Written by Roberta Umor, Yuma Sun

April 1, 2016: Yuma, AZ – At last, she thought, he’s going to tell the story.

“So, you want to hear about the demise of the PEBA?” asked the GM. Patricia nodded. Patsy smiled encouragingly. “Okay then, here we go. First, you gotta understand what Carmona’s $200M contract did. Everything suddenly swung out of kilter. Player demands skyrocketed. Financially strapped clubs begged for relief from the Commissioner’s Office. Wealthy clubs bought up the best talent and some very astute people realized the PEBA had succumbed to the same disease the old MLB had.”

“Disease?”

“Greed, little lady, good old-fashioned greed. Money, the song says, makes the world go round, but money is inert; it doesn’t do anything by itself. No, it’s greed that makes the world go round, and it’s greed that brought the PEBA to its financial knees. In no time at all, half the clubs in the league were in the red. Why, the only thing that kept Yuma out of bankruptcy was the sale of our water rights.”

“Water rights?”

“Colorado River water. We’ve been bottling it for five years now. To keep ourselves afloat we sold the rights.”

“But why? Yuma doesn’t have any big-contract players.”

“Except…?” the GM said, expecting her to complete his thought.

“David Goode? But he’s on the last year of his contract. And it’s only 12 million; that’s nothing compared to Carmona.”

“But Carmona’s contract was the cutting edge of a trial balloon.”

“A what?”

“It started a landslide. It changed the financial ecosystem. It set a new precedent. Everyone asked for a slice of that pie.”

“So salaries exceeded ticket sales and broadcasting rights and you had to sell your water rights to make ends meet, right?”

“You got a head on those lovely shoulders.”

“Who to?”

“Who to, what?”

“Who’d you sell the water rights to?”

The GM paused. He smiled but said nothing. Patricia wondered if he’d lost it again, wandering off into whatever senile dementia was beginning to plague the old man. She was about to ask the question again when he said, softly, “Good ol’ number 99: David I-Ain’t-Got-No-Middle-Name Goode. Shoulda horsewhipped that boy the first time I met him.”

“Goode bought the water rights? Why?”

“Insurance.”

“For what?”

“David was in business with some, uh, disreputable types. He wanted to make sure if that arrangement went south, he had a backup plan.”

“Disreputable types? Like… thieves?”

“Sorta.”

“Like gangsters?”

“You could say that.”

“Goode was in bed with the Mafia?!”

“Can’t confirm or deny who he was sleeping with, but yes’m, David had acquired a new family.”

“But didn’t they…?”

“Disappear his father? Rumors, dear lady, nothing but rumors. Maybe they were holding the senior Goode in a rough shack somewhere and threatening to kill him if David didn’t do what they wanted. I don’t know. Sounds more like something out of a Hardy Boys mystery, doesn’t it?”

Patricia had never read the Hardy Boys, but Patsy had. “Yeah,” she said, “like The House on the Cliff. In that story, Frank and Joe…”

“You wanna hear about the end of the PEBA or not?” the GM interrupted her.

“Yes, please,” Patricia said.

“So where were we? Ah, yes. Goody-Two-Shoes’ new family. However they did it, they persuaded David to start throwing games.”

“David Goode! C’mon.” Patsy could hold her tongue no longer. “You have to do better than that. David sat on your bench most of last year and he’s never been an important enough player to throw games. He can’t even help win them for you!”

The GM stared at her. “Done with your little outburst?” Patricia nodded contritely. “Good. David, as you so eloquently put it, couldn’t throw a game. By himself. But Goode persuaded a few other players to join him. These things are always a conspiracy. Remember the Black Sox?” Patricia nodded. Patsy kept her mouth shut. “Baseball has been alert for schemes like the one Rothstein and his lackeys pulled off in 1919. What baseball is blind to is someone on the winning team who’s throwing games.”

“How can you throw…” Patricia gave Patsy such a look that Patsy shut up before finishing her sentence.

“That was the beauty of it,” the GM said, smiling at Patsy – or was it Patricia? He wasn’t sure. “Goode and his friends arranged for the Bulldozers to win a few games – unimportant games, but games that the Family bet heavily on. Remember that little bubble of victories the Dozers had back in Twenty-Sixteen?”

Patricia and Patsy both gave the old man a look, as if to say, “Whadda you mean back in 2016?” The GM took no notice. “For a couple weeks at the start of the season, the Dozers were in first place. I know, I know – hard to believe, but as the man says, you can look it up. We won some very strange games. 4-3, 6-5, 5-4, 3-2. One-run games that could have gone either way. Games that the Dozers consistently lose because we don’t have clutch hitters or much of a bullpen. But Yuma’s pitching suddenly got very, very good at the start of that year, and you know why?”

Patricia put her hand across Patsy’s already open mouth, muffling whatever the little doppelgänger was about to say.

“Well, now you do.” The GM leaned back in his chair. “Now you understand how the Desert Hills standings got turned so topsy-turvy.”

“Games are fixed?”

“Were fixed, little lady, were. Ain’t no games to fix no mo’.”

Patricia and Patsy looked at each other. One of them had to ask, but which one? “Sir,” Patricia began tentatively, “what do you mean…?” She couldn’t ask it. It might send him off into another silent reverie. Patsy had no such compunctions. “How come there’s no more games to fix?”

“‘Cuz PEBA folded. Ain’t you paying attention?”

“Oh, yessir,” Patricia said, nodding vigorously. “Every word, sir.”

“If you read the papers – which I don’t, personally, too much bad news in the world… still, the important news gets to me, so even I knew when the PEBA was finished long before the Commissioner finally threw in the towel. In fact, as soon as we realized how widespread the fixing had been, how many players – and coaches! – were in on it. The money the mob made musta been huge! But when the public heard about it, when the first rumors hit the press, even before Carmona’s confession, baseball died. Well, the PEBA died. And as far as this old soldier is concerned, PEBA is baseball.”

“And when,” Patricia asked tentatively, “did this all happen?”

“Twenty-sixteen. The season we didn’t finish? You don’t remember? The scandal became so widespread that attendance all across the PEBA dropped to a fraction of what it had been. Teams went belly up so fast, the Commissioner had to pull the plug shortly after the All-Star Game. Which was a fiasco. Half the players on the squad were known to be taking Mafia money. No one even bothered denying it anymore.”

Patricia looked at Patsy. It was like looking in a mirror. The confused and confounded looks on both faces were identical. Patricia ventured another question. “And what year is it now? Sir?”

“Silly girl,” the GM said. “You think I’m losing my memory? Well, I am losing my memory – some of it – but my PEBA memory is as sharp as it was the day I traded David Goode to San Antonio. It’s the first of April, little lady. Spring training. The start of a whole new season and a whole new league.”

“I thought you said baseball died?”

“Baseball die? Never. MLB, PEBA, the Federal League, sure, they come and they go and few bother to notice. But baseball remains. The new Players’ League is starting this spring. You haven’t heard of it?” Patricia shook her head.

“The Players’ Egalitarian Organized Professional League. PEOPL. The People’s League is what everyone calls it because the players own the teams. The players are running the show. It’s a dream come true for them. You probably don’t remember, but the players tried this once before – the original Players’ League, back in 1890, I think it was. National League bought them out. I don’t think that’s gonna happen this time. Them boys back in Ninety were living hand-to-mouth. This new generation of players are all millionaires. ‘Sides, ain’t no one to buy them out. MLB is dead. PEBA is defunct. The only competition for the PEOPL is a few surviving independent leagues like the American Association, the Pecos League, and the Arizona Winter League. They’ve been around since the MLB years. Now, you talk about survival skills! Wee-hoo, them boys …”

Patsy had to cut him off, get him back to the point at hand, or he’d talk all night about the old baseball leagues. So she asked him, point blank: “You never said what year it was.” “Sir,” Patricia added.

“What?”

“The year. We got the date: April 1. But what year, sir?”

“Sometimes I ain’t too sure you’re all there, girlie. It’s 2018, of course. What year’d you think it was?”

“2016.”

“Oh sweetie, you’ve lost a few years. Must be the…”

“No, sir, it is 2016. That’s the date. Right now.”

The GM chuckled. “Nice try, kiddo, but you ain’t gonna fool me that way. If it was 2016 like you say, there’d be no Players’ League, David Goode wouldn’t be working for the mafia, and I’d be the Yuma GM, not Carmona. Now listen, I gotta job to do, even if I’m not GM no more, so you rest some and maybe it’ll all come back to you.” He got up to go to the door.

“What job?” Patsy asked.

He turned. “My job?” Patsy nodded. “Water boy.”