The Bullpen Gospels (5 page)

I didn’t know that man in rags, and he didn’t know me, but we knew how to treat each other because of the clothes we wore. Yet, something deeper than stained rags, dirty hands, glossy pictures, and clean uniforms took place between us. In that moment, both awkward and perfect, something happened I didn’t quite understand. For a moment the burden of baseball left my shoulders, and I wasn’t a player to be labeled. Though I didn’t understand it all right there, I knew my life in the game was going to change.

My grandma didn’t exactly come to see me off as much as she came to stare eerily at me one last time for good luck. She lurked by the open garage door, safe from the harmful rays of direct sunlight, watching me like some carrion bird, as if I might take a dump in her yard. I threw my big suitcase and my Padres-issued equipment bag in the back of the cab and smacked the top of the trunk signaling I was ready to go. Then, despite myself, I managed to play good grandson long enough to hug my grandma even though the risk of being bitten on the neck was considerable.

At the airport check-in counter, I was informed that my bags were both overweight by about ten pounds. It’s hard to pack six months of stuff in one suitcase and an equipment bag. As I forked out one hundred dollars for the overages, I promised myself I’d ship my stuff next year. Then I recalled, I’d promised myself I’d do that last year.

Airplanes can be depressing, especially when you wind up with a middle seat between two chubby businessmen. When I boarded they followed me in, squeezing into the seats on the left and right of me and forcing me into that awkward game of chess involving armrest space. If this were a team flight, my compatriots and I would be smacking each other on the back of the head by now, ringing call buttons, annoying the stewardesses, and generally making asses of ourselves. There is safety in team numbers, a confidence not present when you’re alone. As it was, I pretended I was a mime, and flipped open
SkyMall
magazine while the business brothers broke out their BlackBerrys.

While I marveled over
SkyMall
’s life-changing ingenuity, the brothers sparked up a conversation, speaking through me as if I were invisible, rambling on about widget sales and gross national product or something. Suddenly excited, they hit on some bar they knew in the area they were headed to and how they were going to get ripped, how there was a dancer there, and how if their wives knew about all of it, they’d be in the doghouse—again. They laughed very mischievously, like the Dukes of Hazzard business edition, and might have shared high fives if my head wasn’t in the way.

I gave up on
SkyMall
and made a break for my iPod. I had to rummage through my carry-on to get at it, dredging up all the items I had packed in the process, including the worn chunk of leather I passed for a glove. When I took out my mitt, the Duke Brothers took interest.

“You a ballplayer?” Bo Duke asked from the window seat. He motioned toward my glove.

“Yeah,”

“College?”

“No, professional”

“Really?”

“Yeah, I’m reporting to spring training today.”

“Oh, right on, man. What position do you play?”

“I’m a pitcher.”

“Righty or lefty?”

“Righty, unfortunately.”

“How long you been playing?”

“This is my fifth year.”

“Hey Luke, this guy plays professional baseball, how about that?” He called to his buddy, but there was no way he couldn’t have heard me as tightly as we were packed in.

“Oh yeah?” Luke Duke said from the aisle seat. “What position do you play?” he asked me, but the guy by the window answered.

“He’s a pitcher”

“Righty or lefty?”

“He’s a righty who wishes he were a lefty,” Bo said.

“How long you been playing?”

“He’s been playing for five years, Luke.” I didn’t even know the guy sitting next to me and already he was talking as if he edited my Wikipedia page.

“Got any time in the big leagues?”

“No, no time yet.” I answered for myself.

“So you’re just a minor leaguer then?”

What’s that supposed to mean?
“Just a minor leaguer?”
What are you, just a vacuum cleaner salesman?
“Yes, sir, I’m
just
a minor leaguer.” I exhaled.

“Well, keep playing, never give up. You’ll hate yourself for the rest of your life if you do. You’ll wake up every day and feel terrible about it.” He said it, and then sighed, shaking his head as if I just brought up a dead relative.

How was I supposed to respond to that statement? Did he really need to drop the “hate yourself for the rest of your life” line? There are a lot of people out there with sports-themed regrets, but this was a tad excessive. I nodded very mime-like.

“I’d still be playing today if I hadn’t had kids,” he continued, forcing an empty laugh before elbowing me in a “know what I mean” type way, but I didn’t.

“Did you play pro for a while?” I asked.

“No, I got my girlfriend pregnant in high school and had to quit ball to get a job. The kid ruined my dreams of playing. Don’t have kids. They wreck your life!” Again he laughed in an inside-joke kind of way, and again I didn’t feel as if I was on the inside. I laughed with him to make him feel better.

“Yeah,” he continued, “I was one of the best players on my high school squad. I was looking at colleges and was going to try for the pros, but life gets in the way, you know?”

“Yeah, that’s a shame,” I said. “Someone should really tell life to quit doing that.”

“I had a knockout curve,” he continued, staring off into dreamland, “and I had to have been throwing at least ninety miles per hour. We didn’t have radar guns or nothing, but all the guys told me I was throwing real hard.”

“Oh. Wow,” I said, highly doubtful but mastering it.

“Yeah, she said she was on birth control, but I don’t believe it. She knew I was going to be something special. She thought she’d just lock me down, you know?”

“Hmmm.”

“My advice to you, buddy, don’t trust women.” He stopped and looked at me with a queer smile. “I’ll bet a guy like you gets women after him all the time, what with being a ballplayer and all.” He stared at me as if I had the power to possess women with my uniform. I thought about the only woman in my life, my grandma, and felt the urge to tell him she was available. Instead I said, “Oh you know it, man!
All the time
,” and elbowed him back.

“Attaboy! Don’t ever give it up son, trust me. Say, you know my cousin’s kid has one hell of an arm. Do you think you could get me in touch with a scout to come watch him? I think he’s got what it takes. I’ve been working with him. Taught him the old hook.” He wrung his arm as best he could in our tight seating to demonstrate.

“Looks like a good one.”

“Yeah, it’s nasty.”

“I’ll bet.”

“So, can you get me in touch with a scout?”

“Yeah, sure. We do that all the time.” We never do that.

“What do I do, just give you my info then?”

“Yeah, I’ll pass it on to the Padres for you.”

“Ooh, the Padres?” he cringed.

“Yeah, why?”

“Um…I was hoping you could get the Yankees.”

“…”

I spent forty-five minutes I’ll never get back listening to Luke’s life story before the plane touched down in Chicago. He handed me his card as we exited the plane. I threw it away as soon as he was out of sight.

The long connector flight to Phoenix had me sitting next to a senior couple. They wore big, Terminator-style sunglasses that covered up their whole head. They had to use the bathroom every fifteen minutes and kept complaining about how much they hated today’s music compared to the good ol’ days when you could understand lyrics and women didn’t dress like hussies. When they saw my mitt, they asked me if I was a ballplayer. I told them it was a present for my kid brother in Arizona. I told them he was having an operation due to a rare disease called turf toe, and he was going to be off his feet for a while. Baseball was his favorite sport, so I got him the glove from this really nice, caring, and handsome pro pitcher named Dirk Hayhurst, who played for the Yankees. They said they’d keep an eye out for him. I told them my name was Eric Heater. They said it was shame I didn’t play baseball with a name like that.

Car after car came buzzing around the Phoenix terminal while I lingered in the shade, hiding from the high-voltage sun. Cops made people who loitered too long move; families hugged hello and good-bye. I stood curbside with my luggage looking for the Padres shuttle van, a plain, white, eighteen-passenger van, with one small sign that read Padres printed out on standard computer paper and taped to the bottom right of the windshield. About a half an hour after I landed, it scooped up me and a few others and whisked us to our team hotel.

The Padres’ spring training hotel is a Country Inn and Suites nestled right up against the highway about fifteen minutes from the Peoria Sports Complex. It’s a nice place, and everyone who was with the Padres before it relocated to the Inn and Suites says it’s a palace compared with the dump the team used to be put up in.

I liked the hotel because it had free, fresh-baked cookies in a glass jar at the front desk. This year, the hotel desk also featured an eye-candy dish courtesy of a well-stacked blonde sporting a tight Padres’ T-shirt. She smiled as I approached, my luggage in tow. Undoubtedly, she would become the object of regular player attention, fielding stupid questions, direction requests, package inquiries, pillow-fluffing needs, mattress-fluffing needs, and other after-hours activities.

I, for example, led off with, “Hi, I’m a player with the Padres. Can you tell me where the check-in is?” even though there were a series of bold signs clearly directing new arrivals, besides my previous years of check-in experience. Nevertheless, she gave me thorough directions in a giggly, bouncy voice that made it completely worth it.

I hefted my luggage to the conference room as directed. Inside were members of the organization’s training staff, which doubled as secretarial staff this time of year, imprisoned behind stacks of papers.

Checking in for spring training can be a hassle. There’s a heap of paperwork to be signed, answering questions ranging anywhere from “Do you have drug allergies?” to “Does it feel like razor blades when you pee?” I’m sure it’s important to the organization to get all urinating habits out in the open, but the biggest part of check-in is getting a room and roommate.

There are only so many suites in the Country Inn and Suites, and a smart player spends the whole year kissing up to trainers to make sure he can score a suite with his buddy the following year. So when I hit the check-in room and met two new faces, I didn’t see new trainer friends, I saw a year’s worth of ass-kissing out the window.

“Name?”

“Hayhurst, Dirk.” Upon my utterance, the questioner sifted through a pile of names and sheets, found my information, and marked me off as arrived.

“Do you have any suites left?” I asked, as he worked.

“I don’t think so,” he said, absently shuffling, “I think we gave them all out.”

“Well, I hate to play the seniority card, but I’ve got five years in this hotel, and if I was ever going to use seniority to get a perk, it would be on this issue. I’ve been looking forward to a suite all off-season, and believe me, if you spent a whole winter at my grandma’s, you’d look forward to it too. Besides, there can’t be that many older guys in-house this year?” Most of the other guys in my age bracket were at big-league camp, found places outside the hotel, or were fired.

The trainers sighed and cycled through the rooms. I’d been grinding it out for half a decade, and if I wasn’t going to make it out of this camp, at least I could have a nice winter vacation in Arizona in a room with a refrigerator and a goddamn microwave.

“We’ve got one left. Do you know Leroy Davis?”

“Yeah, I know Leroy. He snores like a semi truck—”

“It’s the only one left. Him or no suite.”

“Usually there are more, especially on the first day.”

“This is the only one left. Yes or no?”

This may seem trivial, but in reality, it’s pure economics. Players don’t get paid in spring training; we get meal money. We get $20 a day, $120 a week after “clubbies” (clubhouse attendants) take their share. If you eat decent meals, you’ll be broke by the end of the week. Even if you get a doggy bag, you can’t bring it home with no place to store it. No suite means you’ll have to go into your own pocket for food. Fine for a high draft pick, debt for everyone else.

There was a SuperTarget within walking distance of the hotel. With a suite, I could pick up a Pyrex bowl and buy pasta, soup, milk, and cereal. I’d be set. Spend forty bucks, pocket the rest, and come out of spring training in the black.

However, I also needed to sleep. Leroy didn’t just snore; he had the septum of a wood chipper. He also has other “unique” tendencies that’ve earned him the nickname Larry the Cable Guy. For one, he looks just like him. For two, he acts just like him. His body is a refinery for dip, grease, domestic beer, and redneck humor. Larry, as we always referred to him, is not a drunk, but he’s consistent. He’s the type of guy who says he likes to have a beer with dinner and then a few for dessert. The more beers he has, the more he transforms into Larry the Cable Guy in looks and demeanor, and the louder his snoring gets.

He’s a hell of a guy, as nice as a big friendly dog, with a streak of that country boy, do-anything-for-ya hospitality a mile wide. He’s hard not to like, or at least laugh at, but living with him would require ear plugs and a strong tolerance to the smell of dip spit. Yet having lived with worse, I opted for the suite.

I parked my suitcase in the front part of my new home, where a table, a couch, and a kitchenette were located, but no Larry. In the rear part of the suite, where the beds were, I could hear a television turned to the unmistakable sounds of ESPN’s
SportsCenter
. Littered across one of the beds was an empty Gatorade bottle containing a brown gravyesque liquid, a can of Kodiak, a Carl’s Junior Bag, and a crumpled up sandwich wrapper. A Western Bacon Six Dollar Burger had been murdered here.

Like a trained detective, I knew the routine. The modus of minor league meals: get food, eat food, put in dip (the official diuretic of baseball), place hand down pants, watch
SportsCenter
, take a dump. This would explain why the suite’s bathroom door was shut with the fan whirring from the inside.

Without disturbing the evidence, I made my way to the bathroom and knocked. No answer. I opened the door and immediately wished I hadn’t. There, splattered all over the porcelain of the toilet bowl was the body of the Six Dollar Burger. The murderer had escaped without flushing.

It was getting late, and Larry still wasn’t back yet. I was looking forward to seeing him, and reminding him what the little lever on the top of the toilet was for. He was probably out with some of the other boys, having a cold one, or four, to commemorate another spring training in the grind. A few beers would mean snoring, so I made a preemptive strike and dragged one of the mattresses from the bedroom portion of the suite into the living room portion and threw it on the ground—just like Grandma’s. So accustomed was I to sleeping on floors at this point that I didn’t know if I’d even be able to fall asleep without the ambient sounds of pissed elderly women beating on doors.

Sometime before midnight, Larry blasted the suite’s door open and nearly stepped on my head. “Jesus man, what the hell are you doing on the floor?” My eyes had trouble adjusting to the light from the hall. Larry stood in the doorway, and between my sleep-dilated eyes and the bright backlighting, he looked like a big redneck angel—an angel with a spitter and a goatee.

“Hey, Larry. Good to see you too.”

“Good to see you man, but seriously [spit], why in the hell are you out here on the floor?”

“Well, the rumor is you snore pretty bad. I’m a light sleeper and figured I wouldn’t take any chances.” I smiled at him, sincerely. He looked at me as if I were fucking retarded.

“Dude, you’re fucking retarded.”

“I think it’s pretty smart! This way we both sleep fine.”

“Why didn’t you just buy earplugs? [spit]”

Why didn’t I just buy earplugs? “Well, Target was sold out. I’ll get some tomorrow,” I said, knowing I was lying.

“Well, what if I wanna sit out here? Your bed’s takin up all the room!”

“Don’t give me shit about the bed, not after what you did in the bathroom. I came in today, and it looked like a scene from the
Exorcist
in there. I had to call maintenance to come and force it down because it scared the maids.”

“Ha-ha, my bad, rommie,” he said, but you could tell he was proud of his bowels. “I got a phone call from one of my good buddies and forgot all about it.”

“I don’t see how you could forget an experience like that.”

“Actually, I thought it was one of my better ones.”

“You’re disgusting.”

“Now wait a minute.” He looked at me, suddenly serious possibly offended. “Who said I snored?”

“Everyone who has ever lived with you.”

“Everyone?”

“Everyone, Larry.”

“Well, hell [spit], then maybe I do!” He stepped over me and went into his room. “Well, I’ll let you get back to sleeping on the kitchen floor, smart guy. Good to see you again!”

“You too, Larry.”