Field of Fantasies

by Rick Wilber

  I also keep my worries to myself and my suspicions, but I decided to sample them to Afton the night before the team was going off to the tournament. I had packed my duffel and oiled my mitt and I got into bed and Afton kissed me and snuggled up. She’d always liked the smell of leather oil and I did too. I said, “Do all the teeth in Chicago come from Lavender?”

  She put her hand on my chest and pushed herself up. “What?”

  “Do all the teeth in Chicago come from Lavender?”

  She laughed a little and said, “Not all. There’s a lot of teeth in Chicago.” “You know what I’m saying,” I said.

  “I don’t know what you’re saying, Eddy, you dear man, but yeah, a lot of the crown work and full bridges are made out in Lavender. It’s sort of famous for it.”

  “Okay,” I said. She lay back down and was still sort of laughing.

  “Is there a seminary over by the theme park in Fort Lunch?”

  “Eddie,” she said. Now she was just laughing at her husband. “You mean over by Calvary World?”

  “Yes, a seminary.”

  “Are you going to take me and the kids over to Calvary World when they’re old enough?”

  “What?” I said.

  “You know,” she said, “ride the wagon train through the mountain tunnel and do that canoe ride and eat there in the barracks?” I remembered when we’d gone over to the place when we were dating.

  “There’s a lot of splashing with those canoes.”

  “I want to go,” she said.

  “Well, then, I do too.”

  “Do you want to go to the seminary there?” she said.

  “There is one,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said. “There’s been one for a hundred years. The seminary was before the Fort Lunch.”

  “Devlin said he was at the seminary, studying.”

  “He would be,” she said. “His dad was minister at Mercy for years.” She lay back down and said, “And the log slide.” She kissed my neck.

  I’m a ballplayer but I’m not dumb as a door. I knew what was going on. “We are going to have a baby,” I said.

  “We are,” she whispered.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “It is a boy or a girl,” she said.

  “Perfect,” I said. “That’s my choice,” and as I said it I knew it was true. Bring on the boy. Bring on the girl. I’ll go into it with my whole heart. Boys and girls play ball with talent, skill, adroitness, and dexterity.

  “Perfect,” she said to me there in the bed.

  That win over the Herons put us in fair shape for the Jubilee Tournament in Blister, which includes all seven teams in the Bird League, as the Mid American Prairie League is called in the papers. It’s shorter, but none of the players call it that. It’s a four-hour bus ride and I could sense the anticipation. I could sense my anticipation. Coach Kaiser went up and down the aisle a few times talking to the guys, his hand on our shoulders. Benito asked him if Fergus Finity would be there. “He will,” the coach said. “This is one stop shopping for that guy. You’ll be in his notebook before Saturday,” the coach said. He said that to a lot of us. It was good to hear.

  The field in Blister is the toughest place we play. The infield is fine enough for mowed bunchgrass, but the outfield is all stubble alfalfa and left center is low and marshy. With the rain there can be some standing water and you’ve got to play the ball in the air or it hits like a hockey puck and shoots into the tall grass. There is no homerun fence. There’s a three-strand barb wire way back by the surplus canal and always twenty black angus standing there like umpires chewing it over. In the night their eyes glowed.

  We beat the Eagles the first night, nine to nothing. Mikel Antenna, who hadn’t homered all year, hit two. It made you wonder if he’d been holding back until the scouts were seated, but a win’s a win. The next night we beat the Loons three to two on a sacrifice squeeze. Coach Kaiser should have been scouted for that call. It was thrilling Each night was a double-header, and so by Friday there were just three teams left. The Wild Turkeys drew the bye and that meant we faced off against the Robins to make the playoff.

  The Robins were all com fed and big, and they played big. I’ve never seen such swings. These guys stood legs apart and stepped toward the ball like they were on the SWAT team breaking down a door. When they swung and missed, you heard the noise, like an angry ghost going by your head. They hit a homer every inning, these balls lost in the far swale and one causing a minor stir in the supreme court of cattle by the back fence. But, they were big in the field too, and it took them a while to get to anything out of the infield, so we had seven doubles by the sixth inning and were only trailing by two runs.

  In the top of the seventh, their catcher hit a double into right which splashed and stuck in the mud in front of Benito Porch. There was a short delay as the umps dried the ball with a towel and put it back into play. I didn’t like this catcher being on second. They were calling him “Hammer” from their dugout, and I hoped it was not an earned nickname, but that he might be from a polite family of Hammers who knew the rules of sport and etiquette. I had already pissed him off by accidentally tapping his hand on the backswing when I had been up in the fourth inning. I hadn’t helped my case by looking at him hunkering there and saying So move.

  Now the two thoughts contended in my ballplayer’s noggin. Come on, big guy, try to steal and meet your certain fate under my mortal tag and Please Please Please do not steal, don’t come this way at all or even look in this direction. When I would glance at him between pitches, though, he was looking in my direction. He looked, in fact without exaggeration like he was coming for me. Harry Whisper threw the next pitch hard, his famous three-finger drop, and our catcher bobbled the ball, not much but just enough to give Mr. Hammer the idea that third base would soon be his. It was only three giant steps away and he was after all a giant, and he was now coming right at me. I ran to the bag and crouched for the throw which was low; it one-hopped and found my glove just as Hammer slid headfirst into my waiting knee. His momentum rolled us both up and over the bag and I was underneath him, trapped. I looked up and saw the umpire’s thumb. Out! He was out. Literally. Suddenly I couldn’t breathe under this bleeding giant. I lifted my head enough to see the doleful Devlin sprinting over, not looking so doleful now, but with a clear vampire’s lust in his eyes. He too looked like he was coming for me. Hammer’s mouth had struck my knee and his face was all blood, as was my jersey now, as they rolled him onto his back and Devlin knelt above him. It looked like he was feeding. Coleman came over and pushed Devlin away and put his fingers into the bloody mouth. “If we straighten these teeth right now,” he said, inches from Hammer’s face, “he won’t lose them.” And he worked on the man there for twenty minutes in the Blister night.

  We beat the Robins by four runs, proving that twelve doubles will beat nine homeruns, but it was an uneasy night for me in the old village. It’s never easy for a ballplayer to have great stripes of blood on his shirt when his teammates, some of them, are vampires.

  The championship game was at two in the afternoon on Saturday. We had known this from the start. I knew we’d be without our vampires, and it ended up being the difference. Fergus Finity finally showed up and we saw him talk to Coach Kaiser before the game. I wondered how Devlin and Coleman felt knowing the scout wouldn’t see them—the only two guys on our squad who really had a chance. Finity was a little skinny guy with his hair combed back severely as if it were a lesson. A couple of the guys went up and shook hands with him. Mikel did. Finity came down the dugout and asked my name and I told him. He said, “Third base,” and I was glad he knew that.

  “You should see our short and second, though,” I told him. We were alone there for one minute and I could speak. “Coleman and Devlin,” I said. “Not one ground ball got through this season. Not one.”

  “I’ll make a note,” Mr. Finity said. “Good luck,” he said.

  A few minutes later, Coach Kaiser said, “Play y
our hearts out, boys.”

  I guess we did. The Wild Turkeys beat us six to four in a pretty good game. The sun had dried portions of the outfield, and Benito Porch had an easier time of it. Two of the cows went around and got onto the field so there was a little break in the fifth. Afton and my folks came down and saw my last at bat in a uniform. The pitch was inside and I stepped out and got it all in a line drive down the baseline for a double. Standing on second I could see the whole world.

  A person has his hopes and his illusions and he does what he can to foster them. I had mine. I played baseball for a while on a good team; two of our best players were vampires for a while. Now, I’ve turned practical. My father grows flax, but next season we’re going to put in ten acres of sunflowers; this is perfect soil for them and there’s a market. In three years some of them will be in the red and blue buckets in the dugouts of Fenway Park and Yankee Stadium. It helps knowing—even at this distance—that we’ll be part of America’s game.

  Cecilia Tan has been writing about baseball since she recorded Dave Righetti's no-hitter in her high school diary in 1983. She is the author of The 50 Greatest Yankee Games and has edited the Yankees Annual every pre-season since 2007. In 2011, she became publications director for SABR, where she edits the Baseball Research Journal and directs the SABR digital books program. Her short fiction has appeared in Ms. Magazine, Asimov's Science Fiction magazine, Best American Erotica, and many other places. In this story, Tan balances the hope of a Red Sox spring training with the reality of the game no matter how informally it is played, as a young player works to reverse the curse in his own small way.

  Pitchers and Catchers

  Cecilia Tan

  THE INFIELD WAS BAKED red clay, that Georgia clay found on fields all over the country, brought in by the truckload. Kirby could smell it from the runway to the dugout, such a familiar smell. It was the smell of Little League, and the field behind the school near his uncle’s house, and the smell of learning to block balls in the dirt.

  He emerged from the damp shade of the dugout into the bright but weak February morning sun. The breeze was cold but the grass was green; a groundskeeper trimmed the verge beyond third base with a manual push mower. Beyond him, the jigsaw puzzle of advertising signs that made up the outfield wall shone bright and riotous. Kirby shifted his bag on his shoulder. He should have gone straight to his locker to put it down, but something made him want to see the field first. His first spring training with the big club.

  The crunch of a set of spikes on concrete behind him made him turn, and there was Mike Greenwell, suited up in uniform pants and a ratty gray T-shirt. His dark moustache was matched not so much by a goatee as an untamed offseason lack of shaving.

  “You’re here a little early, aren’t you?” Kirby said, without thinking.

  “Eight a.m.? Not really,” Greenwell replied as he went up the dugout steps to the grass.

  “No, I mean, isn’t it just pitchers and catchers today?”

  “Like I have something better to do ... ?” Greenwell joked as he began a jog around the warning track.

  It was only lately when Kirby found the locker with his name on it and saw Greenwell’s was across from his, that he realized he hadn’t introduced himself. Wouldn’t want to seem tike a brown-noser, he thought, after the fact. The locker the one with “Wilcox” over it, written with a magic marker on a wide strip of what looked like medical tape, had a pile of brand new catching equipment in it. The elation over the new equipment almost overcame the letdown of seeing his locker tag was temporary. Of course it was—just his first invite to Red Sox camp; he told himself not to get overexcited.

  Catchers tended to get the invite to the big club sooner than other position players. It was just math—there were so many pitchers who needed to work out, put in bullpen sessions, non-roster invitees auditioning for jobs. Probably more than thirty pitchers in camp right now. Maybe forty. Prospects were there, too, starters and bullpen guys—pitchers everywhere. That meant a lot of catching to be done. Kirby knew that, but he’d still felt privileged to get the word that, just a year out of rookie ball, he would be lockering with the likes of an All-Star like Mike Greenwell.

  Other guys were filtering in now, some he knew from rookie ball, some not. Now introductions were okay, he decided, since they were mostly new guys, both the pitchers and the catchers. Ever since Tony Pena had gone, there had been something of a revolving door at catcher for the Sox, and every guy there knew it. Kirby’s heart started to beat harder just thinking about it. Who knew? Make an impression on someone, maybe someone else tweaks a muscle, anyone could be behind the plate on Opening Day, wasn’t that right? He pictured himself crouching behind the dish, Roger Clemens on the mound, the big green wall visible through the bars of his mask, Clemens’ leg kick . . .

  There was Clemens now, big Texas guy, his hair in need of a trim, shaking hands and exchanging back slaps with some of the other players near his locker. Yes, thought Kirby, this is where I belong. He decided to dump the worry about brown-nosing and went to join the circle around Roger’s locker, but halfway there he saw a satin-jacketed coach tacking up a white piece of paper. There were always too many coaches and assistant coaches to keep track of in Spring Training, but anyone with gray hair and a field jacket was probably in the know. Kirby veered toward the bulletin board. The notice had the day’s workout schedule and rotation. He and ace pitcher Clemens were in a group together and he couldn’t help but take that as a little ego-boo. Maybe they do like me, after all, he thought.

  An hour later he was in the bullpen, his gear on, while Clemens and two other starters prepared to take the mound under the watchful eye of a coach. Kirby kept forgetting the names of the other two guys. One of them he should have known, too, because they had faced each other in college. But try as he might, the name Gar Finnvold was too ridiculous to stick in his brain. The other one, same problem, Nate Minchey, for whatever reason it was like these two guys could not be for real. Finnvold took the mound first and tweaked something in his landing leg within the first five pitches. He and the coach went off in search of the trainer, and Minchey took a seat on the bench to wait for his return.

  “C’mon,” Clemens said to Kirby, “I’ll have a go. It’s not like I’m really going to air it out on the first day.”

  Kirby crouched behind the plate and tamped down the spike of anxiety in his throat. He had caught plenty of fireballers in his time and besides, as Clemens said, he wasn’t going to be trying to light up the radar gun today.

  Still, the first fastball popped loudly in Kirby’s mitt, and he felt the sting in his left hand. He plucked the ball out and lobbed it back to Clemens who stood waiting at the bottom of the mound, his glove bobbing impatiently for the return throw.

  The next pitch was the same, and soon he and Kirby sank into a rhythm. All Kirby did was think about catching it, throwing it back, catching it, throwing it back. That was plenty to think about. He didn’t know Clemens’ form, his habits, his tendencies, any of that stuff. His job right now was singular: get the ball back to Roger.

  “All right if I try Mister Splittee?” Roger called as the ball sailed back to him.

  “You sure?” Kirby asked, tipping his mask onto the top of his head so he could talk. Pitchers typically didn’t start on the breaking stuff until later in the spring. But maybe Roger didn’t count the split-finger fastball as a breaking pitch.

  “No, are you sure?” was Roger’s reply, “meat?”

  “Bring it on,” Kirby said with a smile as he yanked the mask back down. He pounded the glove for emphasis.

  The first one, as Fate would have it, got by him. Bounced in the dirt right at the plate, and then went through his legs and hit the chain link fence, startling some reporters on the other side. Kirby felt his cheeks bum under his mask. That’s baseball, he repeated to himself, the mantra he had pickedup long ago when he learned that it could be a humiliating game. That’s baseball.

  No more balls got by and after
a few more minutes, Roger was done. Minchey shrugged, not wanting to throw until the coach came back. So Roger and Kirby sat together on the bench, companionably sweaty and drinking water out of Gatorade cups.

  “So how did it look to you?” Roger asked.

  “Good,” Kirby replied.

  “Good?”

  “Good.” Kirby shrugged. “I’ve never caught you before so . . . what do I know?”

  Roger crumpled the lime green cup in his hand and tossed it on the ground. “You were a Gator, weren’t you.”

  “How did you know that?” Kirby had, in fact, gone to the University of Florida, Gainesville.

  “I play golf with a sports administrator from there, nobody you’d know,” he said, which didn’t answer the question. “Did you always catch or were you converted?”

  Was I that bad? Kirby wondered. “I caught and pitched in high school.. .”

  “Red, hey Red!” Roger shouted to a coach passing by and gave him an exaggerated hieroglyphics-style shrug. “What gives?”

  The coach, a wizened fellow with a shock of white hair Kirby didn’t recognize, pointed back the way he had come.

  “C’mon,” Roger said then, giving Kirby a slap on the shoulder, and jogged off to the practice field where the next phase of the workout was beginning.

  That night Kirby found himself at the local steakhouse the players favored, sitting around the square of a bar in the center with six or seven other guys, all pitchers except for him. He ordered a beer, a steak, and a tall glass of iced tea, “Hold the tea.” The bartender was a cute blond who didn’t get it, but the pitcher on his left, a bullpen hopeful named Hiram Green, burst out laughing.