I signed a Minor League contract with the Detroit Tigers organization. I felt good about this one, I don’t know why. I think I felt like this was the first thing in my life that was happening because I was good at something. Everything else had just happened, more of a question of my being in certain places at certain times than anything else. That’s what childhood is like, I figured, but now I’m an adult. I’m going to start becoming something. A Major League pitcher, even.
Bertrand told me that I would be joining the Erie SeaWolves in AA for a little bit of seasoning. But it was basically a technicality, he told me, and if everything went as expected, I would be in AAA by mid-August and up in the Majors by the September call-ups. But he called me back the day after I signed with the club and told me that there had been some trouble shuffling the Minor League rosters, and because of certain contracts that the organization couldn’t afford to lose, I would have to start in A-ball. He apologized profusely and told me it would only be a couple appearances before they would get me out of there, but I told him I was fine and willing to do anything to get to the Major League level. I told him it had been my dream my whole life, which was a lie, but I figured that was the kind of thing he wanted to hear. So after a week of Bertrand working out the details with the Tigers front office, I took a bus down to Lakeland, Florida to join my new team.
I believed I was a significant Major League prospect because that’s what everyone had been telling me ever since Bertrand had seen me in the bus station. Ever since I signed the contract, I was getting calls at home from people within the Tigers organization telling me about all the highest hopes they had for my success. I even got calls from Baseball America and a couple of other publications, and I told everyone the same time: I was excited to get started and I wouldn’t disappoint.
When I got to Lakeland, I was greeted by a couple of scouts and the Lakeland manager. They took my bag for me and showed me around the complex, which wasn’t much of a complex, to be honest. It was a tiny field with room for 8,000 people in the bleachers (though I never saw it hold more than a few hundred) and a couple of dingy clubhouses attached to the dugouts. It was a little better than the Little League field next to the library back in Burlington. It had a first-class snack bar, though. When I got there, the team was tossing balls back and forth on the field. I could see that a couple of them had noticed me arrive and I gave them a nervous little wave. It was not returned.
The manager brought me into the locker room and showed me where I could put my stuff. My locker had the word “Captain” emblazoned in bold black letters across the top.
“Am I the captain?” I asked. I wasn’t really stupid enough to believe that I had been made the captain already, but I didn’t know what else to make of it.
“No, that’s—the team doesn’t have a captain,” the manager told me. “That locker used to belong to Mark Jenkins. We had to cut him this morning to make room for you on the roster,” he said. Apparently, Mark was only a kind of unofficial captain because he was so well-liked and respected by the whole team. He had been with Lakeland for seven years, since he had graduated high school. He and his sweetheart lived in a little place a few blocks away from the stadium, and he used to ride his bike to every game. He made due with the money he made as a minor league ballplayer and the little extra he picked up on the side working at the local skating rink, and loved his life. He was so distraught when he learned he was being cut to make room for a sixteen year-old from Connecticut who had never thrown a pitch at the high school level that, when he had learned what was to happen during the seventh inning of the last game, he left the stadium immediately and hadn’t been seen since. This is the man I was replacing.
I decided that I would need to ingratiate myself to the team as quickly as possible. I left the manager in the locker room and jogged out to the field. Like I said, it was a small place, but there was still something about it that hit me right away when I stepped onto the warning track. Single-A baseball is very different from AA. AA is where the real prospects start out, the ones who they know are going to be Major League players from the start. That's where they mix with career Minor Leaguers who are just happy to be around. Normally, that’s where I would have been. But A-ball are kids, mostly, a few years out of high school or college, who don’t have too many delusions about making it big. There aren’t too many who stick around for more than a year. The few who do show real potential are called up quickly, the rest are cut down in huge numbers after the season is over. One or two seasons of living the dream is the norm. Guys who stick around with the same club at the same level for more than a couple of years become kind of legendary. And the ones who are going places, who are only using A as a springboard rather than a beautiful glimpse at living a childhood dream, they’re the ones who are resented. We’re the ones who are resented, I should say. You can overcome this, of course, if you understand what’s going on, and if you are particularly good at navigating through these kinds of social minefields, but I didn’t and I was not.
I jogged out and introduced myself to the first man I saw. He just squinted at me for a second and went back to tossing the ball with the guy at the other end of the field. “I’m Chris,” I said, to the next guy and then to the guy after that, and none of them wanted much to do with me. “You’re the one who booted Markie off the team,” said one beanpole with sunglasses. He spit at my feet. I apologized, and tried to explain that it wasn’t my fault, but I couldn’t find the words so I just apologized again. I ran back into the clubhouse as fast as I could.
I was anxious to get started, so I could prove that I wanted to help this team win some games. I walked up to the manager and asked him how I should start. What I should do. He called one of the catchers over and told us to head out for some batting practice. “Don’t go easy on the guys, though,” he told me. “Think of it as a game situation. We want to see exactly what we're dealing with." He was referring to me.
I thought the best way to get these guys to like me was to show that I could really pitch. If I really showed them up, they would respect me, I thought. Stupid me. The first guy to come up to the plate was the quick, skinny little left fielder. He was the leadoff hitter because he looked like a leadoff hitter, but he swung at pretty much everything that was thrown and couldn’t really hit. He was one of the kids who was going nowhere and knew it, but loved the game and played exactly as hard as he had to so he could stay on this A roster for as long as possible. He bunted a lot, because he could do that pretty well. He could lay down an incredible sacrifice and loved showing it off, even when there was no one on base. The team got a kick out of it every time. I gave him an intimidating little squint and then stared past him at the catcher, who threw down a sign I didn’t understand. I think he was just trying to mess with me, because he must have known that I hadn’t learned any of the signs yet. I was a little nervous, so I stepped off the rubber. The hitter, his name was Scottie, dropped the bat and threw his hands up in exasperation, and there was some grumbling from the fielders behind me. Already this was not going well, and in fact, it was getting worse and worse by the second.
I looked over at the dugout. Bertrand was there, letting a clipboard dangle by his hips, watching me. I remembered the bus station. I remembered how those apples had cut through the air. “No one could ever hit that pitch,” he kept telling me, apple after apple. “It’s absolutely inconceivable.” I held those words in my head, stepped back into the rubber, and fired my first pitch at the guy, as hard as I could.
As it turns out, throwing a baseball is a little bit different from throwing an apple. I threw a meatball and before it reached the plate, it seemed, the thing was launched off the bat into the right field stands. Everyone on the team, except for me, of course, went nuts. “Scottie hit it out! Scottie hit it out!” they kept shouting. It was like they had seen a comet or something. I felt like shit.
The next hitter was another scrawny little kid. He was a DH, because he couldn’t hit, but he was even worse at defense. He slammed my first pitch as well, a screaming line drive that bounced off the wall in deep center field. He jogged around the bases handing out high fives like he had hit it out. I pulled my hat down over my eyes, just in case I started crying. The third and fourth hitters picked up a couple more home runs off of me. I kept looking at the dugout, hoping the manager would trot out and put me out of my misery, but he was laughing along with the rest of the team and wasn’t really worried about my psyche, which was a flaming wreck in the middle of the field. He probably missed Markie too. But finally, Bertrand ran past him and met me on the mound.
“What’s happening out here?” he asked. I shook my head and looked at the dirt. “Look at me, look me in the eyes,” he said, and he grabbed my chin to make sure I was paying attention. “You’re better than this,” he said, but I had already learned not to believe anyone who told me this. He must have been able to see this, because he gave up trying to rebuild my confidence just as quickly as he had begun. He looked back to the dugout. “Get this fucking kid some apples!” he screamed.
They bought a basket of apples for me and carted them out to the mound. I felt better with the apple, it’s hard to explain why. Maybe I was just used to it, or maybe the idea that it was all the baseball's fault made it easier to swallow the incredible disappointment I was already becoming. A big beefy first baseman everyone called Alfy stepped up to the plate. He was the kind of guy who crushed everything he hit. 80% of the time it was foul and 20% of the time it was a home run. Everyone loved watching the guy, you could tell, because everyone in the dugout leaned out over the fence. I was a little frightened.
He mocked me and pointed towards the bleachers with his bat. “Closer to the foul pole!” someone shouted from the dugout and everyone except for me and Bertrand shared a hearty laugh. I threw the first apple in there. Alfy jumped out of the batters box because he thought he was about to get smashed in the hip, but right before the it reached him, the apple sliced down and outside until the catcher found it at the corner of the plate. It was a beautiful thing, that first strike. There was silence, then a little whistle of appreciation came from somewhere behind me.
Alfy was clearly not happy that he had just been embarrassed by this little kid who had been getting crushed all afternoon. He wasn’t going to make the same mistake again. I threw him another apple. As it sped towards the plate, red and green patches tumbling over and over through the sky, I could tell he got a real good look at it, like he wanted to murder it. He took the biggest swing of his life, expecting to turn it to applesauce, but it was a sinker and it disappeared in front of him and actually bounced off home plate into the catcher’s glove. Alfy was so stunned, he lost his balance and corkscrewed onto his back right in the batter’s box. Bertrand ran to meet me on the mound again.
“Now just do that with a baseball,” he said. I was starting to believe that I could, despite myself. “Do you know how to throw a slider? With a real baseball?” he asked me. I shook my head. He showed me the proper grip and how I was supposed to put a little more pressure on the ball with one finger. I was slow and clumsy catching on, so Bertrand grabbed my hand and guided my fingers to their spots over the seams. It was all vaguely sexual, in a way. “You need to learn how to throw this pitch,” he said. “You’ve got until August 31, because when September rolls around, your ass is either going to be in a Major League dugout, or it’s going to be on a bus back to your bumblefuck little Connecticut town where you’ll be a nobody again. Do we understand each other?” Quite the inspirational speech. I gripped the ball a little tighter. Bertrand didn’t wait for an answer; he just trotted back into the dugout, the picture of confidence.
I was afraid to let go of the ball, like I would never be able to figure it out on my own and this grip that Bertrand had given me was the last successful slider I would ever throw. I was afraid to move it into my glove, so I just tried a quick little slidestep and gave it all I had. Alfy killed it, of course. I’ve never seen a baseball fly that far in my life. The manager walked out to the mound, after he had finished laughing, and told me that batting practice was over. I punched the hell out of my locker when I got back into the clubhouse. Just beat the living crap out of it. With my pitching hand, because I think subconsciously I was trying to break it, so I could go home and all these people could forget about me and I could forget about them and my career could be over. No such luck.
No one bothered talking to me when they all joined me in the locker room a few hours later. We all got dressed and I walked out with them. They didn’t pay a bit of attention to me. I wasn’t sure how I felt about this. In the parking lot, Alfy pointed at a blimp that was flying over the stadium. It was directly against the sunset, and it was hard to see, but everyone else was already laughing. I finally got a good squint going and saw that it read “CHRIS=QUEER." Which is just about the worst thing you can say about a high school boy, which I was, or an insecure Minor League baseball player, which I had just become.
I don’t know how they got the blimp people to agree to take off carrying that message, and so quickly. Someone on the team must have had a friend.
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