Class A

by Lucas Mann

  “Hi, Nicky,” she says.

  He smiles. “Hi, Joyce.”

  “That’s cool about Moran, huh?”

  “Huh? Oh yeah, cool.”

  They wait in silence for a while, and I can hear her red pen in his hand, scraping over a plethora of surfaces with nonchalance. I see Joyce bounce back and forth on the balls of her feet.

  “You might break the record,” she blurts out. “Dick Kenworthy’s home run record. Did you know?”

  She has her hands clasped in front of her chest, looking up at him.

  “I had no idea,” he says. “Oh, man. Joyce, you’ve got the best memory of anyone I’ve ever met.”

  They smile for a moment, and then he gets on the bus. Joyce and I walk to our cars to drive home. She puts her inventory back into her bag. She looks happy. The baseball that Nick Franklin signed will be placed prominently in a collection of 850 that sit in plastic cases along the walls of her house, each with a different name on it.

  She will drive home alone, singing the harmony to whatever is on the radio. It’s an hour and a half back to Clinton, along Highway 30, running her wipers even when it isn’t raining because the corn sweats at night and everything is fog. People have said for years, “Joyce, Joyce, it shouldn’t be one woman alone in that old car, in the middle of the night. What if you break down or get lost or drift too far?” I like the pride in her face whenever she waves her hand at these people and walks away. It’s the same as when some kid laughs at her baseball bag, the weight tugging at her torso. Or when she hears whispers about that kooky, gray-haired lady in the oversized T-shirt wasting her time yelling at every game.

  To blend in and make sense is not the point.

  “No one will ever be as fond of my pets as I have been,” Joline admitted in the conclusion to his manifesto a century ago. “And at no distant day they will be scattered among the bidders.”

  He held out hope that even as his own attachments with the signatures and letters faded, he would leave a legacy in how he curated them, how he kept what was important. Joyce doesn’t expect to leave Clinton anymore. I asked her once what will happen to her collection, all of it, the stories and letters and names. She has a nephew who loves the stadium, she told me, maybe it will go to him. And then maybe to somebody else. It should stay in Clinton. You never know if the team will always be in town. Things leave. And now, as big cities like Dayton snatch up A-ball teams, as Clinton shrinks, the LumberKings are the smallest market in all of full-season minor-league baseball. She says this with pride and also worry.

  Maybe her material will serve as a reminder of all that happened here, who played, who watched them.

  A few weeks later, I sit in the offices of the Clinton Labor Congress, which used to be its own building, a massive, arched temple, and is now a side room of the local Democratic Party offices, across from a cash-for-gold storefront and a Pizza Hut. The strike was broken in June 1980. By July, with the largest local in town gone, the labor congress couldn’t pay upkeep or property tax for their offices. So the collection of eighty-year-old bricks in the heart of downtown, used for the same purpose even longer than the stadium down the street, was sold to a private developer.

  A man named Bob is explaining to me that he’s one of the few who keeps coming. He is the secretary of the Labor Congress that Joyce’s father used to be a part of, like everyone else. There were thirty-five thousand people in this town and 119 local unions. Now there are twenty-six thousand and 4.

  “After the strike,” he says, “after we lost, people just stopped wanting to make noise for themselves, stopped wanting to hold on to our identity. So we shriveled.”

  I ask him if he remembers Joyce’s father. He shakes his head.

  “It’s hard to remember,” he says. “In this town, I think, it’s easy to forget.”

  Outside the window, the factory funnels smoke up into the low gray clouds, until it looks like the chimneys are creating the sky. Joyce, I know, is at the stadium, perched on the benches in left field, watching batting practice. She isn’t looking at the sky. Surrounded by her notebooks and her pens, her baseballs, she’s looking at the players limbering up, moving in their newly washed whites, gleaming like they always have.

  Next summer, when I travel to Venezuela to trace the lives of players before they showed up in Clinton, she is a lingering presence there, impossible to forget whenever I’m watching baseball. And in Venezuela, I’m always watching baseball in the shadow of a factory, so the connection is even stronger. Polar Beer, Latin America’s most popular brewing company, built a thirty-million-dollar sports performance center—a pasture of perfect fields directly adjacent to the enormous steel facility where the beer is made, all off a two-lane rural road. And Firestone tires, a longtime American presence in Venezuela, built a complex in the urban sprawl around Valencia, a few blocks away from where a major-league prospect will be kidnapped for ransom a week after I leave. Everybody congregates under the Firestone sign for games. Fathers scream, agents watch, boys compete.

  It starts pouring as I’m watching the most intense all-male softball game I’ve ever seen. It’s the kind of flash thunderstorm that can’t be played through, that turns the infield into mud even as the players flee for shelter. Everybody crams into the dugouts. The bleachers and concession stands aren’t covered, so fans, family, scouts, those just passing by, we all take refuge with the players. We all stare at the Firestone sign through the rain, listen to the sound of water off the impenetrable metal of the factory. Joyce would love to see this. Joyce would love to be among these people, baseball people all, not one rushing for his car, but waiting it out until the rain stops and the game finishes before morning. All the softball players once imagined they were going to be baseball prospects. Some of them were. Now, probably, none of them are, but they play biweekly and everybody watches.

  I don’t know how far Joyce would travel for baseball if she could. If she had the money, would she fly to the World Series, or would that be too much, too distant and overwhelming? She is still, after all, afraid of heights. What I do know, shivering, wet, is that when I get back to Iowa, I will drive to Joyce’s home and she will be exactly where she was the last time I saw her. She will ask me if I was scared all the way out there, alone. Yes. That’s what I’ll say. Her eyes will get big. She will be interested but not jealous, not fawning either over where I’ve been. It’s about carving out space. You can run off and try to push to do something wild, to set your exaggerated stories all over the world. But somebody has to stay and remember.

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

  How They Go

  WELINGTON DOTEL IS WAITING for me to get the pitching machine right. I’m turning the crank, adjusting angle and velocity, and he is waiting for me because he has to. Welington Dotel wants extra batting practice, and there is no reason for a coach to attend to him because he will not be hitting in the game tonight, nor has he for a week and a half. So when the starters clear out to shine cleats, pine tar bats, flex bodies, and when the coaches leave to groan into their office chairs, pull at their loose skin while they call their wives, I am the only one left.

  Months later, I will realize that my appeal was, is, rooted in my complete naïveté, the fact that I could ask him with a smiling, sincere face, “You excited to get back in the lineup?” And he could respond with charming cheer in his gentle rasp, “Oh yeah, I’ll be ready.” And there wouldn’t be any of that awkwardness born when people talk around what they know to be true. So he asks me to be his assistant, and I blush. I think of how I’ll describe the details of assistanthood to everyone else in the stands and the way he claps my back with his big, callused right hand, smiling as he dubs me Amigo, a title that I hold up to the legacy of Sancho Panza.

  He practices his swing now as I crank, humming to himself, barely audible over the industrial ceiling fans. I catch him looking toward the door to the clubhouse. I ask him if he wants to wait for someone else. He says no.

  Dotel has had to rush ever si
nce he became a professional baseball player. After all, he was signed at eighteen, quite late for a Dominican. A Venezuelan agent will tell me that the rule of thumb in Latin America is that if someone wasn’t signed at sixteen, you have to wonder what the problem was and if it persisted. And signed at sixteen means getting an agent at fourteen, being on his radar before your sophomore year of high school, or what you would have been had you not dropped out, which you probably had by then. Welington Dotel was too thin at sixteen, underdeveloped, not worth it. It was only later that he sprouted, six feet one inch, chiseled, with power on his résumé as well as the speed that had always been there, but an irreversible two years behind his friends.

  He is nearing twenty-five now, one of the few players older than I am on the team. He was signed in 2006 in his home state of Baoruco, when I was quitting college baseball with no consequences to the decision other than shame, when Nick Franklin was entering high school and his favorite subject was English and he liked to go waterskiing on the weekends.

  Welington looks like a man, more so than any of his teammates, which is odd to say, considering the six-foot-six relief pitchers and bruising power hitters with whom he shares a clubhouse. Their appeal, unlike his, is how unfinished they seem. They have “body projections,” as the same agent will describe them to me, worth gambling on. Body projections are what the experts get paid for. A giant already but hardly a beard on him—how much taller can he get? Rail skinny now, but look at those broad shoulders. How much muscle could be hung on that frame? In Latin America, agents and scouts meet parents to see how tall they are, study the hands of prospects, their feet, how wispy and unfinished their peach fuzz is. In the majors, you might see a finished product. Every other place is about making. And what can be added to Welington Dotel, at this point, to make him better?

  “Perfect,” he tells me as I feed a ball to the machine and it shoots into the rubber mat, belt high. He smiles, the smile that he has learned makes people like him, kind, confident, and nervous all at once. I watch his fingers wrap around the handle of his maple bat, choking up a little, swaying. Like Hank, he swings hard at every ball, with an almost dangerous amount of torque. Even standing behind a screen, I duck and blink every time he makes contact.

  “I won’t hurt you, my man,” he says, smiling as though it would actually be pretty cool if he did.

  As a boy, I was preached stillness at the plate because that’s how my father was taught, and the type A lawyers who always coach Little League in well-off neighborhoods, too. As though there were some strong display of mental focus in the ability to be stiff. It was the Latin players on TV who first wagged or spun their bats, who stomped their feet to what I assumed to be an internal rhythm while waiting for the ball. It created that sense of swagger that we were so quickly taught to associate with them—cocky, loose, raw. Natural, that was the best word. These exotic creatures, born with spring in their muscles, with a lust for physical competition, were natural ballplayers. That was the story I spun as an overmatched outsider on a predominantly Dominican travel team, the one I most loved to share with undersized white friends.

  “Dude, Francisco—that’s my coach’s name, Francisco—he told me I needed to have a little more Dominican in me.”

  “What?”

  “Like, be cool when I play, you know. Be calm, be confident, be slick.”

  “Badass.”

  And badass, too, were the stories about traveling to tournaments where suburban white coaches claimed that birth certificates needed to be checked because what seventeen-year-old is cut like that, while in the crowd local girls pretended to root for the home team but gripped the chain-link fence hard as they watched these questioned foreigners beat the shit out of their boyfriends and brothers. I watched, too.

  I never once felt in competition with the Dominican kids from neighborhoods I never saw beyond baseball diamonds, only the other white players. While we were all teammates, there were two distinct types of showcase happening. The fight by the marginally talented collection of Bretts and Andrews looking to show off baseball intangibles and well-tutored SAT scores to college coaches was nothing like the sexy, boom-or-bust talent that seemed to dance in the infield—so loose!—and had long ago promised their mothers that they would pull them out of a condition of living that I would never understand, and how could they not keep that promise with all their God-given skill?

  Welington Dotel plays with that smiling, easily stereotyped abandon, and thus everybody likes to smile back at him. The white players remembered him from spring training and seasons past and parroted him before he even arrived, adding a shrill, absurd quality to otherwise boring warm-ups.

  “Soda!” they screamed in overdone accents from the outfield, a reference to Dotel’s apparently boundless, childlike enthusiasm for sugary drinks.

  “Nice!” they shrieked when a player did something good in batting practice, Dotel’s favorite American phrase that, in their versions, became something like the throwaway line of an ethnic neighbor in a seventies sitcom.

  Dotel doesn’t seem to mind in the locker room when they do impressions of him, at him. He performs their impressions back at them, mostly, bringing his voice up an octave to match their parody, though lately there have been moments when he’s gone quiet, nodding into his bare chest when teammates address him.

  The machine spins an old, frayed ball out, and Dotel lifts his left leg high, shifts his wrists down, loading before he springs. It should, I know, as most casual observers would know, slow his swing down, all this movement, and make him late to the ball. But the bat whips quickly, and the barrel meets the ball with a satisfying crack. The ball is headed for my face, and I drop to the ground as it hits the metal skeleton of the screen and rolls back at Dotel. He picks it up and looks at it as though he hasn’t seen it before.

  “Nice,” he says.

  Matt, the mailman, the most critical of the season-ticket holders, who attributes his strict standards to his army training, has never once criticized Welington Dotel, and that is an accomplishment. Matt has, in fact, taken to calling him “Sir Welington” and doffing his cap whenever Dotel trots in from the outfield. Matt tells those of us who sit near him that it’s only men of Sir Welington’s character, one he sees as defined by hustle and relentless cheer, who make it to the Show. Matt screams the same message to Dotel’s teammates, though to them it is an unearned fatherly chiding: “Sir Welington is getting dirty like he wants to make it to the Show.”

  Matt has not read the articles, long hidden in Google holes now, about Dotel’s fifty-game suspension for his attempts to push his body projection. I wonder if Dotel knows that I know. He has to be suspicious, watching me watch him. I hope he doesn’t think I am digging, looking for needle tracks on the smooth, hard flesh of his ass when he exits the shower and pads naked across the locker room, the way my father used to look for tracks on my brother’s arm over the table at a Chinese restaurant, not to say “Aha,” just to quietly confirm suspicions that would never go away.

  At least Dotel’s pockmarks would be productive, making him more of the kind of man he wants to be. In late 2006, at twenty, he was suspended for testing positive for steroids, one of 249 minor leaguers who quietly lost a chunk of their almost careers while we fans watched the morality trials of the twenty-five major leaguers who were caught, calling talk radio programs to opine about the devolution of American values. I won’t even know about all these Dotel specifics until a year from now, reading L. John Wertheim and Tobias Moskowitz’s Why We Win: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports Are Played. Dotel never tells me that I’m not the first writer to come asking questions, that as he tries to explain to me all the things that make him special as a player and a man, a behavioral economist is asserting that “the true face of the steriod era? It might look a lot like the smiling mug of Welington Dotel.”

  But for now. Thunk, swish, crack, ping. There is a rhythm to us. I lose track of how many times we repeat the process, each of his swings send
ing hissing line drives back into the screen. He will not step out of the batter’s box, will not de-focus except for the fraction of a second after he catches one just right and turns to the door as if he heard someone come in, even though nobody has.

  We finish the balls.

  “Thank you,” he says to me. “Thank you. You are my man.”

  We scoop up the balls in handfuls and toss them in an old shopping cart, bend, toss, bend, toss, as if we’re harvesting something. He holds up his right hand to display four balls held, with relative ease, tucked in between his fingers, because he thinks I’ll like that. He’s right. I show that I can’t quite hold three with the sausage fingers that my father swears were the main thing that kept me from being great, blaming himself for the genetic sabotage. Dotel smiles at that. He holds his hand up, and I realize that it is an invitation to touch, to compare, and that brings a current of titillation, though I’m not sure exactly why. We press together, and he wins and smiles.

  It is that time when things really begin to change, the middle of the season. Since I’m new to this story, it is hard at first to recognize that no one is guaranteed to stay put. Nothing is permanent. The first guy who left got moved up—Dennis Raben, a slugging first baseman. Tamargo announced it in the clubhouse after a win, and I was the only one surprised.

  “Good game,” he barked. “Oh, and say good-bye to Raben.”

  All eyes turned to him, so huge, almost glowing with his farmer’s tan. He smiled, which meant the good kind of good-bye. I thought they might mob him; he was well liked, jovial. But something close to a reception line formed. His teammates were stiff, shy. His closest friends, Jones, Catricala, Brandon Bantz, gave him quick hugs, tousled his hair a little. Nick Franklin, who had taken to calling Raben “Dad,” put both hands on the larger, older man’s shoulders and looked uncomfortable. Raben told him he’d see him soon.