The Setup Man (2 page)

Let me rephrase that: I spent the early afternoon looking for jeans. I spent the morning in bed with a young woman named Constance O’Connell. Connie is the cousin of my buddy Jerry Simmons, who pitches for Detroit. Three or four years ago, when Jerry was still with the Bay Dogs, a bunch of us were drinking beer by the pool after a day game. It was this very
same hotel, now that I think about it. Anyway, this group of half a dozen girls shows up, college-aged but well dressed. Jerry waves them over and buys their drinks. We assume that he has ordered in some talent, but it turns out the girls are strictly volunteers. Jerry introduces us around, and right away I’m drawn to Connie. She has these inky black eyes, a perfect little upturned nose. She laughs easily and often. We talk about northern California—she has just graduated from Sonoma State, where she ran track and earned a degree in library science, whatever that is. I ask if she does experiments with books. She says she does, and gives me her number. She tells me to call her next time we are in Denver. I do call, but it isn’t until the Division Championship Series in October that we actually meet for drinks. The Bay Dogs lost that series, but I gained a friend. Life is funny that way. Did I mention her hair smells like a pine forest? I love Denver.

Our backup catcher, Frankie Herrera, takes the seat next to me on the bus. Frankie’s about twenty-five, in his second year in the bigs. Like me, he grew up in L.A., but on the opposite side of town. It might as well have been another country. He tells me about gang fights and cockfights and cat fights—basically, his whole neighborhood was fighting all the time. He may have become a catcher just for the protective equipment. But Frankie is about as clean-cut as they come. In this era of gaudy tattoos, of Matt Kemp and Yadier Molina racing Mike Tyson to the last unmarked patch of hide, Frankie has just one decoration: the word “Granma,” misspelled just like that, across his right hip. It was a casualty of high school, he says—a friend was practicing to be a tattooist and Frankie volunteered his ass. He never told his grandma about the tattoo, but he did donate money to build a new baseball diamond in her village in Sonora. He strikes me as uncommonly generous for such a young kid, and it’s obvious he values his family. He
and his wife have twin sons, a big house in San Diego near her folks. He’s just genuinely nice, no drama.

“What’s the good word, Adcock?”

I exhale. “Not ‘cutter.’ But I’ve been working with Phil, and I think we found the problem.”

Phil Sutcliffe is our pitching coach. After I gave up the go-ahead run our first night in Houston, he watched me throw and said I was snapping the wrist too early when I released the cutter. A cutter, or cut fastball, is a pitch thrown more or less like a fastball, but with most of the pressure on the middle finger. I have made the adjustment suggested by Sutcliffe, and we’ll see what happens. The body forgets, so you have to remind it. The problem is that it forgets again.

“Bad night,” Frankie says. “Don’t worry about it. Actually, I need to talk to you about something else. Something besides baseball, if you know what I’m saying.”

Even though everybody on the team knows what I do in my spare time, they speak about it only in whispers.

I slide in closer to Frankie.

“What’s on your mind?”

“That’s it? I just tell you?”

“How did you think it worked?”

“I thought we’d meet in an alley or something.”

“An alley, Frankie?”

“I don’t know—”

“This isn’t Boyle Heights. I’m not selling drugs.”

Herrera pulls a phone from his jacket pocket, checks for new messages, puts it back.

“It’s my wife,” he says. “I got a problem with my wife.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

He looks at me sideways. “Why are you sorry? I haven’t even told you the problem.”

“Listen, buddy, you’re not the first, and you won’t be the last.
We’re on the road a lot. Everybody knows how it goes. Sixty to seventy-five percent of my work is guys who think their wife is fooling around.”

“And are they?”

“Most of the time.”

“Well, that’s not the problem.”

“Lucky you.”

He checks his phone again. When he looks up, his expression is suddenly paranoid. He grabs my arm with surprising force and says, “This has to stay on the down low, Adcock. You can’t tell nobody. I need your word.”

“You have it,” I say. “That’s what I’m here to do.”

He releases the grip and just looks at me, giving himself one last chance to bail out. Everyone does this the first time. A problem isn’t a problem until you tell it to me. After that, it’s a straight line to the solution. Not everybody wants their problems fixed.

“When I met my wife,” he says, “she wasn’t, you know, such a good girl.”

“How do you mean?”

“She worked in clubs.”

“Okay.”

“You know the kind of clubs I mean?”

“I think so.”

“And also, a couple of times, she needed money at the end of the month. For rent and bills. So she made some movies.”

I could have told Frankie the rest of the story myself, I’ve heard it that many times, but I let him finish. A guy wants to be heard first of all. I sometimes think that is half the service I provide.

“Of course, now she’s different. She is a different person since she had the twins.”

“Sure, I bet.”

“I thought everybody forgot about the videos. But then, the day before yesterday, I got this message on my phone.”

“What kind of message?”

“A text message with a link to a Web site. One of those free porn sites.”

“And the video was hers?”

Frankie nods.

“Do you know who sent it?”

I say. “The number was blocked.”

“There are ways to get around that.”

“I was hoping.”

“On the other hand,” I say, “anyone can buy a prepaid SIM card. She’s not still in touch with the photographer, is she?”

“He told me he’d never do anything with the files. Maria doesn’t know this, but I paid him a nice chunk to just sit on them. But I swear to God, Johnny, if I ever find that motherfucker …”

“Easy, Frank. You have a lot to lose.”

“I know. Maria tells me the same thing.”

“Good woman.”

“Tell you the truth, all I want to do is find the files and erase them. I don’t need revenge or nothing. I just don’t want my boys to grow up and find out their mom was, you know, that kind of actress.”

“How old are they now?”

“Gonna be five in October.”

“Time flies, huh?”

“That’s what everybody says.”

“So it was just the link, no message with it? Normally, you get a demand—not necessarily in the same package, maybe by mail, or a phone call?”

“You’ve seen this kind of thing before, huh?”

“Unfortunately.”

This seems to make the kid feel better. He pulls out his phone again but doesn’t even look at the screen before putting it back in his jacket.

“Nah, there’s no demand. You think they want money?”

“Maybe. I’m going to need the phone.”

Frankie’s face drops. “For real?”

“Sorry, Frank, but I need to see the video. You can transfer the number to another phone, but I need the message, in its original form.”

“Promise you’ll keep your hands by your sides?”

“Come on—”

“She’s my wife, Adcock.”

“I know she is, and I promise to give her video the respect it deserves, regardless of how effective it may be.”

“I appreciate that. So—how does this work? Do you charge by the hour?”

“We can talk about that later.”

“Okay. I’ll have my agent call yours. You’re with IMG, right?”

“It doesn’t work like that, Frank.”

“Oh. Right.”

“Don’t worry about it. Just get me the phone. Call Verizon or whoever, tell them you lost your handset.”

“Yeah, okay. I can do that.”

“The sooner the better,” I say. “You know where to find me.”

Tonight our starting pitcher, Tim Harlingen, scatters six hits over seven innings. The Rockies’ only run comes in the bottom of the seventh, when our center fielder loses a routine fly ball in the lights. Harlingen is a prideful guy, he wants to finish the game, but the score is tied, 1–1, going into the top of the eighth, and Skipper pulls him for a pinch-hitter (who strikes out, but that’s how these things go). Bottom of the eighth, we send out Mitsu Yushida to face the top of the Rockies’ order. Yushi gets the first two on grounders, but then he loses his concentration and walks the third and fourth guys on something like nine pitches. I have been warming up for exactly this scenario, because the Rockies’ number-five hitter, Tom Kelton, is a classic Adcock adversary: a lefty batting thirty-five points lower against left-handed pitching.

As I jog in from the pen, I go over Kelton’s scouting report in my head. You’re supposed to jam him inside to start the count, maybe he fouls off one or two, and then put some junk on the outside corner and hope he chases. Kelton and I broke into the league the same year. We have faced each other dozens of times. Like most scouting lines, this one is factual but insufficient. The truth is that if Kelton is feeling good he will put your best pitch in the cheap seats. Inside, outside—it doesn’t
matter. He’s a drinker, though, and it is after ten o’clock. I cross my fingers and hope he’s jonesing.

Skipper puts the ball in my glove. “See you in a few,” he says.

I nod.

Our starting catcher, Tony Modigliani, the third member of our little committee on the mound, goes over the plan: “Let’s start him with fastballs up and in. Got it?” Physically, there are two types of major-league catchers. First is the short, stocky guy with a thick skull, the Mutant Ninja Turtle. Frankie Herrera fits this mold, along with greats like Yogi Berra, Mike Scioscia, and the brothers Molina. Most Turtles took up the position when they were young because it suited their physiques. Growing up, they spent the vast majority of their practice time behind the plate, not beside it, so they tend to be only average hitters. But catching is the most specialized position after pitching—just handling pitchers and their egos takes a degree in psychology—so a guy like Frankie Herrera can expect to enjoy a long career if he stays healthy. Tony Modigliani is the other kind: tall and lithe, maybe six four and 220, with the long, strong arms of an outfielder. In fact, Modigliani played outfield until college, when his coaches told him to try catching. Less competition, they told him, more chance to stand out if you can hit. With those long arms he hits for power—forty homers in his rookie season alone—and because he trained as a hitter, his eye is well developed (he led the National League in walks last year). The problem is that these long-limbed guys are not cut out to be squatting four hours a day, two hundred days a year. Eventually, their knees give out, and they have to move to first base, or join an American League club, where they can DH. There are plenty of examples of this type, too: Mike Piazza, Benny Santiago, Joe Mauer. Everyone loves them—when they’re healthy.

One more thing: for some reason, long-limbed catchers tend to be dicks.

“Up and in,” Modigliani repeats, “you got that?”

“Got it,” I say.

He trots back to the plate, flips down the mask. I take my eight warm-up pitches while the crowd watches bloopers on the big screen. Then the ump gives the signal, and Kelton steps into the box.

I do as I am told, spot a fastball up and in. It has good velocity, a little trailing movement, and it is headed right for Diggy’s waiting mitt when Kelton turns and jacks it over the right-field wall.

The runners come home—one, two, three—and the score is now Rockies 4, Bay Dogs 1.

“One pitch,” Skipper says to me as he takes the ball. “I think that’s a record.”

“What can you do?” I say. “Line on Kelton is up and in.”

Skipper taps my ass. “Maybe it’s time we rewrote the line.”

On the flight home, I hide behind my headphones. One of the problems with being on the road with a baseball club is that you’re never alone. There’s always someone around—teammates, coaches, trainers, writers, video crews. If you want the world to disappear after a bad night on the mound, you can’t just put a blanket over your head. The best you can do is crank up the music and shut your eyes. Most people respect that, even if the sulking player is far too old to be wearing a purple headset labeled “EarCanz™ by Weezy.”

Know what I’m really too old for? Late-inning homers. If a kid with a triple-digit heater hangs a slider and loses the game, you forgive him. You take the long view and trust he will work
out the kinks by his next outing. After all, he’s still bringing the heat. With me it’s another story. My hard-throwing days are long gone. My game is about location, changing speeds, and outsmarting the hitter. The moment I lose the ability to fool a drunk like Tom Kelton, I become expendable. No headphones can drown that out.

When we reach San José, Herrera finds me in the players’ parking lot.

“So, hey,” he says, “do you think maybe we could erase the link before I give you the phone?”

“Afraid not, buddy.”

“Do you really have to watch the clip?”

“Lucky me, right?”

“Look, Adcock—”

“I’m just kidding. I’ll close one eye, how’s that?”

He hands me his iPhone. The case is decorated with children’s drawings.

“Great,” I say. “Let’s see what we can find.”

“I’ve got my fingers crossed. Thanks for your help, by the way.”

“Don’t thank me yet.”

Frankie laughs and pulls out his keys. “Yeah, I guess that would be smarter.” His black BMW chirps. He flips his suitcase into the trunk, slips behind the tinted glass, and disappears into the night.

My own iPhone starts vibrating around seven the next morning. I am in my apartment, on the twenty-first floor of a building in downtown San José. It’s not a glamorous address, but it suits me. The ballpark is walking distance, so I don’t need a car. I keep a motorcycle in the garage for emergencies. The view is a nice bonus. From my living room I can usually see the hills on both sides of Silicon Valley, the little horsetail clouds above the ridges, the windmills in the passes. In front of me, northward, are the backwaters of the Bay, the toxic red sludge in the evaporating ponds, the stinking marshland, the abandoned railroad trestles. On a clear day you can see all the way to San Francisco. This morning, though, I see nothing. We are fogged in.