SEPTEMBER
Postseason record: Pacific Coast League West Champions
PCL Championship record: 0–0
In spite of his occasional injuries and the limits his shoulder puts on him even when healthy, no one questions Vince’s status as the team’s de facto ace. He pitched the game that got them into the playoffs, and it stands to reason that, four days later, he will pitch the first game of round one. He has more than earned the long-overdue distinction.
The morning of that first game, Gene thunders down the Altmans’ stairs with his duffel bag, long since packed. He rounds the corner into the kitchen. Jack is already pouring finely ground coffee into the small metal bowl of an espresso maker, preparing to pull a shot on the at-home machine he got Vince for his birthday last year. Gene waves to get his attention and signs, “Morning,” when Jack looks up at him.
“Morning, Gene!” Jack signs back, his extended fingers curling into Gene’s sign name. Lately, Gene hasn’t felt much like the smile that name evokes, but coming downstairs, surrounding himself in the Altmans’ happiness, helps. “Excited for today?”
Gene nods, cracking open the oven door to get a peek at the good-luck quiche Jack will have made. Jack snaps his towel against Gene’s back with no venom at all, more like a gentle nudge than any real threat.
“Just looking!” Gene signs.
“Do you want to eat down here?” Jack asks.
Gene says, “I thought you’d never ask.” He remembers the signs only for “think” and “ask,” but he says it aloud, too, and Jack grabs a third plate. Then, when Jack is facing him again, Gene adds, “You coming to the game today?” This question he knows well—he asks it before almost every home game, as if Jack doesn’t have a go-to seat just above the dugout. Gene can’t remember the last time he saw someone else in that seat. Never, if he had to guess.
“Wouldn’t miss it,” Jack signs, each movement of his hands emphatic and purposeful, but easy.
An hour later, Vince pulls into his usual parking spot in the staff lot of Beaverton’s stadium, turns the engine off, and does not move. It’s the first time Gene has ever seen him nervous before a game. Sore, yes; cranky, frequently. But nervous? Vince doesn’t get nervous. Vince has played for good teams and disappointing teams and historically terrible teams, and he has been a bright spot on every single one. It leaves little for a person to be nervous about.
Yet here he is, staring out the windshield at the welcoming embrace of their old-ass stadium, and the nerves are unmistakable in the set of his shoulders and mouth.
If they lose this game—if they lose, say, three games in a row and get knocked out of the playoffs in the first of two rounds—it could be Vince’s last ever game as a pro. Gene is painfully aware of this fact, and if he had to guess, he’d say Vince is, too.
He reaches over and claps a hand on Vince’s chest.
“Come on, old man,” he says.
“Don’t call me old. I’m not old today.”
Gene yanks on the door handle and gets out of the car. “Sure, Altzy.”
As if to punctuate his point, Gene slings both of their duffels over one shoulder and raises his eyebrows at Vince, who gives his shoulder a single prod before yanking his door open and facing the game ahead.
Luis waits in the locker room, head leaned against the locker stall divider, shoulders slumped. Gene can tell, with one glance, that Luis got even less sleep than usual last night, and he wishes more than anything that Luis would have called him. They could have stayed up together.
Of course, Gene told Luis not to do pretty much exactly that. It doesn’t soften the blow of missing him.
They do their laps around the stadium, then drop into their familiar push-ups at the top of each section, and today, Gene does not try to impress him with one-armed push-ups or by shoving himself off the ground hard enough to clap before he falls back down. He lowers himself until the tip of his nose barely grazes the cement of the step, and then straightens his arms again until the pleasant discomfort cuts through the morning cold.
When they practice grounders, they don’t do trick shots; the movements are tired but reliable, and Gene can’t help but think of Luis in his truck, telling Gene that things make sense here, playing with him.
Ever since he and Luis started to practice together, since they started to play well and, more important, since he and Luis started to let each other into their lives off the field, too, Gene has marveled at how fun baseball can still be, years into his career, even when things don’t go his way.
It isn’t fun today. But they do their jobs, and they do them well, and if Gene can’t produce at the plate, he can at least help Luis hold down the fort at the keystone. However much he has fallen apart over the last month, that has remained consistent.
It’s better than losing him altogether, at least.
NANCY: We’re seeing history today, as Vince Altman wraps up his warm-up pitches and takes the mound for the first time ever in a postseason game.
DAN: Almost twenty years into his career, he has finally made it, Nancy.
NANCY: Not exactly how he planned, I’m sure. He spoke pretty openly about wanting to get a ring with Portland.
DAN: Right, you have to imagine this is an exciting day for him.
NANCY: That’s a clean strikeout to start the top of the first. It’s been an incredible season for him. Pretty emblematic of the Beavers season as a whole—they had a fine roster, but very few of us expected anything approaching this kind of season. Vince Altman has been one of the biggest examples of that.
DAN: And we should get at least one more stellar performance out of him yet. He’ll be on a limited pitch count today, working on slightly shortened rest after throwing a perfect game to close out the season.
NANCY: The first perfect game in Beaverton Beavers history, Dan.
DAN: It was a special thing to see.
NANCY: You just can’t want anything but the best for this guy.
DAN: He pitches well wide for ball one.
NANCY: That did not look good.
DAN: The delivery was a bit off there—
NANCY: It almost looks like he’s struggling with his windup.
DAN: That’s ball two.
NANCY: Even wider than the first.
DAN: Ernie Gonzales is calling a mound visit. He’s done a hell of a job getting this pitching staff in order this year, don’t you think?
NANCY: Especially with most of them skewing so young. He has more than earned a long look in Portland next season.
DAN: Agreed. It looks like Steph Baker is calling out the trainer.
NANCY: Oh, that’s never a good sign, Dan.
DAN: No it is not.
NANCY: His teammates are surrounding him at the mound, but the way he’s holding that shoulder—
DAN: I don’t think this is going to be the game he planned on pitching.
Gene really does try not to cry when they take Vince off the field, and he really does succeed, until Vince takes his hat off and puts it in front of his face to hide his own tears. The worst part of it is that Gene can’t run off the field to find him, because Vince would never forgive him if he didn’t see this thing through for both of them.
He takes his spot, the same as he has all season. He wipes his eyes, adjusts his hat.
Vince may not want to watch the team succeed without him, but Gene knows for a fact that he’d rather that than watch the team lose.
But the fact of the matter is, they find themselves in a six-run hole by the end of the first, it’s turned into eight runs by the end of the second, and long relief quickly turns into bullpen damage control.
All teams make clumsy, avoidable mistakes sometimes, but today’s whole game consists entirely of these mistakes, one after another, until Baker essentially just throws up her hands. A 12–1 deficit in the bottom of the seventh doesn’t inspire considerable hope, even for the Genes of the world.
“Waste of fucking arms,” Baker mutters, looking over her roster cards.
Gene hasn’t helped matters. In his four at-bats, he has struck out all four times, by far his worst showing this season. It’s saying something, too, considering the uninspiring numbers he’s put up in the last month. If they had any chance of catching up, Baker would have replaced him with a pinch hitter a couple innings ago.
And then, as they enter the top of the ninth, down a whopping 15–1, courtesy of two singles and a homer in the eighth, Baker points at their backup infielder.
“Grab your glove, you’re playing second.”
Gene turns to her, ready to argue his case. If you play a shit game, you finish the shit game. You take responsibility for it. He shouldn’t get to ride the bench while his teammates grind those last three outs.
But instead of pulling him, Baker looks him directly in the eye, something she hasn’t really done since their blowup, and says, “You’re pitching.”
This garners a hearty laugh from Kyle Clark, the first emotion he’s displayed all night that can’t be classified in the “disappointed older brother” collection. Luis, too, looks like he’s trying to hold back his amusement and failing terribly. Ernie just claps Gene’s shoulder with his oversized catcher’s mitt and nods toward the field.
“You know my signs?” he asks.
“I mean, yeah. That’s not going to help, but, yeah.”
As they walk onto the field, Gene ignores the announcers and grounds himself in each of his teammates’ grunts of encouragement as they pass him by, and in Ernie’s voice behind his raised glove.
“What’s the plan?” Gene asks him.
“How good’s your fastball?”
“Sixty? Sixty-five?”
“Oh, Christ,” Ernie says, but his accent and his smile make it sound like a good thing, somehow. “Any curves?”
“Only my ass.”
Ernie tips his head back and laughs, a short, loud bark of a thing. “You and me both. Well, this should be fun at least!”
Baseball has given Gene precious little fun lately. He has served up shit sandwich after shit sandwich of a game, playing just well enough to not screw over his team during their final playoff push. It keeps him up at night—more than any of the rest of it. More than Baker saying Gene will ruin Luis’s career and his own. More than the looming threat of Vince’s retirement and departure from Gene’s everyday life. More than Gene’s crushed hopes of ever playing well in the bigs. Not more than Luis’s broken voice in his truck, the empty space in Gene’s life where Luis should be—but close.
The opposing team’s batter looks amused, seeing Gene up there on the pitcher’s mound, and Gene can’t really blame him.
Ernie flashes the sign for what Gene thinks might be a fastball on the upper-right corner. Those pitch signs are honestly a lot harder to read when he’s sweating this badly. His contact lens prescription must need updating, too, because he’s pretty sure Baker is flashing him a thumbs-up from the dugout, and that can’t be right. But when he nods to Ernie and tosses the pitch Ernie might have asked for, and it lands in its intended spot—albeit at a comically slow speed—Baker gives a yell of approval from the dugout and claps her hand against the back of her clipboard.
It’s one strike, sure. Gene isn’t a pitcher, sure. They’re going to lose this game—badly. Sure.
But that vote of support from Baker, and the way his whole team stands at his back, in spite of the jack shit he’s done to help them over the past month? Gene raises his glove to catch the ball when Ernie throws it back to him, and suddenly the idea of throwing it again doesn’t seem so onerous.
It seems, almost, well…fun.
They’re going to lose anyway. He might as well make it as enjoyable as he can. If they lose laughing, well, that’s better than losing with their heads hung.
Gene gets his first out of the game on a line drive caught with impressive ease by Luis, because of course it’s Luis. He checks the dugout and finds Vince there, leaning his legs against the fence, his good arm hanging over its railing, clapping one-handed against the wood for that out like Gene is about to secure them an important win.
When Gene gives up a home run and Ernie calls a mound visit, Luis jogs in and stands at Gene’s back, his elbow resting on Gene’s shoulder and his glove covering his mouth. For all that has happened between them, that elbow still steadies Gene, reminds him how well his lungs and heart can work.
“He’s got this,” Luis says.
Ernie brushes him off. “Oh, I know. I just wanted to say, we’re going to get this next guy to strike out. I’m calling it.”
Gene covers his mouth and says, “Like fuck we are.”
Ernie grins. “Decide it.”
And, okay.
He can do that. He’s not ready to decide a whole game, to feel that kind of confidence and surety, but one strikeout? He can manage that.
“Okay,” he says. “We’re gonna strike this next guy out.”
Ernie jogs back to the dish, Luis bops his glove against Gene’s shoulder, and Ross and Cooper give him quick, encouraging looks. The whole infield came in to stand at his back for that mound visit, like he was a real pitcher. Even playing his inarguably worst position in their worst loss of the season, at the most important moment, on the sixth mound visit of the game, they dragged themselves in to support him.
He throws absolute garbage to the next guy, not even trying to get the ball into the strike zone. And the guy swings at every one of them, striking out on an easy three pitches.
Ernie, not even bothering with a mound visit, yells, “What did I say!” loud enough for Gene to hear. Baker and Vince and almost every guy on their bench stand at the dugout railing, the rest of them reliable at Gene’s back.
And maybe this is what it feels like—to let yourself be unremarkable, and to try your best anyway. Maybe, Gene thinks, while he shrugs at Ernie for calling a pitch Gene doesn’t even know the grip for, this is what it feels like to let other people help you across the finish line. Maybe this is what Vince meant about the goalposts being arbitrary.
Maybe—maybe—this is what it feels like to let people love you even when you fail. Luis’s elbow on his shoulder, he’s got this—and he does. He has this team, and this game, and, he hopes someday, Luis.
He drives Vince and Jack home after the game, after Vince has been checked out by every trainer they have and scheduled for another MRI tomorrow morning. Jack sits in the backseat with Vince, and they don’t talk about it, because Vince has asked them not to yet.
So, at a red light, Gene reaches his right hand into the backseat, the universal gesture of a dad requesting a bite of his kid’s snack. What he gets is Vince’s hand in his, long enough to give him a squeeze and meet his eye in the rearview mirror.
“Can I say something earnest, or are you not in the mood?” Gene asks.
“You have a green light,” Vince says.
“Literally or figuratively?”
Vince sighs, put-upon in the most Vince way Gene can imagine. “Both.”
And while Gene gets honked at by the guy in the obnoxiously large SUV behind him, he keeps his hand in Vince’s and eases into the intersection.
“I love you, and I’m still going to love you when you leave, and you’re going to be stuck with me no matter how far away you move. Can you sign that for Jack, too?”
Vince smiles and rolls his eyes, but he does as Gene asks. Gene keeps his eyebrows raised in expectation until Vince says it back.
“I love you, too,” Vince says, his signing just as exasperated as his voice. “Now can you try not to get us in a car wreck? I already had to watch you pitch today, it’s criminal that I also have to watch you drive.”
When they get home, and Gene settles, disappointed but not in any way that matters or will last, he types at least a dozen different texts to Luis, every last one of them a variation on the same thing. That he misses Luis, that nothing has changed, but that he would rather figure out every bit of that complicated mess with Luis than spend any more time at all without him.
That things make more sense to Gene when Luis is there, too.
That he loves him, and will love him even when he leaves.
He deletes every text before he sends it, but he tastes those thoughts all night, rolls them around in his mouth until he might know how to say them aloud.