Class A Read online

  Copyright © 2013 by Lucas Mann

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data

  Mann, Lucas.

  Class A : baseball in the middle of everywhere / Lucas Mann.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-90755-4

  1. Minor league baseball—Iowa—Clinton—History.

  2. Clinton (Iowa)—Social life and customs. I. Title.

  GV863.I8C556 2013

  796.357′640977767—dc23 2012034683

  www.pantheonbooks.com

  Jacket image used by permission of the Clinton Baseball Club, Inc.

  Jacket design by John Gall

  v3.1

  For my parents

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  1. The Mascot

  2. Origins

  3. Things

  4. The Fantasy

  5. The Pzazz!

  6. The Collector

  7. How They Go

  8. The Middle

  9. Of Monkeys and Dreams

  10. Voices

  11. The Night

  12. The Numbers

  13. The Winning Streak

  14. What Is Left Behind

  15. Something Climactic

  16. Ride Home

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I had the great privilege of spending the 2010 season with the players, coaches, and fans of the Clinton LumberKings. This book is a reflection of my experience in that world, the meaning and narrative that I found within. Some names have been changed and some chronology has been altered for narrative clarity.

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

  The Mascot

  I AM LOUIE. Tonight, I am Louie. Tonight, regal and oversized, I am Louie the LumberKing.

  I am not a Lumberjack. Lumberjacks are lowly, solitary creatures, and I am not that. I am industry and prosperity. I am hope.

  I am nervous.

  The mascot’s dressing room used to be the umpires’ dressing room, tucked under the bleachers on the first-base side of the stadium. Umps have signed the splintering cabinet where my uniform hangs. I think I can make out “Clinton forever” still scratched into the wood. And, “Remember me.” And, “A stop on the journey.” The journey to the majors. That’s what he hoped. That Clinton, Iowa, would turn into a AAA town like Columbus or Nashville and that would lead to Milwaukee or San Diego or even Yankee Stadium. But this is the Midwest League, Class A, the lowest rung of full-season professional baseball. Yankee Stadium is far off.

  There’s a toilet in the corner, sprinkled with pubic hairs that I think could be both mascot and umpire in origin. There’s a tin of mint-flavored tobacco, empty. There’s a spit bottle, once a Gatorade bottle, now filled with saliva the color of tree sap.

  Replicas of my image are littered everywhere, and they help me, despite the smells and the sight of this rotting cubicle, to buy into my own myth. Promotional postcards with my face saying, “Fun is always in style, come out to the ballpark!” A bobblehead of me. I tap my miniature ceramic skull, and it nods, comforting. There are cards from children addressed to me. “I love you, Louie.” “Your number one fan forever, Louie.”

  I dress late, overwhelmed. I start with the socks, long black baseball socks. The kind that I first put on when I was five, schooled by my father the way I imagine young girls are when it comes time to slide on tights without causing a run. This is one of the earliest tactile memories I have, getting my toes all the way in and then rolling the polyester blend up my leg, feeling somehow armored.

  The white pants come next. They’re too tight. They’re made for small, quick mascots because the ideal mascot is agile and teenage. I suck in, but you can’t suck in thighs or ass. I snap the waist closed, and my fat springs it open. I feel my hands sweating. I try again, fumbling, getting desperate. It’s Thirsty Thursday, and the house is always decently packed on days when alliteration can be made to signify fun. There’re over a thousand out there, quite a turnout in a town with a population that has dwindled to twenty-six thousand people. It’s one of the nights when the construction of this place, its self-referential glory, feels legitimate. I’m an important part of this.

  The national anthem begins to play as finally, protected with a belt stretched to its last hole, my pants stay fastened and I’m halfway toward a full transformation.

  Louie the LumberKing speaks of the past.

  Did you know that there used to be more millionaires per capita in Clinton, Iowa, than anywhere else in the country? Did you know that? In the country.

  I’ve heard that a lot since the beginning of the season because it’s true and it’s nice to say. At the turn of the twentieth century, Clinton was the center of a lumber empire. Millionaires were made here. Thirteen of them, all burly and proud in the portraits they left behind. They became barons of lumber, famous even beyond Clinton, and they built mansions that you could get lost in looming above the center of town. Though the industry and its spoils have long since disappeared, some mansions are still here. A few stand in a regal clump on Fifth Avenue, chopped up over the years into smaller and smaller apartments, odd looking from up close when you see the plastic children’s toys on the lawn. One mansion is a museum, rarely visited. One was demolished in the late 1970s, and a department store sprouted in its place. The department store is gone now.

  A lot of things are gone. Things downtown closed; some collapsed. Things burned. In 1968 the sociopathic hippie son of a local businessman set fire to nine buildings because he was just so bored. He torched Clinton High School, another town landmark, and it turned to ash blocks away from the opulent homes gone empty.

  The longtime fans, the ones I’ve sat with every game along the third-base line, a group that has dubbed themselves first the Roadkill Crew, then the Baseball Family, remember how high the smoke went. You must have been able to see it from everywhere, along Highway 30 and across the river in Illinois, too. The glow reflected on the water, shifting, glinting, like a puddle of oil on a tar road.

  That hippie boy set the most famous fires, but not the last ones. Fans have told me that it feels as if something were always aflame now. When buildings are old, when nobody’s watching, anything can be tinder. Some of the fires are on YouTube. The dilapidated apartment with the mother and her two toddlers inside. The ancient white house without smoke detectors. The Lutheran church with flames dancing in the stained-glass windows. Old homes with no life in them, no care for them, so eventually they burn. And people like me, from anywhere, can click refresh, refresh on the videos. Three months ago, there was a string of fires on a single block, simultaneously ruled “not suspicious” and “under investigation” by local authorities. But fires don’t matter here and now in the stadium. And neither does ash.

  I enter my torso.

  I squeeze through the neck hole of discarded high school football shoulder pads. The XXL LumberKings jersey that has been sewn onto this skeleton hangs off me, and when I tuck it into the pants, it gives my top half a superhero’s triangular shape.

  Now for my head.

  My head is made of mesh and wood and cardboard and felt. My head must be two feet in diameter, sturdy and square-jawed, capped with an enormous golden crown. There are fake veins running down my neck to show my intensity. I have a goatee sewn on, thick and black. I look like a suave, royal Paul Bunyan. My mouth is carved into a confident smirk, and when people look at
me, they won’t know that it’s my mouth that I see through, a dual eyesight. I watch the world in front of me and at the same time the lining of my own skull, the scaffolding of my own construction. There’s a patch of dried blood inside my chin.

  The door swings open, and I’m caught staring into the mirror, stroking my faux beard. It’s Mitch.

  “You look fucking legit, bro,” he says.

  “Really?” I say.

  “Legit. Trust me. Legit.”

  He tucks my neck into my shoulders. He stands back. He shoves me hard and says, “You fired up?”

  I nod and almost topple forward with the weight of myself.

  I am Louie.

  When the anthem finishes, I grab my flag. I push through the door. I trip over a hose, only just catching myself on the dirt with the palm of my left hand, right hand still clinging to the banner. I start again. My approximation of a sprint takes me around the edge of the infield. The team limbers up for the crowd. I hold the flag in front of me and try to wave it as I run. I feel my head wobble as I pass Nick Franklin, the star shortstop. A year ago, after he graduated high school, he was given $1.28 million by the Seattle Mariners. Now he’s been sent here to Clinton, Iowa, to learn and then move up out of here on schedule. All the LumberKings’ players were drafted or signed by the Mariners, and Clinton is just one of the early outposts in their development process. Seattle’s largest present investment, though, by a good amount, is young Nick Franklin, and so now he’s Clinton’s prize, a transplanted, temporary millionaire.

  I stop running in front of the Baseball Family, their pocket of seats always full, even on the many Mondays when the rest of the stadium is empty. I see Betty laying out her candies, one by one, measuring the way each piece sits on the concrete wall, close enough to call out to the players, not so close that the candy falls on the field and the game is disrupted by a rogue Jolly Rancher. Next to the Jolly Ranchers are the strawberry suckers in wrappers made to look like real strawberries. And then the packets of Walmart-brand fruit snacks, first the white, then the blue, then the purple ones that taste like flat grape soda.

  “When did you start?” I asked her once. “Why did you start?”

  “One day, I thought they work so hard out there, they must get hungry,” she said. “That was fifteen years ago.”

  The players remember, she told me. There’s a postcard at home from Derek Holland, who is famous now and pitches for the Texas Rangers in front of forty-five thousand people. It says, “Merry Christmas,” and is addressed to Grandma Betty. It says he misses the candy.

  He was produced here, Derek Holland. In a way. He came here raw and nineteen, and in Clinton, with Clinton, in front of the fans, he was nurtured into something better than what had arrived.

  Bill, Betty’s husband, keeps his sandaled feet hooked back like a bird’s talons, hidden under the shadow of his chair. He’s missing two toes, a memento from the years when he worked at Allied Steel, back when steel, along with paper, along with wood, along with plastic, along with corn, catalyzed the town. But Allied left with a lot of other businesses, and left behind 100,000 tons of coal tar blocks down from the riverfront stadium, not cleaned for decades. And long before that, Bill was standing on the work floor when a four-ton beam fell, smashing his foot and resulting in the steel plate that now heats his head in summer.

  I realize that I like the eyes on me. I wave my flag, and I can trace gazes drifting back and forth along with my movements. It’s every overwrought fantasy I ever got lost in on Little League fields—the simple, pure importance of a body being looked at. It’s not me, really, but still, this vehicle that I operate commands attention. And I can’t say that being the temporary center of this world that I have made mine for the season, the diamond, the lights, all of it, doesn’t make me strut.

  On the pitcher’s mound, Erasmo Ramírez begins to warm up. He reaches down with his right arm and does one last check of his pants. He’s satisfied. There’s a perfect crease of polyester folded over onto itself, making a straight line of fabric just below his knee.

  A minor-league baseball player has an absurd amount of time in the clubhouse before the game. When Erasmo comes in at noon to lift weights alone, he sits for four hours before batting practice, then another two between when he’s done shagging balls and the game begins. How many granola bars can you eat? How many highlights can you watch? How many times can you scroll down a Facebook page, pausing at pictures of your ex on Venezuelan beaches, barely covered, her teasing eyes so far away? So you have to switch your attention to your look.

  Erasmo’s pants are tight around his thighs and his ass because he likes his legs. His shirt balloons out, highlighting the hard width of him. He was never as tall as he should have been. He used to sit in dorm rooms at sports academies, in dugouts all around Latin America, wishing for a growth spurt, some miraculous transformation into a young man with an elegant body, long and broad and thin, primed with wide-open spaces to fill up. A transformation that felt earned. Now he’s realistic, and he bulks up his squat five-foot ten-inch frame until there’s nowhere else to fit the muscle.

  On the mound, he rotates his arms in a windmill, and the clumps of muscle on his shoulders pulse. He flicks his glove toward the catcher, which means fastball coming. He exhales and then fills his acne-scarred cheeks with heavy, humid air, a move designed to be intimidating.

  Betty taps Bill. “Look at his cheeks,” she says. “Isn’t that cute?”

  Erasmo lifts his left knee slowly, deliberately, watching his pointed foot rise and then setting it down in front of him. He looks for a moment like an overweight ballerina. His movements are remarkable only in how unnoticeable they are. At this level of the minors, you’ll see flamboyant young men jerk their legs up near their chins, rock their bodies back, shoot their arms down behind them so that they can whip forward at the hitter. Some stomp around the back of the mound, unhinged, posturing like fighting bulls. Erasmo is boring except for the burst that comes when his foot hits the dirt, a blur of rotation, until the ball spins out at ninety-two miles per hour and burrows into the catcher’s mitt.

  His favorite part of pitching is the eyes on him.

  “Nobody looks at left field,” he told me hours before the game as we sat under the Coors Light sign beyond the outfield wall, staring at the freshly mowed grass, shrugging at a plume of black smoke rising into the clouds from somewhere. “Nobody looks at first base; nobody looks at the coach. Everybody looks at me. All these people”—he gestured his pitching hand toward the bleachers that were empty and will always be more empty than he pictures them—“all these people and they see me.” He smiled, a soft and young smile, the baby fat that still coats his face bunching under his eyes. Off the field, he is shy. He sits alone a lot. He listens when others have a conversation. Sometimes he laughs. He turned twenty a few months ago and celebrated in the clubhouse by eating a Hostess cupcake from a gas station.

  I duck through the gate by third base to mingle in the stands. I’m greeted as both a friend and a celebrity. I hear everybody. Hi, Louie, hey, Louie, Louie, it’s you again, Louie, my friend, Louie, I love you, Louie, our wives want to give you a big hug, would you like that, Louie, would you?

  The wives sandwich me. I think there’s a hand stroking my face for comic effect, but of course I can’t feel. Breasts collide with me and conform to my plastic torso.

  “You’re so stiff,” I hear a voice say. And then, “I remember this from when I was a little girl.”

  A good mascot is mute, so I just nod.

  Muteness is key, but that’s not the only guideline. I’ve done my research on my precursors. The need for a mascot’s presence is almost as old as the game. The first mascots in professional baseball were also the first black men in white professional baseball, and their forced minstrelsy, the way the audience was allowed to feel wholly superior to them, was considered good luck. “Whenever anything’s wrong,” the Cincinnati Reds told their fans a century ago, “it is only necessary to
rub Clarence’s wooly head to save the situation, and call on one of his celebrated ‘double shuffles’ to dispel all traces of care, even on the gloomiest of occasions.” Then there were the Philadelphia A’s, who collectively decided that a disabled, hunchbacked batboy was charmed and that the perceived kindness toward such a ludicrous creature would be endearing. Before big moments, fans could watch their boys touch the hump.

  And there are still all the Native American mascots, from Redskins to Redmen to Braves to Chiefs. That’s a subtle shift, I think, away from pure ridicule. Yes, these mascots are totems of bigotry, but they’re supposed to be frightening, coarse and powerful presences that help a team toward a winning identity. The Peoria Chiefs still exist here in the Midwest League, a rival of the LumberKings. They kept the name but changed the mascot to a lanky, upright Dalmatian dressed in a fireman’s helmet.

  A LumberKing is more. I might be goofy, but I’m an ideal. I’m no mutated animal or anthropomorphized concept. I’m just a man larger than the rest, always smiling. And I have my LumberKing crown, a sewn-on reminder of a time that nobody alive can remember but everyone talks about as if it could still be here.

  Erasmo falls behind the first batter and has to groove a fastball. The result is a line drive that hisses back at him and catches the knuckles on his right hand, tearing the skin with its seams. He gives a yelp and watches the ball ricochet off him into the outfield. For a moment, even looking out of my own mouth, I can see worry in his narrowed eyes. Everything can end so quickly. Danny Carroll, the LumberKings’ center fielder, broke a bone in his hand a year ago, and it’s not lost on Erasmo that he sits now as much as he plays. That the manager looks irritated or, worse, bored when Danny takes batting practice. A piece of him is flawed. His swing isn’t the same.

  “Any little thing can go wrong,” Erasmo told me once, then gave a falsely cavalier shrug.

  A good mascot is supposed to direct eyes away from bad things. Right now, I should jump on top of the dugout and be remarkable, whip fervor from nothing, but I lurk in the stadium walkway, peering out at the LumberKings’ best pitcher, as worried as everyone else. BJ, the trainer, presses a towel around Erasmo’s middle and index fingers, and he tries not to flinch. Later, BJ will congratulate him on not being a huge chocha, just a little one. He will say that the most irritating part of his job is the big chochas, the pussies who complain. He will hold his fingers in a narrow diamond by his crotch to emphasize his point.