The Setup Man (6 page)

“I know that, sir. I am totally prepared for that eventuality. It’s just that …” He pauses, looks me in the eye. His sincerity is flattering, but it also makes me uncomfortable. “When I say
I’m a big fan, Mr. Adcock, I’m not referring to your pitching. That is to say, you’re a great pitcher and all, but … Aw, damn, I really jacked this, didn’t I?”

“I think I see where you’re heading.”

“You do?”

“Sure, but the answer is no. I work alone.”

“I wasn’t asking—Mr. Adcock, please believe me that I wasn’t asking for you to take me on, or not right away. I want to learn from you however I can. I mean, you’re famous! Everybody in baseball knows what you do. I want to be a major-league catcher for sure, but I want more, if you hear what I’m saying.”

“I hear you. And the answer is still no.”

“Okay, okay. I came on too strong. Something I got to work on, I know.” The kid steps around his chair and into the aisle. He puts out a thick, callused hand. A rancher-turned-catcher’s hand. “I’m just damned glad to meet you, Mr. Adcock.”

“Welcome aboard, Díaz. Like I said, don’t get too comfortable.”

I cross to the end of the aisle. My locker is relatively spartan—just a school photo of Isabel, an unopened bottle of B vitamins from Ginny, and a charger for my phone. I plug in the phone and begin changing out of my street clothes. My white home uniform, number 39, hangs from the bar, laundered and pressed. I wonder if young Díaz realizes that he belongs to one of the largest castes on earth—workers in uniform. At the low end, our group includes maids and fast-food cooks, janitors and airline baggage handlers. It moves on to nurses, members of the military, cops, and firefighters. At the very top, even higher than pilots, are professional athletes. Basketballers earn the most at present—an average of $5.75 million per year. Baseball players average three and a third. But no major-league ballplayer earns less than the league minimum of four hundred grand. That includes Díaz
(although his salary will be prorated because he was called up midyear). Is it right that a twenty-year-old kid makes more than San José’s chief of police? You could argue that he deserves it, based on the value our society places on entertainment. Hell, for an autographed bat, the chief might make the argument himself.

I am lacing up my cleats when Phil Sutcliffe comes to see me. Like all pitching coaches, Sutcliffe is a compulsive counter. To a certain extent this pathology makes sense—someone needs to keep track of how many pitches we have thrown—but Sutcliffe, in my opinion, takes it too far. He wears a pedometer on his belt, a little electronic fob emblazoned with a black-and-yellow Bay Dogs insignia. Between innings you see him looking down at the thing, as though his fitness hinges on the number of times he paces the dugout over nine innings. We joke in the bullpen that he gives his wife a hundred pumps a night—no more and no less—and after that he rolls off, whether he has blown his load or not.

“Skip wants to see you,” Sutcliffe says. He scratches his lumberjack beard with both thumbs.

“What about?”

“You’re not in trouble.”

“Why would I be in trouble?”

“Good work last night, Adcock. You looked sharp out there.” I shrug off the compliment, but it is nice to know that someone is paying attention.

“Tell him I’ll be right in.”

Sutcliffe walks off and I finish lacing. Say what you will about my side job; at least it means I will never have to become a pitching coach.

In the back of the clubhouse, Skipper’s office looks like the chief’s office on cop shows: a glassed-in cube with venetian blinds for “difficult” meetings. The blinds are open when I
arrive, which I take as a good sign. Skipper is hunched behind his desk. The scouting binder on the Padres—there’s one for each team—is open in front of him.

“Come in here, Adcock.”

He has not even looked up to confirm my identity, but that is one thing about Skipper: he has eyes on the top of his head.

“You wanted to see me, Skip?”

“Sit down and close the door.”

I do as I am told. Easing into one of the metal folding chairs, I put my feet up on the corner of the desk.

“Don’t do that.”

“Sorry—”

“How old are you, Adcock?”

“Thirty-five, sir.”

“Pretty old for a ballplayer. My knees were shot by the time I was your age.”

Skipper was a catcher in his playing days. Lots of managers were catchers: Connie Mack, Joe Torre, Bruce Bochy, Mike Scioscia. You might say this is because catchers know more about managing a game than any other players—they call the pitches, after all—but I think it is because they don’t know what else to do. By the hour, catchers are unquestionably the lowest-paid players on the team. They show up four weeks early for spring training, along with the pitchers, but, unlike us, they don’t get to rest four out of five days (or, in my case, eight out of nine innings). Plus, it just takes them longer to suit up, with all the pads and guards and whatnot. My theory is that when it comes time to retire, catchers realize that baseball is all they know. They had no time to learn anything else.

“Arm feels great, Skip. Might be another thirty-five years in it.”

“You’re a funny guy, Adcock.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Not sure that’s a compliment. I wonder sometimes about you.”

“If this is about my other job, sir, I promise that it never interferes with my playing—”

“Let’s keep it that way.”

As a representative of Bay Dogs management, Skipper is required to condemn players’ side businesses as violations of their contracts. I’ve always wondered how he really feels. From what I hear, he’s kept himself out of trouble. He would appear to have no vested interest in stamping me out. But he’s never expressed any support, either.

“Adcock, what I’m sitting here wondering is this: didn’t you ever want to be a closer?”

“Excuse me?” This was the last question I was expecting to hear, but my answer comes quickly: “I’m a setup man, sir. I have always been a setup man, and I’d like to think I’m a good one.”

“And I’m glad to have you. Plenty of times I’ve thanked God you were out there warming up when the other team had some left-handed gorilla waiting on deck. But I worry that maybe we’ve taken advantage of you. Denied you a promotion, as they say in the world of suits and ties.”

“I don’t think so, Skip. Besides, we’ve got a closer. Big Bob’s got that role nailed down.”

“What would you say if I told you Bob Schneider was on his way out?”

“I would say I’m surprised.”

“Really?”

“Well, Schneider’s not the brightest bulb in the box, but he throws hard, and he never complains. Plus, this is only his second year in the bigs, so he comes cheap, if you’re into that sort of thing.”

“What if I told you he hurt his thumb again?”

“Same way?”

“Yep.”

Big Bob Schneider has a notorious—and, in terms of his pitching career, dangerous—addiction to video games. His thumbs are plagued by cramps. Last fall, his first in the major leagues, he landed on the fifteen-day disabled list with a sprained palm. Most of us had never heard of such an injury.

“Dipshit was jerking off on the PlayStation,” Skipper explains. “What are they up to now, PS Four? Seems like I buy one of those things every year for my grandsons. Anyway, the trainers think he might have torn a ligament this time.”

“Did they do an MRI?”

Skipper holds my eyes. “They did.”

“And?”

“The results were not good.”

“Ah, shit …”

“So you see I’ve got to promote someone fast.”

“What about Garcia?”

Malachy Garcia is one of our long-relief men—someone to call if the starter gets in trouble before the sixth inning. A side-armer in the mold of Dennis Eckersley, Garcia throws only two pitches, a fastball and a slider, but they operate more like six pitches, because of the different arm angles he uses. He comes from San Pedro de Macorís, a village in the Dominican Republic that has produced more professional baseball players per capita than any other spot on earth.

“Garcia is an option,” Skipper says, “but I want to be fair about this. You have been with the club longer. The opportunity should be yours if you want it.”

“I appreciate the consideration, Skip, but I think I’m happy where I am.”

“What if I said it has been decided already, and you are the new closer?”

“That would be your prerogative, sir.”

“Maybe so, but the fact is, this is my choice. If I say you’re the closer, then you’re the closer.”

“That’s what it means.”

“And if I say you’re not, then you’re not.”

“Right.”

Skipper stares at me hard, his pale eyes so still they’re shaking.

“So am I the closer?” I say.

“Damn it, yes! And you should be happy about it. Closer is a big deal. The front office will want to talk to you, take some new promo photos, that sort of thing. You ever been on the side of a public bus before?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, get ready. It’s going to be loud.”

Skipper was right, of course: closer is a big deal. Outside his office, a young front-office employee in a jacket and tie is already waiting for me. He has a goatee, and the edge of some kind of a dragon tattoo is visible above his collar.

“Mr. Adcock? I’m Buzzy from Marketing. Do you think I could have a few minutes of your time?”

Tattooed Buzzy takes me upstairs to the club level, where the team has its front office. One of the rooms up there has been turned into a kind of photo studio, with lots of bright lights and two armchairs set in front of a navy-blue backdrop.

“This won’t take half an hour,” the kid tells me as he leads me to one of the chairs. “I’m just going to ask you a few questions to get you talking. It doesn’t matter if it makes sense; our guys will cut it up anyway.”

He goes behind the camera and pushes a few buttons. The lights come on even brighter, and I have to squint.

“Just act natural,” Buzzy says.

I take off my cap and smooth down my hair. “Like this?”

“Fine. Now I’m going to start asking the questions, and I want you to answer them in complete sentences. Like, if I ask
you where you’re from, you say, I’m from … and then where you’re from. Got it?”

“I know what a complete sentence is.”

“Sure you do. So tell me, what is your name?”

“My name is Johnny Adcock.”

“And where are you from?”

“I’m from Los Angeles, California.”

“I bet you were a Dodgers fan growing up.”

“I was a Dodgers fan growing up.”

Buzzy gives the obligatory boos and hisses. I wait for the next question.

“So why did you become a pitcher?”

“I became a pitcher—”

I stop. Why did I become a pitcher? There’s the line I usually give, Dad’s bit about left-handed relievers never being out of work. And that’s part of it. But there is more.

“I guess it’s because I hate waiting around,” I say. “All the other positions are about waiting. But the pitcher has the ball. Nothing happens until he moves. Everyone waits for him.”

The kid frowns.

“Do you have anything else, any other reasons? Like maybe something your grandfather taught you on his farm or something?”

I wind up. Lean back. Kick my leg and deliver.

“Well, Buzzy, my dad always said if I wanted to make some easy money I should be a left-handed pitcher.…”

“Ha! That’s great! Now could you say it again with more energy? You looked a little sad just then.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Pretty please? And then I’ll let you go?”

“I’m not that kind of guy. Sorry.”

I put on my cap and walk out, sure I’ve thrown a monkey
wrench into Buzzy’s works—and feeling satisfied, too. Let him collar fucking Modigliani if he wants that kind of interview. What does my childhood have to do with winning ballgames? This is precisely the reason why I resisted this “opportunity” so long. You want an answer, Skip? There it is: I don’t do interviews unless I am asking the questions.

I’ll give Buzzy one thing: he works fast. The game starts at 1:05 p.m., and it turns out to be a pitchers’ duel. Our starter, Ben Osmond, has a perfect game going until the Padres string together a couple of singles in the fifth. Our lineup scatters a handful of hits over the first few innings, but the only run of the game comes in the seventh, when Chichi Ordoñez, our leadoff man, reaches on an error and then steals second. The next guy grounds out to first, moving Ordoñez over to third. Finally, Modigliani lifts a long fly to center, which is caught but allows Ordoñez to tag up and score. One run, no hits: classic Bay Dogs baseball.

In the bottom of the eighth, with the score still 1–0, Sutcliffe sends me out to warm up. In San José the home team’s bullpen is in foul territory behind third base. When you go to warm up, you take someone with you to guard the bullpen catcher from foul balls. On my way up the dugout steps, I tap Díaz on the shoulder.

“Grab a glove,” I say.

“Me?”

“Warm-up time.”

As I toss the ball back and forth with the bullpen catcher—who is a coach, by the way, not a player—I see Díaz losing
himself in the action on the diamond. He is watching every pitch, every checked swing, every pickoff attempt, as though it is game seven of the World Series. I used to be that way. Right now all I can think about is Frankie Herrera. Poor guy signed with the Bay Dogs organization out of high school, spent the better part of a decade in the minors. Years of traveling by bus, sleeping in shitty motels, cashing laughable paychecks. Then he finally makes the big-league club, and a year later he’s dead. He must have been grateful for a taste of the limelight, but it also seems cruel.

I force myself to perform the usual warm-up routine, starting easy and gradually increasing the speed on the fastball, finally tipping the glove to signal an off-speed pitch or two. When I’m loose enough, I stop and slip my left arm into a jacket. Our guys go down in order, and suddenly it is time to go to work.

I have not pitched a ninth inning all season. Have not pitched one in four years, to be exact. I give my jacket to Díaz and jog out to the mound. They are doing the kiss-cam thing on the Jumbotron, where they scan the crowd for likely couples and shame them into making out. It occurs to me that Frankie and his wife might have started out this way. Give or take a few garments, it is basically the same routine.