The Might Have Been

CHAPTER Fifteen





The next morning, Edward Everett as usual got to the ballpark before anyone else, seven-forty, long before his two coaches or the trainer or clubhouse assistant would appear.

As he let himself in and entered the code to disarm the security system, he nearly stumbled over a pallet of unopened boxes marked “Programs.” They had been delivered since the last time he’d been there and were already out of date, he knew, more than four weeks late, one of the consequences of the team owner Bob Collier’s budget-cutting—acting as his own general manager after the previous GM had taken a job with the Marlins organization, using a college intern in the public relations staff at his meat company to do the team’s publicity. A nearly anorexic blonde, she had confessed to Edward Everett in a voice that squeaked that, while she had played soccer in high school, she knew little about baseball and would he mind terribly reading the bios of the players she had tried to write before the yearbook went to press? Three of the players in the yearbook were already gone, one traded to the St. Louis organization, one promoted to double-A and one out of baseball—Tom Packer, an infielder who had left in the second week of the season to join a church group volunteering in Kenya. Sitting in Edward Everett’s office to tell him, Packer wouldn’t meet his eye. “My girlfriend showed me this documentary on YouTube,” he said in explanation, his neck coloring as if he were admitting to some great wrong rather than a decision to help the poor. “I feel real bad, letting you guys down like this. I hope you can forgive me, Skip.” His team was, in fact, still a man short on the roster as, while the big club had replaced the first two players, it had yet to replace Packer. Wryly, Edward Everett thought of it as punishment for Packer’s skewed priorities, at least in the eye of the organization, feeding the hungry and tending the sick instead of working to improve his pivot on double plays and his sense of the strike zone.

In his office, Edward Everett switched on his computer and, while it booted up, took the coffeepot to a sink in the shower room and filled it with water. By the time he got back to his office, put in a new filter, spooned out coffee and poured the water into the reservoir, the box on the computer screen was asking for his log-in and password. The big club had sent him an email not long ago, reminding him that he was supposed to change his password every month, but he had a hard enough time remembering any of his passwords. His entire life was a password: his debit card PIN number, the password for his bank account online, his log-in for baseballamerica.com, and so he hadn’t changed it in four years. It was still Renee’s birthday, 112363.

While the computer went through its start-up sequence, and water began dripping through the filter, he opened the scorebook from the last game they had gotten in before the rains shut everything down so he could enter the stats onto his game log cards; it was a five–four win in the ninth inning, his kind of ball when he was a player; David Martinez, his leadoff hitter, bunting down the third base line with the fielder playing back, a stolen base, a wild throw into center field by the catcher, trying to nab him at second, sending him to third and then scoring on a ground ball to first. Transcribing his players’ cards was tedious, senseless work—at least according to the big club. Last fall, not long after they hired a new director of player development—a thirty-something-year-old who seemed proud that he had never played a day of professional ball and who signed his emails “Marc Johansen, MS, MBA”—the team had sent him to a ten-week course at the junior college to learn a suite of statistical computer programs. “You’ve got a lot of what I call ‘Old World’ knowledge,” Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, said when he told Edward Everett he was asking him to learn the programs. “Just think of how valuable you’ll be if you can marry that ‘Old World’ to the twenty-first century.” Although Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, had phrased it as a request, Edward Everett knew he had no choice: shortly after Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, took his job, he’d sent an email to the organization. “I know that when changes occur at the top, everyone gets nervous. I want to assure you that we won’t make any personnel moves for at least sixty days.” The subtext was clear: starting on the sixty-first day, no one had a guaranteed job.

So, grudgingly, every Tuesday night from early October to just before Christmas, Edward Everett sat in a computer lab with kids less than a third his age and hunted-and-pecked his way through the exercises the instructor gave, making spreadsheets of fictitious daily sales of fictitious products of a fictitious company. He was slow, and so, after the instructor explained an assignment and the other students were attacking it with verve—keyboards clattering away—he would sit beside Edward Everett and go over and over the exercises, reaching over his shoulder and hitting computer keys and clicking the mouse, often so quickly that Edward Everett couldn’t follow what he was doing.

“Here,” the instructor would say. Click: a mathematical function occurred on the screen, a sum appearing at the end of a column. “See?” he would ask. Edward Everett didn’t see but nodded like a dumb mule anyway, thinking he just had to get through the class, because Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, said he had to, wanting the instructor just to leave him on his own, because he knew the special attention reinforced the notion that the other students had, that he belonged to a sub-class of human beings: people too old to live.

In time, Edward Everett did learn to use the programs well enough that he could finish the reports he needed to upload every day so that Mark Johansen, MS, MBA, could do what he called “massaging the data.” Nonetheless, he could not stop first doing it the way he had done it for twenty years—it was easier for him to slide a ruler from row to row on a card to see how much more patient Martinez was at the plate, or how his catcher Sean Vila was hitting against left-handers or how deep into a game his starter Pete Sandford went before he started giving up hits and walks to batters who had no business getting on base against him.

On some mornings, he was late uploading his spreadsheets. Then, he would get a scolding phone call from the assistant in the PD department, Mike Renz, his voice high-pitched and nasal: “We can’t do much with numbers we don’t have.” Edward Everett had met him at last year’s annual meeting for the organization’s managers and coaches. Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, was in Lucerne for his honeymoon and bad weather delayed his return flight so Renz stood in for him. He was a skinny kid, his hair spiked with gel that glistened under the lights, and he droned on for an hour with a lecture he titled, “The Future Was Yesterday,” in which he outlined an alphabet soup of statistical tools: VORP, DIPS, WHIP, and what he called a “proprietary metric,” which allowed the team to predict how a minor league player might perform in the major leagues. “Of course,” he said when he clicked on the projector for his PowerPoint, “I don’t expect you to understand any of this.”

By eleven-thirty, when Edward Everett took a break to make himself a sandwich from the cold cuts he kept in the small refrigerator in his office, he had uploaded his stats and was ready for that night’s game: his lineup card, his notes about the order in which he would use his bullpen staff when Sandford faltered. The big club wanted him to begin stretching Sandford out, having him get into the seventh inning, although he hadn’t been much more than a five-inning pitcher. Off the mound, Sandford seemed a comic exaggeration of a human being: six-foot-six and not much more than bone thin, with a gaunt face and ears that protruded so much that opposing teams taunted him with “Dumbo.” When Edward Everett talked to him, he blinked so slowly that Edward Everett wondered if his mind was able to process anything he was told. Despite all that, until he hit the inevitable barrier after five innings, he had such control that he seemed capable of threading a needle with a baseball. Beyond that, his speed was deceptive. His arm motion was fluid, seemingly effortless, but his fastball came in at more than 95 miles an hour, according to the radar gun Biggie Vincent aimed at him from a seat behind the plate in the stands. Several times a game, the gun registered triple digits. A month earlier, after one of Sandford’s starts, Edward Everett and Vincent had gone for a beer and Vincent slipped the pitching chart across the table to him, the notations of the pitches that had hit 100 or more circled in red. Vincent had had four or five beers by then and as he passed the card across the table, he was teary-eyed. “Don’t get the idea I’m turning faggot, but I love this boy.” Sandford’s curve, which he threw with the same motion as his fastball, hit 83 and his change had come in as slow as 71. Routinely, even going but five innings, he tallied seven or eight strikeouts, often with only a single walk. Then, when he reached his Achilles’ heel sixth inning, he pitched as if he had never held a baseball in his life to that point.

Edward Everett wasn’t sure what would help him become the pitcher that Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, wanted, but he needed to figure it out. The grace period Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, had promised everyone had expired months before. While he hadn’t yet, eventually he would begin firing people and there wasn’t much room in baseball for minor league managers who were approaching sixty.