna packing north and farther north, past the Rockies and the Pacific Coast League, steady north till Aloysius Snuffleupagus and his kind ambled right off the edge of the world. Suddenly, the prehistoric humans couldn’t find anybody to play them. Is that how Jason felt when he started plunking down $100,000 bets and the game went quiet? When he was the last one at the table, forty-eight mind-melting hours into a tournament? Poor Liana, her hair could’ve been on fire, and her husband wouldn’t have looked up from the draw.

  So he pulled a few hands of blackjack in the middle of the afternoon, what’s the harm in that? He and Carver didn’t have anything better to do. Sure, his competitive drive made him the best left fielder since Ted Williams, made him stick with Greg Carver on that run even when he was certain he was going to puke, made him the lead-by-example player the Lions needed in their clubhouse. But competitiveness isn’t something you can turn on and off like a light switch. Hell, it doesn’t even have a dimmer. And that same competitive drive that got him the Triple Crown in 2009 has taken him to the table more times than anyone can count. One source at the casino says he usually stays longer than they do, and they’re holding down nine-hour shifts.

  No one will go on the record yet, jittery as they are about their jobs, about staying in the good graces of one of the country’s most famous men. Did you know that one of Jason’s million-dollar nights could net a dealer a $100K tip? Fuck, I’d keep quiet, too. Folks I’ve spoken with can’t say exactly how high he’s gone (or how deep he’s sunk), but they all remember seven-figure outings—outings, plural—Jason winning some of them but losing more often than not. One of the gals in the count room told me that two nights after he and Carver came in for their afternoon dalliance, the casino cut off his credit—nothing left in the linked accounts, less than nothing, the kind of overdraw that could get them in trouble with the gambling commission. Goody was mad for all of a day, huffing and puffing at the count girls and cursing out their boss, but he came back the next night with a pocket full of thousand-dollar chips. It’s straight out of Dostoevsky, his doggedness.

  No one has ever even seen him in the casino’s sports book, and I can’t find any record of him in an online fantasy league or any college hoops bracket. That’s a relief. Things have changed since the time Mickey Mantle was suspended for “association with known gamblers”—A-Rod and his escorts, everything Jose Canseco ever did, the continuing tumble of Lenny Dykstra—but Rule 21, betting on baseball, will still lock you out of Cooperstown quick as a Stan Rogers fastball. In the commissioner’s head, it’s a slippery slope from gambling to cheating to self-destruction and the Black Sox, which will, in turn, lead to the all-out implosion of America’s pastime. Suddenly, that mum’s-the-word divorce is making a lot more sense. Liana might be mad as hell that Jason’s picked poker over her, but she still doesn’t want word of it getting back to league officials—that’d screw her alimony.

  For now, let’s stick with history and that ancient, adaptable team, because I know how that part goes: What do you do when the competition disappears? You find a new table; you play a new game. That ancient team, missing their mammoths, did the same: they sharpened their tools, aimed with better precision at new and smaller foes. The deer and rabbits proved to be worthy rivals, not much power but light on their feet, the kinds of guys you have to watch on the base path. It’s still a living, playing the small game. Look at Pete Rose, for chrissake. He became the Hit King, all out of bloops and sprints and so many singles. Though bringing up Rose anywhere near Goodyear and gambling makes me squirm. Charlie Hustle knows plenty about Rule 21.

  Look, I did it again. I’m trying to tell you about the ancient team, the men and women who would become the Hohokam, and I go off to left field. Okay, here’s history: A bunch of drafts and vets and trades and called-up Triple-As stand on a field and examine their new configuration. (Their wives and girlfriends, sitting in the stands, do the same.) They’ve been playing for years, but never with these teammates, never with these game calls and strategies. Eventually, with the day in and day out of it, with the mistakes and corrections, they find a new type of cohesion, a coming together that feels good enough to be true. It happens to the Lions every spring, and as much could be said of the Lions’ wives, that sisterhood forced and finessed until they become a unit, ready for the long season.

  The ancient dwellers banded into clusters of floodwater farmers, roving at first but then setting up more permanent camps. They built houses on poles, clapped adobe around the buildings’ sides like they were tarring their bats. Made pottery to hold their sunflower seeds and chew, etched seashells they brought home from the long road trips to Baja. Tied the shells on hide strings and hung them round their necks, tucked under their uniforms like a pitcher’s lucky charm. Did they know the same shells were buried right below their feet? That this used to be an ocean?

  Of course not. How could they? They were progressing just like the rest of us: one foot in front of the other. Or one pitch after another, in the case of the Lions. Or one party after another, in the case of the Lions’ wives.

  And they weren’t calling themselves the Hohokam yet; that came later. After all, do you know what Hohokam means? Those who have gone.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself again.

  THE OUTFIELD

  The baseball wives know you don’t want to be the first to show up in Scottsdale, but surely you don’t want to be the last to arrive at the party. And it is a party: luncheons and spa days, cocktails and color consultations, mornings at the furrier’s and afternoons with the jeweler. There is a great deal of time between the rare preseason moments when they have their husbands’ attention, their calls to duty. Those calls: To cheer him from the family section of the ballpark, loud enough that he might just look over. To get him steak on Sunday nights, to rub his feet on Wednesdays, to dangle—and deliver—a blowjob at the end of the week as reward for all his hard work. There are many ways to earn one’s keep.

  Spring is a sensitive time for the ballplayers, who are working out the kinks of their winters, proving themselves into pitching rotations or fighting to keep themselves in starting lineups, competing against younger knees, quicker bats, unmarried men. They need their support network, the rooting of their numero uno cheerleader. The baseball wives know to stay out from underfoot, to not complain when pitchers and catchers report to camp on Valentine’s Day (again), to not ask about where their husbands go until four in the morning on the nights before cut days, to not complain when they aren’t taken out to brunch even once in the month of March. It’s a sacrifice, what the wives do, uprooting their lives from the Southern California desert to the central Arizona one, leaving the kids with their mothers-in-law or the well-vetted help for a few days, a few weeks, a month or two. And in this sacrifice they need one another, and so they make their own support network of domestic partners to these improbable, impressive men. Now, their lives are improbable and impressive, too. Imagine, getting plucked out of a crowded bar or chosen through a professional sports matchmaking service, being picked up on the beach in Puerto Rico or selected from the Los Angeles Lakers’ Laker Girls lineup. Imagine, some handsome—or at least talented—man saying, Now, here, this is your new life. It is strange, indeed, and theirs is a necessary sorority.

  Those who don’t come to Arizona at all—not even for ten days, a few long weekends, maybe a three-day stint in February and another in March—those who can’t possibly manage to get over from L.A., who miss the whole damn party: highly suspect. Jane Rogers, for instance, the Lions’ ace’s wife, was absent last year, and her appearance this year is looking doubtful. The baseball wives can’t imagine it, how a woman could manage the six-month season without the preseason legwork. It’s like going to the beach without tanning beforehand. A bed, spray-on
, that bronzing cream. Something. Make some sort of effort. If you don’t, you’ll stick out like a sore thumb—and you’ll get burned, red as a lobster. The wives are already striking Jane from their Memorial Day and July Fourth barbecue lists, uninviting her fifteen-year-old daughter from the yet-to-be-planned pool parties. Melissa Moyers, who has been doing this the longest—her husband, Hal, has pitched in the majors for nineteen years, twelve of those with the Lions, and is, if not the best on the squad, then at least, and most definitely, the oldest—once put it well: Play nice or we’ll throw you out of the park.

  * * *

  The baseball wives know it’s best if you call ahead, tell the people who take care of things you are coming. Give them a week. They have services for this, not just for the baseball wives but for all the wealthy part-time residents of Scottsdale, Arizona. There are crews with Windex and Lysol and rubber gloves and an endless supply of garbage bags, because it doesn’t matter how clean the wives left things, their homes will be dirty. The autumn sandstorms, those funny-sounding haboobs, get grit everywhere, even under the lips of the rubber-sealed, triple-pane, energy-efficient windows. So over the phone the baseball wives explain where their hide-a-keys are (of course they have one—for the pool guy, for the maid, for the florist—hidden very discreetly, no one would ever guess to look under the potted Christmas cactus to the right of the door), tell them to let themselves in. No reason the year’s first impression of Arizona should be a dead mouse on the kitchen floor. No reason their husbands’ white-shirted elbows should get gunked up from resting on the kitchen counter, the counter covered in dust the exact same color as the imported stone. How was I supposed to see that? is not a good excuse. There is no acceptable excuse, in fact, for anything less than immaculate.

  The cleaners throw away the shriveled cacti the wives forgot to put on the back patio for the yard men; after several months without water, none at all, the plants look like a line of sad-old-man penises, spikes sunk in on themselves. The top companies will replace the cacti, returning them to bright green sheaths, erect and pointing and so similar-looking to the originals that no one—not the wives, not their oblivious husbands—knows a thing of their suffering.

  Someone will need to run the water, flush the toilets, start the cars—things husbands might do under other circumstances, but the baseball wives know not to ask, not in spring. There will be hiccups in these systems: coughing pipes, murky tanks, engines sputtering as they try to draw from hibernating batteries. Ideally, the advance crew can handle these jobs, too. More legs, less legwork, the wives like to say. Last year, feeling independent, Eliza Summers tried to jump her car herself and got second-degree burns on both palms. Better her than her husband, Melissa Moyers pointed out. He’s the best the Lions have in middle relief.

  * * *

  The baseball wives, even hapless Lisa Putney, know not to let their husbands manage real-estate acquisition; a ballplayer would pick a house with two bedrooms, half a kitchen, and an entertainment room the size of an elementary school auditorium. That would be the first place they’d furnish, too, chock-full of leather recliners, arranged in a semicircle around a TV screen the size of a California king bedsheet. Men, it seems, are happy to eat off paper plates while standing at the kitchen counter, don’t see the point of headboards, and think they’re doing well if their clothes are in folded piles. Some of these men would be fine to stay in hotels or short-term rentals, the way they did when they were just coming up, when they didn’t think anything was wrong with hotels or short-term rentals or being single. But the wives insist they must own; what would people think if they were the only ones still renting? And so they buy, $1 million homes, $5 million villas, Southwest estates in the low eight figures.

  A lesson to them all came at Jane Rogers’s expense: she let Stan pick out their Arizona place, and he bought a man cave with two and a half bathrooms attached. His was a quick trade from Pittsburgh, and the family was scrambling to set up two new homes and sell two others. I have my hands full with L.A., she’d rationalized when Melissa Moyers called to introduce herself and offer help, and Stan refuses to stay at a hotel unless he’s on the road. I told him to get whatever. Jane was overwhelmed by finding a year-round home, getting her kids, then six and thirteen, into the right schools during the awkward, midyear move. It’d be easier if I could just give someone a big envelope of unmarked bills, she’d said, her Nashville accent turning some words short, stretching others long. Ease-yer, on-vell-ope, bee-yalls. How peculiar, Melissa had thought but did not say. She had also thought: You can. Her kids had done fine, switching into L.A.’s top prep school the week after Hal was traded. Donation, that’s what they call the grease on the wheels. Charitable contribution.

  It’s not like they’d had roots in Pennsylvania, Jane had continued; they hated the place, nearly everything except for those neat Carnegie museums—her little boy loved the dinos. If it were up to her, they’d be back in Tennessee somewhere—she was from Franklin, she and Stan had been sweethearts at Vandy—but the closest major league teams were St. Louis and Cincinnati, and who wanted to live there? Melissa clucked in agreement but wondered how much longer this woman would ramble. Jane was lonely, Melissa impatient, and the difference in the two women’s frequencies set the line humming and popping.

  Later that first spring, Jane visited Arizona long enough to order the kids’ beds and a dining room set. She also acquiesced to an afternoon out with the wives: a strained lunch and then a game her husband started, Jane clapping politely after every single strike. Melissa treated Jane to the meal and cheered when Stan Rogers made his outs, even as she resented each one. The team has room for only one ace, and the Lions’ had been Hal, with his beguiling curve, his impossible stamina, his conveyor-belt consistency. What he lacked in speed, Hal Moyers made up for in wiles. (“The Trickster,” players called him in the dugout; “my trickster,” Melissa called him in bed.) Melissa knew the team would still play well behind her husband, but there’s a special oomph the team makes for the number one in the rotation. Because every team wants a guy with twenty wins and an ERA under three. Jane was unconscious of the conflict, all the way through air kisses at the airport. Then, not even a thank-you note. Save for a couple of home-game starts, Melissa has hardly seen her since.

  The rest of the baseball wives, those who took more care with their real-estate acquisitions, they love their Arizona houses. Melissa Moyers has twenty thousand square feet. Lisa Putney sprang for the Italianate countertops in the kitchen but also in each of her five bathrooms. For some, if they’re being honest, Scottsdale is their first-choice residence. Sure, there’s the cache of Malibu, the glint of Hollywood celebrity, but they prefer the clear desert sky to the gritty sunsets of Los Angeles. In L.A., they have to compete with basketball and hockey wives, the Dodgers and the Angels, Hollywood execs and Japanese tourists just to make a reservation for dinner. The pro-Arizona subset comes to visit for a week or two in October, maybe the month of November. Just for the change of pace. If there are no kids or if the kids are away (in Melissa’s case, one’s already in college, a fact she doesn’t like to admit because it makes her feel o-l-d; the other two are so programmed in their extracurriculars she’s lucky to get two meals with them all week), the trip’s an easy midweek jet or a leisurely drive through the desert. Sure, Phoenix is sprawling, but compared with L.A., Scottsdale is a dense nugget of goodness. The wives are perched close to the edge of civilization—five minutes from the south entrance to the preserve—but downtown Scottsdale (everything from the dry cleaner to the gym to Terrazzo, the poolside dance club that is good enough, now that they’re married and just flirting) is fifteen via their preferred livery. They love their Arizona cars, champagne-colored Lexus SUVs and shiny black Bimmers, but there’s no reason to look for parking downtown, to risk driving drunk (Melissa got caught once, in 2005, eighteen months’ probation, and it was a cautionary tale to them all), when their sometimes drivers are a text message away. They can even pick their prefer
ence: Lincoln Town Cars, Cadillac Escalades, stretch Hummers. Their usual Friday night driver, Anton, a chatty transplant from Venezuela, said the service had had a traditional limousine, but they’d put it out to pasture—sold it to a funeral home in Mesa—because no one ever asked for it.

  * * *

  For another subset of women, Scottsdale is their only residence, the second home they got in the divorce. And here is a tricky thing for baseball wives: ex–baseball wives. They are still baseball wives, having endured minor league ball and the onerous winters with husbands underfoot like overgrown teenagers. The exes are still friends to the current baseball wives, having listened to their gripes, having griped themselves. Together, these women have bought vibrators to keep them company when their husbands were on the road and sexy lingerie to entice their husbands upon return. These women know too much not to be friends. And the baseball wives—as much as they’d like to deny it—have some niggling, just a teensy hint of fear, that at any point, they, too, could become ex–baseball wives. Melissa almost lost Hal once, during their last season in Boston, to a kinesthesiology intern from Harvard; she caught him fooling around again, a few springs ago, with some sun-stroked harpy named Tamara. More than one of the current wives have broken up perfectly healthy marriages, severing a ballplayer’s ties to his high school sweetheart or the patient woman who slogged through the farm system. That bitch, the baseball wives mutter when a cleat chaser usurps a friend’s position. It’s the circle of life, the baseball wives explain when a woman they like more replaces one they like less. This uncertainty, the either-way of it—the baseball wives know it also means, It could happen to me.

  * * *

  Liana Goodyear, the former wife of Jason Goodyear, is a perfect example of this treacherous territory—not of the cheating and stealing, but of the problem associated with the divorce. Jason, handsome enough to contend for Sexiest Man in America, clean-cut enough to be, rumor had it, in development talks with Disney, had two American League MVP awards and nary a smear on his rap sheet when he plucked this elementary school teacher out of thin air. Whirlwind courtship, a family-only wedding in an undisclosed location. And just like that, one of the country’s most eligible bachelors was off the market. Liana quit working and did her best at all the baseball wife duties: attending games, keeping house, befriending the other baseball wives.