8

The Battery

You know it’s just a game, right?

—Gini Cocanower

“Dear Abby, I’m having some trouble with _________ and would like your advice,” reads the prompt in the next round of Cards Against Humanity.

My teammate, Dale, and I glance at our hand of cards, considering our options to best fill in the blank and prove our comic chops: “growing a pair,” “a hot mess,” “riding off into the sunset,” “giving 100 percent,” “eugenics,” “the token minority,” “the Big Bang,” “Barack Obama,” “Mecha-Hitler,” and “pixelated bukkake.” This round is winner takes all, and my chest is already wheezy from laughing so hard. I pull at the corner of the bukkake card and raise my eyebrows at Dale, a polite man in his sixties, who lets out a laugh. I am 97 percent sure he has no idea what bukkake is. I am not about to explain it.

7. Jaime Cocanower

Across the kitchen table sits a former Major Leaguer whose own card brought me here to the northwestern corner of Arkansas. He is the most physically imposing of the players I’ve met so far, six feet four, with a barrel chest, but his soft tone belies his physicality, like a bear who never learned to growl. His once-raven-black hair has turned grayish white and is cut back above his ears; his soft, Smurf-blue eyes are close-set and crested by bushy eyebrows like two fuzzy caterpillars. He’s dressed for the occasion, wearing a short-sleeved USA shirt, sandals, and red-white-and-blue shorts, ready for the Fourth of July fireworks that will follow shortly. He has the most unique yet least recognizable name in the Wax Pack: Jaime (pronounced “Hi-Me”) Cocanower.

His wife, Gini, a blond spark plug from Little Rock, is also at the table but paired with someone else for the game. Her laugh, which manages to be both commanding and soothing, ricochets around the room with every new card she reads.

I throw our bukkake card facedown into the pile, and the host reads each group’s submission out loud one by one, filling in the blank and bringing tears to our eyes with laughter.

“Dear Abby, I’m having trouble with when you fart and a little bit comes out and would like your advice” is the winner, crowning Gini’s team as champions. She raises both fists in the air and laughs again, rubbing it in Jaime’s face. He smiles quietly, a sheepish grin that manages to express both deep love and abiding pride in his wife of thirty-five years.

We encore to the spacious wood-paneled deck high above the water, looking out on Beaver Lake in the heart of Ozark country. I lean back in my chair and breathe in the sweet scent of damp earth whisking off the lake’s surface. A shower of green, purple, and red fireworks blast into the air, raining down with staccato explosions.

I’m having the time of my life, surrounded by complete strangers. Lifting weights with Randy Ready, watching kung fu with Garry Templeton, and now playing Cards Against Humanity with Jaime Cocanower—these are the unexpected thrills that have made this trip such a pleasant surprise. But like I’m discovering with so many of these men, there’s more to Jaime’s story than meets the eye.

*

Of the nine positions on a baseball team, one stands apart: the starting pitcher. While everyone else plays every day, the starter trots out every five, meaning he may only play thirty to thirty-five times all season. Baseball is already a game about the spaces in between, and for the starting pitcher, those spaces are even longer. If a hitter goes 0-4 with four strikeouts, he can come back the next day to avenge them; if a starting pitcher gets roughed up, he’s got four days to stew. And stewing is not good for Jaime Cocanower.

“Baseball was very frustrating,” he tells me, standing in front of a wallpaper display of row after row of pink cows on a yellow background. “I don’t look back on it as my fondest memories of life. I did have quite a bit of talent, but I was just not able to put it all together.” He speaks slowly and haltingly, ending his sentences with an allergy-induced sniffle.

We’re visiting the Warhol’s Nature exhibit at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, a beautifully landscaped series of glass-and-wood pavilions in Bentonville, Arkansas. The brainchild of Walmart heiress Alice Walton, the museum opened in 2011 with free admission for all. It turns out Andy Warhol not only had an interest in consumerism and popular culture but also took on the natural world, from his early days as a commercial artist to his later years painting plants and animals. I have no idea what pink cows on a yellow background symbolize, but they have all of Warhol’s customary panache.

“I kind of have admiration for those guys that get their heads beat in one day, and the next day they’re talking on TV like they’ve never given up a hit,” Jaime says.

This is a first. Every other Wax Packer so far excelled at processing that daily failure, taking it head-on and moving forward. And while they all had low moments, none would sum up their overall baseball experience with a word like “frustrating.” They are still connected to the game in some way, and those who are out (Tempy, Ready) are chomping to get back in. But not Jaime.

Then again, Jaime’s origins story is anything but typical. He was born in Puerto Rico, the son of missionaries who moved the family often throughout his childhood—Costa Rica, then Peru, a year in Indianapolis, and finally Panama when Jaime was twelve. Jaime inherited his father’s size and athleticism, and in baseball-crazed Panama, he thrived.

“What is the background of the name Cocanower?” I ask quietly, hoping to not disturb the other patrons as we move along to Warhol’s Flowers series from the 1960s. We stand side by side, a comfortable viewing distance away from the paintings, talking in parallel.

“It’s German. My dad’s German, my mom’s family is Swiss. My dad grew up Mennonite in northern Indiana,” he replies. “I was one of five kids, and I was always trying to please my parents.”

Jaime is a pleaser. While the rest of the Wax Packers took a “see you when I see you” attitude toward my visit, Jaime bent over backward preparing for my arrival, with multiple texts and emails, confirmations, and invitations. He even had done research on me.

“I’ve been reading your blog,” he said when he first picked me up at my Super 8 motel. “And your Rate My Professors page. Pretty good.”

He attended Balboa High School, located in the Panama Canal Zone, an American-run school for kids of parents who worked on the canal or for the military. It was demanding—in his senior year, three of his teachers had PhDs. He began pitching in the ninth grade, and his potential was obvious as a big, strong kid with a live arm. But then the injury bug (which would plague his entire career) struck, and surgery to remove bone chips from his elbow ended his high school pitching career.

Jaime’s parents took great pride in their kids’ education—all five graduated from college—and when the time came Jaime moved to the States to attend Baylor University in Waco, Texas. In his freshman year he walked onto the baseball team, and by his sophomore campaign he was throwing gas in the College World Series and catching the attention of Major League scouts. By the end of his junior year he was a hot commodity, with thirteen Major League teams showing interest.

We stroll the gallery, occasionally pausing to examine a painting in more detail. Although he’s only a few inches taller, I feel like Jaime towers over me in his black button-down dress shirt, his hands stuffed into his pockets.

“How did you end up getting signed?” I ask, pretending to pay attention to a purple-and-orange butterfly.

“Major League Baseball sent an off-duty FBI agent to my apartment to do reconnaissance. He had this questionnaire and said, ‘We’re trying to figure out if you have to go through the draft.’ Turns out Puerto Ricans don’t go through the draft. They’re free agents.”

It all checked out: because Jaime was born abroad, he was allowed to sign with any team whenever he chose. The Toronto Blue Jays, a recent expansion team hungry for talent, were the highest bidder, offering him $50,000 to sign. The Milwaukee Brewers, on the other hand, came in at $35,000 but promised to take their time in grooming him, making sure that he was healthy before he started pitching. Most players would go to the highest bidder, but Jaime was not most players.

He signed with the Brewers.

He got his shoulder fixed (turned out he had a torn rotator cuff and bone spurs from overuse at Baylor) and went back to school for the fall of his senior year, majoring in accounting. Playing with spreadsheets may have been boring, but it was safe and secure—he could control the numbers, knowing that they wouldn’t suddenly change on him, the perfect antidote to his struggles on the mound, where he could not harness his own power. He was an unbroken stallion, a wild fastball pitcher without a second gear. Most pitchers can throw a fastball straight on command; Jaime would try to will the ball straight, and still it would hook.

“Control was something that I could never master,” he says.

He had flashes of greatness: in his second season in the Minor Leagues, he was named California League MVP, going 17-5 with a 2.18 ERA. When he got called up to the Majors for the first time in 1983 along with Randy Ready (“I do remember that!” he tells me when I mention Randy’s story of hiding out together during a tornado), he impressed the brass with some quality starts, so much so that he made the starting rotation in 1984. But he was always treading water.

For most of his four years with the Brewers he rode the yo-yo, shipping back and forth between Milwaukee and the Minor Leagues. Injuries and wildness were his undoing; at one point in 1986 manager George Bamberger even arranged for him to see a hypnotist.

“He tried to get me to wear headphones in the dugout and listen to that stuff during the game. I was like, I can’t be doing that,” Jaime says.

By 1987 he was out of the game, having compiled a forgettable 16-25 record, the shortest career of any of the Wax Packers. He enjoyed the sport itself but not the culture around it. He never got comfortable. Jaime Cocanower was too smart, too timid, too nice for baseball.

But where he slumped in baseball, he starred in life. Done at age thirty, he had two things going for him: a college degree and Gini.

*

The relationship between pitcher and catcher is a sacred one. They are symbiotic organisms, so reliant on each other that in baseball parlance they are collectively referred to as “the battery.” The catcher has the more thankless job, squatting down and getting up hundreds of times over the course of the game, but he is also the brains of the operation. It is the catcher who calls for each pitch, indicating his choice through an elaborate series of hand gestures directly in front of his crotch as he squats out of view of the batter. For the uninitiated, the twenty to thirty seconds between each pitch are a dreadful lull in the action, but for baseball’s devout, this abeyance holds the true beauty of the game, the chess match between the battery and the batter. For example, if the count is two balls and one strike, the pitch called will be very different from what it would be if the count is one ball and two strikes; if there are runners on base, things get even more complicated. While the pitcher has veto power (which he indicates by shaking his head vigorously), his main job is to simply execute. If the battery consists of dance partners, the catcher is leading.

Gini’s been catching Jaime for thirty-five years. They met at Baylor on a blind date, a pledge task for Jaime’s Sig Ep fraternity. He was a sophomore and she was a freshman from Little Rock, and he was told to meet her in the lobby of her dorm when she came home from class. Their recollections of that first meeting differ: “When I saw her, I said, ‘I’m going to marry her,’” Jaime says; according to Gini: “I had just taken a test, and I was dating all these preministry students at the time. I wasn’t gonna date just one person until I was engaged. You have to also understand, I wasn’t sleeping with any of them. So we didn’t go out for a while.” This is vintage Gini—honesty for days, a completely open book, unapologetic. When I was having trouble finding Jaime in the lead-up to the trip, I Googled around and found a reference to Gini on the website for Bentonville High School, where she is an AP computer science teacher. I wrote her an email explaining the project and received the following response, written to Jaime with me cc’d:

Jaime,

This is what comes of answering fan mail. ;). I opened and read Dr. Balukjian’s email in the hopes that he was a computer science Professor and I could parlay your cooperation into future admissions to Berkeley for my students. It turns out he is interested in bugs of the biological variety not the digital variety.

In any case, he sounds nice (with stalker tendencies) and you should reply to him.

Gini

Being a ballplayer’s wife was hard, especially when you’re as independent and smart as Gini. She never loved the game, but she deeply respected her husband’s commitment to it, so much so that she signed on for the gypsy life (albeit with reservations) when they got married in December 1979. Following her graduation from Baylor, they uprooted themselves to Stockton, California, a cow town over an hour inland from the coast, more like Visalia than San Francisco. From Stockton to Vancouver to Puerto Rico to El Paso back to Vancouver to Milwaukee back again to Vancouver back to Milwaukee to Beloit to Little Rock to Albuquerque, Gini hung in there, holding down the fort. When the kids got older, she went back to school for her master’s in education. And unlike most wives, she educated herself on the business side of the game, understanding contracts and labor law and the tension between union and management. While Jaime tended to be laid-back about such things, Gini was wife/lawyer/advocate all rolled into one.

“You have to remember that we wanted them all to die,” Gini says, seated next to Jaime on a plush brown sofa in the tastefully decorated living room of their home on Beaver Lake (“our retirement home,” Jaime says, even though they’re two years out from retirement).

“That’s a little extreme,” I reply, sitting across from them.

“Okay, let me clarify: die slowly and painfully,” she says.

The “them” is the Brewers’ management, and Gini excoriates them as only she can, with humorous hyperbole.

“They just treated people so poorly,” she adds. It’s a refrain I’ll hear from several of the Wax Packers: management’s tendency to make false promises. We’re going to call you back up to the Majors! This is just temporary. We’ve got a place for you. But the reality is that everyone is expendable, and everyone’s time is short. Players are chess pieces on a board, statistical amalgamations. Gini, who has devoted her career to building people up through teaching, can’t stand the ruthless nature of professional sports.

“Ray Poitevint [the Brewers’ director of player procurement], what a jerk. The first time I met him, shortly after Jaime signed, was in Phoenix. He saw my engagement ring and said something like ‘Who paid for your trip to come here?’ or something incredibly rude. And I thought, ‘You don’t even know me.’”

The Cocanowers moved here to Lowell from Conway (outside Little Rock) nine years ago and can’t wait to enjoy the spoils of lakefront retirement—the eighteen-foot speedboat is already in the water, and a pontoon party boat isn’t far off. Their kids are grown and successful: their daughter, Blair, is a CPA and recently got married, and their son, Whit, is about to start as a clerk for a judge at the U.S. Tax Court in Washington DC. The house is huge and immaculate, nestled into the hillside shore of the lake. Early in their marriage, Gini reminded Jaime to keep his long game in mind: “She would always say there’s a lot more CPAs living in the nice neighborhood in Little Rock than former baseball players,” Jaime says.

While he dreamed of making it to the big leagues, Jaime was always strategic about his plan. He had twenty-eight units left at Baylor when he signed with the Brewers, went back to school that fall to finish most of them, and then graduated via correspondence course. When he was still in the Minors, he began working at KPMG in the winters as a tax accountant; behind a desk, nose buried in ledgers, Jaime could be in control.

In 1987, while toiling for the Dodgers’ Triple-A team in Albuquerque, he knew it was time to wind down.

“I called the managing partner at KPMG and said, ‘You told me when I wanted to get out of baseball you would have a spot for me. Well, I’m ready,’” Jaime says.

After Albuquerque ended up winning the championship, Jaime flew home and traded his cleats for a pair of dress shoes.

“I threw my stuff in my Brewers bag and still haven’t unpacked it.”

Gini was thrilled—she had her husband back full-time. His years in the game had put a strain on the marriage. I share what I’ve learned from Rance, Boomer, and Randy about divorce and ask, “What kept you guys together?”

“Poverty. Mainly we couldn’t afford to get a divorce,” Gini says, making Jaime laugh. Then she turns more serious: “Some of the people you’re gonna meet today, we’ve been friends with since we very first got married. Those were our friends from church who have been with us through thick and thin,” she says, touching Jaime lightly on the shoulder.

“It was tough. We had our times when you would have thought we could easily have gotten divorced. But we ultimately found our commitment to each other was stronger than anything else,” Jaime says, his voice growing soft.

“Did you see the strain on other couples?” I ask.

“Yeah, because the guys were all sleeping around,” Gini replies. Baseball players, more than athletes in any other sport, are known to be dogs. I think back to Rance describing his teammates as “kids in a candy store” and his ex-wife’s suspicions that he had had an affair.

“Between that and being away, the celebrity must go to their heads,” I offer.

“Yeah, well, that was never a problem for us,” Gini cracks, smiling at Jaime. They form the perfect battery, finishing each other’s sentences, laughing and then laughing harder. She leans over and whispers in his ear, reminding me of a meeting on the mound where the pitcher and catcher discuss strategy while covering their mouths with their gloves, stymying potential lip readers from the opposition.

The company is arriving soon to ring in America’s 239th birthday, and there’s pork shoulder to smoke and dips to put out and beer to chill. Gini gets up to start putting out the spread. “If you’re at my house and you’re hungry or sober, it’s your own fault,” she tells me.

*

“Where’s Jaime?” I ask Dale, one of the guests and my Cards Against Humanity teammate, when I get back from running an errand. Short on booze, the gang had sent me out for reinforcements, during which I came across my first drive-thru liquor store. Yes, in Arkansas this is a thing.

“Check downstairs,” he says.

I walk downstairs to Jaime’s man cave past the framed lineup cards and ball from his first Major League win (September 24, 1983, versus the Orioles) and find him sitting on the couch in a giant home theater, an entire wall taken up by a screen.

“I just struck out Eddie Murray!” he yelps as I sit down. A few years back Gini had several old VHS recordings of his games transferred to DVD, and today, for the first time, Jaime has popped one in. Fifty-eight-year-old Jaime watches twenty-seven-year-old Jaime stalk the mound in his powder-blue Brewers jersey, his ritual of nervous tics and compulsions on display between pitches: tug hat, wipe nose, wipe hand on sleeve, rub ball, etc. It’s from June 1984, one of his better games, one of the days when he was locked in and could quiet the voice of self-doubt in his head. I watch his catcher, Jim Sundberg, come to the mound for a visit, and I ask Jaime something I’ve always been curious about: “What is the catcher saying to you?” Does he reveal an elaborate strategy for the next hitter, a sequence of pitches based on voluminous scouting reports designed to exploit a weakness? I’ve spent many games trying to read lips, burning with curiosity over the wisdom that must be imparted in these sacred time-outs.

“Usually he said, ‘C’mon!’” Jaime replies.

I am devastated.

We watch a few more innings of Jaime’s prime in relative silence, enjoying the respite from being social. We both enjoy the company of others but prize our solitude as well. Being on grill duty gives him an easy excuse to duck out whenever he tires of the conversation—got to check on the meat! Watching baseball on the Fourth of July in the middle of the country with an ex–Major League baseball player feels like living the childhood fantasy of every boy who has ever collected baseball cards.

And then the unexpected. This quiet, borderline-shy elite former athlete turns to me and says over the whir of air-conditioning, “This December will be thirty-six years I’ve been married to Gini. Four and a half years ago she was diagnosed with inflammatory breast cancer.” He twirls his wedding ring while he talks, his voice steady and earnest. “Only 2 percent of breast cancer is inflammatory. It’s the worst. Ten years ago, 40 percent would die in five years. But we’ve made a lot of progress.”

My stomach tightens, and I look away toward the floor. No, no. That’s just not right, not fair. Not with these people, not this couple that lives so fully and honestly.

I find my voice: “Did she have surgery?”

“Yeah, she had a mastectomy. After she was diagnosed one of the things they figured out is that the order of the treatments is a big deal. She had chemo, and then a drug called Herceptin, then a third drug. She did that for eight months and then the surgery and the radiation down in Houston. She’s clean. Every six months she has a checkup. Next year she starts going once a year.”

I’m sure he has said all this a thousand times to dozens of people in the same matter-of-fact tone. But then he continues in a different vein: “It metastasizes in the brain. We’re just . . .” He pauses. “It was really tough, and at the same time it gave me an opportunity to show her how I felt about her. I’d say that’s probably my main drive today is keeping her . . .” His voice trails off again.

He takes a moment, resets. “She’s awesome, she’s smart, she teaches, she loves to teach and is a really good teacher. I read some of the stuff on your teaching website. Anyway, she teaches programming and AP computer science. All electives, and she has probably 85 percent boys, and they all have Asperger’s.”

He catches his breath.

Finally, finally Jaime is allowed to be out of control.

The words and the love spill out, his emotions wild and running ahead of his brain, and it’s all good, it’s great, actually. He may be a pitcher, but he knows a pitcher is only as good as his battery mate, and with apologies to Jim Sundberg, there’s none better than Gini.

“Got to check on the meat!” he announces, springing to his feet and out of the room.

I sit alone in the darkness of the theater, holding on to the emotion, smiling faintly. I’ve never been a big fan of the Fourth of July—like New Year’s Eve, there’s too much hype, too many expectations—but I know this is one I will never forget. I get up and walk upstairs, ready to rejoin the party.

*

The next morning when I say good-bye to Jaime and Gini, I feel like I’m leaving family. But no sooner am I back on the road than dread creeps in. I know what’s coming next, and I don’t like it. I’m going to have to do something that I hate and that I’m not particularly good at: I’m going to have to lie.