Written by Roberta Umor, Yuma Sun

April 1, 2016: Yuma, AZ – The GM looked lost. His arms were in the air, his mouth open as if to say something, but nothing coming out. His eyes looked about as if he didn’t recognize the place, but he was in his office – “Mine, mine, mine,” he’d insisted only moments before – explaining something to the young reporter trapped under the fax machine. Something about second baseman David Goode… but what was it?

The young reporter – Patricia or Patsy, it wasn’t quite certain – held her pen poised above her notepad, waiting. The old man was lost in one of his reveries again. Neither Patricia nor Patsy were certain he knew where he was. “Sir?”

The GM looked at her, as if seeing her for the first time. “What’re you doing under that fax machine?” he asked.

“You told me to stay here. Remember?” He didn’t answer, just stared at her, unconvinced. “You said since I hadn’t been invited, that I didn’t deserve to sit in the furniture. Your furniture, as you made perfectly clear.”

He smiled. “I tell you what a deal I got on this stuff? The whole lot for peanuts. It was back when…”

“Before you re-signed David Goode?” she said, cutting him off before he started another story.

“How’d you know? That nincompoop. I ever tell you how the Calzones and Dozers conspired to bankrupt those arrogant little Johnny-Come-Latelies over in Tempe?”

“Not five minutes ago.”

“Oh…” The old man seemed to slip away in another memory.

“But you haven’t told me yet how David Goode caused… what did you call it?” She scanned her notes. “The ‘whole chaotic mess’ of the PEBA. Tell me about that.”

“You’re a pushy broad, ain’t ya? Probably tell your boyfriend how to do it, don’t you?”

Patsy, like Patricia, was taken aback. He hadn’t been rude before. She was prepared to lead him through his memories and bring him back as many times as necessary to get this story, but she wasn’t sure she was ready to endure insults. Before she could decide how much she was willing to put up with, he was off on another tale. She started scribbling notes.

“Ol’ Goody Two-Shoes, he probably likes girls like you: pushy types. That would… oh hell, what am I saying? I no more understand that boy than I understand how a pitcher’s BABIP is figured, or why it’s important. It’s a mystery to me, and so’s Goode. I have no idea what makes that boy tick. Never did. Once he came to me – this was before we traded him to San Antonio – and begged me to order the manager to play him at first base. Said it would extend his career. I told him knocking in a few runs might extend his career some, too! You know what he did?”

Patricia waited, hoping he would answer his own question in a moment, but the moments extended into seconds and the seconds were adding up, and still the GM’s jaw was slack, his voice silent. “What’d David Goode do?” she asked at last.

“Huh?”

“When you told him knocking in a few runs would extend his career.”

“Oh,” he dismissed the subject with a wave of his hand. “I don’t remember. Who cares? It has nothing to do with the mess PEBA is in now, does it?”

She shook her head to show she agreed.

“When I think of what this league could have been, what it might have been, what great potential it had, all that talent pouring into it from high school and college ball, and from the Caribbean and South America, even Japan, it all came to the PEBA after MLB folded. Holy macaroni, the possibilities! And then all those fine minds, truly sharp thinkers in the Commissioner’s Office and throughout the league, GMs and owners… there was never anything like it. MLB was run by greedy, selfish, small-minded owners who would sell their family to wring an extra quarter out of ticket sales. And that Commissioner they had, what a joke! A trained seal would have had more original ideas. But the PEBA…” He faded into reverie again.

“The PEBA’s still very much alive, sir,” Patsy/Patricia finally said.

“What? Huh? Oh, I know, I know, but… alive and alive are two different things, you know?” Patricia, sometimes Patsy, had an idea what he meant. “And he brought it all to its knees.”

“David Goode?” she asked, as much to keep him talking as to confirm who he was talking about now.

“Who else?” the old man roared. “Who else has done so much damage with so little talent? That little father-killing, baseball-buggering, hitless wonder.”

“David Goode killed his father?” Patsy asked, incredulous. Patricia remained silent.

“Hootin’-tootin’ Tamalpais, you’re damn right he did. Who else? He coulda saved his daddy, if he’d just made a trip down here when we called him, but noo-ooo, he was on a hitting streak and wasn’t gonna interrupt that for nothing, not even his father.”

“How could he…”

“Hitting streak my hemorrhoidal butt! He’d hit in six or seven games, maybe; that’s what he called a hot streak. No, it wasn’t the hitting; that was just his excuse. He didn’t want to save his father. That’s the unshellacked truth, that is.”

“Save his father from what?”

“From those Ruy Lopez types.”

“Ruy who?”

“Ruy Lopez. Honey, you need to get out more. Ruy Lopez was a chess genius. He invented an opening set of moves that is so simple, any child can learn it. Even the walnut-sized brains of those thugs could have mastered the Ruy Lopez.”

“Thugs don’t usually play chess.”

He laughed. “Oh sweetie, you got a lot of learning to do. Thugs play nothing but chess. Chess and poker. They’re always bluffing and strategizing, making plans three and four moves ahead, their eyes glued to the endgame. Oh yeah, those thugs may not have known the east from the west side of a chess board, but they played a mighty mean game.”

He saw in her eyes that she didn’t understand what he was getting at. “They play chess, little lady, just not with chess pieces or a board. They play with human beings, with their lives, and they had just captured the white bishop in a ploy to draw the white knight across the board. Only the white knight – I’m saying this so you’ll get it, got it? – the white knight was too busy playing baseball to pay attention to the backcourt moves of the black pawns.” He sat back with a big smile on his face, satisfied with his metaphor. He crossed his arms and waited for the obvious truth to hit the young lady’s face like cold water in the morning.

It never hit. Patricia, or Patsy, didn’t want to get lost in his chess metaphors. She still wanted to know what happened to Goode’s father. “His father, Goode’s father…” she started.

“The white knight’s father,” he corrected her. “The white bishop.”

“Yes,” she conceded, “the white bishop… what happened to him?”

“What usually happens when a piece is captured.” He paused dramatically. “He was removed from the board.”

“Oh,” she said, hoping she didn’t understand what he meant. “He was…?”

“Yes, he was,” was all the old man would say.

“And David…?” She tried to lead him to say more.

“Could have prevented it. They weren’t after the senior Goode. Why would they be? They were after the 12 Million Dollar Man. They figured they could cash him in for a big payday, but when he didn’t even answer their calling card… well, they did what thugs are supposed to do.”

“Oh, I see.” Patsy didn’t know if she should believe the old man, but before she could sort it out in her head, he went right on.

“We did what we could. Soon as we heard about David’s father being held, we put a private dick on it. A good one, an academic who’d read all of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. An expensive dick, to be sure, but we figured the old man was worth it.”

“You couldn’t order David to do something?”

“He wasn’t playing for us then; he was with Reno. We weren’t even supposed to talk to him, you know. Collusion and all that claptrap. Players aren’t supposed to socialize with players on another team. And if Yuma’s GM started talking to a certain someone else’s second baseman, well, you know what the front office in Reno would be screaming. Baseball paranoia, that’s what that is. But we did the next best thing; we hired the gumshoe to find his dad.”

Patricia and Patsy were writing furiously in their twin notebooks, so they didn’t notice that the old GM had wandered off again in his mind, his bursitis-ridden hips still planted in the chair adjacent to the table on which the fax machine sat and under which Patricia and Patsy, synthesized in one very young body, sat scribbling. When she noticed his silence, she looked up from her notes. “And?”

“And what?”

“What happened next?”

“Next?”

“After you hired the private investigator?”

“The dick? Oh, well, that’s not a story for such tender ears,” he said.

“You want me to just make it up?” she challenged him.

“Would you? That would make it so much easier on me.”

He slumped in his chair, apparently exhausted from so much storytelling. Or was it the burden of revealing the truth? Patsy, with or without Patricia, was determined to find out. “Okay,” she said, thinking fast, “the private investigator…”

“Dick.”

“Who’s telling this?” she countered.

“I told you you were pushy.”

“The private investigator,” she said, ignoring him, “found the thugs’ hideout and…”

“They weren’t hiding; they were staying with the senior Goode in his trailer.”

“…Discovered where the thugs were hiding,” she corrected, “in David Goode’s father’s trailer.” She stopped. “The 12 Million Dollar Man’s father lived in a trailer?”

“Now you’re beginning to understand,” the tired GM said. “Get it? Got it!”

“But…”

“Not now,” he said, closing his eyes.

“But…”

“Shh,”

“But…”

“Later.”

And with that, she said no more. She listened as the old man slipped into sleep. Then she crawled out from beneath her table and tiptoed over to the file cabinet. If he can hire a private invest… err, dick, then I can behave like one, too, she thought. She began looking through files in hopes of finding something, anything, that would explain why David Goode’s father lived in a trailer, why his son didn’t come to his rescue, and how all of this might lead to what the now snoring GM called The End of PEBA.