July 2008

Lakeland, Florida
Mercantile Stadium

The lacklustre game against the Sarasota Redbirds would have tested the patience of the most fanatical baseball enthusiast.

Sloppy play, defensive miscues, and numerous mental mistakes marred what should have been an entertaining contest between two of the Central Florida League’s long-time rivals. As the moon muscled its way into the cloudless night sky, and the game began its third hour, the Redbirds and Wildcats were still mired in the bottom of the sixth.

With runners on first and second, Tyson Dante got a hold of a 3–1 fastball and crushed it into the left field gap, plating both runners. The double put Lakeland up by a field goal, 10–7.

Moments later, the bullpen phone jingled off its perch on the pen wall. Tim Reid, pulling double duty as the Wildcats’ bullpen coach, answered the phone before the end of the first ring. He held the receiver to his ear, listened intently for a moment, and replaced the phone back in its cradle without speaking a word.

To describe the Badger as a man of few words was an understatement. During one of the more arduous bus trips after a game in early May, a bet was placed by some of the Wildcats looking to pass the time: How many words would Reid speak over the course of the four-hour trip? The winning guess, made by reliever Chris Seaboard, was eleven. Although that number didn’t include the derivatives of “fuck” uttered by Reid after Danny Johnson accidentally spilled beer on him. Danny had been running up the aisle celebrating a complete game shutout, when he lost his balance and showered an unsuspecting Reid with a can of beer.

The multimillion-dollar contract paid by the front office and a lightning-quick intervention by Tom Conrad was the only reason Danny did not end up as roadkill on a desolate stretch of Florida freeway.

“Seaboard. Get loose,” Reid growled, passing along Conrad’s instructions.

Chris Seaboard jumped up and started stretching. The rest of the staff sat up a little straighter, knowing they could be called on at any point to enter the game.

Ordinarily, the denizens of the Wildcats’ bullpen would be hard-pressed to know the score at that juncture in the game, especially if Danny was pitching. Say what you want about Danny’s choice of extracurricular activities, the kid was definitely a workhorse and he ate up a lot of innings for Lakeland’s beleaguered bullpen.

Typically, conversations in the bullpen touched on topics emblematic of twenty-something males with too much time on their hands. Not surprisingly, global economic policy and international diplomacy did not rank highly as talking points. Usually, the guys just tried to figure out which woman in the stands had the biggest tits. Or who got laid the night before. And that was pretty much it. Rinse and repeat.

Such scintillating banter was stifled today, as the implosion of Wildcats starter Chad Cole required every reliever to focus on an impending appearance. As the home half of the sixth inning came to a close, Seaboard jogged toward the mound to the strains of “Until It Sleeps” by Metallica.

Gord glanced down the bench, the dirt covered in a sea of dip spit and sunflower seed shells, and pondered the social hierarchy that had developed in the bullpen over the course of the young season.

Each reliever on the staff occupied a rung of varying height on the bullpen pecking order. This position, determined early in spring training, was the result of a number of factors: pitching ability, experience, personality, likeability, confidence, and gregariousness. Where a pitcher ended up on the social ladder was ultimately dependent on his ability to jell with his teammates. Those unable to do so found themselves cast down to the bottom rungs, basically ostracized by the rest of the staff.

Gord Mattis, as the elder statesman on the roster and a popular figure in the clubhouse, was close to the top tier of the hierarchy. Where he fell short was pitching ability; a situational lefty with a ho-hum fastball could not be the Alpha Dog of the bullpen.

And, while Gord had an easygoing demeanour off the field, once he stepped between the white lines, he was all business. His greatest pet peeve was people who didn’t respect the game. He was the de facto judge of Lakeland’s Kangaroo Court, fining players a handful of dollars each time they did something stupid or disrespectful on the field. Gord took it upon himself to admonish any player deemed to be in violation of baseball’s unwritten code.

Gord policed opposing teams as well. He was always the first Wildcats pitcher to plunk an opponent who pimped a home run or committed a similar transgression. Gord considered playing professional baseball a privilege and he hated to see the game’s integrity marred by questionable on-field behaviour.

This commitment to the honour of his profession rankled some of the team’s younger players, who had a cavalier attitude toward the sport. Gord couldn’t stand guys who coasted through games, took baseball for granted, and believed the game owed them something.

The undisputed Alpha Dog of the bullpen was Steve Anderson, a six-foot-five 240-pound behemoth from the University of Georgia. Drafted in the first round, after a sophomore year in which he averaged an astonishing fourteen strikeouts per nine innings, Anderson possessed a rising fastball that occasionally touched triple digits.

Unfortunately, Anderson didn’t have another pitch. When you throw in the upper nineties in college, there’s no need for secondary stuff. Anderson had little difficulty overpowering kids stressed out about term papers and finding gainful employment after graduation. Getting guys out whose sole purpose was to play baseball at the major league level posed more of a problem. He was used as the team’s closer, but the organization projected him to be a top-of-the-rotation starter. Therefore, the Lakeland coaching staff had worked tirelessly with him to develop a more balanced arsenal.

“Mattis,” Anderson asked, “can you show me your changeup grip again?”

To survive in A ball, Gord had to mix speeds and keep hitters off balance. Otherwise, teams would feast on his mediocre fastball and his career would be snuffed out like a wax candle on a deserted dinner table. For that reason, Gord, through necessity, possessed one of the better changeups on the staff.

“Yeah, throw me a ball,” Gord replied.

Holding the ball loosely in his palm, with his thumb and forefinger making a circle on the side of the stitched leather, Gord lectured Anderson on the nuances of throwing a good changeup. He divulged how he sometimes varied the pressure on the ball with his fingertips to get more movement with the pitch. As Anderson listened attentively, Gord told his fellow pitcher to release the ball with a snap of the wrist, akin to pulling down a window shade.

Just as Gord was about to jump into a dissertation on the merits of gripping the ball parallel to the seams, as opposed to perpendicular, he was interrupted by Jeff Merkle. Merkle was one of the bottom rungs on the bullpen ladder.

“Hey, guys! Did you watch the highlights last night?”

“No, we didn — ”

Gord was cut off by Merkle’s incessant blather. “The web gems were unreal! Two sick diving catches. And St. Louis hit a walk-off grand slam in the tenth to beat Cincinnati. Has anyone seen that new Will Ferrell movie?”

Both Gord and Anderson looked at Merkle in dumbfounded amazement. The speed and inanity of the words that spewed from his mouth were simply astonishing. Silence was a foreign concept to Merkle. He deemed it necessary to fill any dead air with constant chatter about any pop culture topics currently occupying the public consciousness. That was one of the three reasons Merkle was cast down to the depths of the bullpen hierarchy. The second was that, quite simply, he sucked. He was a 45th-round draft pick. In the mid-1990s, a front-office executive from Chicago had drafted his daughter higher.

No one could quite understand why Merkle even had a roster spot. He had terrible off-speed pitches and mediocre control, and his fastball couldn’t dent a pillow. Merkle was relegated strictly to mop-up duty in blowouts. Even in those no-pressure situations, he was somehow able to produce an earned run average over nine. There were rumours that Merkle had an uncle in the front office — that had to be the only explanation why his carcass was still occupying a spot on the staff.

The third and final reason why he was so unpopular among the other pitchers was that Merkle made Eddie Haskell look like Stanley Kowalski. He kissed so much ass to gain favour with the coaching staff that the team was surprised his nose wasn’t permanently brown. Merkle volunteered for so many mundane clubhouse duties and was so eager to blindly agree to everything the coaching staff said, that the team derisively gave him the nickname “Rudy,” after the character in the universally loved movie of the same name.

A story of inspiration and beating the odds, it was one of the few films deemed acceptable for males to show emotion and cry. Merkle thought the nickname was a term of endearment, which just encouraged his annoying behaviour.

“Will Ferrell is awesome. You guys really need to see it. It might be funnier than Anchorman; actually, maybe not Anchorman, but definitely better than Blades of Glory. There’s this one scene when he — ”

Anderson could not listen to any more. “Rudy, would you shut the fuck up? I don’t give a shit. Five minutes of silence, please.”

Completely lacking self-awareness, Merkle bounced up, moved to the other end of the bench and tried to engage two other members of the staff in the same pointless drivel. Mattis and Anderson looked at each other and just shook their heads, turning their attention back to the game, in case one of them was called upon.

After crossing the four-hour-and-thirty-minute threshold, the game finally ended on a walk-off bloop single by Tyson Dante in the bottom of the ninth. It was Dante’s fifth hit of the night, tying the Lakeland team record.

The next afternoon, Gord was alone in the team’s dank and dusty weight room, prepping for the rubber match against the same Sarasota Redbirds. The digital clock on the barren, paint-chipped wall read 2:00 p.m.

He climbed underneath a plate-ridden barbell to complete a set of heavy back squats. The first pitch wasn’t scheduled until 7:30 p.m., so most players wouldn’t stroll into the park for another two hours.

Gord found it therapeutic to train alone. Most players treated their strength training sessions as a glorified social hour, completing only a light set of work every five to ten minutes in between bouts of conversation.

The only things Gord needed to keep him company in the weight room were the driving beat of heavy metal rock music crackling through the primitive sound system, a pool of sweat dripping off his body, and gymnastics chalk streaked across his hands, wrists, and forearms.

Gord found it unbearable to watch the rest of the team train in such a haphazard manner. Their workouts lacked purpose and focused too much on what he termed “Venice Beach” muscles: chest and biceps. A high bench press or preacher curl had a very limited application to baseball. Those exercises lacked functionality and were basically useless in developing true total body strength and power.

The majority of the team put in only enough work to get the coaching staff off their backs. They preferred to spend their time working on baseball skills rather than hitting the weights. Gord was the opposite. He understood the benefits of heavy-weight, low-rep strength training and the positive effects it had on his pitching performance, stamina, and recovery.

Gord painfully finished the fifth rep of his 375-pound work set and carefully racked the weight. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed movement near the entrance. Tom Conrad strode purposefully into the centre of the tiny weight room and switched off the music.

“Mattis, what are you doing here?”

“Just putting in my work, Skip,” Gord replied in between heavy intakes of breath.

“Don’t you remember our chat yesterday? You’re my long guy. I want you to throw three innings tomorrow afternoon.”

“I know, but I always lift heavy the day before I pitch. It helps me mentally prepare.”

“Okay, if you say so. I would think you’d want to be fresh. This is a very important stretch coming up for you.” Conrad considered Gord for a moment. “I do like how you’re here early, though. It sets a good example for the younger guys.”

Turning on his heel, Conrad ended the conversation and exited the weight room swiftly, closing the door behind him. Gord flicked the music back on and began unracking the bar. Typical, he thought. The questioning of his fanatical commitment to strength training was nothing new. Coaches and teammates had long doubted the effectiveness of such a training strategy, but Gord was undeterred in his devotion.

In Gord’s mind, it was the thousands of hours he spent toiling in the gym that led to a career in professional baseball. Otherwise, the opportunity to play baseball for a living would have vanished into the air like the last wisps of smoke on a dying fire.