In which your narrator’s physical
deficiencies are revealed and rationalized.
At about five years old, my dad took me to my very first Chicago Cubs game. I really don’t remember much of it, but my mom sure loves to tell the story. So there was my dad, his good friend, and me sitting in the middle of the bleachers on a hot summer day. Throughout the game I watched them with other bleacher bums, telling old stories, sitting out in the sun, shirtless, drinking beers. Apparently, I was consumed with not only counting the runs in the game but the number of beer cups in everyone’s cup stacks. I was also very confused on why the woman in front of us was removed for taking her shirt off. So when I returned home I was excited to tell my mom about my male bonding time, including how many beers my dad drank, the woman flashing us, and the new vocabulary of profanity I had learned. I was not allowed to return to the bleachers with my father until about fourteen years later.
— GEORGE LOBB, Chicago, Illinois
ONCE, SEATTLE MARINERS THIRD BASEMAN ADRIAN BELTRE veered to his left to field a hot ground ball at the hot corner. The ball took a goofy hop and hit him right in the groin. Beltre was not wearing a cup. It did not end well. He ended up with a “severely bruised” testicle and “internal bleeding.” I am not certain which is worse.
In the aftermath of the “issue”—Beltre immediately went on the disabled list and played the position with eyes crossed the rest of the season—several major-league players emerged to confess that, now that you mention it, they didn’t wear cups either. Oakland second baseman Mark Ellis and Detroit counterpart Placido Polanco said they avoided cups out of “comfort,” and most players admitted they’d never heard of an outfielder wearing such protection. (In football, no one wears cups, which is insane.) Most fans were stunned; major leaguers don’t wear cups? They hit the ball hard in baseball. Mark DeRosa, playing for the Cardinals in 2009 (long story!), had the most rational reaction: “I tell you what, I don’t take the team picture without wearing a cup.”
But I understand. When I played baseball, I didn’t wear a cup either. And I was a catcher.
Like any baseball fan, I’m convinced that this life—the one where I write and edit and type, the one where I smoke and drink and generally lay waste to the body I was given—is the wrong one, a mistake. Again: I’m hardly unique in this. One of the irrational pleasures of watching baseball is to delude yourself into thinking that it’s an accessible game, that it’s one you could play. Professional baseball players don’t run that much, they can be a little overweight, no one is body-slammed to the ground by four-hundred-pound men. Heck, if I’da caught a break, that could have been me. It ain’t so hard. Why those players complaining about their contracts? I’d play baseball for free.
But seriously: I was supposed to be a major-league baseball player. If you ask my father here, he’ll agree with me, even though he’s lying.
It’s not my fault no one discovered my talent in time. There is nothing, nothing in this world I miss more than playing baseball.
I’ve looked around for recreational leagues, but that’s all softball, a bunch of fat guys drinking beer in the outfield, complaining about their jobs and their wives and their kids and their hemorrhoids. (I am now one of these people.) There is no real baseball, the way it’s supposed to be played, with fastballs on the inside corner and picking the runner off first, waving a guy home, sprinting away from the pitcher’s mound and heading for the stands because you just hit a batter with a pitch and now he’s running after you and you are scared.
I haven’t played actual organized baseball, actual baseball, in sixteen years. Since June 17, 1994, to be precise.
Throughout the Mattoon public youth baseball leagues, I had always been known as a bit of a throwback. Typically, our baseball-mad town would force-feed any kid between the ages of seven and fifteen into one of the locally sponsored teams. The dads would coach the kids, usually screaming at their sons to compensate for their own misspent youth, steering them quickly from the game. Most of those kids, by the time they were sixteen and had a car to get the FUCK away from Mom and Dad, did so and were too busy screwing in the backseat to have time for baseball.
I loved the thinning of the talent ranks though. In the youth summer leagues, thanks to those kids who decided baseball was too cerebral and bolted for factory jobs, I got my chance. We didn’t have enough players for an actual league, so we just corralled all the seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds left into a traveling all-star team. By the time I was eighteen and home for the summer from college, I was ready. It was my last chance at glory, the last time I’d be able to play baseball for a long, long time.
All the kids were younger than me, just out of high school at best, and I was the big college boy back in town. I was the grizzled workhorse, the Crash Davis, the vet making one last tour of duty. Everyone knew how much I would have missed playing, so I started every game at catcher, in Cerro Gordo, in Moweaqua, in Teutopolis.
We came down to the final games of the season, a doubleheader in rival city Effingham on, of all days, June 29. (We had a very short season.) Because it was a doubleheader, I only played catcher the first game, considering that two consecutive games would tire a catcher out the way a physical sport, such as basketball, tires people out. In baseball, that is not acceptable.
Early on, when I was learning the fundamentals of catching, I was taught that the best way to make sure no pitch in the dirt ever sneaked past you was to throw your mitt in front of your crotch and dive in front of the ball, allowing it to hit only your mitt or your chest protector, nowhere else. I was known as an excellent defensive catcher, but I was still looking for an edge. So in order to make certain that I instinctively thrust my mitt where it needed to go, which is the elementary nature of catching after all, I secretly—because no youth league coach in his right mind would allow a player to go without—refused to wear a cup. It never came back to bite me. My glove was where it was supposed to be; jeez, what more do you want from a catcher? Question my tactics, but do not question my results.
My coach, a happy guy who later ran for mayor, made a compromise with me: “In good conscience as a coach, I can’t let you catch both games, Will. But how about we put you at, say, third base for the second game? It’s the same principle, right? Knock down what’s in front of you?” Even though it had been so long since I’d played the field that I had to borrow a teammate’s glove, I agreed with him, and so it was.
By the way, Dad was supposed to come to this game, and he admits now that had he known it was my last game, he would come. “I couldn’t have imagined your last game would be when you were eighteen years old.” What a depressing thought.
In the first game, I threw a runner out, forgot to back up first base on a groundball that cost us a run, went 2-for-4 with 2 RBIs, and walked in my last at bat. We won 8–5. I took off my shin guards and chest protector for the last time, sighed, and grabbed some guy named Bill’s glove and headed to third base for my final game. I fielded the first couple of ground balls, warm-ups tossed by the first baseman, with ease, and when the first batter stepped to the box, I even started up some “hey batter, hey batter” chatter, because that’s what you do when you know you’re playing the last baseball game of your life. Our pitcher, an outfielder by position and ultimately a plumber by trade, walked the first guy on four pitches.
A short kid, about fifteen, scampered to the plate. I was ready, crouched in anticipation of the double-play ball, ready to scoop, pivot, and fire, the way Ken Oberkfell and Terry Pendleton used to do it.
Short Kid gets an inside “fastball” and slaps it down the line. Hard. So hard, in fact, that it takes one hop, spinning wildly, whistling, and plants itself in my crotch a split second before the glove can make the trip.
As you know, there is a brief second, before the gnashing and screaming and fuck fuck fuck happens, where you are able to rationally and disinterestedly understand that you have just been hit in the genitals, and it doesn’t hurt yet, but it’s about to crush you, and it’ll happen any minute now . . . then it happens.
I collapsed, and the spectators gasped, followed by those giggles we catch every time we see someone hit in the groin. The coach came out with an assistant and carried me off the field. That Bill guy with the glove took over.
And I spent the last seven innings of my baseball career with an ice pack under my shorts, keeping score, wondering when school started again.
JOSH PHELPS strikes out, immediately, as Josh Phelps is wont to do, and Joel Pineiro’s day is over. He gave up five runs in six innings, and I’m kind of proud of him.
Josh Phelps, despite the statistical pretzel-twisting I tried in the last chapter, is not a very good player. As it turns out, after this game, he batted seventeen more times, collected two more hits, and never played in the major leagues again. His career was like so many in baseball: completely irrelevant. There are countless guys like this: Crash Davis folks, who play in the majors for a couple of weeks, are never really noticed, and then disappear. They can say they were major leaguers. They can say they reached the Big Time. To fans, they’re jokes: The horrible Neifi Perez will be a punch line among my baseball nerd friends and me for the rest of my life. But it is an epic achievement. Making the major leagues requires years of effort, training, talent, and sweat. It is the culmination of years of work, and is only achieved by the very best. To reach that level of success in any other field would make you a captain of industry, a real Tom Wolfe Master of the Universe. In baseball, you get to be Josh Phelps. In baseball, jerks like me get to make jokes about you.
According to Baseball-Reference.com, there are 720 non-pitchers in baseball history who played in a major league game and never got a hit. The most famous of them is Moonlight Graham, immortalized in Field of Dreams. But he never had a chance to bat. He only played the field.
Even though my baseball career stalled as the backup catcher on the 1993 IHSA Big 12 Conference Champion Mattoon Green Wave—I still have the T-shirt to prove it—I take a certain amount of pride in my lifetime spotless major-league record. We think of baseball players as otherworldly athletes blessed with physical gifts beyond our imagination. This is true, of course, but sometimes, we improve on those gifts simply by staying out of the game altogether. That is to say: I think, by way of never making an out in the major leagues, I had a better major-league career than someone who did. That’s the theory. That’s what I’m hanging onto.
Fifty-two of those 720 actually had ten at bats without a hit. The leader of the pack is Larry Littleton, an Indians outfielder, who came to the plate twenty-seven times in 1981 and never so much as singled: He walked three times and even knocked in a run with a sacrifice fly. I’m not sure I could hit the ball far enough for a sacrifice fly. So for the sake of our discussion, the worst player shouldn’t have an RBI, or even a walk.
That leaves New York Giants catcher John O’Neill (who actually spread his fifteen pointless at bats over two seasons at the turn of the century) and Gus Creely, a punchless shortstop for the 1890 St. Louis Browns. Bah: Those were more than a hundred years ago. We need to think more recent.
Thus, this decade’s ten-and-upper, and my personal favorite, is Josh Labandeira, a 2004 Expos shortstop who, just to be comprehensive, also made one error in his six chances at the position. I like Labandeira for two reasons. One, in 2008, he was signed and released by three different teams (the Giants and the Rays cut him within a month of signing him); afterward, he took the hint and retired. The other reason I like Labandeira is because he’s five-foot-seven. Not only was my professional career better than his, but I’m also taller.
Josh Labandeira, who went 0-for-14 in his career, with a double play in there for good measure, might have had the least successful career in baseball history. And somewhere, in Little League, in youth league, in high school ball . . . he was the best player any of his teammates had ever seen.
DAD STILL HAS A TROPHY, down in his basement, that commemorates his 1963 Babe Ruth League Sportsmanship Award. It’s not all that prominently displayed, hanging on the wall with kleig lights on it or anything, but he’s not exactly hiding it either. It had never occurred to me to ask him about it before now because I am a bad son.
“How’d you get that trophy?”
I was a catcher. Some big sumbitch from Windsor came barreling around third base and lowered his shoulder as he came near me. Just smashed it right into my chin. I went flying, but I hung onto the ball. I remembered that there was a runner on first, so I popped up and fired to third and threw the guy out. When I got to the dugout, everyone was grab-assing me, telling me how great of a play it was. They asked me if it hurt, and I told them it didn’t, I said it didn’t hurt. But it hurt. It hurt like a goddamned bastard.
“Is that why I was a catcher?”
I didn’t want you to be a catcher. You were too small. That was your idea.
“Whenever I got barreled over by the runner and hung onto the ball, I always stood over him and dropped the ball lightly on his chest, so he knew that he hadn’t beaten me.”
That’s probably why you never won the sportsmanship award.
“How about a hitter? What kind of hitter were you?”
Lousy. I probably hit about .250. I didn’t strike out much, but I didn’t have any power. I was only in the lineup because I was a good catcher and I liked playing more than the other kids did. I don’t think I ever hit a home run. I did a lot of bunting.
“Could you hit the curveball?”
No. But you couldn’t either. I still think that runs on your mom’s side of the family, though.
WHEN I WAS SIX years old, Dad decided his bookish son—the one who had been chided by teachers for reading Mom, the Wolf Man and Me during recess—needed to start playing baseball, if just to get him off the couch. In Mattoon, five- to seven-year-olds were herded into something called T-ball, where you attempted to hit the stationary ball off a piece of black plastic, and since you couldn’t strike out, you just had to sit there, with parents and mean-ass kids staring, until you just hit the friggin’ thing, for Christ’s sake. For kids like me, for whom a baseball was that thing the other kids threw at you while you were reading Judy Blume, this was a laborious process. In the field, a coach once had to run out and remind me to face the batter and, for the love of God, please quit chewing on my glove.
In retrospect, I realize how difficult it must have been for my dad, who had to watch as his son ran to third base when he finally hit the ball. As a last-ditch effort, my father dragged me to Busch Stadium. It was breathtaking. It was like watching magic: It was watching humans sprout wings and fly. To Dad’s amazement, I was hooked. Something about it was otherworldly. What an odd game. Standing around, thinking, watching the planes pass, mulling . . . and then, suddenly, ACTION. I always liked to think before I did anything. This made me more cautious than other kids, less violent. And this made me perfect for baseball. It felt like it was specifically invented for me.
By high school, I was indeed backup catcher. Our cross-county rival was Charleston, and thanks to some sort of fan initiative, our team was slated to play at Busch before a Cardinals-Phillies game. This was back when old Busch had Astroturf and players’ legs would go careening off into center field when they rounded second. His hand forced by public sentiment, Coach Jackley was going to let everyone play, even the schleps with the pencils.
Like all bench riders, when I was finally given my chance to shine, I was going to prove everyone wrong. My teammates, constantly startled by my encyclopedic knowledge of former Cardinal Dane Iorg’s on-base percentage with two outs against left-handed pitchers in the fourth inning, surprised me by rallying around me in my quest for Busch Stadium glory. One even remarked to the local paper, “He’s the biggest Cardinal fan we know. We really want him to get a hit.”
We entered the stadium through the players’ gate—“Hey, check it out, Pedro Guerrero’s car!”—and walked onto the field. It was even bigger than I’d imagined. It felt like we were playing baseball on a faraway planet, a planet with an Arch. Glancing at the lineup card, I noticed I was batting fourteenth and playing right field in the third and sixth innings.
The third inning arrived, and I trotted out to right field, with Mattoon ahead 3–0. The trot to right was slow and ponderous. Every second had to be documented. I was playing at Busch Stadium.
It had rained the night before, and many of us were panicked the game might be canceled. We played, but the field was still wet. With two out, a runner on second, and a sandy-haired corn-fed kid at the plate, our pitcher threw an outside fastball that was lifted into, of all places, right field. I camped comfortably under the lazy fly.
The night before the game, thanks to a defective air conditioner, we’d hurriedly gathered our things and switched hotels. I didn’t realize that I’d left my cleats in the room until I was dressing for the game. I kept my sneakers on and hoped no one would notice.
As the ball floated toward me, I stepped six inches to my right . . . and my shoe gave way. Before I could understand what was happening, I was lying on wet turf with my sneaker sitting next to me and the ball far, far, beyond me. My one shoe and I sprinted to the wall, where I grabbed the ball and fired it back toward the infield, but the sandy-haired kid had long since crossed the plate. In the next day’s paper, Jim Kimball, the late, beloved sports editor of the Mattoon Journal-Gazette, listed his hit as a home run and didn’t even mention that I had fallen. Bless his soul. And the sandy-haired kid can tell his grandkids he hit a home run in Busch Stadium and have the proof to back it up.
In the stands, a man sitting next to my father said, “Yikes, who is that out there?”
“Um, I think it’s that Alexander kid,” my dad responded.
No one gave me the grab-ass in the dugout.
I COVER THE world of sports professionally. Sometimes I interview athletes, sometimes I interview reporters, sometimes I just blithely muse in prose form. I cannot do what they do. I am an observer, commenting on the actions of others but not acting myself.
There was this kid I went to high school with named Kevin Trimble.
Kevin was the best athlete to come out of Mattoon in twenty years. He was the star in football, baseball, and basketball—taller, faster, and with inherent agility and grace. Kevin’s big coming out party as an athlete was his freshman year, when, at a school assembly, the principal, desperately trying to be hip, dressed inexplicably like a Blues Brother, tossed him a pass from half court that Kevin threw down with a ferocious dunk. We had never seen anyone like Kevin at our school.
Kevin and I didn’t interact much. I usually tried to stay out of the way of guys like Kevin. He wasn’t a jerk, really, but he was just the most blessed, impressive student in school and tended to live his life that way. Whenever Kevin was in the room, he was the room; his presence elevated everyone else into something bigger than they were. We’re sitting here next to Kevin Trimble, we’d think. This will be something to tell our kids someday.
Kevin was the star center fielder for the Mattoon Green Wave, and I was the backup catcher/scorekeeper. It was my senior year, his junior, and two years, the Seattle Mariners would draft Kevin in the twenty-third round of the amateur draft. Before he went into the on-deck circle, he walked over to the quiet kid with the score book.
“Hey, Will, how many hits has this pitcher given up today?”
“Um, six. You’ve got two of ’em.”
He looked at me as if he were a paleontologist who had just come across the fossils of a specimen he’d long thought fictional.
“Will, if they ever have a draft for scorekeepers, you’ll go in the first round.” This proclamation was welcomed with grunts and chuckles. I don’t think he meant it to be mean. Kevin wasn’t that type of guy, not self-aware in that way: Even though I (and everybody else) was acutely aware he had been drafted by the Mariners (in Seattle, wherever the hell that was), I doubt he was even thinking of it when he said it. Truth is, I was a good scorekeeper. I think he meant it as a compliment. I think he was being nice. Even appreciative.
This is not how I felt about it when he said it. When I’ve told this story before, I’ve made myself into some sort of dugout Dorothy Parker. I cock an eyebrow, turn my head warily in his direction, and proclaim, “Kevin, if they ever have a draft for people who blow their talent and end up working for the city, you’ll go in the first round.” That story is patently false. I said nothing at the time, and it is only through hindsight that the “witticism” makes any sense at all. No one would ever say that to Kevin, not because they were afraid of him, but because no one thought Kevin would turn out to be anything other than a ten-time all-star and the guy with the “Mattoon: Home of Hall of Famer Kevin Trimble” sign welcoming visitors to town. I’ve made up the anecdote to pump up my own importance and make myself look like the high school outcast who always had his eye on the bigger picture; truthfully, I think that’s the only time Kevin ever spoke to me.
Kevin graduated as I ended my freshman year at the University of Illinois, and, with much fanfare, he announced he would be attending the school as well, under scholarship as a rare two-sport star, playing for the Illini baseball team and coach Lou Tepper’s beleaguered football program, which I was already covering for the student newspaper. I wrote an article for the Daily Illini about his impending arrival before the school year even started. He hadn’t come to campus yet, so I spoke with coaches of both teams about where he fit in their plans. All were ecstatic about this special talent.
Kevin barely lasted a week. Classes hadn’t even begun, and he had already begun to chafe under Tepper’s workout regimen. At Illinois, he wasn’t so important anymore; he was just another freshman grunt trying to catch the attention of his position coaches. Like any information about Kevin, all I gathered was through rumor and innuendo. I guess he missed his friends in Mattoon. He felt alone and without an anchor. He was never a student, not really, and he worried about the supposed advanced curriculum of a Big Ten school. He asked Coach Tepper for some time off, and next thing you knew, Kevin had dropped out and moved back home. He sat out a year, and then played for the Lake Land Community College baseball team. But a year without conditioning, and with the distractions and temptations that came with it, took its toll, and he was never a star again. He played two uninspired seasons, then left the school and, yes, ended up working for the city, in the parks department. (He now works as a high school coach.) He had been handed a singular ability, and he frittered it away. I looked at him with a mixture of disgust, pity, and melancholy.
Whenever I go home these days, all the Mattoon ex-pats pick one night to head to The Alamo, a steakhouse out by the Cross County Mall. When I was home one Christmas, I filed in with some old high school pals, and sure enough, over in the corner, was Kevin, with the same six people he was hanging out with years ago. Just like I was.
He hadn’t gotten fat, disappointingly, or at least not any fatter than I’d gotten. I walked over to him, said hi, and after an agonizing pause, his face registered a faint trace of recognition. “Hey, Will Leitch. My man. How you doing? I didn’t know you smoked cigarettes.” We made about thirty seconds of small talk, and he went back to his conversation—likely a variation on the same conversation he’d been having for fifteen years—with a “uh, good to see you. Merry Christmas.” He looked happy, actually; healthy and content. Years later, when he was inducted into the Mattoon Alumni Hall of Fame, he told the Journal-Gazette:
“You always think back, but I also think the year I went back to Lake Land was when I met my wife. I have no regrets. I met a wonderful woman and I wouldn’t have probably met her otherwise. I’m definitely happy working with athletes now. I don’t think I’d have had it any other way. I’d have loved to have been playing football on Sundays or playing baseball, but that didn’t work out.”
I could make some belabored argument about how Kevin has never really moved on from high school, and how that inability to move out of his own way has cost him countless opportunities of which most people can only dream. I could say that he is stuck in the past, and that this quiet obsession with what is gone and can be nevermore is tragic. But I would be wrong. Kevin is happy. Kevin has no regrets. He’s not the one writing this and still thinking about it: I am.
JASON LARUE strikes out, and Cesar Izturis grounds weakly to short. The inning is over. No momentum has carried over. The Cubs are six outs away. Dad and I stand up at the same time, disgusted. “Like I can listen to that seventh-inning stretch bullshit after that,” I tell him as we scoot past the standing Cubs fans.
“Yeah, at least put a good swing on it, Izturis,” he says. “For Christ’s sake.”
When the Boston Red Sox fell behind 3–1 in the 2007 American League Championship Series, reporters, after the Game 4 loss, asked then Red Sox outfielder Manny Ramirez about the importance of Game 5, if the Red Sox were panicking. His answer was terrifyingly honest.
“Why should we panic? We’ve got a great team. If it doesn’t happen, so who cares? There’s always next year. It’s not like it’s the end of the world.”
With his team on the precipice of seasonal extinction, Ramirez had committed the one sin baseball fans cannot forgive: He’d implied that he didn’t care whether his team won or not.
When the media gaggle talks about the integrity of baseball and threats to the great game, the usual suspects are gambling and steroids. But the average fan has, at this point, mostly made his or her peace with those. We’ve been through the wringer on both issues, and whatever our thoughts on the degrees of each offense, we accept them both as mostly out of our control and just hope our favorite player isn’t involved. We can handle that type of scandal; the last decade has opened our eyes.
Manny touched on a deeper, more sinister fear. We invest so much emotional capital in these games, hold them so close to our souls, that we imagine the players do the same, only more so. In the moment, we convince ourselves that our happiness, our very being, rests on every pitch. The people playing the games? Lord, they must have it so much worse; we care this much, and we’re just sitting on our couch. Can you envision actually being out there?
But this is not the way athletes react in the real world. An athlete—the integral part of the actual enterprise—cannot grip the experience as tightly as we do. He is far more aware of the limitations his game puts on him. He understands that no matter how hard you try, sometimes you lose. And that a loss does not send the world careening off its axis; the oceans do not fill with blood, and fault lines do not crack. The vast majority of professional baseball players never are blessed with a championship, and no one wins one every year. They nevertheless find a way to push on.
It is one thing to understand this in a theoretical sense, but it is another thing to simply state, “If we lose, who cares? It’s not the end of the world,” when your team is one game away from elimination. It touched the third rail.
Deep down, in a place no one wants to visit, all baseball fans fear they care more about their team than the players do. At the end of every day, Red Sox fans are still Red Sox fans, and all that comes with that; the team is their release and escape from whatever less glamorous activity they fill the working hours with. But at the end of every day, Manny Ramirez is a millionaire, and Johnny Damon can sign with the hated Yankees and not so much as blink. This is terrifying.
Maybe we do care more. What Manny Ramirez said does not make him a bad person, or somehow less of a competitor; it makes him a human being who, whether his team wins or loses, will still go home afterward and sleep in a gorgeous house. Manny touched on an unspeakable truth.
Most of us would give away years of our lives to have the opportunity to play major-league baseball, and we would do it for free, if they would let us.
But we’re wrong. It doesn’t work that way. I’m glad I wasn’t a very good baseball player. I think it makes me love baseball more.
VINCE VAUGHN is singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” and my ears are bleeding.
KNOWLEDGE YOU NOW HAVE