The Might Have Been

CHAPTER Sixteen





An hour and a half before game time, there was a crisis. Brett Webber, his shortstop, was missing. Webber was a moody kid from a small town in Ohio near where Edward Everett was raised; Edward Everett had sometimes gone to high school dances there after he and his friends decided that it would be easier to get girls who didn’t know them than the ones who did. Three years earlier, when Webber was a high school senior, Baltimore took him in the first round of the draft but then let him go in a trade after his second year, even though the team had given him a two-million-dollar bonus just to sign his contract and Webber had led the Florida State League in hitting. With his talent, he should be at least in double-A ball by now but it was clear that unless he matured, he would never get beyond single-A. He had been undependable all season: he was a week late for training camp and then had missed two games when he went to Chicago for a concert. When Edward Everett benched him as punishment, Webber had said, “It was The National, dude. So worth it.” Edward Everett told the big club it should just cut him loose, but Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, talked about his superlative zone rating, his similarity scores—arcane statistics that Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, derived when he massaged the spreadsheets that Edward Everett sent him—and wrote, “Talent carries a price. Have confidence you can smooth out rough edges in BW.”

Today, irrespective of his dislike of Webber, Edward Everett needed him to show up because they were short yet another player: Jim Rausch, his remaining backup middle infielder, had gone back to Alabama three days earlier to bury his father and to figure out what to do with his fifteen-year-old brother. Their mother had died four years earlier and they were, in Rausch’s own words, “orphan boys now.”

Edward Everett felt bad for him: nineteen and a surrogate father to a boy who, Edward Everett knew, had responded to his father’s illness by drinking a six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon one night and cracking up the pickup truck Rausch had bought their father with his bonus money. Still, it was tough running a team with twenty-three players, especially when only four of them were natural infielders. With Packer’s spot empty and without Rausch and Webber, it would mean moving Minnie Rojas from second base to short and bringing in either Ross Nelson or Josh Singer from the outfield to play second, and that wouldn’t be pretty, especially since, when he wasn’t striking hitters out, Sandford tended to induce ground balls. At least until the sixth inning, when the other team started banging hits off the wall.

An hour before game time, Edward Everett was on the field, hitting fungos to Nelson at second base—ground ball after ground ball, starting him off easy to let him begin to gain confidence. Through the stands, some of the high school boys and girls that Bob Collier hired for next to nothing—team T-shirts and a chance for one of the thousand-dollar college scholarships Collier awarded to the kids who worked for him—were moving among the seats, swiping at them with towels that were clearly soaked. As they worked, Edward Everett could see the spray of water their towels flung up. For them, the point seemed not to dry the seats but to get one another wet. Their laughter echoed amid the other pre-game sounds: Edward Everett hitting ground balls to Nelson, the splash of the footfalls of his outfielders running in the wet grass, the happy tunes of Phantom Frank Fitzgerald on the organ, old Broadway songs, mostly, something from soundtracks of thirty-year-old movies: Star Wars, Rocky, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Phantom Frank thought of them as new—he was beyond eighty, his eyesight so bad he couldn’t read music anymore, could only play by feel and memory, and sometimes his fingers started out on the wrong spot on the keyboard and until he found his place again, what he played seemed as if it were a song Edward Everett felt certain he knew but couldn’t quite name and then, when Phantom Frank stopped, found his place and continued, Edward Everett would realize it was “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head,” but three notes off. But he had played the organ in P. City for forty-two years and Collier couldn’t let him go.

“It would mean some kind of hex,” he once confided to Edward Everett.

After two dozen easy ground balls to Nelson, Edward Everett gave him a sign that he was going to start working him a bit harder. Nelson nodded and pounded his glove with his bare hand and got into his stance: hands on his knees, weight forward. Edward Everett hit a hard three-hopper to Nelson’s left and it ticked off his glove. He set again and Edward Everett sent another one-hop line drive to his left, and again it glanced off his glove. It was going to be a long night, Edward Everett thought as he tossed another ball into the air and again hit a hard line drive, this time to Nelson’s right. Crossing leg over leg, his feet got tangled and he hit the turf. But Nelson was game: back up, gesturing at Edward Everett, Hit it again.

Edward Everett liked Nelson, wished that he could hit with more power, had a stronger arm or more speed—anything that would suggest he could move up the line. But it wasn’t to be. While Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, often emailed Edward Everett asking for more data about some of his players, he had never asked about Nelson—a sign that he had decided already that Nelson had no future with the organization. But he asked and asked about Webber. Webber who showed up late to training camp because he wanted to stay longer in Jamaica; Webber who went AWOL so he could go to a concert. Webber who wasn’t there.

He hit Nelson another dozen ground balls until he began to find the timing, began to anticipate the way the ball would bounce. After he grabbed three in a row without missing, Edward Everett decided it was a good time to stop—when Nelson was feeling confident. It still wouldn’t be enough, he knew; ground balls would get past Nelson that wouldn’t get past an average second baseman, but he couldn’t do anything about it: he was just happy that Clinton had a primarily right-handed hitting lineup, which should cut down on the number of ground balls hit in Nelson’s direction.

As he surrendered the field to Clinton for their pre-game warm-ups, telling his hitting and fielding coach, Pete Dominici, to remind Nelson of the other things he’d need to remember as an infielder—when to cover second base if a runner on first attempted to steal, where to position himself for a relay if a ball went to the outfield—he glanced in the direction of the owner’s box in the stands. As Collier did before nearly every home game, he was holding court. He was a beefy man near Edward Everett’s age but looked considerably younger. He colored his hair and mustache and three months earlier his face had acquired a slightly plastic quality. “Botox,” Renee had said. He was with his new wife, a brassy redhead named Ginger who was twenty-seven years younger and whom Collier met when she applied for a job as a secretary at his meatpacking company.

“Can’t type,” he had said. “But she don’t have to.”

Tonight, they had brought her two children from her first two marriages—a sour-looking eight-year-old girl who slouched behind her mother, glowering, and a surprisingly bookish eleven-year-old boy who, when he came to the games, rarely looked up from his reading.

Surrounding them were people to whom Collier had given comp tickets, mostly butchers from area groceries, seven or eight of them tonight. Collier’s blond intern was carrying an armload of cardboard trays down the aisle, laden with hot dogs wrapped in paper and boxes of popcorn. Trailing her, three of the high school kids carried trays of cups of beer and soda. Although he disliked this pre-game ritual, Edward Everett stopped by the box to say hello. Collier liked him to talk to whatever group he had with him, give them each an autograph as a onetime big league player (whom none of them had ever heard of). “Once pinch-hit for Lou Brock,” Collier would always say. “You got to be pretty good to pinch-hit for a Hall of Famer.”

Lately, it seemed to Edward Everett that the butchers Collier entertained no longer even knew who Lou Brock was: some were born after Brock had finished his career; as far as they were concerned, he may have played a century ago in the dead-ball era. Nonetheless, Edward Everett sat with them for fifteen minutes and gave them some insight into the game: what to watch for so they could feel a little smarter when they anticipated a hit-and-run or a pitchout—all so they would buy even more Collier Fine Meats.

Twenty minutes later, Edward Everett was in his office, drafting and redrafting a starting lineup without Webber in it, first putting Nelson into the third spot, where Webber usually hit, and then moving him down to seven, putting Vila third, then trying something entirely different and writing Nelson into the leadoff spot and moving Martinez to number three. If Rausch were here, it would be simpler, or if Packer hadn’t decided to try to save the world. But neither was here, nor was Webber.

“Knock, knock,” Dominici said, appearing in the doorway. “We found Webb.”

“Where is he?” Edward Everett asked.

Dominici shook his head. “He said he’d only talk to you.”

“How the hell can I go talk to him? Game time is, what? Fifteen minutes?”

Dominici shrugged. “I’m just the messenger, boss,” he said, taking the lineup card Edward Everett handed to him. “I tried.”

Webber was in an apartment a dozen blocks from the ballpark, sitting on a fire escape four stories above an alley across from a furniture warehouse where Edward Everett had worked in two off-seasons after his then father-in-law had gotten him a job there, answering complaint calls in customer service. Going inside, Edward Everett felt foolish. He was in his uniform, his spikes clacking on the concrete as if he were some sort of damn tap dancer. A couple stepping out of the building as he came up the front stoop held the door for him but the man muttered something that sounded like “Trick-or-treat.” His girlfriend laughed.

In the foyer, at the bottom of the stairway, he looked with resignation at the flights that rose above him. His knee hurt: damp weather had a tendency to make the joint swell. Nonetheless, he had no choice. By the time he reached the top floor, the pain radiated into his hip, the joint popping with each step.

At apartment 4-B, he knocked on the door. Affixed to the jamb was a mezuzah, worn smooth as if whoever lived there was devout, touching their fingers to it hundreds of times across the threshold. A young woman answered. She was pretty: dark, Middle-Eastern, with long black hair, and a tiny diamond stud through her left nostril; she was wearing a black T-shirt and black jeans. “I don’t know what to do with him,” she said, and led him to a bedroom. There, it was obvious that someone had just pulled the comforter up over the sheets in a way to cover the bed but without making it neatly—because, beneath it, the pillows were askew and the top sheet hung crookedly, one edge touching the floor. Through the open window he could see Webber, sitting in the far corner of the fire escape landing, gazing across the alley toward the building where Edward Everett once spent his falls and winters. Edward Everett poked his head through the window.

“What’s going on, Webb?” he said. The landing was large enough that someone had set up a small sitting area, a wooden chair and table.

“Ah, shit, Skip,” Webber said.

“Personal chauffeur to the park.” Edward Everett hoisted himself into the window, resting his hip on the sill. “Game’s almost starting, Webb.”

“I know,” Webber said. “Katrina and I just had something we needed—”

“There’s nothing we need to talk about,” the woman said, leaning into the window beside Edward Everett.

“How can you say that,” Webber said. “After—”

“It’s been three weeks,” she said. “That’s not long enough to say ‘after’ anything.”

“What’s the problem?” Edward Everett asked. “Maybe I can help.” He pulled himself through the window until he was kneeling on the fire escape. Looking down through the iron bars of the platform, he had a brief moment of dizziness as he saw past the landings below—the barbecue grill someone had set up on the third floor, a large planter on the second—all the way to the broken asphalt of the alley. He felt an anger welling up in him. If it were up to him, he’d tell Webber: Fine. I’ll have Henley clean out your locker. But he couldn’t. He wondered if there was some statistical column that Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, didn’t know about: alongside on-base percentage there ought to be pain-in-the-ass factor. Webber might break the all-time record, his talent not a fair trade for his disappearances, the times he loafed to first on a ground ball or pouted if he took a pitch he thought was high but an umpire called “strike three.”

The woman sighed. “Brett. It’s easier if you just leave.”

Below, the steel rear door of the furniture warehouse banged open; a man in a white oxford shirt stepped outside and lit a cigarette.

“Easier on who?” Webber said.

“Whom,” the woman said softly.

“Whom,” Webber said loudly, banging his hand against the ladder of the fire escape so hard it rattled. In the alley, the man looked up.

“F*ck you,” Webber shouted down at him.

“This is partly why,” the woman said, stepping back from the window.

“F*ck you,” the man shouted back. He stalked toward the fire escape, jumping at the bottom of it, trying to grab the ladder that, thankfully, was retracted onto the first-floor landing.

“I’m sorry, Kitty Kat,” Webber said.

“Webb, maybe you and your friend could work this out later,” Edward Everett said. It had to be well past first pitch. Webber’s status as golden boy in the organization notwithstanding, Edward Everett should have stayed at the park, should have just let Webber show up or not show up. Except that would reflect badly on him. The best thing he could do was to nurse Webber through the season until the big club decided to bump him up the ladder. If he played to his ability, that could be as soon as a month from now.

“Two hours ago …” Webber said in a pleading voice but the woman didn’t respond. “Kitty Kat?” he called.

From deeper in the apartment, Edward Everett heard the click of heels on hardwood and then a door opening and closing and, after a moment, a lock turning.

“Kat?” Webber called again, moving past Edward Everett, giving no sign that he even remembered his manager was there, and stepped through the window. Edward Everett followed him inside and found him at the front door, which was locked with a dead bolt that required a key to open. Webber pounded on the door, bellowing, “F*ck!”

“I think she’s gone,” Edward Everett said, laying his hand on Webber’s shoulder.

“Skip,” Webber said, covering his face with his right hand. Edward Everett couldn’t tell for sure, but he appeared to be crying.

On the way to the ballpark, after they’d climbed down the fire escape—thirty minutes past first pitch, Edward Everett noted with anger when he looked at the digital clock in his dash—Webber was silent, staring out the passenger window. At a stoplight, the fountain in front of the Rand National Bank was on and three young children with their shoes off were kicking in the water while two women chatted nearby. He glanced at Webber. It struck him that, despite his enormous talent, he was still little more than a boy.

A week earlier, late in a game that P. City was leading by a run, Pittsfield had runners on second and third with nobody out. The hitter sent a line drive up the middle, over second base. Edward Everett resigned himself to two runs scoring but Webber ranged far to his left, diving for the ball. Just before it got to him, it hit the bag and bounced seemingly out of Webber’s reach, but he snatched it with his bare hand, belly-flopped onto the ground, leaped to his feet and fired home, where Vila took the throw and slapped a tag on the runner. It was one of the most remarkable plays Edward Everett had seen in forty years of professional ball but, since the high school kid Collier hired to record the games hadn’t shown up, there was no highlight video of it. The play was gone, save for in Edward Everett’s memory. Long after, he sat at his computer, trying to describe it for Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, but gave up—partly because he was no kind of writer but also because, unless it fit into a cell on a spreadsheet, Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, would have no interest in it.

As the light changed to green Edward Everett was trying to reconcile the two Webbers: the man who had both the physical ability to make the play and the game sense to know, in a fraction of a second, what to do when he had the ball, with the boy who was still near, in many ways, to the children kicking in the fountain. He was trying to think of something to say that would bring him out of his sorrow and put him back in whatever state he had to be in to make the kind of play he’d made nine days earlier, when Webber let out a bitter laugh.

“My dad had it right. Women is just bitches,” he said. “Them that ain’t bitches is just cunts.”