Daily Log of a Fresh-faced College Graduate
May 26, 2013

I think I lost ten pounds on the spot – all of it brown.

“Get in the backseat,” Pat Riley said, coming out of the darkness with a gun of his own.

For just that sliver of an instant, I actually had an image of doing some weird kung fu thing that would disarm the Dudes, but that idea dropped from my brain about as quickly as my stomach dropped through the floor.  All I could see was the blue ring of the gun barrel and all I could think about was that this was going to be it.  We get in the back seat, Don-o behind the driver, me behind the passenger, our half-filled cooler of beer sitting between us like an uncomfortable third.  The Dudes get in, Pat Riley driving and Cue Ball sitting on his knees and facing backward with his gun pointed right at my crotch.  I literally feel myself shrinking.

“We’re going to see a man about a horse,” Cue Ball says.  “But first, I think Joe-Joe and I owe you a little payback, don’t you think, Joe-Joe?”  Pat Riley nods and looks over his shoulder at me with a grin missing a tooth.  Sweat lines my brow, and my heart is running faster than Powell Clark on crack.

I look at Don-o, expecting to see the same panicked look on his face, but he’s in a different place, and I mean that in every sense I can imagine.  His jaws are slack and his eyes closed.  His hair is falling down over his forehead in ragged shocks that seem to float in a spot of anti-gravity.  His right arm is laid out over our cooler and his hand is limp, hanging down as if he was sleeping or passed out or dead, but he’s not dead.  His chest raises and falls in a steady rhythm.  Just looking at him makes me feel better, though I’ve got no idea why.

“Hold on,” he says in a voice that echoes in my head.  Did his lips move?  I can’t say, but I grab onto Annie’s hand rest anyway.

Pat Riley or Joe-Joe or whoever he is revs Annie’s engine, and I hear an undertone to the rev-cycle of her eight cylinders.  I hear the crowd from tonight’s game.  I hear a trumpet play an old-timey “charge” blare.  I hear the kind of blues that comes from somewhere around 1930 and see the metallic flash of a knee-high spike at second base.  It feels personal and it feels close.  The seat seems to mold around me, and I feel Annie.  I swear she’s a real thing – Annie Savoy, the woman, the true soul of baseball, keeper of Yeats and the teacher of the fastball and the sacrifice bunt and keeping your hips in.  Then the parking lot was gone and in its place was a plane of solid green lit by parking lot lights under the darkened sky.  This is Annie’s place and she is exerting dominion, owning her part of the plate, throwing the heater up and in.

The car shoots forward, then to the left in a movement so immediate and so violent that I think my head is exploding.  I have an image of Cue Ball flying, his gun twisting one way, his body the other.  Pat Riley’s hands fly from the steering wheel as if he’s got an electric shock.  Don-o reaches out with one hand and uses Annie’s forward momentum to toss the Dude into the air.  Pat Riley goes flying and Don-o scrambles into the driver’s seat.

“Holy crap,” I say.  It seems spot-freaking-on for the moment, capturing exactly what I feel.  So I say it again.  “Holy crap.  Holy crap.”

But Don-o don’t respond at all.  He just drives, drives Annie over her parking lot of green grass, her freakin’ Lot of Dreams.  Her exhaust smells of popcorn and caramel and sweet hops and barley and hot dogs and grilled onions and every other sense I’ve ever felt at a ballpark.  The engine roars and…

Then we’re on the streets of Bridgeport.  The sounds and smells are gone and I’m in the backseat holding onto the beer cooler as if it’s a base I’ve stolen.  “Holy crap,” I say.  “Holy crap.  Holy crap.  Holy freakin’ crap.”

#

It’s three hours to Gloucester, and we do the whole thing that night.  The moon is out, and traffic is light.  The miles run by.

“This has got to freakin’ stop,” I finally say.

“I need a beer,” Don-o replies.

I fish a pair out of the slushy ice pool in the cooler and hand one to him.

“They have to be tracking us,” Don-o says.  “Something’s changed.  What is it?”

“My phone.”

Don-o drinks and nods.

“I’ve been searching a hundred data places about Percy Nor and about baseball and twins and all sorts of crap.  If they’re sensitive about this stuff, I suppose they could put two and two together.”

“If there’s anyone who’s sensitive to personal rep and net searches, it’s Percy Nor.”

“Makes as much freakin’ sense as anything else that’s happening these days.”  I stop and look at Don-o, but he doesn’t take the hint-o.  “Seriously, dude, what’s up with all this shaman-esque stuff?  And don’t give me any of the ‘follow baseball’ crud.  I think I deserve to know what’s up.”

“You want to maybe shut off the GPS part of your phone?”

“You want to tell me what the hell is going on?”

He shifts his beer into his other hand and runs his hand over his stubbled chin.  Despite my pissyness, I bow to peer pressure and a sense of not wanting to ever see a gun again, pulling my phone out and shutting down the GPS function.  I admit it makes me feel better, makes me feel free and on my own in a very, very good way.

“I wish I could tell you it’s something other than ‘follow baseball‘, man, but that’s all I got.”

“’Follow baseball, and it will provide’,” I say, unable to completely keep sarcasm out of my voice.  “You say it like it’s E=mc-freakin’-squared.

“Yeah.  Good call.”

“So seriously, dude.  Seriously.  You want me to believe you’re some kind of baseball savant?  You want me to believe Annie’s some automotive sorceress?  Seriously, man?  This is all you’ve got?”

He shrugs and he’s silent for probably half a mile.  “I think it’s like this,” he finally says.  “A man’s gotta believe in something.  Don’t really matter what it is.  Money.  Trains.  Planes.  Family.  Religion.  Science.  It don’t freakin’ matter.  Maybe a guy believes in pushing sofas up a truck ramp.  I don’t freakin’ care.  But if a man believes in something with every ounce of his being – if he does it, if he truly believes in and understands that one thing – then that thing gives back in whatever the hell coin that man values.”

He swigs his beer and drives on.  I am torn between responding with peals of laughter and the desire to cry.

“And I,” he says, “believe with all my heart in the purpose of baseball.”

#

We get to Gloucester in the earliest morning hours and we find a truck stop to curl up and go to sleep in.  I keep thinking of Don-o and Annie and guns and the Bad Dudes.  I think I might never get to sleep, but I do.  I dream, and every dream is filled with a person who is a lot like me; they are trying to figure out exactly what the hell they believe in.

#

As fate would have it, the Fishermen are hosting San Antonio today.

It’s an afternoon game.  We listen to a call-in show as we head toward Dockside Coliseum, a place that reminds me of some of the old MLB parks with its symmetrical dimensions and its rounded architecture.  Where a place like West Virginia‘s Allegheny Field feels like you’re sitting down in a valley, Dockside makes you feel like you’re out in the open, out on top of the world someplace.

Per one of the callers, there is apparently some truth to the rumor that the Vanilla Queen approached the Fishermen’s owner Clayton Morrissey and proposed that the team advertise her product.  Her pitch, if the rumor is true, made use of the idea that the Fisherman’s record is pure vanilla.  The caller’s complaining, you see.  He’s tired of having an average team.  He wants to win, not just subsist.  Call-in shows and Internet boards are all filled with binary people, I think.  It’s not good enough to compete.  You’re either a winner or a stooge, and there ain’t nothing in between.  The bottom line is this: If you were a Gloucester fan in any given year and you plunked your money down on 81 wins, you were pretty sure to not be far off.  The squad is a classic third-place franchise, which seems fine with Morrissey, because the team has never drawn less than 2.3 million fans, and has made solid profits every season until last year – which, you gotta admit, is a pretty damned good gig if you can get it.

It’s not like the team has been particularly stingy with the pocketbook, either.  The off-season saw them reward local hero Gregory Arnold with a four-year, $61M extension, and they’re in the middle of paying António Coronado north of $13M a season for this year and next.  They have always paid a fair price for fair talent, and yet they are a classic third-place team.  Part of that is that they play in the Pan-Atlantic division, which is generally full of pretty good teams.  In fact, on this night the PA division standings are flashed across the scoreboard:

Arlington 32-17
Manchester 28-22
Gloucester 26-23
New Jersey 26-24
Connecticut 24-25
London 19-30

“Tight race,” Don-o says.  I nod.  The events of the past few weeks flood over me.  I’m thinking about how great it would be to be back in Duluth moving sofas for a living and definitively not looking for anyone remotely associated with Cue Ball or Pat Riley or Percy Nor or whoever the hell else might be in on this thing – whatever this thing is.  I’m suddenly very tired.  Such is life.  Competition sucks, and once you’ve lost, there ain’t no going back.

Right now, the team’s biggest problem would appear to be a disabled list that is big enough to be written on one of those medieval monk’s scrolls.  Five Fishermen are disabled, including pitchers Ron Clark, Toyuaharu Yamaguchi and Edward Cooley, who are likely gone for the year

Anyway, Gloucester is 26-23 and riding a wave of optimism that can only be found during the opening pitch of an important ball game.  This game is important because the Calzones are the kind of team the Fishermen need to handle directly if they are going to make hay in the Pan-Atlantic.  And handle the Calzones they do.  It appears they don’t need any meddling by the guy who might or might not be Manny Aguilar.

Gregory Arnold doubles in a run in the opening frame.  They add two more in the second by stringing together a walk and three singles.  It could have been worse, but Rex Groves gets himself thrown out trying to go from first to third on Glen Ganey‘s base hit that trickled past the infield and into right field.  Keisuke Hashimoto makes the ending clear by hitting a towering homer to left in the third.

But just because the ending is clear does not mean the pain is not over for the Calzones.  Third baseman Rick Glendenning is just now heating up, and he deposits the first of his two homers to deep right-center in the fifth, then follows it with a… ahem… twin blast in the seventh.

Gloucester wins it 12-4.  Millard Wooten, who I would say is having a resurgent year except for the fact that he’s never had a good year to resurge to, runs his record to 5-2, striking out six in 8 innings.  But the best news of all is that Don-o does not go into any trances, Annie does not channel Crash Davis or Nuke LaLoosh, and we see no sign of the Dudes.