The Setup Man (7 page)

I am due to face the bottom of the Padres’ order in the ninth: the shortstop, the catcher, and the pitcher’s slot. Everyone assumes they will pinch-hit for the pitcher, and they have some bruisers on their bench—hoary old guys who can still swing the bat even if they can hardly walk to first base. Pinch-hitters are the only players in the league who work less than me.

I toss my eight warm-up pitches while the crowd howls at the PDA on the Jumbotron. The background music is classy: “Feel Like Making Love” by Bad Company.

Then the music stops, and I hear my own voice come over the public-address system:

“My name is Johnny Adcock. I’m from Los Angeles, California.”

I turn around and see my face three stories tall on the center-field screen.

“The pitcher has the ball.… I hate waiting around.… I’m not that kind of guy.…”

The tape rewinds and repeats the last phrase three more times, with a scratched-record sound effect between each: “I’m not that kind of guy. [
Zweep!
] I’m not that kind of guy. [
Zweep!
] I’m not that kind of guy.…”

The crowd is silent, unsure how to react. To be honest, I am not sure myself. It appears that Buzzy from Marketing is trying to present me as a kind of rebel. On the face of it, the quote makes no sense: the definition of a closer is someone who waits around—i.e., till the ninth inning—but I can admit that it sounds vaguely badass.

Then the screen goes black and the music starts: “Kashmir” by Led Zep. As the volume swells, a yellow-and-black “SJ” appears on the screen, pulsing in time with the punishing beat. The announcer comes on: “Now pitching for your San José Bay Dogs … John-ny Ad-cock!”

I am startled to find the crowd cheering for me. My name is nothing new to them. Promoting me to closer is like giving your children their old toys for Christmas. But Buzzy from Marketing knows his business. Christmas is not about toys, it’s about wrapping paper.

The ump calls for the batter, and the Padres’ shortstop steps into the box. He is right-handed—yes, a righty!—and is one of these guys with an “open stance,” which means he points his left foot toward third base, showing me the letters on his chest. I am sure it is a psychological trick invented by batting
instructors—something to take the guy’s mind off the real business of swinging the bat. I find it hard to believe that such a dumb-looking stance is actually good for your swing. He looks like a goddamn penguin.

Anyway, this silly penguin drives my first pitch into the gap in left-center for a stand-up double.

Ahem. Who hates waiting around? Who is not that kind of guy?

The crowd is now silent.

I have no one to blame. Modigliani called for a fastball low and inside. It was exactly what I had been thinking, and that is what I threw. It was not a bad pitch, either. It would have hit the mark if the bat had not gotten in the way.

I circle the mound, pick up the rosin bag, bounce it a couple times in my hand. I look over at second base, where the runner is chatting with Ordoñez, our shortstop. Ordoñez toes the ground with his cleat.

The Padres’ catcher steps in. He is a switch hitter, so he bats righty against me. I throw out of the stretch, checking the runner twice before delivering. The batter fouls off a decent fastball. I get a new ball, rub it between my palms. Modigliani calls for a slider, but I shake him off. Marcus would be proud. I keep shaking my head until he calls my pitch: a fastball, low and inside. Best pitch for avoiding the sacrifice bunt.

But the batter’s not bunting. He turns and smacks it through the left side of the infield, past Ordoñez’s outstretched glove. The left fielder charges in, scoops it up, and fires home, but the runner, who was going on contact, easily beats the throw.

In the meantime, the gimpy catcher takes an extra base. Once again, I have a runner on second with no outs.

Sutcliffe comes out to talk to me.

“You look nervous,” he says. “Everything okay?”

“Why’d you shake off the slider?” Modigliani asks. It is just the three of us in the huddle, but I can see whose side he’s on. “The slider was the thing,” he says. “I called for the slider, asshole.”

“Easy, buddy,” Sutcliffe says. He taps Modigliani on his chest pad. “You do your job, and Adcock does his. Are we straight?”

“Straight,” I say.

Modigliani has no choice but to lower his mask and trot back.

As predicted, the Padres send up a pinch-hitter, Jim Rambus. Rambus was once an everyday player, a first baseman for St. Louis and Philadelphia. When his knees gave out, he moved to the American League and did a couple of DH gigs. Now he is back in the NL, and this is widely believed to be his last lap. He never hit for average, but in his prime he was good for thirty homers a year—along with four times as many strikeouts. The key with a guy like Rambus is to prevent him from getting the bat on the ball. He does not make contact very often, but when he does, it travels.

I start by pushing him back with three straight fastballs on the hands. Lucky for me, he fouls two back, putting me up in the count, one ball and two strikes. At this point, the crowd wakes up. In the field boxes behind the plate, a few patriots stand up and start clapping. Modigliani calls for the logical next step in our strategy: a pitch on the outside corner. I shake him off. He tries all my pitches—fastball, changeup, slider—asking for each of them outside. Finally, he gives in. He sets up on the inside corner, left knee hidden behind the batter.

I don’t know exactly what happens next, whether it is an honest slip or what, but I plant the pitch square in the big man’s back. He drops his bat, flexes his still-massive shoulders, shakes his head. As he trots to first, I think I see him smile.

And that’s it for me. Skipper walks slowly from the dugout. He steps carefully over the foul line. The organ plays something cheerful—no “Kashmir” now.

“Maybe you were right,” Skipper says as I hand him the ball.

“Yeah,” I say, “I don’t know what happened.”

“Sure you don’t,” he says.

Skipper raises his right hand, and Malachy Garcia races in from the bullpen.

So my career as a side-of-the-bus man is over before it starts. After the game, I am surprised to find that even though I never wanted to be the closer, the failure stings. It was a humiliating performance, and I wasn’t lying to Skipper: I don’t know what happened. Just because I don’t want to be the closer doesn’t mean I like giving up runs.

I have been in this position before. I never wanted to be a husband until I ruined my marriage. Okay, maybe “ruined” is too strong a word. The official line is that Ginny and I married too early. We have come to accept this explanation for the sake of simplicity (and also because it comes with a ready-made lesson for our daughter), but what actually happened is much more complicated. We met in college at Cal State Fullerton. Our age certainly contributed to our demise as a couple, but maybe more important was the fact that Ginny never graduated. After I got my signing bonus from the Bay Dogs, she decided it was senseless to keep dragging herself to lectures and labs. She had been majoring in leisure studies, which is a ridiculous name for a major but was actually the most efficient path to achieving her ambition of running a nature camp for needy children. It was hard to escape the name, though: if she was going for a degree in leisure, why not just drop out and
start practicing? My signing bonus made that possible. We bought a small house near her parents in Culver City, and Ginny stopped taking the pill. It had always given her headaches, and, really, what was the point? Her mother had gone through menopause at forty and warned Ginny and her sisters not to wait to have children. So, when she missed her first period three months later (I was by that point playing rookie ball in the Arizona League, flying her in once a month to take the edge off), we decided to go for it. We got married after a day game in Vegas, and when the season was over, I returned home a married man.

I became resentful nearly right away. Here I was, twenty-two years old, locked down for life. During the season, it had been exciting having a steady girl. We met in hotel rooms, hotel bars, rental cars. The foreign players on the team especially envied my situation—their girls could never get visas to visit them in the States. I felt lucky. But when I got home to Culver City, it felt like something else: Ginny and her mother had painted the second bedroom yellow (we were not going to find out the sex of the child) and dolled it up with furnishings—bassinets and changing tables and musical mobiles and diaper cans and wet-wipe warmers—that I knew existed but thought I would not own until much later in life.

Of course, when Izzy was born, I loved the hell out of her. But I was always on the road. Every time I saw her, she was another couple months older. She had a new word, a new tooth, a new friend at playgroup. Ginny changed quickly, too. At first she embraced the mom thing like nothing else, becoming the leader of Izzy’s playgroup, hatching plans with some of the other moms for a line of sexy lace nursing bras. But Ginny is just as restless as me, and none of it stuck. By the time Isabel turned one, Ginny was talking about going back to school, but we had no one to watch the baby. Ginny’s mom was still working
full-time, and we couldn’t afford a nanny. (I was earning a minor-league salary, the bonus money spent long ago on the house and the conjugal visits.) I asked her to wait a bit longer. Frustrated and angry, she began drinking to pass the time. Even worse than the drinking, she began to think of me as the cause of her stalled ambition. I couldn’t defend myself, because I was playing ball seven nights a week on the other side of the country. I had moved up to double-A, playing home games in Richmond, Virginia. For a player aged twenty-three and a half, double-A was not bad. I could see a path to the majors in a year or two. But I was not allowed to feel any pride. My phone, my e-mail, my voice mail—all were filled to capacity with bile from my wife, three time zones away, drunk, with a screaming baby in the background. It started to affect my concentration on the mound. The pitching coach suggested that I “mute” her. (“Worked for me in the Marine Corps,” he said, “and it was my fucking life on the line there, not a game in the double-A standings.”) I took his advice and stopped returning Ginny’s calls. At first the volume of messages increased, but then it slackened off. My pitching improved, and by the end of the summer I had been called up to triple-A—the last step before the big leagues.

I finished out the season with the triple-A Riverside Iguanas, posting an earned-run average in the low twos and putting together a twenty-five-inning scoreless streak (just luck, really). I started listening to the buzz, heard talk of trades in which I was mentioned in the same breath as major-league players I had watched on TV. I came home a conquering hero, dick swinging like an elephant’s trunk.

And my key did not open the front door.

Since then I have learned that very few marriages survive the minor leagues. What Ginny and I went through—rather, what I put us through—is second only to military deployments in
the number of divorces it provokes. The combination of uncertainty and estrangement is tough on even the strongest bonds. For the tenuous union between Ginny and me, it was death.

I made the big-league club midway through the next season, bouncing back and forth between Riverside and San José several times (just as I described to Díaz). The following spring, I made the opening-day pitching staff, and I have never looked back.

Never about baseball, that is. I have tried to be as clear-eyed as possible about my marriage. I try never to forget that I probably would have stalled out in Virginia if I had not blocked out my wife. She was desperate, raising a baby by herself, feeling trapped and isolated. She needed me, but I was on the other side of the country with my own set of problems. Ultimately, I made a choice. Part of me still cannot believe I did it, because there was no guarantee I would regain my confidence on the mound. I might just as easily have lost both my wife and my career. I consider myself lucky that one of the two panned out.

So, yeah, I realize that I will probably regret blowing my chance to be the closer. But in the decade since my divorce, I have learned not to put all my eggs in one basket, even if doing so means a broken heart. And a second job hunting down blackmailers.

The beat writers want a word with me after the game. Besides the usual shit about how it felt to blow the game, they want me to expand on the comments in Buzzy’s interview montage.

“Hey, Johnny—what does that mean, you hate waiting around?”

“It means I’ve got to get out of here, guys.”

“Sure, Johnny, but give us a sentence at least. What does it mean that you’re not that kind of guy?”

“Whatever I meant when I said those words, it’s not what
they mean now. You know how it is, fellas, they cut and paste like scrapbookers up there.”

“I can’t use that, Johnny. Gimme something else.”

“How about this: Johnny Adcock says he’s glad to be a setup man.”

I grab my coat, unplug my phone from the charger. There is a missed call from Marcus.

“Really, guys. Tomorrow.”

“Fine, Johnny, okay …” The reporters’ attention fizzles away from me like a fuse. “Hey,” I hear one of them say, “where is that new kid, the backup catcher? I have been meaning to get some color on him.…”

The next morning, three days after Frankie Herrera’s death, his funeral is held in a dark and dour Catholic church in Los Gatos, a tony suburb in the foothills southwest of San José. A house here runs about two million dollars. I’m pretty sure Los Gatos was chosen because it’s the home of the Eberhardts, the family that owns the Bay Dogs. Frankie Herrera had no family in the Bay Area—his people are all in southern California—but if he did, Los Gatos is the last place I’d expect to find them.

The widow Herrera is in the front pew, flanked by her twin sons. She’s wearing a tight-fitting black skirt suit and a veil. The pew also contains an older couple I assume are her parents, or maybe her in-laws. The Bay Dogs contingent fills most of the other seats. All the players are in attendance, along with the coaches, front-office staff, and various members of the Eberhardt family. Rumor has it that the Eberhardt fortune dates back to the gold rush, but I have always thought ladies’ footwear is a more likely bet. The current scion is Richard L. Eberhardt, a spoiled but ultimately benign middle-aged child—a Californian Prince Charles. Mr. Eberhardt sits next to his latest wife, a twenty-eight-year-old blonde named (I kid you
not) Laura Ashley. From the looks of it, they’ve been busy: Ms. Ashley is sporting a baby bump.