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April '04 BASEBALL! |
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A Nice Life Andrew Bomback |
Dave Clapper Joe Lee's Fastball |
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The Frozen Iceball Theory Leonard Pierce
I was a teenage fireman, he thinks, trying not to pay too much attention to the nagging, hollow ache in the crook of his left arm. Of course, he isn’t a teenager anymore; he’s looking at the ugly side of his thirties, and in baseball, that means he might as well be a senior citizen. And when he had been a teenager, his hesher hair crammed under a bright green Edgar High School cap and Slayer ringing in his head, he was always more interested in starting fires than in putting them out. But even back then, he was a reliever, and that was what they called relievers: firemen. Now, as many years later as he was years old when he recorded his first save, he’s still sitting in a damp, sweat-slick wooden box not very different from the one where he warmed up in the Wisconsin cold of his childhood. There’s still spit and seeds all over the floor, and there’s still the same old bullshit jokes and bragging about pussy as there was back then, and the other guys in the pen are still yakking it up to pass the time, only now half of them are doing it in Spanish. And ever unchanging is the feeling in the pit of his stomach, the cold sickness, the invasive chill like a hand is reaching up his ass and into his guts and giving them a nice hard squeeze. That, most of all, stays the same. He’s always hated it when he hears someone bitch that baseball is a kid’s game. They only say that when we complain, he thinks; when their team is on the rocks, they scream like it’s a matter of life and death, but when we make noise about our salaries, it’s right back to ‘how can you complain when you’re making millions to play a kid’s game?’. Baseball started out as a man’s game; the fact that children picked it up later on no more made it a kid’s game than boys playing war made killing a kid’s game. Anyway, he’s never made millions: just a million at a time. The old-fashioned, hard-working way, he told his wife: one lousy million at a time. It isn’t a bad life, for sure: he has to keep himself in shape, and there are uncountable stretches of utter boredom, and he’s never more than a slight, micro-meter’s twist of his arm away from the end of his career. But he makes a lot of money to do something he loves, and the hours can’t be beat. Still, days like this, that feeling in his gut: he never feels like he’s playing a kid’s game. Instead, he feels like someone you only call when things are completely fucked up: a cop or a surgeon or – well, a fireman. His left arm dangles at his side as he stares into the bullpen catcher’s eyes. Every pitcher he’s ever known has some stupid superstition, and he doesn’t exempt himself: each night, before he goes to bed, he kisses himself – kisses that beautiful left arm, kisses it on the bicep right above the crow tattoo. Bless you, he thinks to himself. Bless you for not blowing out on me. Bless you for not hurting too much, for keeping the pain dull and manageable. Bless you for not being a right arm, he’ll sometimes think; being in that sinister ten percent has meant an extra ten years on his career. Bless your sidewinder action that made them all notice me, and bless your funky motion that still fools the young guys. Bless your wrists for knowing when to snap and bless your knuckles and fingertips for learning the pitch that’s kept me alive. He reminds himself to always look into the catcher’s eyes, always into those steel-caged eyes, and not think about what will happen if he fails. It’s not as if he lacks perspective, really. He’s been in the bigs for, Jesus: eighteen years. Eighteen years. He’s sat in one pen or another for almost three thousand games, and played in over two thousand of them. He learned a long time ago not to take things too personally, not to let himself be eaten up inside when he gave up a lead, yielded a towering homer or had what they politely called a ‘bad day’. He’s played on good good teams and bad, for high stakes and low, and he knows what it feels like to win and to lose in those situations. He still feels like a heel when he blows someone’s win, but he no longer trashes the dugout after someone tees off on one of his soft, floating knucklers; he’s figured out that he doesn’t have to be a prick to everyone just because his out pitch wasn’t working when he wanted it to. Closing in on forty and he’s finally learned how to be mature, if that word applies to someone who plays ball for a living. But times like this – which, really, is every time: he’s a fireman, after all – he still gets that feeling in his gut, that clenching ghostly fear. Every time he hears the phone ring in the bullpen, he knows that there’s a good chance that the call is for him. And the message is always the same: Get ready, kid. (He’s still kid, in the chambers of his mind: to the skipper, everyone’s ‘kid’.) Someone fucked up. Someone couldn’t get it done, and we’re in big trouble. We need you to go in there and fix it. And he knows that if he can’t fix it, if he can’t dig out of that hole that someone else shoved him in, no one will remember the guy who got the team in trouble in the first place: they’ll remember the guy who couldn’t fix it. If your husband dies on the operating table, you won’t remember the three packs a day he smoked and the triple-cheeseburger diet that put him in the hospital; you’ll just remember the surgeon who couldn’t save his life, and you’ll hate that surgeon forever. Tug McGraw had been his idol growing up. And Tug had this thing he called the frozen iceball theory of pitching. “I remind myself that in approximately a billion years,” said Tug, “the sun is going to burn out and the earth will become a frozen iceball hurtling through space. And when that happens, nobody’s going to care what Willie Stargell did with the bases loaded.” This is the kind of thing that’s supposed to be a great comfort at times like these, but all he can think of when he remembers the frozen iceball is his own pitch. He sees it through the batter’s eyes: huge, white, slow-moving, cold as hell. A frozen iceball. What does Tug have to say about that? Not a lot. Tug McGraw is dead.
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