The Might Have Been

The Might Have Been - By Joe Schuster




The truth is, we are reminded each day of what we can’t do.





—Todd Jones, major league pitcher,

The Sporting News, June 30, 2008





Author’s Note




For purposes of the narrative, I have taken some liberties with the facts of minor league baseball history and organization. In some places, I have created fictional towns; in others, I have used present or past minor league towns but changed their major league affiliations. Where I have used names of actual baseball players, I have done so for their iconic value and in no way intend these depictions to suggest events in their careers.





Chapter One





A long while later—after the accident that would shape his life in ways he wouldn’t understand for decades—Edward Everett Yates would feel sorry for the naïve young man he was then, the one who mistook that summer as the reward for so many years of faith and perseverance.

He turned twenty-seven and was lean and fast, in his tenth year of professional ball, playing left field for the Cardinals’ triple-A team in Springfield, Illinois—well past the age of many of his teammates, who were not much more than boys, twenty, twenty-one, with acne on their chin, two years removed from borrowing their daddy’s car for the prom. One—a nineteen-year-old, rail-thin left-hander with a wicked slider—still had a voice that broke an octave higher when he talked.

Nearly everyone he had begun with a decade earlier had moved on, up and out of the minors or out of the game itself. His roommate from rookie ball, Danny Matthias—a weak-hitting catcher—was in his fourth year with the Milwaukee Brewers, despite averages near .200. But catchers who had the confidence of a pitching staff were rare; singles-hitting outfielders like Edward Everett were not. The previous December, when Danny and his wife sent him a Christmas card, Danny had enclosed one of his baseball cards and written, “The best-looking backup catcher in America.” He’d meant it as a joke, but Edward Everett was envious nonetheless, imagining boys throughout America opening a pack of Topps and finding Danny’s glossy face dusted with sugar from the gum, along with Reggie Jackson and Hank Aaron.

The others—those who had lost patience and faith—had been back in the World for years, selling real estate or tires, finishing college, starting families. One enlisted after his brother died in Vietnam and came back minus a leg, long-haired and strident, on the evening news in his wheelchair, burning a flag.

He woke up that season, found some capacity he hadn’t in previous years when he’d played well enough to stick but not enough to push past the wall that separated the minor leagues from the majors. In the first game, he had four hits in five at-bats against Tuscaloosa, two doubles, a triple and a bunt single in the ninth, when he noticed the third baseman playing back on the outfield grass. From then on, he played what the sports columnist in the State Journal Register termed “inspired ball,” with a sureness that surprised him, settling in to what they all called a “zone” at the plate, see the ball, hit the ball, seeing nuances in a pitcher’s motion he hadn’t noticed before, often having a sense of exactly where a pitch would go and how it would move—up, in, down, out—seeming to see it even before the pitcher released it as surely as if he were living a fifth of a second ahead of everyone else on the field.

He was dating a girl named Julie, a twenty-year-old sophomore at Springfield College, who talked to him about auras, ideas he listened to because he knew if he seemed to pay attention he’d get her into bed. But as the season progressed, he wondered if he’d been wrong to dismiss her notions, because once in a while, standing at the plate, digging his spikes into the Midwestern soil and settling into his stance, he felt that in some way the entire ballpark was an extension of himself.

By the end of June, he was batting .409, forty-five points higher than the next best average, and on the third of July, after a five–four victory in Omaha, in which he caught the final out by leaping against the fence and extending his glove a good foot above the top of the wall to bring back what would have been a three-run home run, his manager called him into his office.

Three decades into his future, after he came to understand the full meaning of that moment, Edward Everett would remember it with rare clarity. And why not? He had imagined it ever since he was a boy, imagined it before falling asleep while he listened to Bob Prince and Jim Woods calling Pirates games on his transistor radio, imagined it as he knelt at Mass when he should have concentrated on the sufferings of Christ on the cross, even imagined it once while he was making out with a girl at a bonfire the October he was sixteen: noticing the shedding poplars silhouetted by the fire, he remembered that the Dodgers were playing the Twins in the Series that night, and wondered, as the girl nuzzled his neck, what the score was, and then saw himself in another October not too far off, in the on-deck circle, in the still point before coming to the plate, while around him the crowd flickered in an anxious and hopeful roar. He had imagined his being called up so often that his imagining seemed more a memory than a desire.

On that day more than half his life ago, Edward Everett sat in his manager’s office—it was Pete Hoppel then—waiting while Hoppel finished a tired conversation with his wife on the phone. He had a practice, Hoppel did, of stripping off his uniform and leaving it crumpled on the floor for the equipment man to pick up and then sitting, his ankles crossed on his desktop, wearing nothing but a red Cardinals logo towel around his waist. Because he was a large man, the towel did not adequately cover him and so, sitting across from him, Edward Everett tried not to notice that his genitals were exposed, but this was difficult since he kept hefting himself in his chair to scratch his hip. In that state, he seemed to Edward Everett, for the first time, shockingly old: the giddy man who had sailed his ball cap into the crowd after Edward Everett’s catch to end the game—that man was in his fifties, Edward Everett realized. In his uniform, Hoppel seemed substantial but, naked, he just looked fat, with folds of flesh cutting across his hairy chest and belly. His legs seemed like kindling that shouldn’t be able to support his bulk and he picked at scaly patches of hard yellowed skin on the balls of his feet while he talked to his wife about whether they could afford a mason to repair their patio. Thirty years earlier, he had been as lithe as Edward Everett was in that moment. On the wall behind his desk hung a picture from when he was with Boston for two seasons, Hoppel’s long arm draped over Ted Williams’ shoulder, two skinny young men in dusty jerseys grinning for the photographer after they each stole home on successive pitches in a game against the Yankees.

“Babe, I gotta go,” he said finally, giving Edward Everett a wink and hanging up the phone. He took his feet off the desk and pushed himself until he was sitting upright, letting out a groan from the effort. “Don’t never get old, Double E.”

“Yes, sir,” Edward Everett said, not certain it was the right answer.

“Look,” Hoppel said, “you done good. Last year, I would’ve said you was going nowhere. You got the body, but your brains was for shit. This year …” Hoppel shrugged. “Long story short. You’re going to St. Louis.”

Edward Everett felt his heart leap in his chest. “I …” he started to say but couldn’t think of any words. Today he had been playing a road game in Omaha, sleeping four to a room at the Travelodge, and tomorrow he’d be in St. Louis, where Musial, Hornsby and Gibson had played and where he’d step onto a field with Lou Brock as his teammate. “Called up”—the words seemed in some way holy.

“It’s maybe just for a month,” Hoppel said. “Perry tore up his ankle going into the stands for a pop fly. But here’s a word of advice. Don’t f*ck up. Make it tough for them to send you back. Do what you been doing here, and you got a chance to stick. Now get the f*ck out of here.”

“I won’t—” Edward Everett said, but Hoppel picked up the phone and waved him out of the office. “Hey, Benny,” he said, without even saying hello. “You still have that concrete connection? That guy, what’s-his-name—he played at Altoona that one year?”

By the time Edward Everett got to the ballpark in St. Louis for the one p.m. holiday afternoon game against Pittsburgh the next day, the team had already finished batting practice and was in the dugout. From down a long concrete corridor that led to the field, he could hear the stadium announcer introducing a woman who would sing the national anthem. The clubhouse was nearly empty. Beside the door, a guard sat on a folding chair, a short and thin man who tugged on his sideburns as he worked a crossword puzzle. A clubhouse assistant laid folded towels on a shelf in each of the lockers, while another set bottles of soft drinks into a cooler in a back corner. A player hobbled out of the training room, his thigh wrapped in an ice pack.

“You Yates?” asked the equipment man distributing towels. “That’s you.” He pointed at the back corner to a locker nearly blocked by a stack of cases of Coke. A white home jersey hung there, his name sewn across the yoke in all capitals; number 66. Edward Everett felt suddenly dizzy and sat down hard on a bench in the middle of the room to keep from passing out.

“A fainter,” the equipment man said, laughing. “You’re not the first.”

Dressed, he rushed down the tunnel to the dugout but hesitated at the entrance. Beyond, the stadium blazed with color—the patriotic bunting draped against the blue outfield walls, the green of the artificial turf, the red and white shirts of the fans rustling in their seats. On the field, the Cardinals worked through their pre-inning warm-ups, outfielders throwing high arcing balls that spun against a nearly cloudless sky, infielders taking ground balls.

“No tourists,” snapped a player on the bench, someone Edward Everett recognized as a relief pitcher, a squat man tightening an ace bandage around his left knee. Edward Everett was going to say he belonged, but the pitcher laughed. “Hey, Skip,” he called. “New blood.”

The manager glanced briefly at him and mumbled something he couldn’t make out but which he took to mean that it wasn’t the time for formal introductions to a rookie.

Not certain of the etiquette, Edward Everett sat at the edge of the bench beside the water cooler and bat rack, trying to form his face into a mask that didn’t reveal his absolute awe at finally being here, his sense that someone was, at any moment, going to tell him it was all an elaborate joke; but once the game began, he might as well have been invisible. Time after time, not paying attention, the other players—my teammates, he thought—tromped on his spikes as they fetched a bat for their turns at the plate. Once, getting something to drink, one of them, distracted by another player whistling and pointing to a blond woman leaning over the railing of the box seats to peer into the dugout, fell over Edward Everett’s feet, landing half in his lap. “Mother f*ck,” the player snapped, “watch out,” as if Edward Everett had been the one tripping and falling and not sitting as he was on the bench, squeezed into the corner, trying to take up as little room as possible, his feet trod upon, players not paying attention when they tossed aside their paper drink cups, flinging them at his shoulder, his lap and once his face instead of the trash can.

The game, as some did, became contagiously static, neither team hitting much at all, through three innings, four, five, easy ground balls, shallow flies, players on the bench seeming to sag as the innings passed, eight, nine, ten, fans growing bored, the crowd shrinking, inning by inning, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, fans pushing their way out of the ballpark for their barbecues, family dinners, horseshoes and backyard sparklers. In the top of the seventeenth, however, the Pirates threatened to score, putting two runners on with only one out. The next hitter stroked a line drive to deep left field, where Lou Brock was playing. He dashed across the turf and, just as the drive seemed destined to fall in, leaped for it, his body parallel to the earth, snagging the ball in the webbing of the glove, and then slammed to the hard ground, bouncing slightly but holding on. So quickly that Edward Everett didn’t see him get up, he was on his feet and throwing a strike to the second baseman standing on the bag, doubling off the runner who’d left too soon.

When Brock reached the dugout, his teammates clapped him on the shoulder but he was hurt—his slide on the turf had ripped his uniform pants at the left knee, raising a strawberry that oozed blood, and he limped to the bench, grimacing.

“You, Whosis,” the manager said, pointing to Edward Everett. “You’re hitting for Lou. Get out on deck.”

He didn’t move at first, unsure the manager meant him, but the player beside him elbowed him. “I wanna get home before my boy starts shaving. And he just turned one.”

Edward Everett realized he’d left his bats in Omaha and searched the rack for one to hit with. He found one engraved “Dan Vandiveer,” a catcher Edward Everett had played with at Grand Rapids five years earlier and who’d spent ten days with the Cardinals the previous season, someone who was out of baseball already, thirty-four and doing God only knew what. When he stepped onto the field, the heat assaulted him. In the shade of the dugout, he hadn’t realized how warm the day was, but in the open, under the late afternoon sun on a cloudless day, the temperature attacked him with a force that made him gasp. That evening, watching the news in his hotel room, he saw that it had been 99 degrees during the day; by the time he went to the plate, it was still near 90, but the radiant effect of the Astroturf and the concrete beneath it must have added another twenty degrees.

The stadium came into his consciousness slowly: bending to pick up the weighted donut for his bat, he became aware of the washed-out green of the turf; on television, it appeared a seamless piece but, bending there, he noticed the warp and woof of the thick fabric. He saw, too, the scaling white paint that described the on-deck circle and noticed his red cleats, which, although they had been freshly polished when the equipment man had given them to him, were scuffed and gouged from being stepped on.

He had no time to warm up. As soon as he dropped the donut onto his bat, Ron Fairly, leading off, laced a drive just inside the first base line, a ball that skipped to the right field wall, Fairly on with a leadoff double, the potential winning run in scoring position.

Edward Everett walked to the plate, suddenly aware of an incredible amount of activity around him. In the stands, the fans began a rhythmic clapping, some stomping on the concrete decking, a thunderous sound that it seemed could bring down the stadium around them. In the third row behind first base, a small girl wearing a too-large red T-shirt snatched a handful of cotton candy off a stick her mother held. A row behind her, a fat man in a gray suit and blue-and-silver striped tie yelled through a popcorn megaphone, “Let’s go, Birds!”

The stadium announcer said, “Now batting for Lou Brock, Ed-dee Yates,” although no one had called him Eddie since the second grade. He could feel the crowd’s enthusiasm sag as their clapping and stomping quieted. It was not the reception he expected but if he were among them, expecting an All-Star and getting instead a player he’d never heard of, he would have been disappointed as well. A sudden vision came to him: his redemption in their eyes. Not a home run—that was something for the movies—but his slicing a base hit into an outfield gap to score Fairly, the fans jubilant, his new teammates leaping up the steps from the dugout onto the field, surrounding him at first base after Fairly was in with the win.

Edward Everett stepped into the batter’s box, trying to shut it all out, his imagined heroics, the movement of the crowd like a field of red and white grain stirred by the wind, the noise that was starting to build again, the organ playing a cadence, bum bum bum bum bum bum, Fairly at second base, taking a cautious lead, one, two, three steps.

Down the third base line, the coach was going through the signals, swiping his shirt, tugging the brim of his cap, tapping his thigh. Edward Everett realized no one had taught him what the signals meant.

“Time,” he said, stepping out of the batter’s box when the umpire gave him the time-out and trotting down the line to meet the coach halfway.

“What you need?” the coach said, standing close to him. His breath smelled of cigarettes and something else that was sour.

“Signals,” Edward Everett said. “I don’t know what you want. No one—”

The coach laughed. “You’re the only guy in the f*cking area code who don’t know. Pop quiz. Runner on second, none out, bottom of the seventeenth, no score. What would you do?”

“Bunt,” Edward Everett said, deflated. “Bunt.”

He went back to the plate, trying not to show his disappointment. True enough, even the Pirates knew what he was going to do. The entire infield edged closer, the first baseman and third baseman playing well in front of the bases, the second baseman edging toward first, the shortstop playing behind Fairly to hold him close. For a moment, Edward Everett thought about changing them all up, swinging away, lining a hit to right field, the crowd erupting in joy. But he knew he wouldn’t do that; he would sacrifice.

At the plate, he took his stance and looked out at the pitcher, who was rubbing the ball between his palms. He was a rookie himself, younger than Edward Everett, maybe only twenty, a stocky, round-faced kid who seemed more like a fast-food fry cook than a professional athlete. The thought pushed into Edward Everett’s head: five or six years ago, the pitcher might have been in junior high. Edward Everett saw him as a boy in a white oxford shirt and blue slacks, sitting in a … but he shoved the thought aside. The past meant nothing. There was only this moment: the pitcher nodding to the catcher’s signal, holding his stretch for a scant second, as Edward Everett slid his right hand along the barrel of the bat, noticing and then dismissing a rough spot in the wood, cradling the bat partway over the plate.

The pitch came in on the outside corner, and Edward Everett caught it with the meat of the bat, dropping a slow ground ball that trickled toward first base. Stay fair, he thought, dashing down the baseline for the bag, wanting to make it more than a sacrifice, thinking, if this were grass instead of artificial turf, it would die in the grass and he could beat it out, but this was not grass but turf. He willed himself to go faster, leaping for the base, urging his body to take off, hearing the ssszzz of the first baseman’s throw from behind him, hearing the slap of the ball into leather at perhaps the instant his foot met the bag, just a touch off-stride, making him stumble slightly as he took his turn into foul ground, thinking he was on with a single, but the umpire was throwing his right fist into the air, and grunting, “Out.”

Edward Everett waited for the coach to argue but he just clapped his hands and shouted, “Good sac, good sac.” And indeed, Fairly stood on third. Edward Everett had done his job.

He jogged off the field. In the stands, fans gave him polite applause before resuming their roaring and stomping as the announcer introduced the next hitter.

Then it was over. With the infielders drawn in for a play at home on a ground ball, the hitter punched a flare over the second baseman’s head that fell just at the edge of the outfield grass, and Fairly was in, the game won.

Later, in the hotel room the team had rented for him across the street from the stadium, Edward Everett stood in the dark, looking eight stories below at the ballpark. The game had been over for hours by then, and the infield was covered by a blue tarp that glinted under the stadium lights. In the bleachers, workers moved through the aisles, bending to pick up trash. From some blocks away, where the city was staging a fireworks show on the riverfront, Edward Everett could hear the muted explosions celebrating the holiday. Every once in a while, a red or blue trail streaked across the sky within his field of vision. He stood there until the finale lit the sky in brilliant yellows, oranges and greens, and as the last flares faded, as the lights went out in Busch Stadium below him and all he could make out was the great dark gaping bowl of it, he thought about calling someone.

His mother would be at his aunt’s house for the barbecue she had every year. If he called there to tell her about what he’d done, she would pass the telephone around, to uncles, aunts, cousins, and he would have to repeat his story over and over for everyone. His mother would say, Oh, if only your father were still alive to see this, and then she’d cry and he didn’t want that, not tonight, not when he’d finally made it this far, the beginning of what he knew would be his years in the major leagues. He thought of the girl he had been seeing in Springfield, Julie, but whom he had stopped calling for no reason he could think of, just made a decision one day when he got back from a road trip that he didn’t want to see her again. For the first time since then, he regretted it, because she was someone he could call to tell, but now he couldn’t.

Stepping away from the window, he caught his dim mirrored image in it, and he actually seemed to be outside, hovering in an incomplete, ghostlike room. There was the reflection of a bedside lamp, a slash of the bed, the table where he’d laid his suitcase. He pressed his face against the window again. Below, knots of people leaving the fireworks show moved up the street toward their cars and, he knew, eventually home. He felt suddenly the fact of his being a stranger in a city of two million people where he knew no one.

He turned from the window and switched on the television, flipping channels until he found a sportscast. The announcer was talking about the game and Edward Everett sat on the edge of the king-sized bed, wondering if he’d be mentioned.

The account of the final inning showed Brock’s catch and throw for the double play, twice—once at full speed, and once in slow motion. Then it cut to Fairly’s double to start the home half of the inning, but then it jumped ahead, and Fairly was taking his lead off third.

“Then with one out,” the sportscaster said, “and Fairly on third, Hernandez singles over the drawn-in infield and the Cards get the win.”

It was, Edward Everett thought, like a baseball miracle—there is Fairly on second and then abruptly on third, through no human agency. Poof. In a way, he might never have even been there. Indeed, he knew what his line would be in the box score the next day, all zeros—no at-bats, no hits, no runs, no RBI, just “Yates PH 0000”—a miracle of nothing.

Still, he thought, he was here. There was a uniform in a locker across the street with his name on it and only six hundred men out of how many tens of millions of men in America could say that. Tomorrow was another game and the day after another still. He would have his chance and he would do something with it.