The Setup Man (23 page)

A no-hitter in progress is like
Fight Club:
first rule is you don’t talk about it. Our starting pitcher, Dan Wheeler, has not allowed a hit through seven innings, and he sits alone at the end of the bench, hat over his eyes, right arm coddled in a warm-up jacket. No one speaks to him. It’s exciting but awkward, like riding in an elevator with a celebrity. When Wheeler heads out to start the eighth, the dugout breathes a sigh of relief to have him gone. Then it’s all over. On the first pitch of the eighth inning, my former teammate Chichi Ordoñez lines a shot over the shortstop’s head into left field, a clean single. There is no call to dispute, no lazy outfielder to blame, just a textbook hit. We still have the lead, 2–0, but as so often happens in baseball, the tiniest shift in momentum changes the balance of everything. Just like that, the air goes out of Wheeler’s sails, and the next batter, Julio Cabrera, takes the first pitch he sees over the center-field wall. The ball goes much farther than that, actually, caroming off the “batter’s eye” screen and returning to the field. Our center fielder scoops the ball up and throws it back toward the visitors’ dugout, in case Cabrera wants to keep it as a souvenir.

In the bullpen we spit our sunflower seeds, cross and recross our legs, and wait for the phone to ring. You can almost feel
the heaviness in Householder’s dialing finger. Until five minutes ago, his pitcher was totally unhittable, a golden boy. Two batters later, the game is tied, there are no outs, and the Bay Dogs’ number-three hitter is stepping up. On deck, in the cleanup spot, is our friend Modigliani.

The phone rings and the bullpen coach picks up. He nods, replaces the receiver, and tells me to get my glove. Fritz DeVries also gets tapped. Fritz is right-handed.

You see where this is headed.

Before I get my glove, I try to touch my toes. My left arm is loose. The problem is my rib cage, specifically the right side, which feels fused. I bend down and hear cracking like knuckles in my lower back. It occurs to me that I am too old to be doing this. Or maybe too old for the other thing. Definitely too old to do both.

“Let’s go, Adcock,” the bullpen catcher calls. “You’re up.”

He crouches behind the plate, and I give a few weak tosses from in front of the mound. He looks at me sideways. I ignore him. Fact is, if he were all that, he wouldn’t be catching practice tosses in a cage behind the left-field wall. He knows this, of course, so he says nothing. Eventually, I work my way backward to the rubber. Until you are injured, you never realize how many muscles are involved in the simplest tasks. With this particular injury, the act of throwing the ball doesn’t hurt too badly; it’s the follow-through that kills, when the right side of my body curls in on itself. Now that I’m moving, getting warm, I hear no cracking, just a sort of moan, like Styrofoam flexing.

Then there’s a crack, and a loud one: the sound of the Bay Dogs’ second home run of the inning. This one is a monster shot onto the grassy knoll in right-center. The stadium falls silent as another of my former teammates rounds the bases. Those fans who are paying attention know that they have seen
the last of Dan Wheeler, and when Householder waddles out to the mound, they stand and give Danny the ovation he deserves.

Five minutes later, these same fans have forgotten about the no-hit attempt. All they see is the home team trailing, 3–2. Never mind that ten minutes before they had been ready to nominate Dan Wheeler for governor. A week from now, his seven innings of no-hit ball will be a statistical anomaly, like getting heads in a coin toss seven times in a row, indistinguishable on the page from seven random, nonconsecutive hitless innings. Which begs the question: is it better to have flirted with history and failed, or never to have flirted at all?

Under the falsely optimistic cheer of the ballpark organ, I jog in from the pen. Every step twists the dagger in my rib cage. I wonder what Householder would do if I kept running past the mound and into the dugout, down the tunnel, into the clubhouse Jacuzzi. Among other things, it would vindicate the baseball brass in their conviction that my second career is detrimental to my first. I would never admit they’re right, of course, but on a day like this it’s hard to argue with their logic.

In the end, I’m too proud to back down. I take the ball from my manager, nod and grunt as required, accept a pat on the ass. “Just like last night,” says the catcher. “Let’s get him again.”

First pitch is wide, and Modigliani takes ball one. Second pitch is the same. Diggy calls time, steps out of the box to check the signs from the third-base coach. I try to guess what he is hoping to see there: a bunt? You never know what the other guy is up against. Could be Modigliani had a hard night, too. He could be angling for a walk, nursing a hidden injury through these last few weeks of the season. A pitcher can hope.

I throw him a couple of sliders away, and he fouls both off—one deep the other way, off the corner of the old warehouse that doubles as the left-field foul pole.

I am pitching from the stretch, even though the bases are empty. This is standard reliever stuff, facing every batter like the bases are loaded. Each pitch must be sequestered in its own universe, each as important as the next. The rhythm of a windup, the economy of motion it provides—all that is useless to me. I will face one batter today. I can afford to burn my last drop of fuel. In fact, if I have anything left when I’m done, I will have failed to do my job.

The count is two balls and two strikes—a pitcher’s count. The catcher wants a slider outside, the same pitch we got him on last night. Diggy’s weak spot is weak for a reason, not because last week he forgot how to hit breaking balls on the outside corner. This bit of intelligence is culled from years of analysis, from thousands of at-bats. Yet today for some reason I have convinced myself he is expecting the slider. A high fastball, my gut tells me, would be a better choice. I wave off the catcher until he agrees.

Modigliani steps into the box. The catcher crouches down, raises his target. I set my hands at the belt. I stretch. The pitch feels right as it leaves my hand. The arm angle is good, the follow-through doesn’t hurt too badly. But this is baseball, not ballet. You get no credit for a beautiful motion. Half a second later, as my pitch rockets into the San Diego afternoon, on its way to becoming the Bay Dogs’ third homer in as many batters, I remind myself that often we are just plain wrong. About our friends, about our enemies, and even about ourselves.

Nothing like a humiliating loss to show you who your friends are. In the Padres’ clubhouse after the game, I am surrounded by a cone of silence. My teammates are talking to reporters, talking to one another, just talking in general, but not near me. I want to tell them I know what they’re thinking, that I was asked to do a small job and blew it. I feel awful, but that’s part of the game when you pitch to only one batter a night. There’s no middle ground; it goes either very well (you get him out) or very poorly (you don’t). For years I’ve been content to take my lumps, but today it hurts. Maybe it’s my age. Pitchers tend to lose their confidence like Hemingway said men go bankrupt: gradually and then suddenly. And once the confidence is gone, it can take weeks to gain it back, if it comes back at all. Plenty of guys just retire.

If I were going to chat with my teammates, the topic of the day would be Frankie Herrera’s porn film, news of which hit the Twitterverse this morning. By noon, ten different acquaintances had forwarded me the link: “Know this guy???” and “Pst, Adcock, check out GRANMA!!!” In the end, ESPN wouldn’t touch the story, so the scoop came from an unauthorized Bay Dogs blog called
DawgPound
. I know the guy
who wrote the piece—he hired me to follow his new girlfriend to Vegas during the off season three years ago. (She was what they call a weekend warrior, a stripper who lives elsewhere but flies to Vegas on the weekend for the premium tips. I think he was actually pleased by my discovery.) In his article, my friend pointed out that the Herrera film represents an interesting cultural moment. In an era where celebrity sex tapes have become so common they’re almost required for a certain kind of fame, we get a new wrinkle: the tape from beyond. On my phone, I skim the article and some of the hundreds of comments. Most of the talk is about whether or not the black guy is Prince Fielder (I’m pretty sure it’s not him), but there is also some discussion of the actress. A couple of people correctly identify her as Herrera’s wife. Somebody else says a reporter tried to track her down for comment, but apparently she has gone into hiding.…

I’m surprised the writer signed his name to the post. Now he’ll have no chance to make the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, the members-only body that votes on the Cy Young and MVP awards. The BBWAA remains one of the stodgiest clubs in a stodgy sport, but I guess my friend decided it wasn’t worth playing by their rules. The times are changing for all of us. I hope at least he made some money.

I shower quickly, throw on borrowed street clothes, and wait in the hall outside the visitors’ clubhouse door. A couple of the Bay Dogs say hello as they leave, but most do not. It’s like they can smell the failure on me and don’t want to get infected. I have a choice to make. I could stew in my loneliness, or I could reach out and touch someone. In moments of personal crisis, I used to call my mother, but since she passed away, five years ago, I usually end up dialing my ex-wife. Not sure what that
says about me and the choices I’ve made with women, but, for better or worse, Ginny will always be family.

She does not say hello when she picks up.

“What’s the matter, John?”

I hear beeping in the background. “Relax, nothing’s wrong. I just need your advice.”

“I’m at Trader Joe’s.”

“Okay, I’ll call back.”

“No, let’s get this over with.…” She pauses. “Now is fine, I mean.”

“I’m thinking about calling it quits,” I say.

“Retirement?”

“That’s it.”

“And what will you do with yourself if you retire?”

“I have some ideas.”

“Like what?”

“Marcus wants me to work for him.”

“At his bar. Isn’t that a cliché?”

“Marcus’s place is different, but, yeah, I see what you mean.”

“Do you really have to work? You must have some money saved up.”

This strikes me as a very Santa Monica thing to say.

“I have some money, yes.”

“I’m not digging, you know. Simon gave me everything in the divorce. All he needed was the love of a good man—he said that. Last I heard, he was sleeping under a
palapa
in Zihuatanejo. My point is, don’t keep playing baseball for our sake. Izzy and I are doing fine.”

I was afraid she would say this. I was hoping for the opposite, that she would berate me into continuing my career, scorching my ear with all manner of vicious threats and belittlements.
You are a fool, Johnny Adcock! What kind of man quits a job that
pays a million and a half dollars a year?
But the sad fact about divorce is that even anger falls away eventually. First the good kind of passion dissolves, then the bad. I never thought I would miss her rage, but I do.

“Suppose I retire,” I say. “Will you still, you know, respect me?”

She laughs, then apologizes. “I don’t mean to belittle your dilemma, but this is not about earning anyone’s respect. This is about one thing: do you want to play baseball or not?”

“Fair enough,” I say.

I hear the checker ask Ginny if she wants her milk in a bag. “Is that it?” she says.

“Actually, I have one more question. You don’t have to answer if you don’t want. It’s about birth control.”

“You’re not worried about Izzy, are you?”

“No! Oh, God, no. No—it’s a question for you.”

“I guess that’s a relief.”

“Do you know anything about IUDs?”

“A little. Why? Are you shopping around for Bethany’s birthday?”

I ignore the jab. “What I want to know is, do they put you to sleep for the operation?”

A pause as Ginny realizes I’m serious. “Okay, my sister has an IUD, and if I remember correctly, it’s not even an operation. She said they just slipped it in. Maybe some local anesthesia.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it. The mysteries of the female anatomy.”

“Thanks, Ginny, that’s helpful.” Out of the corner of my eye, I see that Jerry Díaz has emerged from the clubhouse. “Okay, I gotta go. Kiss Izzy for me?”

She agrees, and we hang up. Another awkward conversation in the past.

Díaz looks as fresh as ever in jeans and an ironed polo shirt, an Adidas tote slung over his shoulder. “Johnny!” he exclaims when he sees me. I must admit that his enthusiasm is especially welcome today. He shakes my hand with gusto.

“Díaz.”

“Well?” he says. “You ready to go?”

The Aztec Motel in Mission Valley looks pretty much the same as it did when I stayed here in the late nineties as a member of the Cal State Fullerton baseball team: a two-story block of tiny double rooms, external walkways wrapped around the second story, cracked asphalt parking lot with numbered spaces corresponding to the rooms. Off to the side of the parking lot, the motel’s office has its own bungalow, an aged swamp cooler chugging away on the roof. Out on the street, a fluorescent signboard reads
VACANCY, COLOR HBO
,
$69+TAX
. No extra charge for bedbugs, and no questions asked.

Díaz and I go around the back of the main building and climb up the stairs behind the rumbling ice machine. On the second floor, three doors down, we find Room 16, where Díaz has arranged to meet Rosario. This morning, after Marcus dropped me off at the park, I called Díaz and told him I had another favor to ask, a hunch that needed testing. I said it just like that, “a hunch that needs testing.” Needless to say, he was in. After bringing him up to speed on my night in Tijuana and the situation with Maria Herrera, I asked him to call Rosario.

I knock softly, turning sideways so I can keep an eye on the parking lot.

A voice from inside: “Who is it?”

“Barrio El Dorado,” Díaz replies. This is the name of his parents’ ranch. It means Golden Neighborhood. He said he always thought it would make a good password.