Class A Read online

  It’s best for the players not to think of the scope of what they’re trying to do, but I can’t help it. There are close to two hundred other minor-league teams. There are twenty-five men on each of those rosters. After spring training in March, every professional baseball player in every organization is evaluated, ranked, put on a team—rookie ball, Low-A, High-A, AA, AAA, the lucky ones perched above the muck in the majors. And then they’re shipped. They’re moved in bulk because, no matter what, you need twenty-five to fill out a team. For every one or two prospects on a given minor-league squad that the scouts believe will make it to the majors, there are two dozen working alongside them, faithful or trying to be, a “necessary expense,” as the Mariners scouts put it to me in the bleachers and would never put it to them. If you happened to be on a commuter flight to a small place anywhere in America in early April, chances are you were staring at loud, large young men in identical sweatshirts, trying to figure out if they were famous. They weren’t.

  Danny was drafted 105th out of every baseball player in America in 2007. That is fantastically good. Third round, in fact. There were only three players that the Seattle Mariners bought before him in 2007. He remembers that. After him, there were a thousand others, three days’ worth of names periodically spit out on a Web site, until the fiftieth round was over and there were no more picks on the board. But then there’s the international players like Erasmo, a group that now makes up nearly 30 percent of professional baseball, all of whom are ineligible for the draft and are signed as free agents. Dominicans, Venezuelans, Japanese, people from littler countries in the Caribbean and Central America that some of the U.S.-born players can’t place on a map.

  On April 6, players arrived in Clinton, but also in bigger towns dotting the Midwest—Peoria, Cedar Rapids, Appleton, Burlington, South Bend, Dayton, Cherry Lane, Illinois. And in Jackson, Tennessee, and other C-cities of the South. And in Eugene, Oregon; Everett, Washington; Columbus, Ohio; Pittsfield, Massachusetts. And Tulsa and Des Moines and Staten Island. Places with nothing in common except for these tall, broad visitors all sharing a talent and an ambition and maybe a delusion.

  In that commotion, Danny Carroll landed back here. His hosts lent him a pickup truck that their son used to drive, an F-150 from the 1980s. He looks like a local boy when he drives it. He knows that’s not the best thing to look like. The more people who know you, who say innocently, not trying to be hurtful, “Oh, hi, you were here last year,” the more you are exposed as stagnant.

  I imagine the first day, the way I want to see it. I imagine Danny, with all his unenviable experience, as the calm and knowing tour guide.

  “It’s not usually so warm here in April,” Danny told his teammates when they got to town. And it was true, a sticky seventy-nine degrees shouldn’t happen until mid-May.

  “One time, in Appleton, it snowed,” Danny continued.

  There were confused nods. Only one other player, Kalian Sams, Danny’s friend and fellow outfielder, could remember back three years in A-ball and verify Danny’s story, and he was not particularly eager to advertise that fact.

  A lot of the young players had never seen snow. Certainly not the Dominicans and the Venezuelans. And even prospects from Florida and Southern California were not made for such weather. Danny is a Southern California boy, from one of those burned brown towns in the Inland Empire, east of L.A., but now he’s entering his third midwestern April and has spent more of his adult life here, working, trying to leave, than back home.

  As they left the hotel, somebody asked Danny, the expert, what the big factory was, the one across the street, sort of across the street from everything. Danny was unable to answer because Danny, like almost every player I will meet, had never bothered to find out, had written it off as a constant, unfortunate reality not related to what he came here to do. Some players developed their own theories. The strangest I heard was that horses were being ground into dog food. It was the rotting blood of ground-up horses that accounted for the smell.

  Danny gave his best friends a lift home in the pickup, Sams and a catcher named Henry Contreras, called Hank, another one who wasn’t as young and loud as the rest of the team. Hank sat in the flatbed and started doing sit-ups, saying that the training never stops. Danny laughed. Sams took a video from the front seat on his phone, Hank’s brown face bobbing up and down on the gray background, confused smiles from white people in passing cars. They drove down the one-ways like that.

  “Dang,” Danny said as he drove.

  The scene is dang-worthy, I know. Dang is the feeling I had in a moment that I didn’t tell Ted Tornow about, when I got lost driving to the stadium that first time, with each new outlet seeming to head to the same gated place, and ended up on a dirt road under smokestacks with truck drivers pointing at the “Private Property” sign and calling me a dumbshit.

  The two youngest and richest LumberKings wandered out of the hotel. The Mariners made Nick Franklin the 27th pick of the 2009 draft and then made him a millionaire. Steve Baron was the 33rd pick and got $980,000. Nick and Steve were both from Florida, both had just turned nineteen, and both liked to go fishing with their fathers. They were going to be roommates. One had an Xbox 360. The other had a PlayStation 3. They were confident.

  Steve Baron hit the outside air, saw the factory, smelled the smoke, and vomited all over the sidewalk.

  It’s easier to think of the players as hypothetical ideals. To look at their pictures, read their names and stat lines with virtual distance on BaseballAmerica.com. I know this, standing in the clubhouse before the first game of the season, conspicuous and invisible at the same time. I think of my front-office conversation with Dave and Ted and Nate and Mitch, talking about how these boys are just like everyone we knew growing up. And maybe they are. But in these breathless first few seconds they are only impenetrable, nothing but perfectly filled-out skin.

  Danny Carroll is the first one to talk to me, the only one. He saves me.

  John Tamargo, the manager, has left me marooned in the center of the green carpet, surrounded by lockers and large strangers. Earlier, in the damp, quiet safety of his office, he told me, “You can poke your head around, you can stay as long as you like, but I ain’t going to try to make these boys be nice to you.”

  “No, sir,” I said, the instinct to call any coach “sir” still alive in me.

  “They’re going to treat you how they treat anybody.”

  I watched his forearm flex as he gripped a ball. He’s fifty-eight, bald, and stocky. He limps from a career as a catcher, waddles really. I stared at the heavy gold of his Rolex.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’d recommend you shave the beard or whatever that is.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He walked me down the hall, past the trainer’s room with free weights and padded massage tables and a bathtub full of ice, to the locker room. He whistled to his twenty-five young charges and said, “Hey! Shut up!” They did. He said, “This guy’s going to hang around and watch you. Any problems?”

  There were a lot of shrugs. There were a couple of sneers, glances expressing distrust or disinterest or immediate, silent, physical dominance. This isn’t a space where anyone not in the game is supposed to be. There are signs asserting that fact, tacked up next to the required notices about the dangers of smokeless tobacco, which have already been defiled with tobacco spit.

  Now, stranded, I raise my hand in a stiff wave to all and then drop it immediately. I shuffle around the room, smiling as though there could be victory in that. I wait for someone to step out of the tangle of bodies and become real, singular. I turn to find Tamargo and see him waddling back down the hallway. This is when Danny Carroll saves me because he knows that it’s important to be a good person. He smiles and says, “Hey, dude.”

  Danny has been standing by himself, making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. He’s wearing compression shorts that would hug the fat of his thighs and ass in place if there were any. He’s not wearing a sh
irt, something I’ll come to find is common with him and, upon each quick glance, makes more and more sense. He has a superhero’s trapezoidal chin, tempered with goofy ears that stick out and impish eyes. He watches me looking around at how many men and how much noise can fit into one room.

  “You look scared,” he says and smiles because he’s right. “Don’t look scared.”

  I nod and try to appear unimpressed as I scan statuesque bodies in various states of undress, tattoos across the full expanse of backs identifying hometowns or credos, or displaying a glowing Virgin Mary. Nick Franklin’s ink dominates his lean, still-growing torso, marking the brand: “Franklin, Est. 1991.” Music blasts, never one song, always two, from opposite corners, in competition. Right now Usher is playing with heavy bass from subwoofers in Nick’s locker. The Americans are listening to it. Three Venezuelans are trying to turn their iPod speakers loud enough to drown Usher out with Daddy Yankee, a Puerto Rican rapper chanting in Spanish about tremendous asses, but Nick Franklin buys better and newer products than they do, and he will not be defeated.

  Nick cups his ear and says, “What? What? Sorry, I can’t hear you.”

  Jose Jiménez, a barrel-chested, left-handed reliever, screams at him in Spanish. Nick shrugs.

  Players begin cursing each other bilingually, and I see Danny wince a little, just a twitch of his high cheeks, as “fuck” and “shit” and “cock-sucker” are tossed around. He’s used to it, though. After two years of pro baseball, he knows that despite the constant cross tattoos and Christ-crediting postgame interviews not everyone went to church three days a week every week for his entire life before getting drafted. Coming out of high school the way Danny did means that clubhouses in strange towns become your first knowledge of life out from under your parents’ roof. Instead of Intro to Psychology, he gets this. The former college players talk filthy about keg stands and spring break, about faceless, eager sorority girls. Danny had just turned eighteen when he was drafted, and on that night he knelt right in his living room with the whole family and gave thanks before taking a senior class trip to Disneyland. Danny doesn’t tell other people what to do here. He says “gosh” a lot. And “dang.” He’ll say that things suck when he really means it, when they really do.

  It must make him uncomfortable that I’m sticking so close, but he doesn’t show it. I realize that my interest might be flattering enough to make me tolerable. Boys get used to attention at a young age when they’re faster and stronger than those around them. It’s when the attention has gone away a little, I’ll discover, that it stops becoming boring or an inconvenience. Danny eats his sandwich in four bites and then goes back for more. The strength coach yells at him for using all the peanut butter.

  “Man, you see this?” Danny says to me, weary. “They don’t give us any kind of spread down here. I mean, how much is a thing of peanut butter at Walmart?”

  “Two bucks?” I venture.

  “That sounds like too much,” he says.

  He gives me a brief, mistrustful glance, eyebrows arched, so I say, “Yeah, totally, definitely, you’re right.”

  I look in his locker. There’s his jersey for tonight, the Clinton LumberKings’ home whites with green and black trim. There’s a black and gray glove that he got custom made to say, Dan the Man. There are gray cleats to match his gray glove, Air Jordan brand. There’s a Bible with bookmarks in it. A proverb that I don’t recognize written on notebook paper. There’s a picture of him and a young woman with impossibly white teeth. They’re standing on a beach. His arms are around her and she’s so small.

  “You miss your girlfriend?” I ask.

  “Wife,” he says. “We got married at eighteen. Crazy, right?”

  “Good for you.”

  “She’s a blessing, dude. I walked her home from church when we were fourteen, and she’s blessed me ever since. She might be coming out here soon. But I don’t think I’m going to be here very long this time, so, you know, she’s waiting.”

  I nod and say, “Totally.”

  There is a pause as he watches me watch his movements, scanning over his bats and body, his Bible.

  “Are you a Christian?” he asks.

  “Not really.”

  He nods, and I clap my hands together for no reason.

  Nick Franklin has turned his Usher up as high as it can go. He and some others are dancing in the faces of three Venezuelan players. Danny sighs. He calls them all kids. I ask him how old he is. He just turned twenty-one. He grabs one of the bats leaning against his chair. He holds it out, the wood resting on his upturned palms, such a dainty move with such a solid thing. He shows me his name imprinted along the barrel. The company even made a stamp of his signature and pressed it on there, too, a big, swooping D and C, with tight, practiced waves running between them.

  “Sweet,” I say.

  “Right?” he says.

  “How’d you get that?” I ask because he wants me to.

  “Agent,” he says. “If you’re a top-pick kind of guy, they get you stuff. I was third round.”

  This is the first of many times that he will tell me this. I will come to find out that it’s a calling card in here. Everybody knows where everybody was ranked when the team brought them in. Every player crammed into this room has an agent. Many of them were found by agents when they were still boys. Some of the agents are famous; others are nobody special, a guy from the neighborhood who is good at talking. All of it matters. The players have counted each other’s money. Sometimes they overestimate for motivation and because it is exhilarating to feel screwed over. The white players sitting at a makeshift card table fashioned from an upturned bucket glance over at Mario Martínez and Gabriel Noriega, a pair of Venezuelan infielders who were signed around the age when they should have been juniors in high school. The white players assume that there was a big payday involved. They see imported bonus babies. They say, “Damn, I wish I was from Venezuela and weighed 115 pounds and could tie my shoes,” looking at the rail-thin, nineteen-year-old Noriega, who has a penchant for rhinestone-studded Ed Hardy T-shirts and diamond earrings.

  I leave for air, pretending to have to make a call, and hear the screech of a row of ten-ton train cars hitting the brakes.

  The trains that run alongside the stadium parking lot don’t go fast. There is no rush. There will always be more. There is corn in these train cars, thousands of ears packed in so tight that it’s impossible to distinguish individual kernels. Later, in the stands, I will be told that it looks like gold when the tops of the train cars are opened and the sun hits the product. I walk toward the train now, looking, I guess, for a weak spot, an opening. There are ladders running up the side of each car, but I will never see anybody on them, can’t picture hands on the bars. I want to see inside, want to feel like I can know more than what is shown, but the size of everything, all the metal, all the weight, it scares me. Instead, I watch the graffiti glide by, names over the corporate logos, written in small towns on quiet nights when the wheels finally stopped.

  The corn keeps running across the state, nearly five million Iowa tons per year, and so much of it stops here to be processed on the banks of the Mississippi. The factory opens up and trains and trucks unload their wares, a process that I have never seen happen, will never see happen, a steel door that I imagine opening in slow silence.

  The Clinton facility processes its corn with a wet milling procedure, drawing water from beneath the ground, from eight-hundred-foot wells that go deeper than the city wells. There was grumbling from when the wells were proposed, then allowed, in 2006, residents wanting to know how the company got first dibs on water, but that quieted down eventually. The water comes up somewhere into the middle of the gray windowless buildings, and it meets the corn in vats the size of blue whales. The corn is “steeped,” which makes it sound like tea, but that’s not at all the case. The corn sits in chemical-aided water heated to exactly 50°C, until the kernels soften, ready to be separated into all their parts.

&nbs
p; There’re five million gallons of water heated each day. There is corn slurry sitting or heating or processing, always. And the smell that pours out from the smokestacks when corn and water and sulfur dioxide are processed with coal-burning energy, the smell that some still complain about, that most shrug and laugh about, that Steve Baron threw up from, that a local congressman tells me is “toasty and comforting,” is accepted as routine, as was last year’s Department of Natural Resources warning that the particulate matter in Clinton’s air was bordering on unallowable, as is the ominous billowing sky on a heavy production day.

  · · ·

  Back in the clubhouse. I follow Danny into the batting cages, housed next door in a big shed with a twenty-foot-high aluminum roof and no windows. He’s holding his bat in his right hand like a club, label out. I think I see him looking at his own name. Last year there was talk about Danny having a bad attitude, which Danny didn’t like. He wasn’t brought up that way. Some people still think that he’s pouty, think that he’s soft. When he got hurt for the second time, he started thinking too much, and then he started to get mad because that’s what thinking does to you.

  How can there be so many bones in a hand, each one breakable? He didn’t deserve to break two different bones in the same hand, each one at the fifteen-game mark of the season, 2008 and 2009.

  “Like it was a curse,” he tells me.

  I laugh, but then he looks serious.

  “No, not really,” he says. “I don’t believe in curses.”

  Danny lost a little bit of faith last year, and he doesn’t plan to again.

  Yesterday he talked to a reporter from the local paper for an article called “L’Kings’ Carroll Seeks Fresh Start.” He told the reporter that God gave him a gift as a hitter and that he didn’t plan to waste it. He told the reporter that God’s challenges only make us stronger, that he had become a stronger Danny Carroll. He tells me those same things now because he doesn’t know me yet. Because I’m an out-of-shape guy with glasses and a sweaty notebook and baseball players are taught to speak to us all that way, self-assured, sober, noncommittal.