APRIL
Current record: 0–0
@JenWertherPDX: THREAD: In a surprising (and potentially very exciting) last-minute move, the Portland Lumberjacks have sent a bevy of pitchers to Arizona in exchange for rising star Ernie Gonzales & former top-100 prospect Luis Estrada. Both will start the season with Triple-A Beaverton. (⅕)
@JenWertherPDX: With this move, Portland’s infield plans gain some clarity. Both Gonzales & Estrada will need some additional minor league seasoning first, but the hope is that they’ll slot in as the Lumberjacks’ catcher and shortstop of the future. (⅖)
@JenWertherPDX: Gonzales, who signed at 17 out of the Dominican Republic, finished last season with Arizona’s Triple-A affiliate team, the Reno Aces. His stellar reputation with pitchers and strong offensive profile make him the clear centerpiece of the trade for Portland, but…(⅗)
@JenWertherPDX: Estrada—son of the late Luis Estrada, Sr.—is an interesting add-on: since returning from an ill-timed off-field injury, his bat has been uninspiring, but he’s coming off a Gold Glove year defensively, and some believe he’s due for a resurgence at the plate. (⅘)
@JenWertherPDX: We’ll have a full write-up soon, but a parting thought: with Gonzales & Estrada expected to remain at Triple-A this season, this won’t pay dividends for Portland right away, but, at the very least, the Beavers should be plenty of fun to watch this year. (/end)
Opening Day, most years, attracts the biggest crowd of the season. It’s the stink of hope that hovers over the game, even for a team with a lackluster roster and a long history of heartbreaking seasons. On Opening Day, anything can happen.
Gene, most years, loves that stink.
The people turning up to spend a tepid, verdant Oregon Tuesday in a ballpark that has no roof and is subject to rain delays more often than not in those early months. The bated breath, the waiting, the open arms of possibility—all of it the foundation of Gene’s love for this slow, old, American sport.
Today, a small collection of cars has already started to fill the parking lot outside the stadium when he and Vince pull up. Cars Gene doesn’t recognize, cars that belong to neither his teammates nor Jen, the reporter the Oregonian assigns to sporadically cover their games. Near the front doors, a small handful of overenthused fans wearing Portland jerseys waits for the gates to open. These are the truly hopeful ones, here to see the big league team’s future, all for the price of a cheap minor league ticket.
Most days, Gene would give them a smile on his way past, welcome them to the game. Today, he skirts around them, careful to stay out of view until he and Vince are behind the stadium and Gene can swipe into the heavy staff entrance doors. Today, he has an unfamiliar churning in his gut, nerves and apprehension and every other variety of I don’t know how I feel about this.
“You’re panicking,” Vince says.
“A little.”
“It’s going to be fine.” Before Gene can voice his worry, Vince tries to alleviate it. “I’m sure they’re just going to slide him over to second. We need a decent second baseman.”
“Okay,” Gene says, though he has his doubts.
Because the thing is, Luis Estrada is a shortstop.
And Gene is a shortstop.
And Gene doesn’t have a Gold Glove. Gene doesn’t have a former superstar dad. Hell, Gene doesn’t even have a size-medium jersey. No, Gene has his dependable size small, and a dad who played for this same minor league team for a little over a decade before retiring without fanfare.
If someone needs to move to second, well, from an outside perspective? Most people would pick Gene. He’s younger, less experienced, with a weaker arm and fewer accolades. Most important, when he and Luis shared a field in college, Gene did play second—it’s an established pattern, the expectation.
But this is his minor league team, and he has more than held his own at shortstop. It’s the de facto captain-of-the-infield position, flashier and more impressive, and for all that Gene tries not to care what anyone else thinks, he has always, always enjoyed impressing people. Surprising them. Shortstop carries more pride than second, however you slice it, and Gene has grown into that pride quite nicely over the last year.
All he can do is show up and hope, which is all he can do most of the time anyway.
Gene decided, in the days since the trade was announced, that he would give Luis a chance. He did not obsess over Luis’s impending arrival, but maybe he did do a bit of reading.
Maybe he read Luis’s whole Wikipedia page, and a slew of articles, none of which told him anything he didn’t already know: that Luis Estrada was born in Los Angeles, the youngest of five and the only boy, a former Stanford student like Gene. That Luis started playing baseball with his dad—star shortstop Luis Estrada, Sr.—as a kid and that, after his dad died when he was eighteen, Luis took his senior season off from his high school team. That he was selected by the Red Sox in the fourteenth round of the draft after his junior year at Stanford, almost exactly a year after Gene first met him.
(Wikipedia and Baseball-Reference don’t mention the phone call Luis never made to Gene after he got drafted, or the seven silent years that followed. They don’t mention the way the Stanford team fell apart after Luis left, or the way some of his things still sat abandoned in his old locker stall when Gene came back for his sophomore year.)
And maybe Gene read about Luis’s accident, the one he’d also heard about as it was reported in real time, almost two years ago, when Gene was still playing a few levels lower in the minors. His teammates’ cell phones had lit up with the news that Luis Estrada, at the time still playing in the Red Sox system, was being called up to the majors to fill the roster spot of an injured infielder. Gene remembers reading the news, the way his pulse had jumped at it, excited and thrilled for Luis in spite of it all. But, while Gene had hit two doubles and a triple against the opposing team that night, Luis never made it to his own game.
Maybe Gene allowed himself a sliver of soft-bellied empathy when he revisited those same articles he read two seasons ago, about Luis’s rental car hitting a wet patch of asphalt on his way to the stadium, about his weeklong stay in the hospital and the resultant months on the injured list; about the long road to recovery, and how Luis had never been the same hitter since.
The thing that stung the most, that Gene swallows down and promises himself he won’t dwell on anymore, was that he hadn’t gotten to be there for Luis when any of it happened. Because Luis had decided, without explanation and without ceremony, that Gene didn’t need to be in his life anymore—that Gene would watch all the successes and all the hurt from the sidelines.
So Gene can be mature. He’ll try to just think of Luis as a human being—not his competition and not his former teammate, though both are true. He’ll play team-first, stay in the moment. He’ll look on the bright side.
When he and Vince arrive in Beaverton’s clubhouse, even hours before first pitch, its offseason staleness has been consumed by a buoyancy Gene hasn’t seen in months, their teammates a sea of brown and pink-tinged skin, covered only in the laziest way possible by their Beaverton workout gear. For the first game—particularly the first game post–blockbuster trade—guys show up early.
On first glance, Gene sees neither Luis nor Ernie, but the clubhouse thrums anyway.
The Kyles have staked their claim on the locker room speakers, blasting a new playlist. Charlie Cooper, a minor league journeyman who has shifted to first base in his later years, is shucking himself of a Hawaiian shirt far too bright for such a dingy April day. Their third baseman, Trevor Ross, has set up shop in his stall, cap pulled low over his eyes while he takes his first pre-practice nap of the season—the sleepiest man to ever handle the hot corner. Bench guys and relief pitchers and junior coaches mill around, their steps and shouts and head nods setting the rhythm for a new season.
Nestled in the corner of all that calamity, Gene finds his locker stall with ease. Vince, for his part, lies down on one of the benches, his sturdy legs stretched in front of him, crossed at the ankle.
“Feels good, right?” Gene asks.
Vince has been in far more impressive locker rooms than this one. Still, he nods.
Gene doesn’t bother asking if Vince wants to run stadiums with him—he never does, hasn’t in the full year Gene has known him, likely won’t ever again before he retires. He has reached the point in his career where no extra pound of muscle can overtake time’s slow assault on his bum shoulder. Having missed more than his fair share of time to every arm injury possible, Vince playacts at lazing, but Gene knows that when he comes back from warm-ups, Vince will be working with a physical trainer, deploying interminable ice packs and careful mobility routines to try to milk his left arm for all it’s got.
So Gene focuses on his own routines. He holds up two pairs of cleats—one pair blue and pink and white, well-worn; the other high-top, a deep and brilliant green, never used. He barely considers before hanging his usual pair by their laces on a hook in his stall, the height and barely-there heft of the spikes familiar as they click against the wooden wall. If nothing else, when he puts his uniform on in a few hours, he will have stable ground under his feet.
Before he can get out to the field, Baker’s voice comes from her office—crystal clear and well-projected. “Altzy, Nes. Get over here.”
Vince makes a face—How are we in trouble already?—but heeds her request; he clears a path for them both, until they land in front of Baker’s door. Behind her desk, she greets them with a nod before gesturing at the man sitting across from her.
“Boys,” she says, as if Vince isn’t closer to her age than Gene’s, “this is Ernie Gonzales. Gonzales, meet Vince Altman and Gene Ionescu.”
Ernie Gonzales is somehow bigger than Gene expected. He’s seen the numbers—six-foot-three, 220 pounds. They don’t exactly scream compact. Up close, he’s solid, with thick legs poking out from his practice shorts, the prototypical catcher’s ass rounding them out. But when he stands and turns toward them, it’s his broad grin and enthusiastic nod that stick with Gene. He’s big, yes, and effusive.
“It’s good to finally meet you,” Vince offers with his handshake. He’s at ease, the way he always is around new people, and it’s obvious why Baker tends to leave intra-team relationships up to him. She likes to say that, as captain, Vince is the babysitter—not her. “Been a big fan since we played you last year.”
Gene extends his own hand. “Bigger fans now that we don’t have to play against you anymore. You can call me Nes, by the way. Everyone does.”
“Nes,” he repeats, Gene’s nickname already sounding at home in his voice, thickly accented and filled to the brim with an easy brand of kindness. “In that case, you can call me Gonzo.”
“Deal,” Gene says, and he shakes the hand of this man who is more than a foot taller than him, this man who is destined for something really incredible someday, and the trade doesn’t feel half so bad if it means they get someone like Ernie playing for them. “It’s great to have you here.”
At that, Ernie pulls him into a hug, the kind perfected by men in locker rooms—a tug of the hand, one arm each trapped between chests, two solid and encouraging pats to the back—carefully calculated for minimum intimacy. When Ernie does it, it feels genuine.
“I’m gonna take him to meet the rest of the pitchers,” Vince says.
“Team meeting in ninety,” Baker says.
Vince waves his acknowledgment over his shoulder as he leads Ernie down the hall, and Gene swings himself into one of the two open seats in front of Baker’s desk.
“So.”
She leans back, feet on her desk, and holds up a hand to stop Gene’s line of questioning before it can start. “I don’t have the lineup ready. Don’t ask.”
Having Baker on your side makes a world of difference—it’s the only reason he’s here at all. Last year, she served as pitching coach, but this year, with their regular manager out on family leave, she’s stepped in as interim manager. Gene played for other teams, lower in the minors, before coming here, but when he finally got to walk into this particular stadium, play for this particular person? It settled something in him. He feels safe here, in her capable coaching hands. Plus, part of him hopes it bodes well for his season—to have someone who gets it, at least a little bit, in charge.
So, he shoots two lazy finger guns and drops the subject. “You get any sleep last night?” he asks instead.
She raises two unimpressed eyebrows high on her forehead and laughs, a flat, humorless burst of a thing that has Fuck no written all over it.
“That good?” Gene asks.
“Just get your asses to the playoffs this season and make it worth my while.” She seems almost genuinely pleased by that, the idea of her team getting to play into the fall, before she gets back to business. “But, listen—I called you in here because I need you to do me a favor.”
“Shoot.” Gene leans forward in his chair, hoping against hope that the favor might be something fun and not, like, Can you move my Subaru into one of the shady parking spots?
“I need you to give Estrada a tour of the stadium.”
Gene sucks his lips between his teeth to keep from grimacing. Positive attitude, he reminds himself.
“Sure, yeah. Not Gonzo?” The whole endeavor would be significantly less awkward with Ernie’s presence added to the mix.
“The pitchers have Gonzales covered. Just Estrada, thanks.”
It’s a dismissal of sorts, in her subtle but firm way.
When Gene goes looking for Luis, Kyle Nguyen points him toward the showers.
Gene elects to wait at the edges of the locker room proper, in the hopes it will make for a less awkward reunion than the showers might. When Luis emerges, though, he wears a towel and nothing else, and Gene regrets every decision that landed him in this locker room, in front of this man. There is no amount of googling that could have prepared Gene for the immediate, too-deep recognition that sucks every bit of oxygen from the space around them.
Luis is always shorter than Gene expects, borderline tall in any other company but almost small amongst athletes, his collarbone nonetheless distractingly eye-level for Gene. His skin is still that same bright and beautiful brown, his arms thoroughly tan-lined where a T-shirt might fall; his eyelashes are still long, his eyebrows still thick, his hair almost-black and, yes, still fucking perfect. He’s handsome—has always been—but also? Almost pretty, in a way that photos just can’t convey.
There are differences, too: broader shoulders, deeper eye bags, shorter hair, more of a beard. Somehow even less confidence than Luis used to project. When he opens his mouth, the left side of his lips remains unmoving in a way it didn’t used to—nerve damage, courtesy of the same car accident that kept him off the field for a full season. And still, Gene recognizes him. More foundation-crumbling than that, though, is that Luis clearly recognizes him. The way Luis stares at him, the way his eyes slide a little to the left of Gene’s ear when Gene stares back, makes Gene feel eighteen all over again, breathless and tense and desperate for things to make sense.
It’s not as if Gene has changed so much, really. Not like a shorter haircut and a few years of testosterone have altered him so fundamentally as to look like someone fully new. But Gene has separated his time at Stanford—those pictures of him and Luis in the same jersey, crowded at the mound when Stanford’s ace pitched them into the College World Series, happy in a way that feels simpler in hindsight than it did at the time—so thoroughly from his time in the minors. It’s jarring to have Luis here, suddenly belonging to both the before and the now—to have to reconcile those two versions of Luis, those two versions of himself.
When Gene finally manages to talk, his voice much deeper than last time they spoke, Luis’s face does register the barest traces of surprise. That, at least, is satisfying.
“Baker asked me to give you a tour.”
“Uh,” is the first word Luis says to him in seven years.
“It won’t take long.”
“Can I”—he squints, shoulders raising up by his quite prominent ears—“put on a shirt first?”
His voice—which Gene used to know so well but which sounded so different in the video interviews he definitely did not watch last night—comes out as flat as his mouth.
Yes, it would be for the best if he put on a shirt, because—well. It would just be for the best.
“I’ll meet you outside?” Gene asks.
When Luis walks out two minutes later, a dog trails behind him—a husky, his tongue lolling and mouth open wide, one eye bright blue and the other brown, with far too much fur for the summer. Luis has changed into the most nondescript outfit possible: a T-shirt, impossibly soft-looking; full-length track pants, tighter than they need to be and tied at the waist; a plain zip-up hoodie, worn open; and remarkably uncreased sneakers, the only pop of color.
“You good to go?” Gene asks.
Luis shrugs, like, Sure, let’s get this over with.
Awesome. Perfect. Great start.
Gene points out the weight room, sparsely attended today while everyone enjoys the first-day-back-from-vacation atmosphere of the clubhouse. Luis nods. Gene shows him the equipment room, not yet completely stale this early in the season. Luis nods. Gene shows him the elevator up to the press box, where their announcers sit dutifully for each game.
“They’re like local celebrities,” Gene says. “Dan and Nancy?”
Luis nods, his expression unrecognizing.
“Well, very local celebrities. Like, pretty much just in the stadium.”
Gene has listened to Dan and Nancy announce games for as long as he can remember, used to mouth along from the dugout while they announced his dad’s name in the lineup. Dan and Nancy may be celebrities only to Gene, but they are celebrities all the same.
Luis nods.
Voice and shoulders already tired from carrying every bit of this conversation’s weight, Gene leads Luis down the main concourse, the one with the visible metal beams of their bleachers’ undersides. He explains that the stadium was constructed in the 1920s, making it by far the oldest stadium for a Triple-A team; its last major renovation was in the nineties, right before the Beavers moved in.
Luis.
Nods!
Gene can’t bite back his grimace now. This has gone about as well as he expected it to, but it would help if Luis would, like—say words. At least his dog is smiling.
The thing is, Beaverton’s field is home to Gene. It sits off Beaverton Hillsdale Highway, down the road from Beaverton City Library, across the parking lot from the Village Inn where he and his dad used to eat an occasional breakfast during the season. All the streets and landmarks that made up home when Gene was a kid. He wants to point to the cracks in the paint, to the hot-dog-and-pretzel stand, to the women’s bathrooms where, at age eight, he hurled cotton candy while his dad held his hair back. He wants to laugh over how his dad apologized every time someone walked in and found one of Beaverton’s players, still in his uniform, huddled over the trash can with his kid; he’d imitate his dad’s Romanian accent—Sorry, sorry, give us one minute please.
He’s not sure if this version of Luis would appreciate the humor or the heart of that story, so he keeps it to himself.
Instead, he takes Luis to the nosebleed seats and sits him down. If Luis has questions, he can ask them. Gene has already done more than the minimum.
A few silent minutes after they settle into their seats, someone starts to replace the letters on the lineup. Beaverton uses a green-painted wood scoreboard, with the game’s stats manually posted in white numbers and letters. Every player’s name, number, and position gets placed into the lineup before each of their games—the embodiment of classic, old-school baseball, where Gene should not but does belong.
Luis watches those letters just as Gene does, and Gene realizes, belatedly, that the name they’re spelling up top of the lineup—batting first—is his own.
Gene Ionescu, number zero, second baseman, spelled out in those tall and incredible and improbable letters, all five-foot-two and 145 pounds of him. Up at the plate first. He’ll take the season’s inaugural swing, hopefully get his name notched next to the season’s inaugural hit—
Wait.
Second baseman?
He looks again, squints until his eyes sting.
There it sits, next to his name: 2B.
“Well,” Gene says. Positive fucking attitude. “Good news for you.”
Luis takes this opportunity to speak up, finally. “Is it news? You’re a second baseman.”
Gene’s eyebrows raise so slowly, so perfectly in sync with the turn of his head, that by the time Luis makes it into his line of sight, his eyebrows have completed their journey to his hairline. “Excuse me?” he says.
Luis manages, somehow, to look surprised by Gene’s reaction. “I just mean, you’ve never really been a natural shortstop.”
Every bit of Gene, every inch of him, wants to tell this guy that, when he left their college team, Gene held down the fort just fine for the next three years. That he had finished second in Gold Glove voting last year, thanks. That his glove always has been and will remain more than fine. He wants to ask if Luis would like to go down to the field and see who can sprint down a rogue ground ball faster.
He wants to ask Luis what he thinks a natural shortstop is, exactly, and why Gene can’t be one. To ask if he knows that Gene still gets asked by hecklers if he got lost on the way to the softball field. He could yell his accomplishments until he went hoarse, and they wouldn’t matter to the people who only want to mock him for not wearing a cup, that vocal and not-insignificant subset of fans who are upset that Portland would ever allow someone who looks like him to play in their system.
Luis’s dismissal stings differently, though. He doesn’t call Gene a gimmick, doesn’t roll his eyes at Gene’s presence; he just doesn’t care, seems to now think of Gene like a piece of lint to be brushed from his shoulder.
The worst part, though, is that Luis is right—Gene was never going to be Beaverton’s shortstop today. This lineup is exactly the one Gene knew to expect, much as he had tried to pretend otherwise.
He sucks his teeth, not gently, and nods once. “All right,” he says. “That’s the tour. See you at batting practice.”
He leaves Luis sitting there in the stands. It’s possible Luis can and will help their team this season, but what Gene hopes for most in this moment—what the selfish, petulant pit in his stomach begs for—is for Luis to fall flat on his face.
The first play of the season comes directly toward Gene, a simple pop-up off of Vince’s third pitch—a breaking ball that the batter barely catches a piece of. It’s an easy out for Gene, as if the guy had aimed right for his glove.
Or, at least, it should have made for an easy out.
Instead, Luis crashes into Gene from the right, much more solid than he looks. He makes no call, lays no claim to a ball that has sailed perfectly into Gene’s territory—just tries to make the catch anyway, and fails. Almost as if he doesn’t trust his teammate to make the simplest play imaginable.
They tumble into the dirt and lie there, tangled, Luis’s elbow buried in Gene’s shoulder, until Gene pushes up and forward and gets the ball in his ungloved hand. He snaps it to first and scrambles to cover second.
The opposing team’s runner holds at first base. If the error gets charged to Gene and breaks his perfect fielding streak, he’ll be pissed.
“Fuck,” Luis mutters from the ground. His voice deep and even, unmoved and unmoving.
Out of begrudging sportsmanship, Gene offers his hand to him. As frustrated as he might be, it’s nothing compared to the offense that bubbles under his skin when Luis ignores that hand and acts put off by its presence, standing up and sighing.
Okay.
Fuck this guy, maybe.
Vince turns and gives Gene a look that’s part Are you okay? and part What the hell. Gene waves him off. He tries to do the same thing to his own sinking gut. Plenty of games get off to a shaky start, for plenty of reasons. He can’t do anything but get settled into position for the next batter.
Still, by the time the ninth inning arrives, even Gene’s hope has worn thin. With two outs and down by one run, he stands in the on-deck circle, willing Luis to hit the ball anywhere a fielder isn’t. Take a walk. Anything. It just has to be enough to get to first, to give Gene a chance to tie the game up.
Luis strikes out looking on three pitches, his bat never leaving his shoulder. By the time Gene and Vince straggle to the locker room with a frustrated Baker, Luis has long since left.