The Might-Have-Been

by Joe Schuster

  Beyond the poor condition of the field, there were also no dugouts—only two long, weathered wooden benches running beside the first and third base lines, separated from the field by rusting chain-link fencing. Behind the bench on the home team side, a ramshackle concession stand sat against a stone retaining wall holding back the hill that rose behind it.

  “There is an upside,” Vincent said from the top of the steps. When Edward Everett turned around, Vincent pointed to the hill beyond right field and the edge of the fairgrounds visible above the rise. “We get a honey of a seat for the fireworks show the last weekend of August. Come on and I’ll show you the clubhouse. Or I should say ‘clubhouse.’ ” He wiggled his fingers, drawing quotation marks in the air.

  The “clubhouse” was what had once been the boys’ locker room. “The visitors get the girls’,” Vincent said, smirking, opening the door, showing Edward Everett what was little more than a dank concrete cave with two facing lines of steel lockers; ductwork and copper plumbing crisscrossed the ceiling. Martinez and Mraz were already there, the first of his players to arrive, neither in uniform, their equipment bags unopened on the floor.

  “This is a big fucking joke,” Martinez said when Edward Everett came in.

  “My high school was eighty times better than this POS,” Mraz said, kicking at a locker, which popped open, a sheaf of papers spilling across the cement floor. “What fucking dipshit organization did I get traded to?”

  “This is home,” Edward Everett said, trying to conceal his rage at Collier. Whatever his feelings toward him, it would not help his players if he fed their disgust. “Pitching rubber is still sixty feet six inches from home; bases are still ninety feet apart.” At least he hoped that was true. He realized he had no office here. In the back, in a small alcove just before the shower room, sat a small desk stacked with cardboard boxes, soccer goal netting and metal basketball hoops. He began collecting the junk from the desktop and putting it into one of the cartons.

  “What if we refuse to play?” Mraz said.

  “Then we forfeit,” Edward Everett said.

  “Shit,” Mraz said, kicking at another locker, popping another door open, this one filled with football pads, which clattered out.

  “It’s not the best, but it’s what we have for the rest of the year,” Edward Everett said, putting the last armload of junk from the desk into the cardboard box. He sat at the desk, unsnapping the elastic binding from around the accordion folder with his scorebooks and game logs.

  “Maybe we could call Webber,” Mraz said. “He’s got a couple mill. Maybe he could buy us a new park.”

  “He’s probably sitting on his ass on a beach,” Martinez said, “drinking mai tais and hitting on supermodels.”

  “He’s the only one of us who got any brains,” Mraz said.

  “Who is?” Tanner said, coming in with Sandford. He groaned. “What the fuck?”

  “Webber is,” Mraz said.

  “He’s the only one of us who ain’t going to play again,” Sandford said.

  “Jesus, Sand, bring everyone down,” Mraz said.

  By game time, the crowd was pathetic. In fact, Edward Everett thought, to call it a crowd was inaccurate. He did not know whether Collier—who did not show up—put a sign at the ballpark or how the pitifully small number of people had found their way to St. Aloysius, but there were fewer than a hundred scattered throughout the bleachers. Edward Everett was curious whether Nelson would appear and realized he was worried both that Nelson would show up and that he would not. Whenever anyone ventured down the steps, he glanced at them, wondering if it was Nelson; it never was.

  Just before first pitch, as Edward Everett exchanged his lineup card with the umpires and the Quad Cities manager, the plate umpire poked a chaw of tobacco between his cheek and gum and asked, “What crime did ya’ll commit to end up here?”

  “Must’ve been a major felony,” Edward Everett said, grimacing, not wanting them to think this was his doing—he didn’t flood the ballpark, he didn’t choose this place.

  The Quad Cities manager spat into the dirt at Edward Everett’s feet. “It’s fucked-up.” He was maybe thirty, still in playing shape. “I don’t know if this field is regulation.”

  “Relax, Pete,” the field umpire said. “We measured it; we talked to the league. It may look like shit but it’s by the book.” He scanned the diamond. “Barely.”

  One day, years ago, Edward Everett had calculated how many professional games he’d been part of. At the time, he was sitting in a bar, five or six beers deep into a reunion with Danny Matthias, his onetime roommate at double-A. Matthias by then was ten years out of baseball after hanging on for eight seasons in the majors as a second- and third-string catcher and sometime first baseman; he was “into real estate,” he said, but that meant he had invested in apartment complexes and then moved into commercial space, owning more buildings than he could count. As a player, he’d been squat, but by the time he and Edward Everett met for drinks when Matthias came to Lansing, where Edward Everett was that season, he had let himself go to fat, and he reclined more than sat in the chair across the table from Edward Everett. “You know what,” he said at one point, his eyes little more than slits because of the alcohol, “I miss it.” He asked Edward Everett how many games he’d seen from the inside and Edward Everett had asked their waitress for a pen and then made calculations on an unfolded napkin. The figure came to four thousand six hundred and something. Both he and Matthias sat back in awe of the staggering number, the more than ten thousand hours those games would have consumed. “Wow!” Matthias exclaimed. “You are one lucky son of a bitch.”

  Edward Everett had never repeated the exercise but as he sat on the sagging bench behind first base at the decaying high school field, the thought struck him that he had most likely climbed near to six thousand games by now, maybe fifteen thousand hours of watching men pitch a roughly three-inch-diameter ball, spinning, dipping, tailing, to other men, who were trying to hit the hell out of it. When he was younger, the thought struck him often, “Someone is paying me to be here, playing ball,” and regularly something occurred that took his breath away: a teammate digging his spikes into a padded outfield wall, willing to sacrifice everything to catch what otherwise would have been a home run; a teammate getting the sweet spot of the bat on a ninety-five-mile-an-hour fastball and launching it into the upper deck.

  By now, the capacity for the game to surprise him had diminished. But on that ordinary Monday night in late June in a dying town in the middle of Iowa, with roughly ten dozen people on hand, Sandford surprised Edward Everett, as if the pitcher had decided that he was going to remind them all that it wasn’t the park or the ambience or the size of the crowd that mattered, but what happened between the foul lines—specifically, what happened in the narrow, sixty-and-a-half-foot corridor that ran between the mound and home plate. For two and a half hours, it was enough that Edward Everett forgot that his career was tenuous, that his wife had left him, that one of his crazy former players had gone missing.

  From Sandford’s first pitch, Edward Everett could tell that he was on. It was a fastball with movement on it, slicing the barest edge of the outside of the plate. The umpire missed it, called it “ball one,” but Edward Everett didn’t complain: there was no point in grousing about one pitch. The umpire did not miss the next, another snake-in-the-water fastball, this one on the inside edge, knee-high: strike one. The third pitch—a curve with a wicked, twelve-o’clock-to-six break—the hitter topped back to Sandford, who tossed it to Turner at first for the out. Four pitches later, the inning was over: another ground ball, this one to Rausch at second, and a foul pop fly to the third baseman.

  Perabo City scored in their half of the first, three runs, two of them coming on a fly ball by Mraz that the Quad Cities right fielder misjudged and then, when he realized he could not catch it, waited back on it for the hop, which never came. Instead, the ball settled into the thick mown grass, cradled gently as an egg. He plu
cked it out of the straw and threw home, but too late to catch Tanner, sliding across ahead of the tag. The dust rose in a cloud, drifting across the left field bench and bleachers.

  When the inning ended, the Quad Cities manager complained to the umpire about the condition of the outfield, but there was nothing in the rules that said the mown grass had to be raked away.

  In the second, Sandford struck out the first hitter on three pitches, the third strike on a curve that seemed to start out head-high and then broke down over the plate as if the ball had just remembered it was subject to gravity. The next two hitters went down on one pitch each, a pop foul that Vila caught and a gentle liner to Rojas at short.

  That was when Edward Everett realized that Sandford was doing something special that night; on the mound he seemed oblivious to everything except the ball and where Vila wanted him to throw it. The third, fourth and fifth innings echoed the first two, Sandford pitching what seemed effortlessly, the Quad Cities hitters compliant—four more strikeouts, nothing hard hit.

  Edward Everett began watching the sixth inning standing behind the fencing in front of the Perabo City bench, his fingers laced through the links, and then, without realizing it, he drifted down the line until he was behind the backstop, from over the umpire’s left shoulder watching Sandford work. Sandford seemed in a trance, not in a game at all, but present in the nano-second of each individual moment flowing into the nano-second of the next: his eyes registering Vila’s signals, Sandford’s windup and pitch, his movement fluid, his face blank and inscrutable. It was only when the plate umpire turned and saw Edward Everett, yelling, “Hey, get the fuck out from behind there,” that he realized where he was and went back to sit on the bench. By the top of the ninth, with Perabo City up by five–nothing, Quad Cities still had not had a base runner—no hits, no walks, no Perabo City errors. In five thousand however-many-hundred games that Edward Everett had seen from the field, from the bench, from the coach’s box at first base or third, he had never seen a perfect game, twenty-seven men up, twenty-seven men down. He wondered if Sandford realized what he was doing, but on the mound, as he threw his last warm-up pitch and then stepped aside so Vila could throw the ball to second base to start the pre-inning around-the-horn, his face still seemed blank, a man without a conscious mind. The first hitter for Quad Cities took strike one, and then as Sandford released the second pitch, the hitter shortened up, tried to punch a bunt trickling toward third base. A few fans in the bleachers booed; Sandford stumbled slightly going after the ball, recovered, took it up in his bare hand and threw to first, nailing the runner by two steps. One out. Edward Everett glanced at the crowd—no, it wasn’t a crowd, a few score of die-hard baseball fans who had come out for the game and not the radio-controlled car races between innings, nor the Owl mascot, whom Collier had also not sent, nor the college girls in hot pants and belly shirts (also not there). As Sandford stood on the backside of the mound, rubbing the baseball between his two large palms, they were all intent, leaning forward. One held his iPhone in front of his face, shooting video; another had a camera. The Perabo City players not on the field were all standing behind the fence separating them from the field, their fingers laced through the chain links, still and expectant.

  The second hitter went to two balls and two strikes—had Sandford even allowed as many as two balls to any hitter that night until then? Edward Everett would have to check Vincent’s pitching chart but he couldn’t remember anyone—and then hit a hard line drive to center field. Edward Everett groaned but Mraz had picked it up as soon as the ball came off the bat and dashed into deep center, catching the ball over his left shoulder like the tight end he’d been in high school would have caught a pass.

  Then it was over. The third hitter swung at the first pitch and popped it up to the infield. Rausch came in, windmilling his arms to call off the other fielders, yelling, “I got it. I got it. It’s mine.” He squeezed his glove around the ball an instant too soon, clearly wanting badly the perfect game, for Sandford and for all of them. The ball bounced out of his glove and banged against his chest. For a moment it seemed as if it would fall, the hitter reaching base on an error, the perfect game not perfect after all, but he hugged it against himself, clapping his glove over his heart like someone about to pledge allegiance, and Edward Everett thought, There it is, the final out, but then Rausch didn’t have control over it after all, and it slipped out of his glove, bounced off his knee and hit the dirt, trickling away. Rausch stood there, stunned, while the Quad Cities runner kept going, hitting the bag at first and making his turn toward second.

  “Pick it up, pick it up,” someone was shouting, but still Rausch stared at the ball, until finally Rojas knocked him aside, scooped it up and flung it toward second base, where, miraculously, Mraz was standing, come in all the way from center field for some reason (Because he was dashing in to celebrate the perfect game? Because he had the baseball sense to realize that no one was covering the base?), and he took the throw, and put down the tag, getting the runner on the ankle as he slid into the base. The field umpire hesitated and then threw up his right thumb, out, the game over and won, Sandford’s twelfth against three losses, no longer a perfect game, but a no-hitter. A no-hitter was a marvelous thing, but a perfect game—that would have been a miracle, and there was no miracle tonight.

  In the locker room, his team was sour. They showered and changed in silence as if they had suffered a heartbreaking loss, not won the game. Rausch sat in front of his locker, his head hanging, as his teammates avoided him—not, Edward Everett knew, out of anger, but because they weren’t certain how to console him. Finally, Sandford sat beside him, draped one of his long arms around Rausch’s shoulders and spoke quietly to him, Rausch shaking his head slowly, but when Sandford got up, Rausch stood, finally, and went to take his shower, then changed and left hurriedly. As for Sandford, he stayed under the water a long while, although it was cold by then and the shower room stank of mildew, until everyone else save Edward Everett was gone.

  Edward Everett waited until Sandford had finished changing and then said, “You were incredible tonight.”

  “I really, really wanted it, you know, there at the end,” Sandford said, zipping his equipment bag. “I told Rauschy it was okay but I lied. I’m trying real hard not to let it matter but I just keep seeing the ball drop out of his glove.”

  “You’re an amazing pitcher,” Edward Everett said. “But here’s the thing, you can only control what you can control.” He shuffled through the game log cards until he found Sandford’s and pointed at the line for the game. Eighty-nine pitches, sixty-four of them for strikes, a good balance of fastballs, curves and changeups, seven strikeouts, only five fly balls to the outfield. “You cannot do any better than this,” he said. “It’s a team game, but all you need to focus on is what you do.”

  Sandford nodded but Edward Everett could tell he wasn’t convinced. He was only twenty-one, just a few months past being able to buy beer legally, and again Edward Everett thought, He’s still a boy. “You’ll pitch a long time and eventually you’ll figure out that when one game is over, it’s over, and all that matters is, what did you learn out there that will make you a better pitcher the next time you take the mound?”

  Sandford nodded again but Edward Everett knew he was only trying to end the conversation, be able to go home, and so he said, “Have a good night.”

  When Sandford left, Edward Everett was alone in the locker room. From the shower room, water dripped and something pinged in the pipes. It really was a terrible place, he thought, the concrete pockmarked, graffiti scrawled on some of the lockers, no place for a professional baseball team. Someone with Sandford’s gift deserved better; Collier’s easy answer for their home for the rest of the season—a solution that Edward Everett knew rose out of his desire to spend as little of his money as possible on the team, just so his silly wife could buy more drapes, more dresses from Macy’s—it was an insult to all of them but especially to someone as rare as San
dford.

  He looked again at Sandford’s game log card, the row of numbers that Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, believed in so fiercely. As he studied it, he could see Sandford on the mound, the man who for more than two hours lived and breathed in an alternate universe from everyone else there, who could only watch him from the outside and get a glimpse of a world that transcended the rusted fence, the cracked home plate—but only a glimpse. Yet when Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, looked at the numbers after Edward Everett uploaded them, they’d be merely elements in an equation, digits on a screen.

  His cellphone startled him, Elton John’s “Your Song,” his ring tone for Renee.

  “The most amazing thing happened,” he started to say, but she interrupted him.

  “I know you’re probably not fond of me right now,” she said, “but I need to ask you for a favor.”

  “Sure,” he said, thinking she was going to say, Will you water my plants? My car is going in the shop tomorrow, can you pick me up and give me a ride to work? Thinking, here was the chink in her resistance, the pastries maybe having done the trick, although they sat, the box still full, on his kitchen counter.

  But she said, “Please leave my parents alone.”

  “I don’t—” he began.

  “Whatever you think of me, my parents are upset enough already—my dad especially. Please don’t try to use them to make me change my mind.”

  “I wasn’t doing that,” he said.

  She sighed. “Those pastries?”

  “I was just doing something nice for your folks,” he said.

  “Please,” she said. “We may not be together now but we were together long enough that I know a little about how your mind works.”