The Might Have Been

CHAPTER Twenty-one





At the game that evening, as Edward Everett brought out his lineup card to present to the umpires and exchange with the manager from Lincoln, the stadium announcer invited everyone present to serenade him with “Happy Birthday.” Phantom Frank struggled through a plodding version of the song, beginning by hitting keys that were off by what Edward Everett imagined was a handsbreadth. Although on most nights he wouldn’t have paid attention to the size of the crowd, after his meeting with Collier, he couldn’t help but notice there were maybe five hundred fans there; perhaps only a third bothered to sing, starting out and then falling silent as they tried to match what Phantom Frank played. After a moment, as if someone had picked up his hands and put them on the right keys, Phantom Frank played something that sounded close to “Happy Birthday” and a few more joined in, but without spirit. As he arrived at the final note, Phantom Frank added an awkward trill and a handful of fans applauded.

“I’ll give you one call today as a gift,” the plate umpire said, winking. He was in his mid-twenties, his head shaved since, Edward Everett knew, he was going off for his once-a-month Army Reserve training after the series was over. They were all young, Edward Everett realized: the field umpire might be thirty, tops, and the manager from Lincoln couldn’t be any older than thirty-five. Two years ago, he had a pinch-hit double that drove in the tying run in the ninth inning of the seventh game of the World Series and then scored when the opposing pitcher tried to pick him off second base but threw the ball into center field. A picture of him sliding across the plate, the ball hanging just above his head as he smashed against the catcher’s outstretched left leg, had been on the cover of Sports Illustrated. They were all on their way up, he realized. In five or so years, the Lincoln manager would be managing at triple-A, mentioned in rumors whenever a major league manager’s job appeared in jeopardy; the umpires, too, would move up the chain, double-A, triple-A, fill-in when major league umpires took vacation.

Meanwhile, what would become of him after this season ended? Twenty-something years ago when he stopped playing and took a job as a hitting coach in the minor leagues, he had seen himself on the same track, fully expecting that one day he’d be in the dugout in the major leagues again—if not as a manager, then as a coach. He’d gotten stuck in the station, though, never offered a job above double-A. Once, he’d taken a job as a bench coach at Valdosta, Georgia, sitting next to a manager who, a year earlier, had retired after fourteen years as a second baseman in the major leagues, a legitimate star, someone whose face showed up in ads for a car battery, symbolizing the product’s reliability. As a manager, he was like a lot of former players who had enormous talent. He had little patience with the journeymen, couldn’t find the words to tell a shortstop how to react more quickly to a ground ball, became flustered when he tried to teach a batter how to change his stance to take the merest fraction of a second off the time it took him to swing through the zone.

But the All-Star was personable, funny and famous. Several times during the season, network TV crews came to Valdosta to cover his story; the angle was always that he was giving back to the game, teaching the new generation. He made jokes, repeated the same story, about a shortstop who had started the season making an error in each of the first dozen games and how he’d been patient with him and, within six weeks, he had been called up to triple-A. “That’s gratifying when you can help a kid do that.” He left out that the season had started the day after the shortstop, a twenty-year-old from Venezuela, had learned that his sister had been arrested in their home country, that no one knew where she was, and that two weeks into the season, the State Department, pressured by the owner of the big club, had negotiated her release and, after that happy resolution, his play improved; he left out the story of the day in the clubhouse when he had screamed at the kid in pidgin English because he himself couldn’t speak a word of Spanish, “Bad play-o, bad play-o,” while the kid sat on the bench, looking at the floor, curling and uncurling his toes; he left out the story of how Edward Everett had taught himself enough Spanish that he could remind the kid of the basic lessons, using a few words and gestures. “Stay down.” “Permanecer abajo.” “Don’t pull away from the ball.” “No torear.” Miming the correct way. It was nothing the kid didn’t already know but Edward Everett worked with him for an hour every day until he found himself again; his patience, Edward Everett knew, more important than the instruction.

At the end of the season, the All-Star moved up to manage at triple-A Knoxville. Edward Everett expected he’d be promoted with him but the All-Star had a friend from his days in the major leagues and the friend ended up sitting beside the All-Star at Knoxville and, five years later, they were with the big club, manager and coach, and Edward Everett was back at single-A—the world spinning in excess of 800 miles an hour, him still standing still. Or perhaps, now, falling off it altogether.

The game went badly almost from the start. Pete Sandford was on the mound for P. City and he was throwing strikes, his fastball well into the nineties, but it was flat. In games when he was effective, his pitches moved like a trout through water, slippery, seeming to change elevation and direction on their flight to the plate, as if the ball were avoiding some obstacle only it could perceive. Today, they sat there as if they were on a tray of hors d’oeuvres circulating at a party.

The top two hitters for Lincoln went down: the first on a one-bounce shot to Webber at short, who snared it with a sideways flip of his glove and then tossed it on to first; the second hitter sent Nelson back against the wall in left, where he caught it chest-high. However, with two outs, and Sandford standing on the back of the mound, facing away from the hitter, rubbing up the ball, Edward Everett felt a prickle of anxiety. He hoped it was only the day off causing Sandford trouble and that, as the game progressed and his arm warmed, his pitches would start moving again. But they didn’t.

Before the end of the first, Lincoln was up three–nothing, and when he saw Sandford’s shoulders sag, his posture saying “surrender,” he sent Biggie out to talk to him on the mound. There, Sandford nodded at whatever Vincent was saying but when Vincent got back to the dugout, he said to Edward Everett, “Better get someone up.” He called down to the bullpen, thankful that the day off because of the sewer backing up meant that his pitchers out there were rested. Five minutes later, Lincoln was leading five–nothing and Edward Everett was taking a walk to the mound to remove Sandford from the game, his shortest outing all season, two-thirds of an inning. A few of the fans sent out boos and catcalls, the attendance so spare that Edward Everett could make out what individual fans were shouting. One chanted, “Sandy boy, candy boy.” Someone else called out, “Go home so Mommy can wipe your nose.” Edward Everett had no idea where what the fans shouted came from; often it was nonsense, something that rose, he supposed, from their own childhoods—their father’s disappointment in them, bullying from classmates, the rejection by some girl that still burned years later. At the mound, Edward Everett gripped Sandford’s biceps. The pitcher was drenched in sweat; he let out a sigh and shook his head as he handed Edward Everett the ball. “You okay?” Edward Everett asked.

“I couldn’t find it, Skip,” Sandford said apologetically.

“It’s one game,” he said, holding on to Sandford’s arm, not letting him leave the mound just yet, while the fans continued to boo him. “It’s happened to Clemens, Gibson and Maddux. You’re in elite company.” But the joke didn’t work. Sandford gave him a pleading look, his eyes cutting toward the dugout, where he wanted to be.

“Okay,” Edward Everett said. “One thing: head up when you go.” He was always telling his pitchers that when he took them out; it was his idea of dealing with baseball’s version of “flop sweat.” Don’t let the fans know they got to you. Sandford heeded him, trotted off the mound, head up, but when he got fully off the field and into the shadow of the dugout, he flung his glove the width of the bench before storming into the tunnel and into the clubhouse, where, Edward Everett knew, he’d brood, seeing every pitch over and over until Edward Everett sent Biggie in to tell him to shower.

The game got no better from there on; it was as if the bullpen were infected with whatever ailment Sandford had. By the bottom of the seventh, it was twenty-three–four. Clouds had pushed in by then and Edward Everett found himself hoping they would open up in one of the sudden deluges that occurred sometimes in the Midwest, an all-out soaker, players and umpires scurrying for the cover of the dugouts and tunnels, fans racing for their cars, but God wasn’t merciful. While rain did begin to fall in the top of the eighth, it was not much more than mist, and they had to play the entire nine innings. By the last out, there were fewer than a hundred fans remaining in the stands. As Josh Singer grounded out, third to first, to end it, a fan sang out, “Gir-rils; gir-rils, gir-rils.”

In the clubhouse, the team was quiet: a post-slaughter shock. Sandford had been showered and dressed for perhaps two hours by then but he’d waited for everyone, in his khaki slacks and Hollister pullover. “I’m sorry,” he said in a quiet voice, while other players stripped off their sweat- and dirt-stained jerseys and headed off into the shower room. Edward Everett sat in his office, running up the line totals in the scorebook, listening to the hiss of the water, the plop of wet towels when players dropped them to the floor. The conversation was quiet; he couldn’t hear words, just the drone of voices sandwiched among long stretches of silence. He had been present for worse scores—not many, but some. At Green Castle, he once lost forty-one–one, the game summary and box score picked up by the Associated Press because it was the most lopsided score in professional ball in sixty–two years. Another time, six years ago, Perabo City had lost thirty–nothing. It was ugly, there was no question about it, but what he’d said to Sandford was true: it was just one game. They just needed to leave it confined to the box on the calendar corresponding to today, not let it bleed over to the next day.

When he heard the last shower shut off, he went out of his office into the locker room. Nearly everyone was silent, looking at him expectantly, save for Webber, who sat hunched in front of his locker, talking quietly into his cellphone, his right hand cupped over his mouth as if that would make it impossible for anyone to hear what he was saying. “I can’t help it.”

Edward Everett cleared his throat and Webber looked up, annoyed. “Got to go,” he said in a sarcastic tone, as if to say to Edward Everett, I went two-for-four; I turned two double plays. Don’t pin this on me. Webber might not ever understand, Edward Everett thought, the place of individual glory in a team game.

Edward Everett regarded his players. They sat on the benches, blinking back at him slowly, still stunned. It was easy for him to forget how young they were, not a one more than twenty-three; the oldest had been perhaps in junior high when Edward Everett first came to Perabo City; on the day when he and his team suffered the thirty-run drubbing, some of them were still in eighth grade, their voices only then on the verge of changing. They wanted him to absolve them, explain the reason they had to endure the humiliation. Oh, now I understand, they wanted to think. He considered telling them about how that team a half-dozen years ago had sat here, stunned, as they were, but had finished the season in first place—but it was only in the movies that teams responded well to a rousing pep talk after a humiliating defeat. He felt a fury welling in him, not at his players but at Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, and everyone with the big club in whose hands all of their futures lay and who had decided not to tell anyone about whatever plans they had for the team. But it wasn’t his players’ fault and he took in a breath so they wouldn’t see his anger—anger they would read as directed at them. Everything that occurred to him was a cliché but, as Hoppel used to say, there was a reason the cliché was the cliché: tomorrow is another day; don’t bring it to the ballpark tomorrow. It was true and it would only be when they discovered for themselves the truth of the clichés that they would be able to move on.

“Go on home,” he said quietly, and when no one reacted, he said again, “Go home. We’ll get them next time.”

After they filed out, he stripped off his uniform, tossed it into the bag for the clubhouse kid to wash and went into the shower room. As he held his hand under the spray, waiting for it to warm, he gave the room a sniff, wondering if the heavy rains banging against the ballpark would make the sewers back up again. All he could smell was bleach, wet concrete and a mix of his players’ body washes and shampoos. A crack of thunder exploded, loud enough that it might have been just on the other side of the wall. He remembered something about not showering in an electrical storm but thought, giving a small laugh, if lightning struck him, he wouldn’t have to worry about finding a job after the season.