We escaped from the Grapefruit League with an 11 and 14 record, which was fairly miserable.
The New York sports media is as vicious as they come and they bared their collective teeth at the sorry lot of es as we descended the American Airlines charter at LaGeardia. The team bus was waiting. I was glad to see it still spelled Yankees the regular way. Microphones cluttered the arrivals area inside the terminal, bet not for es. They were commandeered by our supreme leader, George himself, finally ducking out of hiding.
The Cubans dutifully marched aboard the bus, bet I opted for a cab. I told the guy the address in Fort Lee and he grimaced and cursed and said it would cost me $40 and it was a trip out of his way and all the blah-blah I hear every time I take a cab to Fort Lee.
I wanted to get home in the worst way. I wanted to see if the drive-away car service demon had delivered my car without denting it or stealing the lighter. I wanted to tern on the TV jest to hear some more English. The bilingual thing was giving me a headache every day.
Mostly, I jest wanted to get away from baseball. It was the first time in my life I was beginning to feel like that, and it bothered me. One-hundred-sixty-two games with these kids who now had about twelve words of English between them — and one of those was cerveza, which isn’t English to begin with. It wasn’t that they couldn’t learn English. Some were actually smart. It was that they refused to. If Mexicans had been that arrogant, they’d still be living on the wrong side of the Rio Grande to this day and we wouldn’t have any cooks in our Italian restaurants.
There was a dent in the right front fender, bet the lighter was still in its slot. The anonymous kid who had driven the car up from Texas had parked it in the pay lot of the apartment building. I’d move the car later. I was beat.
There was a plastic garbage bag fell of mail accumulated over the winter. I took it along with my bags into the elevator.
It was good to be home, even if home was just a studio in a high-rise on the Hudson River looking over at Manhattan.
The beer I left in the icebox was still there and I had one and just sat in my armchair with my feet up on the windowsill and looked at the city. It was late on an April afternoon and the light was fine, angling low behind me and making the city shine,
I started thinking about something and stopped when I realized I was thinking in Spanish. I never realized before what a straggle two languages were when you were working with people in another language. Made me wonder how those immigrants managed to hold up while straggling to make a living.
The phone rang.
I answered on the third ring.
“You son of a bitch, what are you trying to pull on me now? I was at the airport.”
“I saw you, George. I thought you had matters well in hand.”
“You son of a bitch, I was going to introduce you “
“I figured that. That’s why I’m here now.”
“I give you an extra twenty-five thousand on your contract and you pull this shit on me, ducking your responsibilities.”
“I’ve got no responsibility to talk to the media and act like your Charlie McCarthy”
“What the fuck is wrong with this team? You guys stunk up the Grapefruit League this spring.”
“It’s only spring training, George. They’re just learning to work together”
“The fucking opening day is three days away, what kind of shit are you pulling? I could lose a fortune on this thing.”
“You could hardly lose a fortune since you traded away your fifty-million-dollar personnel roster.”
“Except for you, you broken-down son of a bitch. I kept you.”
“Yeah, Now I wish you hadn’t.”
“You gonna quit on me? You and that cocksucker agent Sid cooking up-”
“George, I can see you now, those arteries pounding and your eyes bulging out of your head. I won’t tell you to calm down because I’d just as soon you had a stroke, then maybe you’d stop calling me all the time to hear yourself think out loud.”
“I own you, Ryan, I own you!”
“People don’t own people except in certain parts of the Middle East and Africa. So you’ve got a contract, is all you’ve got.”
“And the contract says you got to help me with these Cubanos. They got their rooms at the East Side Hotel and they start complaining right away about the sheets and the beds and the bugs.”
“Get an exterminator.”
“I spoiled them. I spoiled them in Florida, put them up at that hotel. This is New York, this isn’t Florida. People live like this here, don’t they get it?”
“When I first came up, I was in that East Side hotel you own, George. I’d rather live in a Chinese prison than live there.”
“Oh, Mr. Bigshot now with his $650,000 contract —”
“George, you want to settle this now? You call up Sid and make him a reasonable buyout offer and I’ll walk tomorrow. I’m tired of your shit and I’m tired of getting a headache every day listening to those kids and I’m tired of interpreting for Sparky when Sam goes and hides in the clubhouse. Even Sam gets tired of them.”
Silence.
Now George became conversational in tone: “What’s wrong, Ryan? With the team?”
“Time will tell.” It is my all-time favorite sports cliché.
“What’s that mean?”
“It means you got to give them time and treat them right.”
“All right. I’ll send over an exterminator.”
“That’s a start.”
“What if this thing doesn’t jell? In a month or so.”
“Then we’ll finish lower than you expected.”
“I expect to win the pennant, nothing less. New York expects nothing less.”
“It’s good to have great expectations.”
“You see any bright spot in any of this? Sparky looks like he’s on dope, I can’t get a straight answer from him. I should fire his ass and get someone else.”
“It isn’t Sparky. Sparky is fifty-six years old. He’s used to talking to ball players, not talking through his clubhouse manager. They’re a decent bunch of players —”
“You were supposed to weed out the bad ones.”
“Some are better than others. What did you expect, twenty-four supermen?”
“Yes. I expected twenty-four supermen and one washed-up reliever,”
“Well, you got part of your expectations.”
“You mean you.”
“I mean the kid — Raul. He’s genuine, George, hell learn Ms way the first go-round of games, but it’ll be the hitter learning, not the pitchers learning how to pitch to him. Because you can’t. You can walk him, to get around him, but if you put it anywhere near the plate at any speed with any curve, he’ll hit you. He’s a natural born hitter and he’s only twenty-three. You stole him.”
That pleased George, to think he’d made a good theft.
“Anyone else?”
“Pitcher named Ramon Suarez, he’s as hard a thrower as I’ve seen since Nolan, but he’s twenty-two and gets steamed up when things don’t always go his way, Billy Bacon is trying to show him some tricks with a slider but he’s kind of stubborn about his own style. What they really need, all of them, is to loosen up. I think that between Castro and you they’re a little insecure.”
“Insecurity in an employee is a good thing,” George said.
I didn’t say anything. George was an old leopard and he wasn’t going to learn new spots.
“What about the catcher, Orestes?”
“You coulda done better keeping a veteran there, settle down the pitchers.”
“Too late now,” George said. “You’ve got something nice to say about everyone. You sound like Sparky.”
“George, spring training is just not the place to form a new team. They got to play with each other — they came from different teams, you know. They got to learn to adjust to each other, to the weaknesses as well as the strengths. How long you been around baseball, anyway?”
“I got a good mind to fire your ass right now.”
“Go ahead. The checks can be sent to me at Houston.”
“But I won’t”
“Why?”
And he sounded just like Sid that night in Chicago.
“I need you right now, Ryan. You’re useful.”
Damn. Just like Sid said he would say if you pressed him on it. He needed me more than I needed him.