The Bullpen Gospels (28 page)

We soaked one another, chasing each other around as if the bottles were squirt guns. We drenched teammates, walls, furniture, the ceiling, members of the press, mascots, and everything else we could blast. Drew took a champagne bottle and sprayed it as if he were riding a pony. Lunchbox acted as if he were jerking off with his bottle. Ox sprayed it up Manrique’s ass, and I sprayed mine on the wall thinking it was my fellow players because I had my eyes closed. Dalton ran around naked, and Blade, knowing he wouldn’t get his arms ripped off, sprayed Juice in the face, then dumped the rest down his shirt back. When the pressure in the bottles ran out, we tackled each other and dumped the remaining gulps on each other’s heads.

Randy fought us off as long as he could before we cornered him with the watercooler. Ice cold, it took his breath away when we dumped it over him. Abby, less mobile than his managerial counterparts, stood his ground and was demolished—standing with his eyes closed, hands out like a blind man while a river of booze splashed down on his head. Pops happily called us all manner of swears and curses, which only served to cement the inevitable dumping of an ice chest on him by his hitters.

When we ran out of bubbly, we moved to beer cans. We sprayed it from the lid, slopped it like paint, spit it out of our mouths, and dumped it on heads and down pants and shirt backs. We even punctured the cans and let little annoying streams squirt out like baby sprinklers. Ox tried to catch as much of it in his mouth as he could.

When the waterworks stopped, we peeled off, picked each other up, and stumbled around, staggered by the surreal quality of our victory. Hugs, shouts, arms over shoulders, punches to shoulders, chest bumps, hugs again, until there was nothing left for us to do except take it all in. There we were, a pack of grown men, big kids, and wild warriors standing in the locker room so far from our homes. We had done the very thing we only whispered about in spring training, back before teams were made. We were a family now, baptized in the power of a championship. We posed for personal pictures with our arms around shoulders and our pointer fingers up, declaring we were number one. We stretched the Texas League Championship banner out in front of us and surrounded it, soaking wet, hair matted to our faces, reeking of cheap booze for the best family picture of the year.

After showering and changing into dry clothes, we made our way to the hotel for the after party. There was beer there as well, but the meant-to-be-drunk kind. There was also pizza, chips, our freshly acquired championship trophy. Fortunately, Dalton was clothed again.

The guys took turns having their pictures taken with the monstrous Texas League trophy, complete with a fresh engraving declaring the Missions as 2007 champions. I took my turn next to it, though the real prize was something far less tangible, something that felt like redemption.

A promise is a promise. Drew poured me a tall, plastic party cup, like the kind I refused at so many forgettable college parties, filled to the brim with New Castle. With my chalice in hand, I walked to the center of the converted conference room. I interrupted the party, asking for the attention of my teammates, raised my cup and declared, “Here’s to you guys! A hell of a good reason for a first!” With that, I inhaled the entirety of my cup in one gulp, slammed the cup onto the table in front of me like a Viking, then gagged, cringed, and coughed. My teammates shared a laugh at my expense, then showed their approval by screaming, “Get him another one!” Twenty-three fresh beers were immediately pressed into my face.

“That’s okay,” I said, waving them off, “I think I’ll take it easy from here on. It really does taste like piss.”

Twenty-four hours later, I was on a plane back to Ohio. The season was over. No long good-byes, no sobs, and no last-minute declarations of love. It was done, the institution of minor league baseball shut its doors, packed up, and closed for the season. The next time we’d see each other would be in the spring, when we’d duke it out for a chance to do it all again.

One Year Later

I could tell them anything. The people who didn’t know me, which was most of the people in attendance, had probably heard the fantastic tales perpetuated by baseball books and movies and would take me as an authority on the subject, eagerly swallowing whatever concoction I fed them. My friends and family would believe me because of the inexhaustible supply of fantastic tales I’d already told. Stories about baseball just have that effect, I guess—it goes down smooth. But this wasn’t the time to goof around, even though my uncle thought it would be cute to toast my last night as a virgin with, “Don’t swing for the fences on your first at bat, buddy—just manufacture runs, steal a base or two, bunt.” My family has a way of spicing up any occasion, including my wedding.

“First,” I began, “I’d like to thank all of you for coming today. I’m so very pleased Bonnie and I could share this special day with you. I know you wouldn’t have missed it for the world, but we appreciate it all the same.” Especially since their showing meant a guaranteed gift.

“Second, I realize many of you here today don’t know me, which is a regrettable side effect of my career. In fact, I’d say most of you know more about my job than you do about me. I’ve been told by several of you that you’ve been following my stats on the Internet and rooting for me. Thanks.

“I’d like you to get to know me though, beyond my stats, and, with my wife’s permission of course, I’d like to tell you a story about me and baseball, a real one that I think we can all relate to.” Unlike my uncle’s hitting advice.

Most of my wife’s relatives—the bulk of the guests—flew in the day of the wedding and would be leaving the next. They didn’t know me, though most thought I was a nice young boy because reports they received about me told them so. What they did know, for certain, however, was I was a big-league baseball player, something that always seemed to dominate my conversation regardless of the occasion. Though I did spend most of the nonceremony portion of the evening being cordially threatened by the males in my wife’s extended family over what would happen if I didn’t treat her right, I also spent an inordinate amount of time getting big league ticket requests and contract speculation fired at me by fingers folded into the shape of guns.

Making it to the big leagues was no small feat, especially considering how distant and impossible the goal once seemed. Me meeting a beautiful, caring, and capable woman was no small feat either. As it would turn out, both of these occurrences had their roots in the 2007 championship season.

At the time, meeting my wife wasn’t quite as celebrated as winning a championship and discovering some of the mysteries of baseball. We were introduced through the wonders of technology, over the Internet. We spent the last two months of the season, even the night of the championship party, talking on the phone and exchanging e-mails. Our first live meeting came days after I returned home. When we finally met, the heavens opened up, doves flew in her wake, and I knew right then and there she would be the reason I moved out of my grandma’s. It was love, and the following season, I proposed.

Speaking of the following season, I pitched my way back onto the Triple-A roster out of camp. I put up good numbers in the spring, even good enough radar reads to warrant Earp talking to me about something other than my nuts. Though I was sent off to Portland, Oregon, with a message from Grady that I might have to come back down to Double-A and pick up some spilt innings, it never happened. I pitched well enough to avoid that scenario, well enough in fact to earn an invite to the Triple-A All-Star team. (I turned it down to go home and help my wife plan our wedding, FYI.)

Abby and Randy moved up along with several players from the 2007 championship team. Reunited, we had another season of adventure, but then again, they are all seasons of adventure. Come the end of the year, the Portland Beavers selected me as the Community Player of the Year, an honor given to a real person who moonlights as a baseball player. And then one unassuming night in August, I was called into Randy’s office, the door was shut, and I was told I would be exchanging my minor league uniform for a major league one.

My relatives, much fewer in number, sat together at their tables. They were already bored with me and preferred to lavish my wife with attention, resulting in the males of my own family threatening me over what would happen if I didn’t treat her right.

My mother, brother, and father, along with my agent and some mutual friends, were grouped together. My closest, nonbaseball friends sat at the wedding party table. My grandma sat at home watching Judge Judy because she refused to come. She said that my wife had the voice of a whining dog and that she hoped she was dead before the day of the wedding. That’s okay, she was just upset I was leaving her for another woman, and I’ll take that as a compliment. She’s still single now, and if you’re interested, she loves bird watching, is handy with a gun, and is a fantastic cook. Bless her heart. Naturally, my wife and I sat together, happy as could be.

Officially sworn in as new family additions with everyone comfortably seated in front of food and beverage, I thought I’d introduce myself and my intentions with an experience that helped me put the game into perspective, even at the big, brightest level. This is what I told them:

I was sitting at my locker when a big hand fell on my shoulder. It was the hand of Trevor Hoffman. I turned around, nervously, and offered a pathetic squeak as baseball’s save leader pawed me.

“What you doing kid? Writing a book?” he asked, staring down at me as I typed away at my laptop computer. I started keeping a diary at the start of the 2007 season.

“Uh, as a matter of fact, I am,” I replied, shutting the lid to keep my thoughts private.

Hoffman sat down next to me, which was as flattering as it was terrifying. I hadn’t been in the big leagues long, but it didn’t take me long to realize that this level had more unspoken rules about time and behaviors than any other. Young guys were weighed and sifted by older guys, and depending on the disposition of the older guys, the scales weren’t always balanced.

Young guys in the bigs aren’t only auditioning for the front-office Brass, they are auditioning for their teammates at the only level that really matters. New guys know from climbing up the many rungs of A-ball, they are to be quiet, seen, and not heard, and when they are seen, be doing something productive or entertaining. In my short amount of time at the big-league level, I wasn’t doing either. I had my butt handed to me on several occasions. In fact, my biggest highlight, the one my mom called to inform me I made
SportsCenter
for, was giving up a home run to Manny Ramirez.

“You like writing?” Hoffman asked.

“Yeah, it’s a good release,” I said, trying my hand at humor, “speaking of which, if I keep pitching the way I am, it may be my next career.”

Hoffman smiled, but he was not looking at me when he did it. To me, this conversation was a once-in-a-lifetime event. To him, it was small talk, something to pass the time while he waited for whomever he had business with to finish taking a crap.

“Did you major in English in college?” he asked.

“No, no, I didn’t.”

“So you just kinda picked this up then?”

“Yeah. I started doing it because I thought the experiences we have in baseball are too valuable not to be recorded.”

“What’s the book about?”

“It’s about one season in the minors. It’s about baseball. Maybe it would be better to say it’s about what baseball isn’t.”

“What it isn’t?” Hoffman asked, now giving me his full attention.

“Yeah.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Well, baseball is a lot of things, but it’s not everything. It can’t make your brother sober. It can’t make your family stop fighting. It can’t make peace or win wars or cure cancer. It makes or breaks a lot of people, like many jobs where the folks who do it find their identity. I don’t know if it should be as valuable as it is, or maybe baseball is valuable, and we players just don’t use it the right way. I guess that’s what I want to figure out in the book.”

This was probably one of those moments I should have kept to the seen-and-not-heard rule. Hoffman was talking to me, on his own accord, and I went into deep water. I could have just said it was about baseball and smiled like a kid in a parade while he waited for the sound of a toilet flush, content with the scraps from his table. When people asked, Hoffman could say I was a nice, harmless kid who majored in English. I would tell folks I talked with baseball’s all-time saves leader, who was a nice, personable guy. We could both ride off into the sunset, another conversation neatly wrapped up with a bow and forgotten. Instead, I just told the person who was baseball’s walking synonym for “save” that our identity shouldn’t rest in our job.

Hoffman looked at me, evaluating and judging me like those big leaguers with time and power do. “I agree,” he said, and the words struck me as if someone had taken me out to be shot but fired blanks instead. “Baseball’s brought me everything I have, but I agree, it’s not as important as a lot of other things in life.”

“Yeah. I, uh…” I swallowed hard. “I mean, I believe that if you take baseball out of the world, it would keep spinning, but if you took math or science, or love, or art, or teachers, or doctors, or some of the other things we take for granted away, it would stop. Baseball is such a small thing, comparatively speaking.”

“I’ve never thought of it like that, but I’d agree with you,” he said. “Though, you can’t deny it’s still a great tool.”

“That it is, if you know how to use it,” I added. A bold comment for a rookie to make, but one that would spark more conversations than I ever thought I’d have with my childhood hero.

Every now and then, when the pen was quiet and I was feeling courageous, I would pick Hoffman’s brain on a subject about life and baseball, and he would always give me, some rookie with less big-league time than the watercooler, a real, thoughtful answer. Come the end of the year, after the last game of the season, while everyone packed up their bags and readied to escape the dismal conclusion of the 2008 season (we lost 99 games), I felt compelled to approach Hoffman one last time. With a half-a-dozen baseballs I had snuck from various sources, I asked him whether he would mind signing what would become my groomsmen presents. He obliged, and while he stretched the ink of his name across the balls for me, I asked, “Do you remember a few years back, during spring training, coming out to speak with the minor league pitchers?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“Do you remember being asked a certain question about psychological routines and inculcating yourself?”

He looked at me funny, then smiled, “Yeah, I do remember that. You were the one who asked me that huge question. Now that I know you, it doesn’t surprise me at all!”

I didn’t know whether I should feel flattered or embarrassed that he remembered. “Yeah, about that, I just want you to know you turned me into a laughing stock.”

“I’m sorry kid. I remember that question, and to be perfectly honest, I didn’t know exactly what to say to you. I mean, you have to understand, when you reach this level, there is so much pressure surrounding you, it’s easier to let people down than it is to meet their expectations. This game puts us on a pedestal, and showing our human side doesn’t always go over well with those keeping track. I’m sorry I made you look bad.”

“That’s okay—it made for a good story,” I said dismissively, as he scratched his name across the white leather. “Do you think it would be better if it wasn’t like that, if we weren’t placed on pedestals?”

“Sometimes.”

“Do you think people like
you
could change that?”

Hoffman looked up at me, “I think all people could change that, not just me.” He handed me the last ball.

“You know,” I said, “there weren’t many players I cared about while I was growing up, though I always kept track of you. You were one of the players that inspired me to chase my dreams. I was excited to get up here, if for no other reason than just to say I played on the same field as you.

“But when a person gets to the big leagues, he realizes that the people in the bigs are just people. Heck, some of the guys up here are dirtbag savages just like the knuckleheads in the minors. Not everyone lives up to the expectations, and not everyone is safe on his pedestal. I guess that’s just life, but I want to tell you Hoffy, you met every one of my expectations, for whatever it’s worth.”

I took a moment to look out at all my guests, listening to me tell them a story about life in the big leagues, which was really just a story about life, and smiled.

“I’m sure a lot of guys had kissed Hoffman’s butt in his career. Guys do that to big names in the industry, but that wasn’t why I said it. I said it because I wanted to tell a person who was great in the game that I respected him more for who he was than what I thought he was. I knew him as a real, genuine person, and that’s what I valued. Baseball wouldn’t make my marriage work, just like it didn’t make so many other things work, but a man of integrity can make any profession seem heroic by how he lives while doing it.

“Hoffman told me I paid him a very high compliment, and he was very flattered. Then he said words that I will never forget. He said that the conversations we’d had touched him. He said they made him think about baseball in ways he’d never thought about it before. He said, with absolute sincerity, that the best part of me wasn’t in the locker room or on the baseball field, but beyond the lines. Just like the best parts of us aren’t in our jobs or stations. He said there was more to a person than just what they do, and that only a real person, not an icon or an image or a jersey, can take a job that puts a man on a pedestal and use it for something selfless.”

I stopped there and let the words settle on my listeners. Relaying the story was the easy part. The next part was a little more spontaneous.

“When I signed my contract to play professionally, I thought that was the best moment of my life. When we won the Texas League, I thought that was the best. When I put on my big-league uniform, I thought the same. Then there was that moment, the one I just told you about with Hoffman—truly, an amazing experience I will never forget. Yet, as amazing as it was, it pales in comparison to this.” I reached down and picked up the hand of my wife.