Flying With Annie

[roncollins]

Flying With Annie
Written by Casey Neal
Daily Log of a Fresh-faced Graduate
April 20, 2013

Seeing as every PEBA team within reasonable distance is on the road, our options are a long haul north or a longer haul west. Don-o and I decide to swing for the fences and head west –- destination Yuma, which we think we can make before Canton gets out of town. It seems like a hella trip, and the fact that we don't have to wear parkas to the ballpark this far south – and neither do the girls – is also a factor.

So we hitch from New Orleans to Baton Rouge with this old guy and then get on a migrant hauler that takes us just across the Texas state line before the driver decides he's had enough of two greasy gringos and tosses us out.

Let me tell you this: Texas is a big piece of desert.

The first problem we face is that we're running more than a little short of green. We've been hitting Dan-o's ATM card pretty heavy, which has always been Mr. Reliable, seeing as his Mom made about a bazillion dollars selling Mary Kay or Tupperware or some other thing that old ladies buy like they're Bret Michaels records or something. But the card got bent and… well… eroded… when Dan-o tried a 3 a.m. hook slide on the bar top a couple nights before. The bank won't issue a card to him until his Mom approves it, so now we're a little shy.

At least he got safely into third, if you know what I mean. I, of course, proved I'm willing to sleep in the dugout for a buddy. Talk about the raw end of a deal.

Anyway, this is how we find ourselves in Beaumont, Texas, cleaning out the gutters and cleaning the rocks (I kid you not) on the house of a guy named Jessip Johnson (pronounced “Jawhnson”, of freaking course, because no one here can actually talk). It takes a full day and I think my arms are gonna go spongy from all the sandstone scrubbing, but we get enough spending cash to last us a few days. The second bright side is that Don-o feels the light of second thought and realizes that begging him Mom for another card is less bothersome than another day of gutters and rock-scrubbing. She extracts about twelve pounds of pride from his metaphysical hide and says she'll have the card sent to Houston.

We find a pair of old-timey Astros fans in a rusted-out 1966 Chevy convertible who agree to take us as far as Houston, and all it'll cost us is a couple beers.

This car of theirs is ab-so-lute-ly so sweet, it makes your teeth rattle. It's the Texas of automobiles – huge and expansive, with the top rusted permanently down so that it lets the sun and the wind beat you down. What's left of the body likely used to be a metallic blue. Probably gets about three miles a gallon, but it makes you feel like a king just to sit in it. Dan-o and I ride in a backseat that lacks only hot water and magnesium sulfate for being a hot tub. Our caps are drawn down over our foreheads, the bills riding the tops of our sunglasses, and we're grinning from ear-to-freaking-ear as we fly over Highway 10 and share baseball stories with these two guys who, honestly, I can't even remember their names but seem like hella good friends already.

"What do you want for her?" Dan-o says when we get to Houston.

The driver dude looks at him and says a price. Dan-o says he'll give him 10% more, and they walk away with a handshake deal.

"WTF?" I say as we walk away.

He looks at me with that far-away look of his and says, "Sometimes you just know, eh?"

He then goes to the post office and picks up his new card. A bus trip to an ATM later, he's got the cash. A taxi back to the driver dude's place is the last step in the process that gets us the ride of our dreams.

We name her Annie after the all-time greatest cougar that ever drew fake breath, because, just like her, she's comfortable, still racy and will always be a classic.

#

The next day, we fill Annie up and get her running on Highway 10 heading west. We know from yesterday that the car will do 90 or more, but Don-o is playing it cool on the speed limit, which is right as an eephus pitch on a Saturday to me. We stop in a Starbucks, load up on caffeine and whipped cream, borrow someone's connection to Google and rediscover that Texas is Holy Mother of God huge.

Realizing that we needed to drive straight through if we were going to make a Canton game and worried that we might fade off, we both decide it’s wise to drop a few tabs of caffeine and give it a little mushroom-chaser. This honestly seemed like a great idea at the time, and we were both for it. To top it off, we decide to invest in a cooler befitting the backseat and throw in a twelve-pack in order to stave off potential dehydration. To say the opening laps of this drive were full of laughter is, well… an understatement.

The sun starts getting brutal come about noon, but Dan-o doesn't seem to mind at all. He's talking to me about a vampire he met on a road trip to Wisconsin one summer, and how he was thinking he might want to introduce the vamp to the better side of mushrooms, and could you imagine a Dracula-freak-on-acid? I crack a beer and cautiously start sipping it. I'm getting into the scratchy country guitar of the songs the radio blares on max volume.

Counting traffic, it takes almost four hours to get to San Antonio. Then, guess what? We keep going freaking west, the sun starts to move to our faces and my butt starts to hurt despite the fact that Annie is built for comfort. Oh sure, you go through places with cool names like Junction and Sonora and Ozona (which I quickly name "the Hole" because I'm being environmentally conscious and not throwing my empties anywhere but in the backseat because they can then be recycled), but a day in the car is hard on just about anyone.

We stop for sunscreen but forget to buy any when we get sidetracked by the Cheetos packages that have been strategically placed at the eye-level of the average tripping guy. This is okay, we figure when we get back to the car, because now the sun is not so high in the sky. By this time, neither the beer – which I've still been cautiously sipping – nor the leg-stretching snack run is doing much to fix my stir crazy, and I'm getting leg cramps. But Don-o is dead from driving, and it's my turn at the wheel.

He climbs into the back and takes a nap while I head – you got it – west. Luckily, it's dark, so the sun isn't in my eyes no more. Don-o's snoring is keeping time with the radio and I'm coming down, so I hit another couple tabs and Annie and I fly together over the empty highway below a ceiling made of stars. I get a long, long stretch (is there any other kind in Texas) of desert with nothing much to do, and in those long, long moments of silence I find myself thinking about Mezzy. Once, I thought I saw her sitting in the seat beside me, one long leg angled up and hanging bare toes out the passenger side door, the red bang of her hair blowing in the wind like she was Thelma… or was it Louise?

Made me sick. Made me angry. So I admit I dropped another hit.

Perhaps not the best thing to do, but I gotta say that you really haven't lived until you see a lizard light up a cactus flower and blow prismatic smoke rings while you're driving 75 miles an hour and listening to Hank Junior.

#

By the time the sun is rising, I've gotten us to Tucson. My brain is exploding. I've been holding arguments with late-night talk radio, yelling at a weak ESPN announcer that was arguing the PEBA should be expanding so this bigwig conglomerate owner could have a team, and I'm so angry at that kind of political bull that I've screamed my throat dry and had to stop for another beer.

Anyway, Don-o takes over, and it's my turn to sleep. Only I can't because when I fall into the backseat and close my eyes, I still see images of Mezzy.

Eventually I at least zone out a little, and when I become conscious again, we're three miles outside Yuma, both burnt to a crisp and both needing a shower. The game is going to start in two hours. We find a roadside trucker's station and pay the dude twenty bucks for a quick shower and another couple beers.

#

Okay, that was a long-winded story to get us here, but I told you, Texas is a… you get the idea.

#

John Deere stadium feels like you're sitting in a missile silo, which is okay, I guess, because balls launch out of the place as if it was the home of rocket science – though whether this is because of Yuma's pitchers or opponents' hitters is a matter of some debate. Last year, Yuma hitters connected for 97 homers. Their pitchers contributed 241 for the cause. Only two Yuma hitters, Yoichi Inoue and John Copestake, hit as many as 15 homers. Eight Bulldozers pitchers registered at least 15.

Though the team is only 3-14, this is still opening weekend, attendance is nearly 33K and the park looks great. Both Don-o and I are hungry for something more substantial than Cheetos, and the polish sausage and DozerDogs with chips are full of yummy goodness. We see girls, we see families and we see Gozo the Bozo, a digital clown that plays out on the scoreboard in the middle of innings.

We sit next to an old guy with about three teeth but who knows baseball from probably as far back as the Federal League. He's about had it with Yuma, a team that defines "youth movement". Eighteen players on the Bulldozers' roster have one year or less major league service time. Only 3B Yoshihito Kichida and C Nathan Clark are past their arbitration years, and only five others are out of their min-sal years.

"It's all about the money with these guys now," he says, talking about front office, which is apparently set to make a ton of money this year.

The game, however, seems to be over almost when it begins.

23-year-old Dozer pitcher Roy Hopper gets Geoff Green to ground out to short, but then John Greene singles and Steve Fergus follows with a homer to left, and before our first DozerDog is done, Yuma is down 2-nothing.

Fergus tops that in the second inning with a three-run shot that quite literally had to have NORAD scrambling the fighters. I mean, the crowd literally hushes at the sound of the bat on the ball. Tack on another run in the third and Canton was up 6-0 after three. A few of the fans have started to leave, so Dan-o and I take the opportunity to move down a bit.

In the fourth, things get interesting again, though, as Kichida matches Fergus's second shot and the score is 6-3. The fifth inning sees 22-year-old Dozer 1B Denny Parkinson double in another run, and it's 6-4. Yuma goes double, single, fielder's choice, and it's 6-5. In the meantime, Matsuo and Eric Fisher have combined to cool down the Longshoremen's bats. A scoreless 7th bring us to the end game and has the remaining Yuma fans on the edges of their seats at the prospect that they might see a Bulldozer victory.

Alas, came the eighth.

25-year-old Michael Bender gives up a double and three walks, and a Fergus sac fly before giving way to Dave Bignell, who might better be called “The Fire-caller”. A walk, a double and a Jack Miller homer later and this game is so over. The stadium clears out and we get to sit behind the dugout. A Bulldozer homer in the 9th by Nick Harris merely makes the score 13-6.

After the game, the grounds crew cuts the lights to minimal in order to save electricity costs, and we can see the stars up over the stadium light fixtures. It is a glorious sight. I look at Don-o. Don-o looks at me. For just that one moment, it's like a tree has fallen in the forest and we were the only two around to hear its sound.

Magic. Sheer magic.

That's what this trip to Yuma has been, starting with hitching from New Orleans, picking up Annie, Cheetos and beer, watching round-ball and then seeing the stars.

For just that moment, life is very, very fine.

[Arroyos]

A delightful article, I'm glad I finally tracked it down. You've been turning out pieces so fast along the route for this "Fresh-faced Graduate," that I missed this one the days I was sick. But it was worth searching for.

First, thanks for appreciating the little touches we've made to our stadium in Yuma. Though no one can figure why the place is named John Deere (since only one outfitter in Yuma sells John Deere bulldozers; the preferred brands are Holt, Case, Caterpillar and International Harvester ), still we find it a commodious bandbox in which to pass an evening watching something vaguely resembling baseball.

The grounds crew, as you noted, douse the lights shortly after the end of the game, but not just to save money. (As you also noted, we got bulldozer shovels full of the stuff.) In part, it's to enjoy the beauty of a desert night. There aren't many places left in America where you can get far enough away from artificial lights to really enjoy what the night sky looks like. When it's especially clear, we can still see the Milky Way. Realizing that our entire solar system sits on a remote edge of that whirling saucer of gas helps us put baseball, and losing, in perspective.


But I would like to take exception to one thing in your piece. The old geezer who said, ""It's all about the money with these guys now," was David Goode's father. Yup, the former Dozer and infamous $12 Million Dollar Man still lives in Yuma, in a trailer off I-8. His son moved him here when David signed his multi-million dollar contract with my predecessors. And when his son was traded, the old man decided to stay put. He likes the desert, he likes the town, and we treat him like royalty at the ballpark. Why not? Trading his son has saved us $24 million dollars so far, and the figure goes up by 12 each year.

But Mr. Goode wasn't talking about the front office when he complained that "It's all about the money with these guys now." He was talking about the ballplayers, the high salaried ones, like his son. He's bitter. David sends him a check each month, but not much more than the old man needs to pay his rent. And David never visits. Nor has he volunteered to buy his father a house to live in. Yet David is a multi-millionaire. That's what gripes his dad. And that's what he was talking about.

As for those of us in the front office, we are indeed saving up the money at a good clip. I think we have as many bank accounts as we have bottles of water. Well, not quite. The water franchise is our ticket to eventual success in the PEBA. But we're not stashing away the cash because we're greedy. To us, it's not all about making money, it's all about spending money. We plan to buy the most talented young players available for the next several years. We'll be spending many of those bundles after the up-coming amateur draft. And if our plan holds, those youngsters will, in 4 or 5 years, put Yuma back in the PEBA competition.

You want to take a real road trip, see some real baseball being played, take a glimpse into the future? Travel to Kivalina this summer and watch our rookies learning their trade. And don't just drive by the Salton Sea on your way to Palm Springs, stop off and watch a game at our single A franchise, the Kilmers. That's where our money is going.

For a few more years, the rest of the league can launch rockets every night from our stadium. We hope they do, it brings in the crowds. We're pouring our resources into the minor leagues and trading away every player with a teaspoon of talent who sits on our major league roster. You want Clark or Kichida for that ball club you imagine yourself managing? Just ask. They're cheap. You think Bignell is the only real major leaguer on our pitching staff? He's yours for the asking. And Denny Parkinson? He can be had for a song. Buy the whole roster if you want, but leave us the minor leagues.

Yuma may suck, but Yuma is sucking on the tit of the future.

[roncollins]

Cool pic.

Love the back story, too. :)

[Arroyos]

Cool pic.

Love the back story, too. :)

Nothin' like inventin' backstory on the front end of a car outa control!