-Our man in Havana
While attending my literary duties I observed a change in the name plate on the locker of Juan Lopez. Whereas it had previously only borne the simple declaration of hi first and last name there was a third name wedged ‘tween the pair. It now read ‘Juan “Pez” Lopez’
Curious, I imposed myself upon Mr Lopez’ locker neighbor, Jonathan Sherwin. Surely, I surmised, this nickname was a simply shorthand as it were, condensing his dual syllabic family name into a field expedient monosyllabic, often of great utility in the midst of a baseball game. An example of which might be “Pez!” whereby a player might signal his desire for the ball to be thrown in his direction as to make a baseball play.
Mr Sherwin looked at me, and with a shake of his head said simply, “Nope.” With a wave of his glove to directed my gaze to the locker’s top shelf where much to my surprise I observed a genuine 1964 baseball Pez candy dispenser. “He’s had that since he was a kid” Sherwin informed me.
Satisfied in my findings I resumed my regular writing duties at the desk in the video room. When the teams chief video review scout dropped in to start editing his latest videos I saw the perfect opportunity to impress with my new found knowledge. He listened politely to my tale and at it’s conclusion he simply shook his head. “A moment.”, he said and one back to the tape vault and returned with a single dvd.
As he loaded the dvd into the player one couldn’t be helped to notice the the disc bore the logo of the Scottish Claymores. “Scouting report we … err … came across …” the chief scout said, “He left it in the seats. We looked for him a little bit but couldn’t find him somehow.”
The video showed Juan Lopez on the mound during a game. As the recording continued you could here two men conversing, narration the play.
“Gonna be a fastball outside.”
“How you know that?”
“Watch his head. See how his head goes back slightly and he does that little yawn kind of thing?”
“Yeah. So?”
“He’s tipping. He looks like one of those candy things we had as kids.”
“What, a jawbreaker?”
“Hah no no one of those plastic things you’d stuff the candy in and pop ‘em out. He looks like that. You know the head goes back and it dispenses a candy. The ball like’s that candy being dispensed. Whaddya call that thing again … had a ‘P’ or a ‘Z’ in the name.”
“Pez?”
“Yeah that’s it. He looks like a Pez dispenser when he uncorks that heat.”
The audio cuts out after that and goes on to show a number of fastballs being delivered with a that same strange head motion preceding each delivery. Then there is a blurry image of what appears to be a foul ball headed directly for the camera before the camera appears to drop and the images stop.
The chief removed the dvd and returned it to the vault.
For my part I found myself in the knowledge of three possible explanations for the revised locker name plate, not really sure of which bore the reason for the revision. In the end it really didn’t matter. Somehow ‘Pez’ just worked on its own merit.
