The Might Have Been

CHAPTER Thirty-one





He decided his team would win the pennant. In the great scheme of life, in the universe of a hundred billion galaxies, who won and who lost a single-A championship in the middle of America mattered perhaps not at all. But it was one small thing he could try to give Johansen, something to move the organization higher in the Baseball America rankings; something to give his players. When the season was over, as many as half of them would get the same sort of thin envelope the Cardinals had sent him a dozen years before any of them was born: We hereby grant … unconditional release—victims of the organization “rebalancing its portfolio,” as Johansen had put it to him in his mother’s million-dollar great room, the organization investing in talent in another country rather than the talent it already had. It wouldn’t matter a whit if, at the end of it all, it was Perabo City players rushing out of a dugout on a ball field the last Sunday in August, fists raised in triumph, but it would be one moment that his players could have for when they were sixty and had been out of ball themselves for decades, working behind the counter at an auto parts store or at a desk in the lobby of a bank, and be able to say, Oh, man, I remember this one year, the twenty-year-old young men they’d been reawakening for a moment inside their sixty-year-old selves.

As they moved past the All-Star break and into August, whatever new arrangement the stars had shifted themselves into seemed enough to change all their fortunes. In the series after he came back from St. Louis, they lost the first of three games against Oshkosh but then took the other two, the last game eleven–ten on a walk-off, bases-loaded double by Martinez with two outs in the ninth. Quincy moved in and Perabo City took two of three, and then all three against Urbana, a tidy seven–two record for the home stand. It was a streak that nearly no one noticed. The attendance was almost nonexistent; for the two Sunday afternoon contests in the home stand, the crowd might have reached 150, but no other crowd came close to that. Although Sandford did not match the brilliance of his first game in their god-awful park, he pitched eight innings in his next appearance and in the one after earned a complete game, although he was spent when he heaved the final pitch, a breaking ball that came in fat and flat above the strike zone. A more mature hitter would have let it go or would have had the discipline to wait on it and drive it a long way, but the Urbana hitter was green, a second baseman maybe five foot seven, and his eyes grew large at the pitch sitting there, saying, Hit me. He stood on his toes to reach it, swinging hard, thinking home run, but getting under it weakly, a pop out to second. “You’re doing a good job bringing Sandford along,” Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, commented after Edward Everett uploaded the statistics from the game.

Twice during the home stand, he saw Meg, the first time after a Sunday afternoon game when he drove to meet her in Cedar Falls, where she lived in what had been a carriage house behind a three-story Victorian brick home, much of her life still in boxes she had shoved into the attic crawl space. “After two years, you’d think I’d have fully moved in,” she said when she had him poke his head into the crawl space to look at the stacks of cartons. “I worry the whole ceiling will come in on top of me sometime.” She showed him the house she’d had to sell after her divorce, a tidy ranch that the new owners were letting fall down already, and drove him past where her ex-husband was living, an apartment above an accountant’s office, one of his windows broken out, replaced by a sheet of cardboard. For dinner, she cooked a miserable lasagna, the casserole runny, the noodles stiff as cardboard. “I should warn you, I am not domestic in the least,” she said, and then added, blushing, “Not that I’m expecting you to have to know that about me. No promises, no obligations.”

The second time he saw her was late on a Wednesday, after she called him while he was driving home from the ballpark (not quite a ballpark).

“What are you doing?” she asked. When he told her, she went on, “How’d you like to keep going another fifty miles or so? Halfway between us? There’s a Holiday Inn.”

When he got there, after going home briefly to let Grizzly out, she confessed that she had already been there when she called.

“How did you know I would drive up here?” he asked.

She slipped her hand beneath his belt and said in a low voice, “You’re male, aren’t you?”

Later, while she read the room service menu—she wanted something with beef and grease—she looked at him and said, “I know I’m too old to think this but sometimes all we really need in our lives to be happy is someone who wants to f*ck us bad enough that they will drive a hundred miles on the spur of the moment.” She laughed. “The real test will be when you have to drive here all the way from Costa Rica.” She raised the menu again but then lowered it and asked, winking, “So, tell me, Mr. Flour Salesman, what kind of bread goes best with Angus beef and Swiss cheese?”

He flushed, remembering the conversation when he’d admitted the truth about who he was, the first time he called after he got back from St. Louis, worrying the lie would be a deal-breaker. Instead, she’d laughed. “That’s far more interesting,” she said. “Before, all we could have talked about was wheat. Now I can have you describe all the naked athletes you’ve seen in the locker room.”

In the Holiday Inn, she gave him a quick peck, reaching for the phone to order the food. “I love reminding you of that because you’re so darn cute when you get embarrassed.”

The next day when he got home, he looked for the divorce agreement and financial disclosure and filled them out, surprised at how much easier it was than he had expected it to be, and took it to the bank so he could sign it in front of a notary. “I’m so sorry,” she said. She was a stout older woman with three chins and a floral print dress that spread across her ample girth like a slipcover would an overstuffed chair. “I shouldn’t comment,” she said. “I know that—just sign, stamp and off with you. But I see so many sad things—some good, yes, but a lot of sad, and I can’t help myself sometimes.” When she slid the document across the desk toward him, she patted his hand in a maternal way. “Things will get better. I know that maybe you can’t see that right now but they will.”

He considered telling her that he was already all right but only said, “Thank you,” and then slipped the document back into its envelope and took it to the Duboises’. When Rhonda answered his knock, he handed it to her. “This is for Renee,” he said, and left so that she wouldn’t think it was something he needed to talk about. Which it wasn’t.

The team kept winning after they went on the road—their longest trip of the season, seventeen days in Illinois and up into Wisconsin. It was fortunate that they were leaving town when they did, since the rains came back to Perabo City the day they departed, a hard storm that began as large, spare drops plopping against the windows of the bus as it pulled out of the lot and then buffeted the bus as it picked up speed on Highway 17. It followed them nearly all the way to Peoria, the sun appearing only half an hour before they pulled into the lot at the Bradley Inn near the university where the minor league team played its games.

After weeks of dressing in the dark and mildew-stinking locker room at the shuttered high school, the visitors’ clubhouse at Bradley was something to behold: recently painted, brightly lit, carpeted, the lockers wide and with wooden doors that the maintenance staff had recently refinished, the wood gleaming.

“Shit,” said Vila. “Did we die on the way here and end up in heaven?”

Glen Perkins lay on the carpet in the middle of the room and swept his arms and legs over it as if he were making a snow angel, sighing, “Ahhhh.” When he stood, there was indeed the faint outline of a winged, robed figure in the carpet pile.

“I have a good feeling about the game today,” Rausch said, pointing to the image. For the entire three days they were in Peoria, they trod around it so that, by the time they left—a three-game sweep, including another complete-game shutout by Sandford, number fifteen for him—the faint image was still there. After they had all showered following that last game, Mraz stepped onto the edge of the image.

“What are you doin’, man?” Vila shouted, yanking him away.

“Just didn’t want the mojo left for the next team,” Mraz said.

“Man,” Vila said, “you call down the sacred, you don’t send it back. You better light a candle or something when we get to Rockford or we don’t know what’ll happen.”

“I ain’t Catholic,” Mraz said.

“It don’t matter,” Vila said.

Then, as the bus cruised into Rockford, and they passed a Catholic church—Our Redeemer—Mraz yelled out, “Bussy. Bussy. You gotta stop.”

The bus driver caught Edward Everett’s eye in the rearview mirror and he gave him a nod. The driver pulled to the curb and Mraz hopped off. The first door he tried at the church was locked but the second was open. He was back out in five minutes. “I lit two, man,” he said. “Just to be on the safe side.”

In Rockford, they dropped the first game, four–three. If Edward Everett were more superstitious, he would have said that Mraz should have lit five candles. Even the numbers Edward Everett entered into his game log revealed that: five times at bat for Mraz, no hits, no runs, no RBIs, three strikeouts, two errors. Twice, Mraz had come to bat with a runner on third and fewer than two outs, and twice he struck out, the second time watching a flat fastball cross the middle of the plate. “I froze,” he said when he slumped back to the dugout. “I was thinking, ‘Swing,’ but I couldn’t.” Sitting beside him, Tanner made a show of moving away from him on the bench. But the team was loose: everyone laughed and the next day Mraz batted in the seventh with runners on second and third, the team down three–one, and laced a triple in the alley, two runs scoring to tie the game, and then came in with what proved to be the winning run on a passed ball, setting up a rubber game the next day, which the team won eight–four, Sandford starting and good enough to get through seven, his sixteenth win against three losses.

Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, was pleased: “Effective management of Sandford,” he wrote in an email. “Likelihood he reach 20 W? Sent from my BlackBerry.” 20 W. Twenty wins; the notion had never occurred to Edward Everett. How many years had it been since a pitcher had won twenty in a minor league season? Twenty-five? Sitting on the bus on their way north to Oshkosh the next day, he got out his accordion folder, flipped through the cards until he found Sandford’s and counted how many more starts he would have: six. If he pitched as he had been, he could end up with twenty wins, but it would take a lot of luck—a lot of angels on a lot of locker room carpeting. And for what? The truth was, who could even name the last pitcher to win twenty in a minor league uniform? The truth was, what happened in the minor leagues stayed in the minor leagues. Still, Sandford was Johansen’s property and Edward Everett thought it a small gift he could give him. “Okay,” he replied.

By the end of the trip, Sandford had two more, seventeen and eighteen—but they were far from pretty. His game log still looked good: number seventeen, seven innings, ninety pitches, three runs, five hits, three walks, four strikeouts. Number eighteen, six and a third, eighty-seven pitches, four runs, seven hits, four walks, two strikeouts. But the raw statistics concealed cracks that bore watching: the number of his walks was creeping up, and in number eighteen Madison had hit him hard late in the game; he was saved largely because the ballpark had a large center field, four hundred twenty-eight feet to the wall, and Mraz caught two flies deep, one just at the edge of the warning track, the other with his back pressed to the wall. In any other park, they would have been gone, and Sandford’s line would look far worse—eight runs instead of four.

He was worrying, Edward Everett knew. You’re not happy unless you’re anxious, Renee had joked to him once when they hadn’t been married long, when his flaws were still part of his charm. It was true: by all other measures, the team was successful. They came back from the trip in second place, two games out of first—not bad for a club without a home, he thought wryly. And other things were going well. Martinez had started listening to him about plate discipline and he was walking more; the chart recording the locations of Tanner’s hits showed that he had stopped trying to pull everything to left, was collecting hits to right and center; Singer, on the other hand, had started to pull the ball more, take advantage of his size and power. He had no business being a slap hitter.

Maybe, Edward Everett thought, he was a good enough coach that more of his players would survive the post-season purge than he had expected before the road trip. Riding the bus back to Perabo City, he went through his game log cards, scrutinizing the numbers on them as Johansen would, asking who would survive, who would not? The first time he sorted them, he decided that eleven would make the cut, thirteen would not. The second time, it was a dozen on each side of the ledger. He hoped he was wrong; he hoped that more of them would end up being outliers.

Then Nelson came back.