The Hitmen Need to Start Hittin'

[roncollins]

The Hitmen Need to Start Hittin'
Written by Casey Neal
Daily Log of a Fresh-faced College Graduate
May 24, 2013

We get a late start and decide to take an easy ride, so we've got the tunes flowing and Coors in the back to deal with the three hours on the road to Trenton. Don-o's driving. Between sips of beer, I'm thinking about twins, about following baseball across the country, about how my butt is aching from sitting on this seat for so damned long, and I'm watching this short burst of rain that soaks us to the freakin' bone before moving on. Annie gets us dry in fifteen minutes, though, and that's all fine.

"Who's doing all this?" I finally say out loud what I've been thinking for the past day or so. "Who's behind the twins thing?"

"Could be anyone," Don-o replies. He's done with his beer and drops the can on the floor behind him. We pass a cop whose hiding behind a pine tree, but we're lucky enough that Annie's coasting along a only a notch above the limit and the beer is out of Don-o's hand well before the cop would have seen it.

"No," I say.

"Whaddya mean?"

"It can't be just anyone. No one just wakes up one day and says, 'I think I'll kidnap some twins who are PEBA players and substitute them for the real guys.' That just doesn't happen."

"Okay."

I reach into my pocket, pull out my phone and graze on the baseball pages I've got loaded into the scanner. "Who owns that house?"

"What house?"

"The one with the boat dock – where Aguilar is? Who owns it?"

"Great question. I've been chasin' down all the twins in the league, but didn't think about going the other way."

I do a quick query or two. Nada. "I need an address," I mumble, but the words are lost in the wind of Annie's passage. I pull up my global map and slide the window to Florida, then Jacksonville, then St. John's Bluff. The shot is only six months old and was taken on a sunny day. The house and boathouse are both there. The water looks dark blue.

I feed the address into the search bar. "Even Co.," I say.

"What?"

"The place is owned by a freakin' company. Even Co., Inc." I do a few more queries. "Looks like they're a clearing house for other companies."

"Idea factory?"

"Maybe. Or a financial shell." I've heard of these things before, but I don't really understand them. All I really get is that they're like these weird tax havens to keep rich folk in spare cash. It's supposedly located in the Virgin Islands.

"Who the hell owns Even Co.?" Don-o asks.

It takes a few seconds. "There's a board of directors… and… Percival Norestra."

"Percy Nor?"

"The one and only."

"Son of a freakin' be-atch."

#

The fact that he has never been caught or arrested does nothing to change the fact that Percival Norestra is a crook. He's a cool crook, a crook that every guy would give his left Johnny-boy to be and that every girl would lay down her soul to be with, but a crook nonetheless. At least that's what his PR machine would have you believe.

He first appeared a few years back with a rap song called "I Frick U Up/Down" and followed that up with an Oscar-buzzy performance in an indie film that was screwed up and didn't go nowhere. Somehow he played it into a world tour, dates on TV calendars and dates with about every hot chick on the planet. He hobnobbed with NFLers and hit batting practice with Jeter and A-Rod.

And here's where it gets interesting… When MLB went through its last stage hissy fit – aborting, then restarting, then finally fading into a money-draped coffin – Percy Nor had tried to step in and buy the entire league.

My personal belief is that Bud Selig had a heart attack and was revived only by the prompt administration of an aspirin under his tongue and the promise of additional TV revenues. Apparently, Norestra wanted to call it the PNL – the Percy No League – and had a few, uh, inventive ideas about marketing.

Bottom line: I'm sure there wasn't an MLB owner on the planet who wouldn't sell his right hand for the kind of cash Percy Nor was flashing, but apparently they had a late-night visit from the powers that made the Grinch's heart grow. Somehow they all bonded together and promised fans that under no circumstances would they sell baseball to a snot-nosed teenager from Port St. Lucie who was busy flaunting his six-pack abs and his gold-toothed grin from the front page of every tabloid in the nation and beyond. Even the Players' Union wanted to avoid Percy Nor, but of course that's just because PN promised to drive them out of business.

#

I do some more searching. Percy Nor is having lunch today with Ze Ghandi, a dude in Britain who thinks the world could be powered by harnessing the brainwaves of people as they sleep. "Chinese sleeps power American Jeeps" was his brilliant advertising slogan when he was touring the U.S. I assume his Chinese pitch was equally as adroit.

The FBI is apparently looking into some of his activity regarding protection of his copyright. He's rumored to have begun a physical enforcement. A guy claims a pair of goons ransacked his house, saying this is what you got when you torrented Percy Nor. They had nothing on Nor, though.

So it went – until I grabbed a set of pics. There, amid hundreds of glammed-up snapshots of the dude with this chick and that star, was an image of PN walking over a red carpet with an entourage that was maybe six or eight guys with chests like tectonic plates. In that entourage were two guys who were totally to freakin' familiar. They were tall. One was wearing that slick-back hair, the other bald. Both in standard black.

The Bad Dudes.

"Ah crud," I said.

#

It doesn't take Don-o and I long to decide Trenton, New Jersey is a strange kind of place. It's loud and it’s… grimy… or maybe gritty is a better word. It's a place that can't decide if it's a city or a neighborhood. If there's a stereotype about folks in Joisey, it's because it's all true. Within minutes of crossing the city line, I swear Don-o is talking with an accent, and I'm dying for a beer and some onion fries. There are cars everywhere and people moving up and down the sidewalks.

I think I like it.

The PEBA franchise here, though, is one with a proud (if brief) heritage. The Hitmen won the first ever Planetary Extreme Championship and they fielded playoff-quality teams for three seasons. But if you need an example of a, “What have you done for me lately?” kind of town, Trenton is the place for you. The media has been out for blood after the team faded to lower-division standing over the past three seasons, and right now the team has had to go 8-5 over the past two weeks just to get to the .500 mark. New manager Tracy Evans is already feeling the heat, and General Manager Holleb Kasprowicz is being destroyed in local blogs despite the fact that his recent free agent signings of Pablo Souza and Pedro Ramírez have both panned out fairly well so far.

The fans, you see, are from New Jersey. They do not have time for losers.

"I would probably be pissed if I lived here, too," I say as we go through the gates, thinking about my 5th-place Duluth Warriors.

"You need a winner here," Don-o replies.

"Freakin-A," the ticket attendant with a cigar stuck in the side of his craw says. "The Hitmen need to be freakin' hittin', if you know what I mean."

I think I do, but I'm afraid to ask.

#

Mercer County Waterfront Park is an oasis in the middle of downtown Trenton. It's surrounded by tall buildings and, when the stands are empty, you can hear the sounds of traffic and tams and police sirens. But it's nestled down so the place feels insulated, and as people appear and the PA plays its music, the city disappears and there is only baseball.

We settle in for what turns into a bit of a pitchers' duel. Jian Du is on the mound for the Hitmen, and Frank Helms for New Orleans. They are different as night and day; Du being Taiwanese, short and a bit squat, Helms a gangly 31-year-old from Fairfield, Connecticut. Both throw hard, but Du has just a three-pitch tool bag while Helms wields the equivalent to a pitcher's Swiss Army knife.

Through four innings, they combine to give up four hits (all singles) and a lone free pass. Du walks two in the fifth but gets out of it when Steve Rucker waves at a wicked 2-2 slider. The Hitmen then get to Helms when Lee Kohler leads off their half with a line drive single to right and moves to second when Carlos Rodríguez bunts. Sancho Romero then pulls a grounder through the hole between short and third to plate the run.

New Jersey first baseman Anthony Hough touches a 2-1 Helms fastball for a two-run shot in the sixth, and that was all Du needed. He throws eight solid innings to bump his record to 5-2, and Carey "Checkmate" Bond comes in to lock down his 11th save. The Hitmen win 3-zip.

"That was a hella game," Don-o said. He looks… sated.

I think about it. Yes, it was a good game. A solid game of baseball. A game with two pitchers who threw well, where the go-ahead run was created out of a combination of skill and tactics, where the homer was a result of a fine duel between pitcher and hitter – a good hitter just flat-out beating a good pitcher. Three players tried to steal and no one got caught. Lee Kohler flashed that glorious glove of his, and the only error all game was a pickoff play where the ball got away and advanced a runner. It had no impact on the outcome, though. The win pulled the Hitmen out of the mire of .500 and gave their faithful some hope to go home with. And finally, it was a game played in the afternoon under a blue and white sky that seemed to hold the sounds and the smells of the park so close and let the sun shine down just often enough to give your arms and face that warmth that can only come at a ballgame.

We follow baseball, I think, and baseball provides. So, yeah. I agree with Don-o. It was a hella game.

We sit in the stands and wait for the place to thin out. The PA plays "Louie Louie" and I see a ball girl dancing with a grounds crew member. I look across the stadium to the third base side, and I suddenly focus on two forms that are emerging from a tunnel and into the main aisle. It's them. The Bad Dudes. The slick-backed hair is looking straight at us and pointing.

"Don't look now, Don-o, but I think we're in trouble."

[Hitmen]

I like the scruffy ticket mans thoughts, "The Hitmen need to be freakin' hittin', if you know what I mean." There have been some "hits" in the past Could probably use a few more if I ever get back to writing my story line The town being grimy and gritty sound accurate to me.

One small correction though is that manager Tracy Evans isn't that new as he has been manager since 2007 for the team :)

[roncollins]

Thanks for the pointer. I'll be doing some streamlining and rewriting when the whole thing is done, and I can use these to make things right. I was calling Tracy Evans a new manager because of an entry in the transactions list. Was his contract renewed?

[John]

Thanks for the pointer. I'll be doing some streamlining and rewriting when the whole thing is done, and I can use these to make things right. I was calling Tracy Evans a new manager because of an entry in the transactions list. Was his contract renewed?

Yes, Evans contract was renewed late last year. You were referring to this entry, right Ron?

Monday, December 3rd, 2012
Signed Manager T. Evans to a 4-year contract extension.

[roncollins]

Yep. That's what I get for reading too fast, I guess. :) It's a big world out there.