Class A

by Lucas Mann

  “They tell me he’s doing good,” his mother says. “I haven’t seen him in a long time, but they tell me he’s doing all the right things.”

  “He is,” a coach later confirms for me. “Good kid. Fast.”

  “Will he … will I see him in Iowa?”

  “Oh. No, probably not.”

  There are thirty-five players on the roster here, ten more than on any professional team in America. The Dominican Summer League Mariners also have thirty-five. There is no room on American teams for the vast majority of those players. There was never supposed to be.

  “He left school?” I ask the mother of the Curaçaon boy. “To come here?”

  “Oh yes,” she says. “And what boy doesn’t want to leave school?”

  She smiles, so I do, too. Her son comes up to bat and bunts the first pitch down the third-base line. His teammates scream, “Corre, corre, corre,” and the mother screams, “Run.” He does. He is, for three seconds, totally un-gawky, unquestionably a man, the power of those legs like the power of Erasmo’s arm, both the surprise and the reason. The umpire calls him safe.

  His mother jumps and cheers for him and waves a towel around as if a championship has been won.

  “They tell me he’s the best bunter,” she says. “He’s a major-league bunter.”

  The boy smiles on first, his smile hers. Erasmo’s parents never watched him play, not since fourteen, I know that. Maybe it helps.

  Erasmo is talking now, but I have stopped listening, gravitating instead toward the aged, post-church table, standing to shuffle to their cars. They agree that the burgers were good, as were the fries and the company. They agree to meet next Sunday, to do this again, and then maybe again, and indefinitely.

  Erasmo is saying, “Continue working,” I think, and I’m remembering my dead brother.

  It is a reach to feel long-stale grief while watching Erasmo roll up his empty burger wrappers until they are something to grip like a baseball. This is about him, not me, but my brother is dead, and the last thing he ever lied to me about was watching me play baseball.

  I do not tell Erasmo that my brother, nodding off on the phone, told me that he would come watch me. Told me that he still remembered the way our father looked at me playing, how it had been so long since he’d been looked at like that, how the field, a field, would be the place where a family that had never really existed before would exist again. Told me because, even as he slurred, he knew that it would be what I hoped for and could be convinced of.

  In most of what I remember of him, he’s talking about what he’s going to do. Always future tense, always believable until it was impossible. He spoke about me the same way, and that was believable, too, and it felt important, having my own greatness and meaning identified for me. He told such beautiful stories of what would be. How can anybody be so dedicated to something that it ceases to mean anything? Erasmo doesn’t elevate his quest to something huge, doesn’t seem to allow much time for wondering at himself. It’s about the need to become something, not the story of it. That’s what is working for him, and it brings on thoughts about my brother, about my father, about me. That maybe we who love to appreciate and mythologize what we might do never fail to disappoint.

  He does not want to talk to me anymore.

  “We go?” he says, a pretend question.

  We go. We pull up to the field where the whole LumberKings staff is out drying the mud. Ted is still running the John Deere back and forth over the home team’s bullpen, trying to turn brown water into packed dirt.

  “Do you want to call home?” I ask Erasmo, a desperate move to see if my questions, our relationship that I see existing and that maybe he doesn’t, have made him soften for a moment to think of things other than what is in front of him. He shrugs.

  In The Kid from Tomkinsville, the Kid takes the train. And even the Kid is older than Erasmo when he leaves home. He sees his grandmother with the dust around her ancient face as she watches him leave, and he leans out to watch her watch him, and I was safe and home, listening until the chapter ended, then mewling, “Read it again.”

  The Kid misses Grandma, and he writes to her by the streetlight seeping into hotel windows. Grandma has a lined face and white hair, and the Kid knows she makes strong tea for herself when she is worried about him, and just to know that is comforting. They own a farm and he misses it. There is a town to miss, a contented quietness. I had never seen a farm in real life then, had never felt contentedly quiet, but I wanted to.

  Now, before games, if the players won’t talk to me or if things are slow in the clubhouse, I drive on the gravel roads out into the farms, play Christian radio, smoke bummed cigarettes out the window, and try to pretend I’m somebody that I’m not. Joyce told me once that if you’re in an old enough car listening to old enough music and you drive far enough late enough in the season for the corn to become like blinders, you could be anywhere and it could be any time.

  I walk the stadium in slow circles, tired of watching Erasmo’s back-and-forth sprinting in the still-damp outfield. I find the wooden plaque with the names—from Clinton to the Show. I stand next to fathers and their sons as the fathers say things like “Do you see how possible this is?” I look for the first Spanish name in a collection of Duanes and Marvs and Eds and Billys. Angel Bravo, 1963, enshrined here and in the Venezuelan Baseball Hall of Fame on the second floor of that shopping mall in Valencia, and nowhere else. And after Angel Bravo there is Angel Mangual, Miguel Fuentes, Pedro Garcia, Carlos Velázquez, Leo Hernández, Germán Rivera, Alejandro Peña, and the beloved Candy Maldonado. And then more, into the 1980s, then the 1990s—Guerreros and Santanas and Escobars. Torres and Valdez and Rios and Volquez and López and Nieves and Chávez and Feliz.

  Erasmo, just Ramírez to most since his first name has been written off as unpronounceable, lives with Noriega, Martinez, and now Medina, fresh off a plane from Caracas to Miami to Chicago to Moline, picked up in a dirty sedan by a guy with his name misspelled on cardboard, doing a favor for the team. Jose Jiménez, a reliever, lives in the apartment upstairs with his wife, who cannot speak English and has no visa to work and spends a lot of time looking out the window of her fanless apartment at the streets of downtown Clinton wondering where all the people are.

  There are different ways to view the internationalization of baseball. The easiest, perhaps, is as metaphor. If baseball is America, its hard work, its organization, its productive and pastoral beauty, depending on how you feel like seeing it, then baseball players are the ultimate Americans. Now nearly 30 percent of baseball is Latino, and here comes a big leap into “What does American even mean anymore?” It is easy, though it brings with it difficulties, resentments like in a factory a century ago, hordes of brown men with their willingness to do anything, “totally raw” but “naturally athletic,” taking over the game and remaking it in their image.

  Then there is that paternal instinct, marveling at what these players can become but resenting every suggestion that they should not be grateful for what they’ve been given or at least enraptured by the beauty of this game we have exported. I have stopped asking pessimistic questions, and I even let them slip away in Venezuela, too, because the answers are cold and still hard to argue with.

  Isn’t it bad not to get an education? Education will give them nothing.

  Won’t it be hard to adjust to a new country and life on the fly? Rosetta Stone.

  What happens when they don’t make it? We made them richer than they were before. And they can always coach somebody.

  What about being young and frightened and alone, far away from anything that makes you comfortable? We’re making men here.

  Yes, these things are true. And yes, it is unfair to want Erasmo to feel more. I come to these games for meaning and metaphor, and he comes here for numbers, the right algorithm to move on.

  When the field dries and Erasmo finally stops sprinting and the game starts, a new guy is on the mound for the LumberKings. Tom Wilhelmsen is in
stantly adopted as a favorite, a twenty-six-year-old with the kind of story that runs for two and a half minutes during televised major league rain delays. He used to love weed, and he still loves Steely Dan, still wears a Fu Manchu mustache and has hungover eyes. He quit baseball when he lost his love for the game, and now he loves it again and he’s married, newly focused, and his father is so proud. He made mistakes and speaks about them in interviews with a tired humor born from lessons learned. We, all of us in the stands, see ourselves in him if ourselves were six feet six inches and could throw a ninety-four-mile-per-hour fastball after seven years away from the game working at a bar in Arizona. He is the gifted and redeemed man who we want to be. And he’s pitching a no-hitter.

  It’s a bit cringe-worthy to say that I am trying to figure out how to be a man. Maybe it is a lie. I don’t know what I want other than to not feel like me. When Betty tells me I can stay at her place tonight if I don’t want to drive home again, and Tim says I can stay with him, and Cindy, and Joyce, too, I freeze, not sure how to answer. I wonder if Betty would tuck me in. I want to be tucked in, and that hurts with how silly and small a desire it is. I don’t talk about me. I point to the field instead, whisper, “I think Tom has a no-hitter going.” So we all turn to him, what he might do, his total self-sufficiency on the mound.

  Tom Wilhelmsen gives up a single in the sixth, and we sigh. Tim says that the last no-hitter thrown here was by Domingo Valdez. Remember Domingo Valdez? Baby face, Tammy remembers. I watch Erasmo, on the front step of the dugout all game, leaning back, raising his eyebrows at the most explosive of Tom’s pitches. After seven innings, no runs, ten strikeouts, Tom tips his sweat-drenched cap to the crowd, we few who waited through the delay, and we call to him. The game ends in a win. Tom Wilhelmsen is 1-0, hasn’t given up a run. He’s off to a numerically exquisite start, as is Yoervis Medina, fresh from Agua Linda, who along with Tom and Erasmo forms a trio of talent that people think could take the LumberKings to the play-offs. But none of that matters to Erasmo. They are nice guys, just like he is a nice guy. They all wear the same jersey. But their numbers, even the wins that they earn for the same organization, are lined up in tense opposition on that master sheet he imagines.

  In a few days, Erasmo gets a new chance to improve his numbers, on the road in front of a drunk and rowdy crowd in Quad Cities. He is quiet before the game, not just with me, with everyone. He is expressionless on the mound as he warms up. And then he is magnificent. Over six innings, he throws decisively, takes the rubber, throws again, fast but calm, curveballs that snap, changeups that fool, fastballs that would look good in a major-league stadium. This is angry success. At the end of the fifth, he bounces off the mound, cocky, challenging the opponents, the crowd, his own teammates maybe. He smiles to himself before descending into the dugout, smiles at how good he can be, how good it is to be so good in front of so many.

  I’m in the little Clinton section of the crowd, watching former marines who had been screaming, “You ain’t a pitcher, midget,” at the beginning of the game become grudgingly electrified by what Erasmo is doing in front of them. Dominance, we are watching dominance, and maybe none of us knew how much we wanted to see that. I’m thinking about my brother again because that is the only real difficulty that has ever anchored my life, and when you have luxury like that, all you want to do is savor the difficulty, the hard weight of it. I think of that last conversation again, about him watching me or promising to, about him slurring that he had never won anything, that he had never been looked at as great, even though I always looked at him that way. He lived for recognition and never received it, and that is so common, and that is why baseball is such a resonant thing. It gives special men instant, prolonged recognition. I realize that Erasmo Ramírez is being watched by more people throwing his twelve strikeouts than ever watched my brother do anything or will ever watch me do anything.

  I watch him after the game, before he dresses quietly, gets on the bus, waits for his teammates, calls home to recite the numbers of his evening. Watch him before he becomes a boy again in his striped shirt, his jean shorts hanging below still-pudgy kneecaps. Watch him before he lies down in the cramped one-room apartment, keeps his mouth closed in case of bugs. Watch him before I hound him again, asking for meaning, getting one-word answers, before he hits the weights tomorrow, working too much, working without smiling. He is perfect right now. He is playing a game and winning, and he is being admired because he deserves to be. And that is a happy thing.

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

  The Winning Streak

  SOMETHING HAS HAPPENED.

  The LumberKings are good. Not just showing potential or getting there, but the bully of each new game, the better squad on the field. Other teams do not want to play them. I know because when the coaches are chatting in the bowels of the stadium before games, the opponents, guys Tamargo knows from somewhere and some time, say, “We don’t want any piece of you boys right now.”

  In the first week in August, the LumberKings win seven straight games, most of them beat downs, the kinds of high-scoring contests that make casual fans actually like baseball. Twelve runs from the home team, doubles that come in bunches, players hopping out of the dugout again and again to celebrate, Brad gleefully hoarse in the PA booth by the end of the night. What has changed?

  A lot of things have changed.

  For one, Cerione, Danny’s main competition in center field, is on a hot streak. And the team, as a whole, is better. In truth, it’s a stretch to think of this group as the same team. Say all you want about figuring out how to win together, but the figuring out has been a complete overhaul. The bullpen is brand-new, a stable of big, bullish prospects throwing ninety-five, easy. The core pitchers who have survived all season, Erasmo and some others, watch the newcomers warm up each day, smiling and then wincing. Wilhelmsen and Medina, with his gap-toothed smile and vicious sinking fastball, haven’t lost yet.

  There are so many new faces that I’ve stopped trying to introduce myself when players arrive to replace guys I’ll never see again. Slugging first basemen and balletic Venezuelan infielders and even more out-fielders who have shown up to fill the hole that Kalian Sams left when he was demoted and ensure that Danny doesn’t start every game. Betty and Tim and Tammy and Joyce are scrambling to keep up with the name changes, programs out, fingers pointing at players, then paper, then back again.

  But as August rolls on with heat and tumult, the way I see it, this is Hank’s story now. He has wrested control of the narrative or at least staked out a place in it. His name is known. When Betty gives him candy, it is no longer a grandmotherly gesture to keep him occupied through aimless innings, it’s a fan’s tribute: You deserve these strawberry suckers, you special, special boy.

  I am in the bleachers going crazy with adjectives.

  He is stooped. He is noble. He is weathered. He is squat and thick and strong. He is serious, always serious on the field, because there is a job to be done.

  He is stealing adjectives from pages in my memory, from The Kid from Tomkinsville.

  Old Dave, the catcher. Nobody’s dandy. The sturdy, brown-eyed figure behind the mask.

  Hank has been batting sixth, occasionally even fifth. He has benefited from being unknown. I’ve never seen him get a hit off anything other than a straight fastball, but that’s okay because there’s no scouting report to announce his secrets. He still swings at the first or second pitch, either puts the ball in play or fouls it off and gets up hacking again. They are formidable hacks. And he’s being treated like a formidable figure, addressed by teammates as an equal. He no longer has to bargain with the strength coach, fresh off a star playing career at a tiny college, promising that if he throws Hank batting practice, Hank will return the favor to keep the coach in playing shape. And he no longer has to suffer the ultimate indignity when the strength coach is busy, lowering his voice and asking me to pitch to him, trying not to get mad as I bounce timid lobs at his feet.

  As H
ank’s season is beginning, his teammates are exhausted and scowling.

  “I feel like shittiness is contagious,” Vinnie Catricala says over the card table in the locker room. “So, like, if we’re in this really shitty place for half a year, we’re bound to catch it.”

  As a very literal example, he describes an effort to move out into the community, hitting the local pool before practice. A kid shit himself, and Vinnie was forced to swim away from the turd like everyone else, the current of his flailing only pulling the loaf closer. He refused to go back, ever. Pool-shitting happens in everyone’s hometown, but here, in an August that feels drab and endless, the anecdote becomes unforgivable.

  “You know, it would be one thing if anyone gave a fuck,” another player chimes in. “Pack the fucking stadium one time. Watch me play. You don’t have anything else to do. We’re the main draw.”

  I wince and put a card down, look around to see if anyone is silently deriding my move. There are levels of acceptance that one strives for around a team, some proof of deserving to be attached to the core group and its unified purpose. Anyone who serves a function is accepted, and who doesn’t want to be functional? The Jimmy John’s sandwich delivery staff has, with their punctuality, earned universal acceptance and can walk into the locker room at any time, face a wall of unabashed, enormous, nude bodies, and be welcomed with thanks, even a tip. Dave can come in, look at the lineup card, ask politely for pregame interviews, wave his hand awkwardly in hello and good-bye, then retreat back into the world of the watchers. Any Mariners employee in town for a progress report is, of course, welcomed with a respect merging into fear. And there are two reverends who enter each Sunday, one with an approved English sermon, the other with the exact same sermon in Spanish. They’re trained volunteers with Baseball Chapel, serving an almost uniformly Christian population of players, so they are perhaps the most necessary of all. Indeed, many fans saw me popping in and out of the clubhouse early in the season and, before Betty set them straight, assumed I was some sort of junior minister. Why else would I occasionally wear collared shirts? Why else would I deserve a place in the sweaty, cement-walled inner sanctum? I never tried to explain my place inside, because it felt like all I did was show up, tolerate being stared at, stay so insignificant that nobody could find cause to kick me out. And I know that my only qualification to make me different from the longtime fans is living outside of Clinton—not a player, not a coach, just an alien allowed in for being unfamiliar.