Class A

by Lucas Mann

  Ryan nods at Nick as he gets close and says, “Nick, Nick, Nick.”

  Nick leads off the game.

  He steps in to bat lefty. He is not naturally left-handed, but he hits from both sides and is better now from the left. When he was old enough, twelve or so, his father thought it was good to flip him into the opposite of the way he’d always been and make him hit that way. Nick swung looking into a mirror, his father standing just behind him, over and over, until swinging lefty wasn’t just a stiff copy but its own movement, one smoother and stronger than the original. He takes his time in the batter’s box. He runs his cleats over the dirt, tills it, claims it as his own. He places his back foot, his left, just inside the chalk line of the batter’s box and twists until he’s dug in. Then he lets his weight bob down on his back leg. He looks almost serene.

  We watch him wave his bat. He starts slowly, little loops made with hands and wrists that have been described on blogs and scouting sites as a trigger, a blast, a whip crack. The circles move faster and tighter as the pitcher steps back and begins to wind up. When the pitcher lifts his leg, Nick’s bottom half moves, a glide of his weight onto his back leg until he is coiled and there is nowhere for his body to go except forward, at the ball. We watch him as he unloads his body, sliding his right leg up until he is stretched broad and then launching, violent and smooth, a rotation of his hips followed by the sudden trigger or blast or whip crack of his wrists.

  Baseball, and this is why we nonparticipants here get to feel so participatory, is a game that allows ample time for reflection and appreciation. Each movement isn’t followed by a quick, dangerous response. The moment stands. The mover, the idol, holds his pose, and we can hold him in still life. Nick follows the ball into the sky, sees it hang for a moment at its apex and then come crashing down over the last row of seats in right field, out of sight because it’s out of the stadium. There is a surprisingly muffled popping sound as the ball hits the concrete of the edge of the parking lot that we can’t see. There is a minor explosion in the bleachers. Standing, clapping. Tim gives out some hugs.

  From the PA booth, Brad, who will assert confidently to anyone that Nick is a good kid, the right kind of kid, announces, “Home run number seven for Nick Franklin!”

  “Did you see that?” Derek says.

  “I saw it the whole way,” Ryan says. “I never lost sight of it.”

  Tim starts a Here we go, LumberKings, here we go chant.

  Nick rounds the bases slowly, looking down, not letting himself show a smile that would reveal him to be a giddy boy, one who just hit a ball maybe farther than he ever had, one who will text his father about it in all capital letters in the locker room and then pull out the marble notebook that he keeps with him always, making a notation of this exploit before sliding it back into his bag and walking to the showers. Tamargo, coaching third, is waiting with his hand up for a high five. They nod at each other, and Tamargo gives him a shove on the back, as if claiming his role in this moment. I feel my body rise and lean forward with the others as Nick walks back toward the dugout and toward us sitting above it. Hank Contreras meets him at the top of the dugout steps, whispers something in his ear. Hank is fast becoming like Nick’s older brother, but without the competition that strains familial bonds. Nick smiles finally. He turns away from all of our voices—Nick, Nick—and looks back at the path that his home run has just traveled, eyes pointed past everything.

  The Roadkill Crew doesn’t really exist anymore, but it feels as if it does, sitting next to Tim. The Roadkill Crew was the Baseball Family before they started aging and then dying, when they had the time and the energy to drive to away games, attaching themselves to the team. I have, quite happily, become a sort of story receptacle. It helps that the structure of the stadium is still in place, still exactly the same, so sentences can begin with, I was over there, right there, see where that guy in the red shirt is? Now, and during every game, Tim makes a second story line, spoken over the image of Nick, as though the two were related—this perfect boy in front of us and all the games that Tim and his friends drove to decades ago.

  Tim speaks to me in “we.” In fact, I have never met a man less concerned with the “I.” In his stories, he is always with somebody or many somebodies, often not named, just there. Every exploit is shared. Tim has never married. He lives in a one-bedroom house a few blocks from the stadium. He walks to games alone, then walks home alone. He makes venison chili in a big Crock-Pot, eats a little, saves the rest for days. He falls asleep in a single bed. These are things that I know but cannot picture.

  They drove twenty thousand miles in a summer, easy. And that’s not including the trips they made down to Arizona for spring training, never stopping through Missouri and then Kansas and then Oklahoma and then Texas and then New Mexico, speeding through the desert and watching the sun rise over the cacti that stood waving in warning or welcome. Tim has never ridden an airplane, has never seen a reason to. He has absorbed every mile that he has traveled away from Clinton, and then he has retraced them all. The Roadkill name isn’t just a joke. More than a few possums were sacrificed for their pilgrimages over the years, left dying with his tire treads in them, tokens of his travels until finally their corpses dissolved in the rain.

  Tim calls out to Nick when the half inning is over and he takes the field.

  “We love you, bud,” he says.

  There’s that “we.” And it’s a little different, I think, from the most common uses of the word when screamed by a sports fan. At most stadiums, in most bars, you hear We did it! Tim takes no credit. He doesn’t include himself in the perspective of the doers, wouldn’t presume to. His “we,” and, sitting next to him, his bare arm around my shoulders, I am included in it, claims only to love.

  Nick Franklin doesn’t turn around to Tim’s voice. He gets to where he needs to go and stops on the edge of the infield to adjust the brim of his hat. He’s not being rude; I don’t mean to suggest that. Imagine if he did stop and turn and wave. Imagine, good God, if he did what most people in most relationships do: Awww, I love you guys, too. How the stadium would freeze, all nine hundred people scattered about the front rows. He is not supposed to gush. He is not supposed to feel the way we feel. Sometimes I think he’s not supposed to feel at all, a strange demand for a teenage boy.

  Tim goes back to the stories, a jumble of them rolling in on top of one another, conflating time and place and character.

  Once, back when Springfield had a team, we showed up with maybe fifty or so Clinton folks. We organized a full-on caravan down I-74. We got to the stadium like a swarm of bees, and it was like there were more of us than there were Springfield fans. After we won, the Clinton players said, We couldn’t have done it without you, which was pretty nice to hear.

  Once, we got drunk with the umps before a game in South Bend. It was a generous strike zone that game.

  More than once, we had the boys over for barbecues when they looked lonely.

  We rode back alongside the bus after the championship in 1991. We honked the whole way. The players pressed their faces on the windows and smiled.

  It is easy to reduce Tim’s “we,” easy to poke fun at the very use of the word. I feel myself pushing away from it when not unavoidably in his proximity. Players see me in the stands next to Tim, ask me later if I’m a part of that ever-present cadre of rooters, and I feel myself distancing, avoiding the reality that when I’m in the clubhouse, surrounded by individuals consumed with competitive excellence, I long to see them all from Tim’s perspective again. I know how Tim seems to the players, and sometimes to me, and maybe sometimes to himself. He is a man who is attached to nothing—no job that means more than a paycheck, no family that wasn’t the family of his childhood, no voiced desire for wealth or accolades, for any fantasy. His craft, like his fraternity, is his appreciation of things.

  The arguments are common enough.

  Maybe religion was once the opiate of the masses, but now it’s sports.

&
nbsp; Every sad sack wants a chance to win.

  Those who cannot do root.

  But that can’t be it. You can’t reduce a lifetime of devotion to that—those born unremarkable living vicariously through those who are better, a stranger’s body serving as everybody else’s metaphor for the type of perfection they will never achieve.

  The most frighteningly poignant account of fandom I’ve ever read was A Fan’s Notes, a novel that was really memoir. But even that narrator, looking out from the depths of alcoholism, from the back room of an insane asylum, devalued his own infatuation.

  “It was very simple really,” he wrote. “Where I could not, with syntax, give shape to my fantasies, [his jock hero] Gifford could, with his superb timing, his great hands, his uncanny faking, give shape to his.”

  So the shortcomings of one man’s life and art are confirmed, sublimated, ultimately soothed, by the effortless beauty of the art of another’s body. Is that really Tim, then? Is that his brand of devotion? Right now, as Nick warms up in the field, flipping the ball up over his shoulder, flexing, spinning, is Tim thinking about the things he cannot do, the things that have made him freeze and never leave Clinton, the way his body is aging into a stranger’s, that hole in the plaster of his living room ceiling?

  Of course I’m thinking of my father now, and his voice, and all of those yellowed, overdramatic baseball books that he read to me, and the promises within them. I assumed and he hoped that he was reading a reflection of what I would become in protagonists like the Kid from Tomkinsville, the untainted Roy Tucker. The Kid is the attraction, made to be ogled, and that was what I should aspire to. The fans were written of as eager and malleable, nameless. The Kid, the great one, the lead, he looks up and sees them validated or deflated along with him, their own worth hanging on his lanky frame, a rabble that has to be there but not looked at head-on. I am rabble now. Everyone is rabble. And is Nick Franklin, in comparison, a born protagonist, or do I just need one, and he’s an easy fit?

  There have been seventy-three bests in this town. Since 1937, there has been a star in Clinton, the only sure thing. Even in the worst years, when the team was in last place, one boy out of twenty-five presented something a little more hopeful than those around him. The best hitter in 1991, the year of all the giddy stories, when the Roadkill Crew traveled to every game and watched the team win its last championship, was Ricky Ward. His career ended in AA in 1994. He’s the hitting coach on a rookie ball team in Oregon now and still part of Tim’s “we,” when Tim chooses to remember him.

  I don’t care about Ricky Ward when Tim describes him. A solid kid. A tough kid. Didn’t come from anything fancy, so everybody here could relate to him. Swung like he was pissed off at something. Great, fine, that doesn’t mean anything to me, no face to it, no surprises. And maybe in five years, certainly in twenty, nobody will care about Nick Franklin. So what does that say about Tim, about Betty, about Tammy, and all the lost or not-so-lost people whose lives revolve around each new season? They are the ones who look at somebody hard enough until a player becomes what they need him to be. They make the fantasy.

  For nearly a month, I vacated the batting cage during Nick’s personal practice time, adhering to an unspoken rule. There’s something about his eyes when he doesn’t want you there. Nothing cruel or aggressive, but worse, disinterested. Bored by you. You are slowing him down, standing there being boring.

  When I finally joined him, he didn’t look at me. He took a swing at the tee he’d set up, watched the ball push through the mesh at the back of the cage, watched it hit the cinder-block wall, watched the red laces fray and spin off it like a blood spurt. He leaned his weight on his bat, glanced finally in my direction but over me. He smiled.

  “So,” he said. “You came for a look.”

  It wasn’t a question. And he was right.

  He kept on hitting until his bucket was empty. He spoke to himself in whispers after each swing, a common habit of his, reanimating the words that his father had spoken to him throughout Nick’s whole, short lifetime. A staccato code.

  When he finished, he was happy with the day’s output. He felt like talking, and I was there. He told me that this place—the field and the town, too—was like high school, which was a good thing. High school was fun. And here it was like being in the hallways, leaning against a locker with your girlfriend, not really knowing the people around you, but knowing who was who, kind of, recognizing faces as they recognized you. It has always been this way. Nick Franklin has never not had something to do. If people wanted to look in at him, they could. But how could he be expected to look back?

  He went silent for a moment, and it was my cue to do the same. I wanted to ask him how somebody who made himself so sought after could want so much to be alone. But that would remind him that there was company, and he would turn off, giving one-word answers behind plastic smiles until I left and no longer felt special through proximity. I have, after all, watched his face during team batting practice, with his coaches in his ear, doing the jobs for which they have nearly a century of combined experience, pretending that they don’t notice how little this kid listens and how little that lack of listening affects his performance. He nods just to mark the beginning and the end of their voices, the point at which he can return to himself. Then they stand and watch him swing, listen to the sound of the ball on his bat. They make eyes at each other, each planning the story he will be telling soon, that of a skinny kid whom they helped make, just as I will tell people that we became fast friends, that sometimes I put my hand on his shoulder and sometimes he put his on mine. Nick is right. This is high school. And he is that girl that you love forever because she won’t remember your name.

  I was numb-assed and daydreaming about high-school embarrassments on my overturned bucket when Nick attacked. He left the cage, tossed his bat aside, saw me open and vulnerable. He sprang. He snaked his right arm around my shoulder blades and pushed into my chest with his left. He tipped me back, as if we were dancing and I were the woman. I felt the coarse lines of muscle that ran across his arms, so much of it in such a wiry frame, but probably not as much as I let myself feel. I looked up at him, saw no strain in his face, just a slight smile as he looked past me at the floor.

  He held me there.

  I heard my breathing, loud and labored compared with his.

  “What would you do,” he said, “if I felt like dropping you?”

  It wasn’t a taunting tone of voice, or angry in any way, just flat.

  “For real,” he said. “What would you do?”

  I would do nothing to him. I wouldn’t know where to begin.

  And I said it. “Nothing,” I said, and I heard my voice catch on the spit that had pooled in the back of my throat.

  “True,” he said.

  He hauled me up and then bounced away from me, hands in the air, bobbing from one foot to the other, simulating the roar of a crowd that would have cheered at such a mismatch.

  When he sat back down across from me, he actually looked at my face for a moment, into my eyes. I thought he might have been looking for a reaction, for anger. He is suspicious of all the people who watch him. People are fake sometimes, he has told me. People want something. People like to muddle and distract you—maybe it’s just their own weakness, maybe it’s on purpose. Like sabotage.

  This moment was a test that I was failing. Or maybe not. Maybe I was acing the test with my inaction, with how limp I felt, even though I knew my body was rigid with giddy fear. I would not push back. I would not say anything to upset Nick Franklin, the way nobody said things to upset him, and at least I wasn’t pretending to be somebody who could affect him the way he could affect me.

  He offered me fifteen more minutes of his concentrated time.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Bro,” he said, genuinely tender. “Don’t worry about it. I got you.”

  He sat up straight and still. I kept looking.

  Sociologists and psychologists wri
te often about the phenomenon of fandom, trying to define the specific makeup of sports fans.

  Sports fans are:

  “The emotionally committed consumers of sports events.”

  Or:

  “Enthusiastic devotees of some particular sports consumptive object.”

  Or, more specifically:

  “[Those who] know about techniques, guidelines and rules associated with the sport they follow; many are walking compendiums of the current status of particular players and teams. Wild applause, cheers, catcalls and groans seem reasonable manifestations of effective involvement.”

  So the motivation has been acknowledged as powerful and has been tied to commerce. The fan is, of course, the loyal customer, even if some of the wares are out of his price range. And fandom is spoken of as separate from spectatorship. A spectator is anyone who watches, and a fan is more. A spectator retains the dignity of detachment, while the fan is somehow dependent. The fan is participating, and noisily. The fan is searching, in someone else’s play, for so many things. Relaxation and also passion. Self-esteem and also companionship. Emotional release and emotional content. Every goal word that I have ever spoken doubtfully to a shrink distilled into watching.

  But to be here every day reveals peculiar and diverse subsets of devotion, beyond buzzwords. In Clinton, in all of minor-league baseball, every reward is less, so distinctions become more obvious. You are consuming what fewer people clamor to consume, consuming a product that often does not turn a profit. Yet there is still greater desire to be a part of something that shouldn’t be desirable. And there are enough spaces in sparse crowds to distinguish the look on one man’s face, enough intimacy to see the way individual fans react when a player is close enough to touch.

  Do they lean in slowly from the front row of the stands? Do they snatch at hands or jerseys? Are they unable to move at all?

  I look around here and I recognize the category of fan that I fall into, the way I was taught to by my father, not a man who hung out with other sports fans, a man who kept his obsessions quiet, a family trait. We, the overeducated and overindulged, are defensive fans. We are hyperaware of the absurdity of our devotion in every moment except those spent enthralled with the action. We find long, defensible, metaphorical reasons for the love we feel for strangers, the allegiance we feel to a uniform we’ll never wear. I see myself, watching the men who sit on the fringes of the Baseball Family, who come to every game, who betray care on their faces but who never yell or plead, who make quick jokes in disappointing moments that lay heavy over the stands before hopping up for another beer.