The Might Have Been (39 page)

“I’m Ed Yates,” he said dully, not wanting to but nonetheless thinking of the money she had.

Syl cocked her head to one side. “Like the Irish poet or the American novelist?”

“I’m sorry?” Edward Everett said. “I don’t—”

“Ed manages for us up in Iowa,” Johansen said.

“Oh,” Syl said, giving the younger woman a look that clearly suggested the answer Johansen had given had immediately moved Edward Everett from one category, “men who were interesting,” to another, “men for whom she had no use.”

“Mother thinks of you as something like a two-legged polo pony,” Johansen said.

“I do not,” Sylvia said.

“Your words, Mother,” Johansen said, adding a wink, as if Edward Everett were now part of a conspiracy he didn’t fully understand. “As far as Mother is concerned, I live in two worlds. There’s my old world, working for my grandfather’s company, and there’s my new world, where I deal with two-legged polo ponies. Ed, sorry to say, you’re part of the second.”

“Stop it,” Sylvia said. “Mr. Yates, I don’t know what my son is—”

“Last month,” Johansen said, “at the Bridle Boutique—that’s B-R-I-D-L-E, as in horses, it’s a fund-raiser for abused equines—those things always have such clever—”

“I’m sorry,” Edward Everett interrupted, no longer masking his anger over being caught in a game between Johansen and his mother just when Johansen was about to tell him he was finished. “I’m sorry, but I think I’m just going to go.”

“I don’t understand—” Johansen said.

“I didn’t fly all the way here to lose my job and be made the butt of a joke.”

“Lose your job?” Johansen said.

“Marc, did you fly this man all the way—” Joni said.

“Good Lord, Ed,” Johansen said, laying a hand on Edward Everett’s
shoulder. “I wouldn’t have flown you here to tell you I was letting you go.”

“He’s too much of a coward for that,” Sylvia said.

“Syl, you promised,” Joni said. “Mr. Yates, I apologize for my mother-in-law’s rudeness, interrupting your business with my husband.”

“Business?” Sylvia snapped. “The company his grandfather started is
business. This
is a hobby.”

Her daughter-in-law took her arm firmly. “Enough,” she said, sharply, pulling Sylvia with her out of the room.

“Joan, this is …” Sylvia began to say, but whatever
this
was, Edward Everett did not hear because they were soon beyond earshot.

“Please,” Johansen said, his voice soft, perhaps even penitent. “Sit down and hear me out. I wasn’t going to fire you. I was going to ask you if you wanted a job.”

By the time he left Johansen, it was dark, nearly nine p.m. As he crept down the long, narrow, steep road that led from the horse farm, he slid one of the CDs Johansen had given him into the car’s stereo. After a moment, a woman’s voice came from the speaker: “It’s a pleasure to meet you.
Es un gusto conocerie
.”

He repeated the phrase. He could hear the Midwestern awkwardness in his pronunciation and he said it once again before the woman’s voice went on: “The pleasure is mine.
El gusto es mio
.”

“
El gusto es mio
,” he repeated.

He was going to Costa Rica and he had Renz to thank. Renz, whose voice dripped with sarcasm when he complained about delinquent spreadsheets, when he spoke to him about pitiful Ross Nelson. He’d hated Renz and now he had to thank him for his new job.

“What do you know about any of the proprietary metrics we’ve been using?” Johansen had asked after the two sat down again.

“A little,” Edward Everett had said tentatively, thinking surely Johansen was not offering him a job centered on the arcane statistics he and Renz loved so much.

“There won’t be a test,” Johansen said, his voice still soft, no doubt
to compensate for his mother’s shocking behavior. “The main point is that we’ve been taking a look at some of the Poe scores across the organization.”

“Poe?”

“I’m sorry. P-O-E. Performance Over Expectation. It’s a value we derive by combining several—” Johansen laughed. “Short story: Renz—did you know he sleeps maybe three hours a night? He’s going to have my job before the year’s out … That would make my mother happy, at least. At any rate, Renz started playing around with … well, the tools we use when we prepare for the draft. We think they can predict, with some accuracy, how a player will perform at various levels in the organization based on … well, never mind what it’s based on. At any rate, he thought that if we backdoored it, took a look at what the numbers might have predicted about players who already had a track record, we could tweak it so it would have even more accuracy as a predictor. Renz started to notice that some players were outliers—”

Edward Everett opened his mouth to ask what an “outlier” was but Johansen caught himself, smacking his forehead. “Look, I am who I am and so forgive the jargon, because the method is not important. What’s important is that Renz asked: what conclusions can we draw about the outliers—you know, the players who perform better than the numbers would have predicted—and one of the factors he looked at was coaching. I mean, it’s simple.
I
should have thought of that but I didn’t. Renz did. The already-too-long story made short is that he took a look at data for players that’ve run through your teams going back twenty years and found a not inconsequential—oh, hell. When we started correlating aggregate POE scores to coaching, your numbers were damn good. This year, for example, Martinez—we really thought he was nothing more than an organization player, maybe he’d get, best case, three years, but surely not much above A ball. But now he could turn out to be something. And there was that kid you had in Missoula, independent ball, who stuck it out for four seasons with the Giants. How many guys in indie ball ever get to the big leagues? One in a thousand? A handful of outliers—you can ascribe that to acceptable error, but yours were not statistically insignificant.”

Not statistically insignificant
. In the world of Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, that amounted to something approaching praise, Edward Everett guessed.

On the CD, the woman was saying, “Can you direct me to
… Puede usted decirme cómo llegar a
.” He laughed. He’d fretted about hanging on in Perabo City, as if managing a broken-down single-A team was something to fight to hang on to. He’d let his vision narrow. Baseball was dead in Perabo City, but it wasn’t dead to him.

Costa Rica. He had no idea where it was, exactly. Somewhere south, somewhere they spoke a language he knew only well enough to communicate in a rudimentary way with his Latin players. “Untapped territory,” Johansen had called it. “Think of Nicaragua, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic as tapped-out mines. Everyone and his brother has scouted every bush, every rock.” Costa Rica was another story and Costa Rica was where he was headed. “We’re going to find the best athletes and you’ll help turn as many of them into ballplayers as you can,” Johansen said.

They would pay him half again as much as he earned for this season. “We’ll make it a three-year contract,” Johansen had said. “We know you don’t want to leave everything without a guarantee.”
Leave what?
Edward Everett thought. If he stuck out the full three years, they would give him another year’s salary in deferred compensation to reward him for staying. It was nowhere near twenty-three million dollars but it was something most people didn’t have: a guarantee he wouldn’t be destitute for the rest of his life.

When he got back to the hotel, it was past ten. Parking the car, he thought of himself as he’d been the day before: someone certain he was going to lose his job, someone certain, for how many minutes, that he was going to die in a crash with a hundred strangers. That was a different self. That self was grateful for what amounted to table scraps from the banquet of life, as his father had once said apropos of his own settling. The self shifting the car into “park” and setting the emergency brake as a massive American Airlines jet swooped over him had a guarantee of more than a quarter million dollars over the next thirty-six months, all for leaving a town that no longer had any hold on him and moving to a country he couldn’t even pick out on a map.

Hell, he thought, the self he had been when he left this very lot earlier in the day was a different man. That man had been stunned, that man had despised Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, for the decision Edward Everett was certain would mean deprivation for the rest of his days. That self never would have seen Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, as a living, breathing human being with a mother he’d made unhappy—a mother who made the same pronouncement about her son’s desire to be part of baseball that Edward Everett’s had three decades ago when he had told her that he had signed the minor league contract with the Cleveland organization.
We’re brothers of a sort
, he thought with a laugh.
He’s the rich brother, sure, but brothers
.

Just before Edward Everett had left, Johansen walked him out to his car. After he shut off the current to the fence, as Edward Everett was about to open his car door, Johansen had said, his voice kind, “You know, what happened to you was the shit.”

“How do you mean?”

“That injury. Montreal,” Johansen said. “I Googled you. What a day you were having, and then, bang, all over.” Even in the darkness as they stood on either side of the gate, Edward Everett could see Johansen shake his head sadly. “I don’t know how you didn’t give up. Someone else, they’d’ve thrown in the towel. Succumbed to bitterness.”

Touched, Edward Everett said, “It never occurred to me.” Of course, it had—but in this new version of his life, he hadn’t fallen into bitterness over his bad luck.

“It’s probably no consolation,” Johansen said, “but at least you got there. You know? For a minute and a half. I … A lot of guys say that it was the curveball that kept them out of baseball, but for me it was everything. Hit the curve? Hell, I couldn’t hit a fastball. Or a change. Or a ball someone laid out there on a plate and said, ‘Take your best cut.’ ” They shook hands and Johansen said, “You must really love the game.”

“I guess I do,” Edward Everett said.

Walking from his car toward the bright foyer of the hotel, he thought,
What a difference a day makes
. There was a song like that,
it struck him, and he pushed open the door to the air-conditioned lobby humming the tune. He hummed it as he jabbed the button for the elevator and was humming it still when, just as the doors slid open and he waited for two children in swimsuits to exit, a woman coming up behind him spoke his name.

“I kept telling myself I was going to leave in fifteen minutes,” she said when he turned around. Meg. The woman from the flight. “For an hour and a half, I kept saying, ‘Fifteen minutes, fifteen minutes,’ but every time fifteen minutes passed, I thought about going back to my daughter’s and how messed up they were—all of their New Age blady-blah about how this had to happen and there was a reason I survived. But then I thought about how I at least have a messed-up daughter who I can visit and a granddaughter who doesn’t deserve her silly name. But you had this boy that you never—and I felt so sorry for you.” She shrugged. “Maybe it’s my own New Age blady-blah but something told me I should come here.” She laid a hand gently on his arm. “Is it okay to go upstairs?”

“Yes,” he said.

In the morning when he woke, she was gone. She left a note on a hotel postcard. “Forgive my presumption.” And then a phone number with an area code the same as his. Just before he checked out, when he was pulling back the covers to make certain he wasn’t leaving anything behind—despite the fact that he had no luggage, it was a force of habit after hundreds of nights in hotels—he found a pink sock she evidently hadn’t been able to find whenever she’d left, an anklet with the fabric worn thin at the heel. He folded it neatly and put it into the pocket of his jeans.

The flight, as he felt fate owed him, was uneventful. There was no rain and nearly no turbulence. When the plane began its descent, they passed over a river he thought must be the Flann, the one that ran along the edge of Perabo City. Fields around it were in flood still; the tops of trees poked out from the water, as did the roofs of houses and barns. The water seemed placid, unthreatening to anything at all. It ebbed and flowed gently against the sides of buildings and
their reflections rippled against the actual structures. Under the full sun, the water gleamed and he thought that it was actually beautiful. What would that be in Spanish? he wondered. “
Agua
” was “water” and “
hermoso
” was “beautiful” but how would he say it in a sentence?
El agua es hermoso. That isn’t right
, he thought,
but close enough
. “
Agua es hermoso
,” he said aloud.
“Agua es hermoso.”

H
e 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.