GPS (4 page)

As promised, he let the woman lead him along while he relaxed, and found the very thought of that plan to be divine. Highway to highway, she never missed a beat, giving him fair warning to go ahead and merge onto 49 North and then to take a quick stroll onto LA 3132 West. He was probably about two hours into the bliss of his relaxing new world when his guide spoke to him, again startling him out of whatever else he might have been thinking.

“
In two, miles, exit right.”

She was right. He still wasn’t used to the boredom of making long drives. He would have missed that exit, and it was a pretty big one, as many are when traveling the lonely highways of this gateway to the southwest. Funny, he thought, how GPS technology had effectively made being a pilot way less of a big deal to him, not that it was much of one to begin with. The things took the thinking right out of the equation.

A minute later, Jeff did as the lady asked and got off the next exit. And she didn’t even want to stop at a bathroom, but as it turned out, he did. And while planes don’t have to stop along the way for gas too often, the Celica drank gas like Jeff drank liquor on his days off, and most of his nights — slow but steady.

The exit, he knew, was the merge with I-20 West, which meant he was in greater Shreveport. He’d arrived in one of the places he fancied stopping, so not long after his merge, he steered onto another exit ramp —
“Off-route. Recalculating,”
the GPS warned from the dash — toward town. Shreveport, he’d always thought, was a great place to stop for drivers going from New Orleans to Texas and all parts west. You start in the toe of the state, drive toward the heel and then move up the leg. Jeff was one of those drivers now, and stepped out of the car and stretched his legs in a long, luxurious sort of way that suggested he’d already driven through a handful of states, not merely a handful of Louisiana parishes.

Standing there in the parking lot of the Mega Gas and Convenience Plaza, Jeff thought about who it was he was even supposed to be watching the following night when he saw the Zephyrs for the first time this year, already 5-2, playing the Isotopes. Ainsley and Ricard, he remembered out of habit, already thinking neither would be worth the effort.

That thought brought to reality the fact another season was under way. The love-hate (mostly hate) relationship with the road and baseball was back, whether he was on the ground or in the air.

The Zephyrs were the lucky recipients of a 2008 schedule that began in Sacramento, then went to Round Rock and would shift to Albuquerque the following night before heading to Nashville on Monday. The New Orleans club didn’t play its home opener for better than a week, so here was Jeff on his way to New Mexico to watch two players that would likely be taking most of their hacks that summer right in his hometown.

“
Off-route. Recalculating. Off-route. Recalculating. Off-route. Recalculating.”

Jeff felt a twinge of guilt upon opening his car door to hear the shrill voice of the GPS still chattering away to no one in particular. While he’d been out messing around at the Mega, the GPS had been repeatedly trying to tell him this was still not Interstate 20 toward Dallas, and basically that it would be best if he started moving his car and himself in that direction. It was the first impasse in this strange new relationship.

Jeff needed to lay down some ground rules, to get an understanding going along the same lines as the one he had with Lefty, his poor old cat which he now imagined pacing back and forth from the bedroom to the kitchen in the apartment.

He agreed it was time to get on toward Dallas, or maybe even Amarillo. But after that, the direction-finding lady was going to have to accept his terms and his lifestyle choices. In one of the Texas towns they’d steer into together over the next few hours, Jeff and GPS would be going their separate ways for the evening. After all, no player personnel man worth his salt goes to the ballpark without doing his research first, and in Jeff’s case, research involved liquor consumption, and that was something he didn’t generally do in the car.

- 4 -

Jeff was right about his season opener with the Zephyrs, and it was only the second inning.

Neither Blane Ainsley at first base nor Sammy Ricard at third gave Jeff any reason to think either could or should ever be called up to New York this season, or any reason to want to keep watching, really. Unless maybe they needed Ainsley to fly up to Shea Stadium to show the boys how to first back up on a sharp grounder and then tumble toward it, sending his body in two different directions and the ball screaming past him and down the line for a double while he swims around in the dirt. He hoped for the Mets’ sake there were no early-season injuries, but at this point didn’t give a rip one way or the other, and that factor was likely having an impact on his opinions.

With a chilly breeze swirling around at Isotopes Park, Jeff spent most of his time shifting uncomfortably in his seat behind the plate, thinking about how the cool gusts must be blowing at him from the snow-blanketed mesas in the distance, straight out from home plate toward Santo Domingo Pueblo and on farther to the northeast toward Santa Fe. He thought himself pretty keen, sitting there grinning and naming local landmarks to himself, knowing the direction he was facing when seated behind home plate in Albuquerque’s minor league ballpark.

He felt like a modern day Hemingway, able to talk the talk anywhere about any place. It was a lie, of course. Jeff knew what he knew only because after he rolled into Albuquerque in the middle of the afternoon Thursday, hung over from his late Wednesday night cram session near Lubbock on the two Zephyrs corner infielders, he spent a couple of hours sitting in his car, right there in the Elegante Hotel parking lot, retracing his trip, examining his surroundings and even seeing what time he would arrive in various other cities if he left right then.

As he sat in the Celica, a red 1997 he’d owned since his second scouting stint in Connecticut and which still carried the amusing (he thought) Hartford Whalers license plate frame that was on it when he bought it, he turned the key over in the ignition and started the engine every 10 or so minutes to run the air conditioner as the mid-afternoon sun leaned in on him. Jeff charted every inch of his surroundings on the GPS, not really knowing why and also not really caring, which seemed to define him at the moment. He certainly knew what a GPS was before he’d been given one and he sure didn’t care anything about them, until now.

The shapes and colors of everything on the screen fascinated him, not only in their exactness but in their
compactness
. Every little detail was spelled out on what was the most massive screen available in the world, according to Riley — 8 inches wide. He couldn’t help but think Riley really had found him not only a great gift — whether she meant to or not — but the most perfectly perfect goddamn gadget ever. He only wished the thing got a signal everywhere, and he would’ve taken the party inside to the room.

It hadn’t occurred to him yet, sitting out there in the same T-shirt and shorts he’d put on that morning in Lubbock, that perhaps the journey could become more exciting than the destination with a toy like this. Like a 1980s teenager hovering all night over the Pac-Man machine at the local skating rink, Jeff pored over the GPS all afternoon.

At one point, as the shade began to outgrow the patches of sun on the sandy hotel parking lot, Jeff briefly considered blowing the game off entirely and heading out for an early drink instead. He knew at once, before the evil side of him could start having its way with the good side, that if he did, he’d have to stay in New Mexico another day and be at Friday’s game. Not a chance. That would be no way to start the season, breezing out of the Savannah game in the fourth inning, then ducking the Zephyrs the first chance he got.

He could make plenty of excuses fly with the Mets as to the status quo of South Atlantic League flounders in Georgia, but not with the Pacific Coast League’s brightest prospects, and he was here to see two of the latter. In truth, Jeff watched Ricard and Ainsley with a doubtful eye in large part because both were players classically stuck on the brink. Both had big seasons for the Zephyrs the previous year, both had promising September call-ups to the majors and both had spent most of the March Grapefruit League stint with the big club. Yet, both were having trouble finding a permanent seat in the Shea Stadium clubhouse, so both were now grinning and bearing it, like Jeff seemed to be doing all the time.

So there he sat, caught in the terrible bind of being simultaneously cold and bored. Ricard fought off an inside, 1-2 pitch, spinning around stupidly in the box as he did, overreacting like every minor leaguer who thinks he’s too good to be fouling off Triple-A pitches. Jeff hated that, but the so-called top prospect in the Mets organization dug back in and conked a high slider into left field for a single. As usual with Ricard, Jeff couldn’t decide what to think.

In one sense, Jeff was perfectly content to write off all but the easiest talent to scout. Despite his willingness to crunch all of the relevant baseball numbers on his laptop late at night with a tall Bushmills to his right, he could no longer muster the energy to analyze anyone’s tendencies in certain pitch counts or base-running habits in key situations. Let the stats speak for themselves, he figured, despite his years of learning to do exactly the opposite. Lately, he’d begun to wonder how obvious his lazy ways would become if his own current status quo persisted.

Would the major league club, the New York Mets for God’s sake, somehow not realize they had great players going to waste in the minor leagues because one of their trusted scouts was unorganized, uninterested and mostly intoxicated these days? But at this point, if he tried to measure the difference between the effort he would put into driving his car all over the country this season and the effort he seemed ready to devote to the actual job, he would go mad right there in New Mexico. It wasn’t really even close, and that made it seem all the more pointless.

Now Ricard charged back onto the apron near the third-base line and trapped a line drive with a perfect lunge, then stood, collected himself and heaved the ball across the diamond to first base in time to nail Isotopes speedster K.K. Ellton with a helpful call from the ump. Ricard was still developing, even while stuck at this level, and Jeff had spent enough time with him in Port St. Lucie in March to have seen plenty of evidence he was ready for something bigger.

Just because Jeff no longer gave a shit didn’t mean he could stop doing his job altogether, he finally decided, so he started doing it.

Baseball scouting is an imperfect science at every level, as he had often blabbed to Riley while watching a game on TV. It would always be incorrectly influenced by overbearing parents, crooked coaches, homer sportswriters, idiot Internet bloggers and yes, of course, the paid scouts and heads of player development themselves.

Since Jeff, now 38, had mostly become a hybrid of the last two things on that list, he was paid to live in the grey area of pro baseball scouting. Different baseball organizations were nothing more than different companies and naturally did things a little differently everywhere in the world. With the Mets, Jeff was perhaps best described as the highest of the low. He was what many hard-working scouts might call a glorified scout, someone whose previous good work in the game compelled teams like the Mets to simply create jobs out of thin air just to have good people watching their young talent.

But as important as he might have seemed, the long and short of it was this — Jeff wasn’t likely to be at Shea Stadium more than two or three times all season, and when he was there it would be for organizational meetings and nothing more. Those were the few times during the year people like Jeff actually had to prove they were doing something with all that time on the road.

Jeff still had a damn good reputation in the game, albeit one he was currently beginning to test more and more. Staying in the same city for six years and landing three jobs with the only three major league clubs to drop their anchors there was actually quite an accomplishment. But Jeff had long since begun to ask himself what was next, if there was a next. He just couldn’t imagine staying in New Orleans just to be a Marlins scout, and there was no guarantee they’d want him to.

Typical Ainsley. Great swing with the hit-and-run call on. Now he’d earn himself a favorable report as well, and on a night when Jeff intended to criticize him heavily. Ainsley had backed out of the box twice, drew some jeers from the Isotope rooters and then made solid contact on a fastball, sending it bouncing into right-center field and sending Zephyr left fielder Brandon Lyles to third with one out.

The problem was, Jeff realized as he continued to try to find a warm spot for his butt on his hard plastic seat, there was never any telling what was next in baseball, and it didn’t always matter if you were a scout, a cotton candy salesman or a star center fielder. Jeff was 3-for-3 in New Orleans in terms of maintaining employment, but had been otherwise mired in a deeper and deeper slump in his life, epitomized by the divorce from Riley that would likely be finalized by midsummer. Truthfully, he didn’t think at this point he’d even want another baseball job, anywhere, but hadn’t exactly learned any new trades recently.

Jeff sure as hell hadn’t forgotten the increasing cold, though his furious thinking had made him mostly ignore it for five innings now. The thinking had made for an unexpected decent night of scouting. He’d already lasted longer here than in Savannah, and the weather there was like midseason. Here in New Mexico, in the chill, he was actually doing his job.

Jeff figured the least he could do was stay the full nine innings and file some real game reports on his two subjects. It was a good thing, too, as the fellows actually both played games the Mets should have known about. Ainsley homered in the seventh inning to complete a steady 2-for-4 day, and Ricard had three singles and a sacrifice bunt in the Zephyrs’ 6-4 win. Thanks to a great wireless signal in Isotopes Park, Jeff sent detailed accounts to Mets director of player personnel Sandy Morino before the final out was recorded.