Rooting for Rafael Rosales

by Kurtis Scaletta

  Maya felt her shoulders tense up, the way they did whenever she saw someone treated unfairly. She willed somebody to notice her sister. At last a player did. He smiled, signed Grace’s baseball, and handed it back. Grace shouted something, probably a flustered thank-you, as the player sprinted off to the outfield. Maya smiled for the first time since she’d gotten to the ballpark. She liked this guy, who had picked her sister out of the crowd.

  Grace threaded her way through the crowd and walked along the bleachers to join her.

  “What happened to Mom?” she asked.

  “She’s still at the gift store.”

  “Like she’s going to buy anything.”

  “I know.” Mom was frugal and didn’t like baseball. She must have gotten bored waiting for the game to start. It was a long wait. Grace had begged to go early because it was the best time to get autographs. She hadn’t expected that there would already be a crowd around the dugout.

  “So, who signed your ball?” Maya asked.

  “A guy named Rafael.” Grace squinted at the signature. “Rafael Ronaldo?”

  “Rosales,” a voice behind them corrected.

  The girls glanced back and saw a man with a spiral-bound notebook on his knee.

  “Rosales is the only Rafael on the team,” he explained. “He’s a non-roster invitee. He was considered one of their hottest prospects, but now he’ll be lucky to survive spring training.”

  “How come?” Maya asked.

  “His BA is zero sixty-eight. As in zero point zero six eight.”

  Maya didn’t know much about baseball, but she knew zeroes at the front of a batting average weren’t good.

  “So maybe he’ll get a bunch of hits today,” said Grace.

  “Probably not a bunch,” the guy said, “since he’s not in the lineup.”

  “Of course not,” said Grace. “Are you a Twins fan or a Phillies fan?”

  “Neither,” he said. “I’m a writer. Have you heard of Sticks and Stitches? It’s a baseball blog.”

  “Yes,” said Grace. “You’re Danny Diamond?”

  “That’s the name they gave me!” he said. “Well, the name I gave myself, obviously. It’s my nom de plume. My real name is Danny Rhombus!” He laughed hard at his own joke, then explained. “You see a rhombus is like a…”

  “We know,” said Grace. She turned back around.

  “Kind of a creep,” Maya whispered.

  “I never liked his blog,” said Grace.

  ***

  Rosales came in as a pinch hitter late in the game. Maya and Grace stood up and cheered at the top of their lungs as he came to the plate.

  “Go, Rafael!” Maya shouted.

  “Wallop the ball!” yelled Grace.

  Mom didn’t know who he was, but she stood because the girls stood, and cheered because they cheered.

  “You can do it!”

  Rafael glanced back at them. He was young and had a mustache and goatee that looked like he’d drawn them on to look older. Grace held up the ball so he’d remember her. He turned back, dug in, and waited for the first pitch. Maya’s heart was beating a little faster than it usually did. She had an urge to look away because she was so worried about this one at bat. So this is what it’s like to care about sports, she thought.

  Rosales swung and lined the ball past the pitcher’s outstretched hand. The shortstop fielded it on the bounce but not in time to throw to first. Rafael sped safely past the base. There was scattered applause around the park.

  “Woo-hoo!” Grace shouted.

  “Way to go!” Mom yelled.

  “Now steal a base!” Maya yelled, surprised at herself.

  “It would be stupid to steal second,” said the blogger behind them. “They’re down by six runs, and there’s nobody out.”

  “Steal it anyway!” shouted Grace. Several people around them laughed. Rafael took a lead off base. The pitcher threw to first; Rafael scampered back in time while the crowd jeered.

  “Pitch the ball!”

  “Home plate is that way!”

  Maya felt a thrill. The other team’s pitcher was worried.

  The pitcher hurled a fastball toward the plate. Rafael took off for second.

  The crowd screamed.

  That’s not the crowd, Maya realized. That’s me.

  The catcher heaved the ball to second as Rafael tried to slide. The second baseman tagged him on the foot, and the umpire signaled he was out. The crowd groaned.

  “That’s a CS—for completely stupid,” Danny Rhombus announced to nobody as he entered it on his scorecard.

  Rafael picked himself up and slinked into the dugout, his uniform now smudged with dirt. Nobody at the dugout door greeted him, told him it was a good effort, or slapped him on the back. Maya didn’t care about the out, but it broke her heart that nobody was there to comfort him.

  She decided he was her favorite player.

  Dad was still at work, hunched over the laptop on the glass coffee table in the living-room half of the suite.

  “Did you even have lunch?” Mom asked.

  “I grabbed a sub from the place next door.” Dad gestured at a sandwich wrapper and paper cup. “How was the game?”

  “It was great,” said Grace. “Even Maya like it.”

  “I did have fun,” she admitted. But now her worries came swirling back into her head. Especially the bees. Vast numbers of bees were dying, and nobody was sure why.

  “We were so close to the players!” said Grace. “I could have spit on Joe Mauer! Not that I would, but that’s how close he was!”

  “That’s awesome,” he said. “Wish I could have gone.”

  But you could have gone, Maya thought. She knew what his work-related emergency was, or at least she had a pretty good idea what it was.

  He must have seen her frowning.

  “Are you OK, honey?” He reached out and lightly touched the corner of her mouth with his thumb, as if he was going to push it up into a smile.

  “Just tired from sitting in the sun,” said Maya.

  “You do look a little worn out,” Dad agreed.

  “Dad, what’s going on at work?” Grace asked.

  “Oh, I don’t want to bore you with the details,” he said.

  “Is Alceria in financial trouble?” she asked in a grave tone. “You can level with us.”

  “No, no, of course not. Don’t worry about us,” he said. “We’re a very stable company. And don’t worry about my job either. Everything is fine. The crisis will be over by the time you get home. I promise.” He made a show of shutting the laptop. “Look, I’m done for now.”

  “Great,” said Grace. She eyed the laptop. “Can I have screen time?”

  “Sure.” Dad pushed the laptop at her. “I’m going to take a dip in the pool before dinner. Do something vacationy on my vacation.” He patted Maya’s head on his way to the bedroom.

  Maya wandered out to the balcony and watched a couple of kids do cannonballs in the kidney-shaped pool. She thought about a fox she’d seen last winter, limping across their snowy front yard one cold morning. When she and Grace had gone to catch their buses, Maya had paused to look at the tracks.

  “Are you going to track down the fox and keep it as a pet?” Grace had asked.

  “No!” Maya had insisted, although she had been imagining exactly that: following the tracks, discovering the fox curled up underneath the porch of an abandoned house, and carrying it home cradled in her arms. It had seemed so cold and hungry. What was it doing in the middle of the city? Where was its pack? Why was it awake in the middle of winter?

  She’d told her father about the fox when he got home from work. They looked up foxes together on the Internet and discovered that foxes were common in the city, even if she’d never seen one before. They found out foxes didn’t hibernate when they had plenty of food and didn’t mind the cold. They learned that most foxes were solitary and didn’t travel in packs like she’d thought. So the fox was fine. Maya was relieved, but a not-very-sm
all part of her was sorry the fox didn’t need her.

  Baseball players didn’t need her either. They were big, strong men with lots of money.

  Dad finally trod out to the pool in his trunks and slid into the water. The kids stopped horsing around. Maya went back into the hotel room.

  “Hey, let’s look up Rafael Rosales on the Internet,” she suggested to Grace, who was still on the couch and tapping away on the laptop keyboard.

  “Really?” Grace looked up. “You want to look up a baseball player?”

  “Sure.” She sat down next to Grace, and her sister shifted the computer so Maya could see the screen.

  “First baseball crush?” she asked.

  “It’s not a crush.”

  “Of course not,” said Grace. She entered Rafael’s name in the search bar and scanned the results. “I doubt Rafael is also an Argentinian blues guitarist,” she said. “Or a graphic arts professor in Rhode Island.” She added baseball to the search terms. “Aha. Here’s a website called DRProspects.com with a whole half-page on our Rafael. That’s DR as in Dominican Republic. Lots of baseball players come from there.”

  “Oh yeah,” said Maya, as if she’d known that. She remembered the Dominican Republic from school, one of many island countries in the Caribbean. Two thirds of an island, she corrected herself; the other third was the nation of Haiti.

  “It says he’s from San Pedro de Ma-cor-ís,” Grace sounded out the name. “Listen to this. ‘Rosales emerged as one of the top position players in the Dominican Summer League—that’s rookie ball—batting .340 and stealing sixteen bases. He is expected to reach A or advanced A next year.’”

  “What does that mean?” Maya asked.

  “I keep forgetting you don’t know anything,” Grace teased. “When baseball players get drafted, they have to work their way up through the minors. First they play rookie ball, then there’s single A, advanced A, double A, and triple A. Every level has its own leagues and its own teams. And every level is a lot harder.” She shut the laptop, moved it aside, and put her bare feet on the coffee table.

  “Where do the Twins’ teams play?”

  “All over,” said Grace. “Triple A is in New York State, Double A is in Tennessee. Their advanced-A team plays here. They’re called the Fort Myers Miracle. Can I have one of those pillows?”

  “Sure.” Maya handed one to Grace, who set it under her feet.

  “Aaah,” she said, mimicking their dad perfectly even though she wasn’t trying to.

  Maya sat sideways on the couch, feet up next to Grace’s. She still had a lot of questions.

  “So how come Rafael gets to play with the Twins now?” she asked.

  “Because it’s spring training,” said Grace. Her eyes were closed, her head tilted back against the couch. “You don’t have to be on the official forty-man roster to play at spring training. Teams can see how their prospects do against major league pitching, or invite old-timers to see if they’re washed up or not.”

  “I get it,” said Maya. That Danny guy had said Rafael was a “non-roster invitee.” Now she knew that meant he wasn’t really a Twin. At least not yet.

  “So what will happen to him?”

  “I don’t know,” said Grace. “He could get cut completely or go back to rookie ball in the DR.”

  “If he starts playing really well, could he skip all that and play in Minnesota this summer?”

  “That’s not going to happen,” said Grace. “He has to develop as a player.”

  “Next year?”

  “Don’t count on it.”

  “What if he never plays for the Twins?” Maya asked.

  “He might not,” said Grace. “Most minor leaguers never make it to the big leagues.”

  “Oh,” said Maya. She wished she’d known that before she let herself care about his success. She felt hopeless about so many things already.

  The next morning, Maya’s family went to the beach in the rental car. They got there early enough to park close to the boardwalk. It was lined with tacky gift shops and restaurants advertising all-you-can-eat Gulf shrimp. They trod in their flip-flops across the cool, white sand while seagulls squawked and circled around the surf.

  Mom and Dad hid under an umbrella, Mom reading and Dad tapping on his smartphone. Grace attempted to use a boogie board. Maya walked along the surf, letting the waves wash over her feet. Back in Minneapolis, she often felt doomed, seeing the smoke billowing over the skyline and the snowbanks turned gray by exhaust. Here, the water was blue and the beach was littered with shells. Maybe the world would be all right. So much of it was still achingly beautiful. She retreated to the blanket and sat next to her parents, pouring a handful of shells she’d collected from hand to hand. Dad had dozed off.

  “Those are pretty,” said Mom, looking up from her book to admire the shells. Maya decided she had an opening.

  “I was wondering if there are many shellfish left after that oil spill,” she said. She knew that a few years ago five million gallons of crude oil had gurgled up from the seafloor, taking their toll on marine life. Her mother sighed wearily as if Maya had been going on and on about the oil spill for days.

  “We’re having a nice day,” she said. “Don’t spoil it.”

  “I wasn’t trying to spoil anything,” said Maya. “I’m having a nice time.” She smiled extra wide to show it was true.

  Her mother’s voice softened. “I’m glad you care about the world, sweetie. I love that about you. But you have to start filtering or you’ll be worried sick all the time.”

  Maya decided she couldn’t tell her mom what was really on her mind.

  ***

  That night, when the lights were out, she told Grace. They were sharing the foldout bed in the living-room part of the hotel suite.

  “Alceria is killing bees,” she whispered.

  “Huh?”

  The metal frame of the foldout bed creaked when Maya rolled sideways to look at Grace.

  “Alceria make insecticides for crops called neonicotinoids.” She had labored over the word, memorizing it in syllables and practicing how to say it. She knew adults and older siblings would jump on a mispronounced word to dismiss a kid’s entire argument. “They don’t kill bees right away, but the poison affects their central nervous system and they get lost and then they die. When enough bees die, the whole colony collapses.” Maya went on, now blurting out details in a nonlinear way. If the bees died, fresh fruit and flowers couldn’t get pollinated. If that happened, people would starve. And even if it didn’t happen, the bees were part of the ecosystem. A keystone species, they were called. Because without them, the entire system collapsed.

  “Where did you learn all this?” Grace asked.

  “TV.”

  “One of those nature documentaries? They always say the sky is falling.”

  “No, it was 60 Minutes. I was flipping through the channels last week and saw it.” That wasn’t true. She’d known it was going to be on and tuned in on purpose.

  Grace said nothing.

  “So, Dad’s a part of it,” Maya added. “He’s part of Alceria.”

  “Dad sits in an office all day. How is he killing bees?”

  “He helps Alceria, and Alceria kills bees.”

  “Well, I’m sure he’s against it,” said Grace. “It’s not like he gets to decide what the whole company does.”

  “No, of course not.” But Maya wasn’t sure. Dad had smoked out a hornet’s nest once, and they were almost the same thing as bees. She continued. “I think that’s his crisis at work,” she said. “This show aired a few days ago, and now Dad’s trying to make the data tell a different story, even if it’s not the true story.”

  “Dad is not a liar,” said Grace.

  “I didn’t say he was,” said Maya.

  “Actually, you did.” Grace rolled over, turning her back to Maya. Maya waited for Grace to calm down, to turn back around and talk some more, but a few moments later she was asleep.

  Maya woke be
fore dawn. Grace had kicked around and rolled herself diagonally across the bed, leaving Maya crammed into an isosceles triangle. She climbed out of bed, used the toilet, and washed up in the clam-shaped sink. She saw in the mirror that the tops of her ears were bright red. She’d forgotten to put sunscreen there. She touched the burn on one ear and watched it turn white and then red again. Why did it do that? She could ask Dad. He was like her own personal Bill Nye the Science Guy, explaining why ice froze and how airplanes flew.

  When she came out of the bathroom, she saw a rectangle of blue light in the alcove by the door. She thought for a moment that Grace had woken up and gotten online, but Maya saw the hump of Grace’s body was still on the foldout bed. It was Dad. She walked over to ask him about the strange properties of sunburns.

  “Hi,” he said sheepishly. He’d pulled over a chair and had his feet up on an empty suitcase. “Hope I didn’t wake you up.”

  “You didn’t. But Dad, are you working? It’s like four a.m.”

  “I know. I have a few things to catch up on. And I couldn’t sleep anyway.”

  Maya forgot all about sunburns. “Dad, is any of this about the story on 60 Minutes?”

  He looked at her with startled eyes. “You saw it?”

  She nodded.

  “Yes, that’s the crisis,” he admitted. “Although the official phrase at Alceria is ‘an opportunity for strategic communication.’” Maya snickered at the doublespeak.

  “Thanks for telling me,” she said. At least he was talking to her like a grown-up.

  “Don’t worry about it, sweetheart.” He closed the laptop. “My job is safe. Alceria isn’t going to collapse overnight.”

  “But…but…” she stammered. “Dad, I’m worried about the bees.”

  “Honey, the media…Well, fear gets better ratings than facts. That’s all.”

  “They did have facts. They had numbers. They had a scientist on from the U named Dr. Jenkins. All she does is study bees!”