The Might Have Been (21 page)

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.

A
n 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?”