Class A Read online

  Erasmo has never complained about anything physical in his career as a baseball player, one that began professionally at seventeen. People seem to like him for that.

  “We don’t quit in Clinton, Iowa,” yells Matt, the mailman, a peripheral but boisterous member of the Baseball Family. He has an extensive list of dos and don’ts for baseball in this town. We certainly don’t quit. We get dirty. We run hard. We play the game right. Each mandate is trumpeted from his seat in the front row, an arm’s length away from the players as they trot into the dugout.

  “Attaboy, Ramírez,” he continues now. And then, as though he is quoting something famous, “Excellent. Excellent. This world rewards tough men.”

  Erasmo hears him, but he doesn’t respond. He knocks his heels against the sterilized white of the rubber, and he goes back to work. Today it’s the hard labor of trying to win when it’s apparent that whatever odd bit of magic gives a pitcher his best stuff isn’t there. He surrenders another single and walks a circle around the mound as though alone. He breathes deep, and he throws the fastball that he wants to throw, boring in on the handle of the bat, eliciting a hollow crack and a weak ground ball to Noriega, the second baseman, but it kicks off his foot and into right field. A run scores, two men stand on base, and Erasmo Ramírez, for the next few minutes, looks petulant and confused and twenty years old. Four runs later, the inning is over, and he walks back to the dugout.

  He glances up to the stands. Worn white faces look back at him. When he got called to Class A ball in a place he’d never heard of, Erasmo didn’t realize that it would be the same people here each night in this small stadium, that it would be so easy to pick out individuals as they call his name. Sometimes his BlackBerry rings, and it’s reporters from the biggest newspapers in Nicaragua. They want to know everything because he’s important now. On his laptop screen is an article from just a week ago, telling the nation that Erasmo Ramírez is the best pitcher in a place called Clinton, Iowa, that even in America he has his control. When the readers in his home city of Rivas imagine him, thousands of miles away, basking in all of his accolades and wishes fulfilled, they don’t think of this: semicircular bleachers with a few rows of dark green seats, above which it’s just metal benches, long and low, with the usual bodies dotted along them at various points like a bored student’s pencil marks on a clean page. Green poles rise up between the fans and hold a tin roof that hums when wind blows hard off the river.

  If you took a picture of this scene, tinted it sepia, and burned the edges, it would be believable as something pulled from a time capsule of the game, from rubble, from ash. This is a Depression-era building, a WPA initiative, one of thirty-three hundred stadiums built in a two-year sprint, all virtually identical, now mostly gone. The crown jewel of the project, Tiger Stadium in Detroit, was bulldozed into a parking lot two years ago.

  I wander through the fans.

  Children ask me to sign things. A man named Kevin who has come to the games for twenty-seven years for the sole purpose of dancing the chicken dance in front of a crowd turns to me between innings and announces, “Louie, it’s time for the chicken dance.” A toddler sitting in the front row reaches out to me, blue tendrils of cotton candy covering his cheeks. He’s the son of one of the team’s catchers. Born in Venezuela, he’s spent ten of his first eighteen months in basement apartments of American houses and in stadiums. I see his mind begin to work on centering himself when he notices me, a landmark for where he is and what’s happening. I’m not the portly bee in Burlington or the ear of corn with arms and legs in Cedar Rapids or the stupid firefighting canine of Peoria.

  I am Louie, and he is home.

  I hold him so that people can take pictures of his little head pressed against my enormous one. People like the way that he’s fascinated with me, overwhelmed by me. I like it, too. It’s so easy to trust my own significance in the suit and in the stadium, to be sure that he will remember me and remember this whole tableau, always, even if soon he can’t quite place the memory. His mother urges him to tell me, “Te amo, Louie,” but the boy has been mute since he got here.

  By most standards, Erasmo has had a fantastic season, but he’s failed to win two of his past four games, due to a combination of opposing players walloping his fastballs for disconcerting home runs and his teammates’ inability to score. This quasi-failure has contributed to a change in his demeanor. He arrived as the grinning, agreeable little brother of the locker room, but now his quiet is the sullen kind, even as his team is slowly pulling itself into the play-off hunt. He sucks down fruit cups and wanders around, ending up back in the weight room, staring at himself as he hoists dumbbells over his shoulders, ignoring coaches who tell him that’s enough.

  Tonight, he wills himself back into the game. In the third inning, he begins to feel his changeup working, a pitch relatively new to him, and he throws it again and again. He gets the massive Dominican prospect Rainel Rosario to freeze and watch a changeup float past him, his legs unsure, his face frantic. Erasmo lets himself crack a quick smile before bouncing off the mound. Brad in the public address booth presses the button that delivers the ha-ha sound, like in The Simpsons, and everybody laughs at Rainel Rosario.

  In the middle of the fifth inning, I judge the miniature John Deere tractor race. Two brothers, four and five, struggle to pedal rusted tires on the grass by the dugout. I hold out my hands as they finally pass me, and I indicate, lying, that the race was a tie. I’m cheered by most for my benevolence and booed by two drunk men with thin facial hair around their jaws and indecipherable neck tattoos. They believe in hard truths.

  They throw peanuts shells, try to get them stuck in my crown. Betty comes to my defense. There’s a sense of etiquette here, woven into the boring spaces of every home game. For fans who’ve come year after year, fifteen, twenty, thirty years, seventy home games each year, until thousands of innings run together in memories, all from the same view in the same seat in the same park, there is pressure to represent all of the noble tradition that should be, that is, still here.

  “Why on earth would you do that to Louie?” Betty asks these drunken man-children. And they can’t answer her. It’s the same as when she’ll whip her head around toward the sound of fans who’ve come, it seems, only to feel the rush of insulting the home team. She admonishes them without a word.

  The nasty fans aren’t crazy. It’s intoxicating here—the proximity to the players and their proximity to failure. When I used to sit high up in Yankee Stadium with my father, a heckle could earn you, at best, an agreeing nod from the drunks around you, but the players I irrationally hated were bulletproof. They were so markedly better than me and everyone I knew that even when they failed, there was no power to be found in aiming cruelty in their direction. Here, you can hurt them if you want to. Every voice is distinguishable, and the players listen even as they pretend that they don’t.

  But the idea among the loyal fans, I’ve come to believe, is to provide something of the best of yourself. Treat them as though they will be great so that they might remember. And isn’t the idea of greatness enough? The closeness to the promise of something extraordinary? The possibility that here, right here where you’ve always been, you cared for them first, before anybody else decided to give a shit?

  The top of the sixth inning is Erasmo’s last, and he gets out of it with a series of ground balls. He leaves the mound with his eyes focused on the dirt. The game is tied at four, and if his teammates score in the bottom of the sixth, he’ll be in line for a win, pulling the club within a game of a wild-card play-off spot, but that doesn’t happen. He tries to be stoic because that is what he always tries to be, but his face hangs disappointed. A win would have helped his stat sheet, something for the Mariner higher-ups to notice. Instead, today has been a wasted day, almost as if it never happened except for the slow, accustomed ache running between his elbow and his shoulder. He trudges to the clubhouse to ice his arm. He passes Betty and Bill and Tim and Tammy and Joyce and Matt a
nd Derek and Julie and Gary and Eileen and Cindy and Angie and Craig and they call to him.

  As he drapes a jacket over himself with my face emblazoned on it, Betty yells to him, a burst, almost as if she hadn’t intended to say it.

  “Do you like it here?” she asks him.

  He stops trudging for a moment and turns to her. He forces his face into a smile. He nods his head and looks earnest.

  “Oh,” he says. “Yeah. It’s nice.”

  He doesn’t wait to see the satisfaction on her face, and I don’t know if he hears her as she responds, “Well, it’s not too big and it’s not too small.”

  The game stays tied until the tenth inning, and I’m exhausted. Those fans who wander into ballparks just to drink and heckle are long gone. There are fewer than five hundred now. The weight of my skull is beginning to hurt, and the wood and hard plastic scrape at my collarbone. I let my head hang and then realize how absurdly melancholy that must look—not a normal person dejected, but a localized Disney character, eight feet tall, with his hands in his pockets and his ever-smiling face tilted toward the ground in despair.

  Erasmo is still icing his tired right arm at the elbow and at the shoulder, sulking and eating a granola bar.

  “Jiménez,” BJ calls to him, but he doesn’t respond, because that’s not his last name. “Jiménez. Jiménez. Oh, shit, I mean Ramírez.”

  Erasmo looks up and sees the trainer pointing at the clubhouse TV. A sportscaster is announcing that the best young pitcher in the world, Stephen Strasburg, who was guaranteed $7.5 million before he was even sent to the minors, could need elbow surgery. You never know with a pitcher’s arm, the sportscaster reminds the viewers. Things can just disintegrate. Erasmo, whose own signing bonus managed to clear $50,000—a number eaten into by taxes and his agent’s cut, which would have been 25 percent at a minimum, the remainder placed in a bank account shared with his entire family—leaves to stand by the left-field fence, just in time to see the winning run for his opponents cross the plate.

  He likes to walk home alone along the river. It’s amazing, he’s told me, that there are no sounds. Maybe a buzzard overhead, or a car passing, or a train. Once the fans drive home, downtown is empty. There is a McDonald’s and a Wendy’s. There’s a barbershop, closed down since before Erasmo arrived here, with a couple of chairs left inside facing each other as though in conversation. There’s the pawnshop where he buys DVDs on his days off. There’s an abandoned karate studio. There’s a discount furniture center. And another. There’s a music store. And a Taco John’s that sells tacos in sacks of twenty. And a gas station where the attendant always says “See you soon” when you leave. And a bunch of windows that reveal dark, empty rooms, with white paint on the glass that used to say something and still almost does, but it’s just faded enough to be illegible.

  Erasmo lives in the Lafayette, originally a hotel, then converted into the largest apartment building in a town that hasn’t built a new apartment building since 1976. He rides the elevator with a puckered woman who drinks from a two-liter bottle of Coke and seems to be vibrating. Erasmo holds the door for her, and she raises her eyebrows. She doesn’t know that he’s a town hero. Nobody in this building does. He says that it’s as though when he leaves the stadium, people look through him, as if he were no longer who he just was. And then occasionally someone will come running up to him at the Walmart, pointing, squealing, and it’ll be nice for that moment.

  He cooks for himself—half a stick of butter into a pan, then three eggs, then the tub of yellow rice he’s been saving in the fridge. He mixes it with a fork. His roommates haven’t come home yet, three Venezuelans, two infielders and another pitcher, who sleep in an even row with him on the floor of this twenty-by-ten-foot studio. Erasmo eats on his mattress because there’s no furniture. His stomach hurts because he still can’t get used to eating dinner at midnight. He tries to fall asleep to images of himself, his laptop propped open on his bare stomach, the electric warmth on his skin. He scrolls through pictures of his face in glorious strain, his arm in blurred movement, and it’s important to remind himself that others see him like this, too. That men with cameras search him out and he means something bigger than where he is now.

  Betty tries to stay positive, but Bill gets frustrated sometimes. Tonight, he waves a hand at the field, at all the players.

  “It’s like they don’t want to win,” he says. “Can you believe it, Louie? Playing the game like they don’t want to win.”

  The Baseball Family rises. They touch each other on the shoulders and say, “Damnit, that was a tough one.” And then, “See you tomorrow.”

  Betty collects the remainder of her candy, kisses her son Tim on the cheek, and ushers Bill out to the home they’ve lived in for forty years. She’ll stand on the porch tonight and look at what was the house next door and is now sticks and ash and a couple of pieces of badly singed furniture. She wonders how people can just let things burn. There was a whole life in there, pictures on mantels, bicycles, casserole recipes, things that had existed for so long, burned into nothing.

  Bill will fall asleep first while Betty listens to the postgame report on the radio, saying the season isn’t over, not yet, no reason to lose faith. After a hundred and some-odd games, the LumberKings are still in the running—a few more wins than losses, stuck in third place, a chance to make the play-offs, and just as good a chance not to.

  I tiptoe when I take my first steps of the night, having shed Louie. As though somebody might notice him in my walk or my feet or the shape of my ass, and something will be ruined. My T-shirt sticks to my chest. Everything itches. Mosquitoes flock to my head, no impenetrable shell to protect me now.

  I’m so small outside the wearable myth, and when I realize that I’m anonymous, I don’t like it. It’s gutting, the way things can inflate or shine or reverberate under the lights that look unstable so high up, like skinny children with big heads. Spot-lit when the whole surrounding area is dark.

  Nobody knew it was me. That’s not true, I couldn’t resist and I told some folks, but for the most part I was, as every Louie has been, loved without a moment’s question, allowed to mean something. I want that meaning to be more concrete, after all these games, but all I can say for sure is that I feel it.

  I think of Betty staring at ashes and how quickly things can be gone. How when a player leaves, somebody else is handed his number, and it’s as if he was never here, except for a picture that you might take with him and then ask him to sign. This season will be over soon, very soon if they don’t make the play-offs, and everybody who showed up every day to play or coach or cheer will cease to do so. Maybe they’ll start up again next year. I begin to drive away, humidity fogging my windshield, and then I stop at the tracks for a train. The stadium is behind me, still glowing, something from a book my father would have read to me a long time ago. In front of me, train cars glide by the same as they always do—faceless black ovals. Company names are printed on the sides of the cars. There are no windows. They are full of raw bulk that I will never see. They mirror one another as they pass, like a flipbook that doesn’t tell a story. I watch them, moving, moving, moving, finally gone.

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  Origins

  AT SOME POINT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, a game was first played in which people hit a ball with a stick. That is fact. Then things get fuzzy. My father took me to the Baseball Hall of Fame when I was a boy and stood with me while I stared up at the oil-portrait face of Abner Doubleday, the man called the creator of baseball, enshrined in Cooperstown, the place where the creator supposedly created. He was a perfectly American man, Doubleday, face worn with some sort of perseverance, mustache stiff and thick like firewood. He was a Civil War hero, a generously wealthy man, an avid believer in things like God and goodness. He was credited with the invention of baseball fifteen years after his death when a Colorado miner faked a memory, said that on a dirt patch in a little industrial river town he watched Doubleday draw the game’s par
ameters on the ground with a twig, said that they played it that same day, a moment of pure inspiration.

  Nothing is ever so right, of course. Baseball was probably first played in some form by Irish immigrant boys, pegging each other in rank city alleys. And the game only became popular, truly American, when gamblers took to it, when there was profit to be made off the fastest and strongest boy in the neighborhood.

  This isn’t my own well-investigated information, nor is it any revelation. Everybody who cares about the game knows the lie. I knew it when I was a little boy touching the statue of a false idol, but what I loved, even then, was that it didn’t matter. That everyone, it seemed, had recognized the importance of the story that had been made. So awe was still appropriate because it was made to be so.

  We can go back, trace a line through all the people who made the game oversized.

  Go back to Herbert Hoover: “Next to religion, baseball has a greater impact on our American way of life than any other institution.”

  Go back further, to Teddy Roosevelt, who dubbed baseball one of the key sports for a “true and manly race.”

  And even further, to Walt Whitman, certainly no straitlaced statesman: “I see great things in baseball. It’s our game—the American game.”

  But these are clipped soundbites. I’ve always preferred the hyperbole.