BASEBALL HAS BEEN BERY BERY GOOD TO ME: PUERTO RICO
I left for Puerto Rico on a Thursday. The cab was late picking me up and the driver dropped me at the wrong terminal before I ran him down with all my bags and got back in. Carlos was waiting for me at ticketing with a nervous smile, “I don’t like getting here early man. I like showing up and getting straight on the plane”. I wondered why he was so early.
We went through security smoothly. I felt experienced. We sat at the gate across from ours in the row of seats facing the walkway to view scrambling families, overdressed couples, and of course to judge the female travelers. Some of my past teammates had devised a number scale to accurately appraise the sexual value of each woman at the airport, not nearly as scientific as I’m making it sound, simply how much money you would pay to sleep with her, 100 being the most. In the end this game reflects more the mind state of the judge, and less the attractiveness of the woman. Now, whenever I’m at the airport, I can’t seem to avoid playing the game in my head. I’m awful.
Carlos said he needed a drink so we went to the bar. It didn’t open until four, and by then our plane would be boarding. The bartender just stood behind the bar and told us, “No drinks, just beer”, as he pointed to a cooler with a, fuck you. I’m at work, look in his eyes. Carlos said, “This dude is pissing me off. Hey, they have Pac-Man. I’ll just play Pac-Man”.
A younger girl was roaming around our gate waiting to board. Carlos started talking to her in Spanish. We had to take a bus to the plain out on the tarmac. It was very full on the bus and the girl and I stood close together, me holding the overhead bar and her clutching the pole I was standing against. We were lying comfortably, but standing. When we got to the plain Carlos asked her to sit between us, and told her we’d get the person whose seat it was to switch. A big Spanish man came up and said, “Naw, Naw. I want my window seat”, in English. Carolina went back, and I was left between Carlos on my right and the muscle man with poor sense of personal spacing on my left. Discomfort was to become a theme of the trip.
When we landed in San Juan we met up with well-mannered Mikey, and went outside into the warm moist air we had talked about back in New York to wait for Reggie, our coach, and his blue van. I had met Reggie once before, but besides he and Carlos, I would be meeting everyone on the team for the first time. We waited almost an hour while other flights landed and more guys arrived. Reggie told me I owed him $265 for league fees, hotel rooms, and uniforms. I gave him 150 and told him I would get the rest to him by the end of the weekend and thought, shit man, that’s all my money in the world. Can’t someone with a job and lesser baseball ability just pay for it?
We pulled into Howard Johnson’s around 10pm, dropped our stuff in the room, and walked down the strip the hotel was on looking for food. Los Pinos Restaurant was a few doors down between Seven-Eleven and Burger King. San Juan was nothing like Santa Domingo where I had played last summer. It looked more like Florida, All-American. On the walk we noticed a small bum in shorts and a t-shirt. He was leather tan with straight brown hair coming out of his baseball cap. He and his little dog were sleeping outside the entrance of Seven-Eleven, a little authenticity. I ate chicken, rice, and beans, and had my first Medalla, the delicious Puerto Rican Beer. It came to twelve dollars. With my outstanding balance to Reggie, I knew it would be the best meal I ate all weekend. It was budget ball for me again.
When we got back to our room I met my other roommates, Hawk and J-Rod. They had been in Puerto Rico for a long time already having played in a tournament the week before for other teams. J-Rod was on the phone, eating ice, and dipping, hotel hobbies of the ballplayer. There is nothing better then a ball hotel room, and nothing at a more perfect ease than a ballplayer on the road. J gave me a slight, “Hey” that sounded more like “A”. Los had told me about J-Rod on the plain. He played several years for the Marlins and Angels, but he had never made it up to the big leagues. “He hits a ton and can pitch with either hand”, Los said. I had never actually met anyone that could throw equally well with both hands and I was suspicious as to whether he could actually do it.
Hawk was much more personable. He wore corn row braids and spoke in a heavy New York accent. All three of my roommates were born in Puerto Rico and moved to New York at various times in their lives. J-Rod did not speak good English even though he had been living in the states since he arrived to play ball 10 or more years ago when he was 17.
Four dudes. Two beds. I turned the little desk sideways and carried the chair out to the hallway, called for extra blankets and pillows, started making a nice bed for myself in the corner. The other three looked at me like I was crazy. Hawk and J-Rod were going to share the bed and they were surprised I planned to stay on the ground as opposed to sleep with Carlos. But I had been doing it for years; two on the beds, two on the ground. We were supposed to have a team meeting in the morning at nine so we all went to sleep.
Guys slowly arrived half uniformed anywhere between 9:30 and 10am , and the meeting didn’t actually happen till almost 10:30. I was meeting everyone as they arrived; John and his girlfriend, Willie, Snoop, Geo, Angel, Jose. This was my second experience playing on an all Spanish team in a Spanish speaking country and I have learned that time is more an abstract concept to them, not a hard reality to which one must adhere.
Our team had won this tournament the year before so Reggie just thanked everyone for getting there, went through some quick introductions, and talked briefly about how playing time would work. “Everyone paid so everyone’s gonna play”, Shit, I still owed Reggie 150. We left for our game in the Puerto Rican sun.
Reggie told me when he picked us up at the airport, “Fish, you’re gonna sit game one, and John’s gonna catch. I’ll Be straight up with you, you’re the better catcher, but we’re playing a stronger team in the second game so I want you to catch that one, and I want you to play short one game. I’ll probably have you pinch hit in the first game after we get through the order once, so be ready”.
I was relaxed on the ride to the park, I expected to just take ground balls and some swings. I sat in the back of the van next to Willie. He was the only black man on the team. He looked around 50 years old. His hair was an old shape, he had two wild bugged eyes, a little mustache, and wore the 1985 Barry Bonds Pittsburg Pirates gold stud earring with a chain hanging down to a cross. He wouldn’t stop talking to me on the ride over. His breathe smelled bad. He was annoying.
The park was beautiful when we got there. The stadium looked like 1960s or 70s architecture. The Roof angled back over the seats. It was cement, red, and yellow. We entered from behind home plate and saw the field for the first time (the best way to enter a ballpark). We walked behind the first base dugout and went down through the club house and out onto the field. Sunlight. Bright Geen Sunlight coming from the ground. Hot. So hot you could see the heat rising from from the field when you stood eyes at ground level in the dugout. So hot your feet actually burned inside your spikes. 100 degrees.
It didn’t take much to get loose, and we started taking ground balls. I felt good at short stop. The surface was the new artificial grass. The “soil” is rubber pellets that settle between the blades, leaving perfect inch and a half matted plastic grass. Everything was fast and bouncy and honest. My legs felt good and my arm felt like it was two hundred feet long.
Reggie read off the lineup and our team took the field; we were the home team. K.C. was pitching.
We had been taking swings before the game when K.C. was warming up in the bullpen. Almost every ball was getting past John, the catcher, and skipping down to us in front of the dugout. K.C. was throwing hard, but not that hard, around 80 mph I guess, but John clearly could not handle it. He did not look good going out to catch the first inning and he was already complaining about the heat.
We struggled badly in the first. K.C. gave up three runs, we made two errors, and John was only catching half the pitches. When they finally got back in the dugout John said a foul ball had hit him in his bear hand, that it hurt, and he had to come out of the game. That was fine with me. I was already putting on the catchers gear and telling Carlos I was going to throw out the first guy that tried to steal by the time Reggie told me I was going in. We had a quick 1,2,3 in our half of the inning and the next thing I knew I was trotting out to home plate to catch my first game in four years. I jogged out to the mound to talk to K.C. for a moment, took a good look at the eleven people in the stands, and jogged back to the plate where I gave the ump a smile and an hola.
The first hitter of the inning reached on another error and tried to steal second two pitches later. The ball travels from my hand on a downward plane to second base one hundred and twenty three feet away. Out.
It was hot though, and the more errors we made the longer we stood out there. I was wearing; two knee high socks, a long pair of tight pants over jock and sliding shorts, a belt, a red t-shirt under a vest jersey, covered by a chest protector and two knee-to-toe leg guards. My head was in a backwards baseball cap and face mask. My feet were in two tightly tied black metal spikes. I felt as good as a properly functioning robot, happy to be playing, and happy I had put myself through all those workouts.
I was hitting twelfth. One of Reggie’s, “everyone plays policies”, was that fourteen hit in the early games instead of nine, “to see who’s hot”, and get everyone at-bats. My first time up was against an old lefty throwing what we call puss, not very hard. He started me of with a fastball down the middle a bit on the inner half. I had made my mind up not to swing at the first pitch in my first at bat, to give myself at least one look before I started hacking, and of course he grooved me one. The next pitch was a brutally slow change up down the middle. Crack, a knuckling one hop line drive right at the short stop. He did a good job of staying in front of it, pinning the ball to his stomach with his glove and bare hand and getting the lead runner at third base. It felt good, a hard hit ball. I eventually scored after a walk and a single
We continued to make errors in the field and the other team continued to score runs. By the seventh inning the mercy ruled was in sight. Our team was old, slow, and sloppy. Our third baseman, Temple, made four errors in the first game alone. Easy ground balls were missed completely or thrown away to first base. K.C. only made it into the fifth inning, and maybe worst of all, I realized John had no intention of going back out there in that heat and catching anymore then he already had. I went into the clubhouse after the sixth inning to cool off in the AC, and there he was actually drumming a beat on a chair with his hands. I thought, The hand doesn’t look so bad to me. But I didn’t care, I was really having fun out there.
In my second at bat I faced a big righty throwing a bit harder. I got to three and 0 and looked down to Reggie for the green light to swing away. A fast ball down the middle. I skied it into shallow center field. My swing felt long. “Just missed it”, everyone in the dugout said. Our dugout had already taken on its own identity. Snoop brought a ghettoblaster and was playing Hip-Hop, Reggae Ton, or Spanish House music for the hitters’ walk to home plate. Some guys sat and talked and some guys went in and out of the clubhouse to sit in the AC. Snoop brought his kids down into the dugout, everyone watched there mouths at first, but by the fifth inning it was all “Fucks”, “Bitches”, and screaming at the other team. I would say we were a certifiable Bush League team.
We did get mercy ruled, thank g-d for my knees and Snoops little twins. We went to Applebee’s for lunch between games. The other guys ordered all kinds of deep fried food. I ate a turkey wrap with a side of broccoli, took a multi vitamin and some glucosomine, and drank a ton of water. When everyone else went to walk around the mall, I laid in the van. For those who have never experienced the pleasures of catching a full nine inning game, stand with your feet shoulder width apart, squat down until your but almost touches the ground in back, keep your shoulders tall so you can see the ceiling, and then explode back up to a standing position and repeat two hundred times. You should also have some one there occasionally throwing a rock off your face or hitting you in the back of the head with a bat. Don’t forget to throw a ball as hard as you can each time you stand. And that is pretty much what catching a single nine inning baseball game is like. I needed the rest.
It cooled off beautifully for our 4:30 game. We were in the third base dugout now, the shade dugout. Warming up on that perfect field in the cool air was enough to get me moving again and I jogged out to the center field fence with the clouds turning pink above me. We were playing the White Sox, a team made up of mostly Spanish guys recently released from there minor league contracts. The best team there.
Hawk was pitching. When I went out to talk to him in the bullpen about what pitched he throws and how we are going to work the game he just said, “It’s like some Gregg Maddox shit. Just put the glove up and I’ll hit it. Everything is side arm. The slider is straight nasty.” I liked his attitude but the lack of science worried me. Hawk knew everyone on the field from both teams, and he was completely intent on winning the game.
We hit first. I was hitting fifth now, behind J-Rod. We went down 1,2,3 in the first and had only scored one run in the first game. We weren’t playing real well. Hawk got us through the first despite more errors. I flew out to left field in my first at bat and was off to an o for three start to the weekend. In the second inning they scored three runs. We made two errors in the field and hawk threw a fit on the mound after Snoop dropped a ball in left field. By now we had made more errors then clean plays. I threw someone out trying to steal. When we got into the dugout hawk was screaming, “Come on now. We’re grown men out here. Play the game the right way. Shit, we ain’t kids no’ more, if this is the game you love, play it the right way. I don’t even want to pitch no’ more.” I had to take him to the end of the dugout and calm him down and tell him that getting mad about errors wasn’t going to help anyone make plays and it wasn’t going to help him on the mound. In baseball. You can only concentrate on those things you can control. There is a lot going on in the game, so the worst thing to do is think about it all at once.
They scored more runs in the third and hawk developed a blister on his left foot that was bothering him. He started the fourth but motioned to Reggie and said he had to come out of the game, that the blister hurt too much.
Carlos finally got something started for us on offense when he led the seventh inning off with a double off the left field fence. He was excited out there on second base. He is about 5 foot six inches tall and weights over two hundred pounds. He played pro ball straight out of high school, but had since married, had two kids and put on about fifty pounds. We waddled around first base, hesitated, not sure if he could get a double, then ran the rest of the way to second coming in standing up. He looked into the dugout and clapped his hands as if he had proved to himself and the rest of us that he could still play. He scored on a single. Now we had one to their seven. We kept rolling back through he top of the order and by the time I was on deck, J-Rod was up with two outs and runners on second and third base.
Everyone knew J-Rod is a beast, and no one knew who the hell I was so I wasn’t surprised when they intentionally walked him loading the bases to pitch to me. I quickly went to 0 and 2 after fouling a pitch off and trying too late to check my swing on a curve ball. I stepped out of the batters box and told myself, you can still do this. This dude has nothing to beat you with. See it and touch it with your hands. We got to two and two. He threw a fast ball down and in, barely missed. It was too close to take and could have been called a strike, but that’s what I get for being a catcher. Three and two, bases loaded. Two outs. Another fast ball, crack, I didn’t even feel it leave the bat. I looked up and saw a line drive sail about twenty feet over the short stops head and I got moving. A base clearing triple. I slid head first into third base even though the base coach was motioning”up”, not to slide. I couldn’t help myself. The score was now seven to five. The next hitter flew out to right field, and that was as close as we got.
After the game Carlos was smoking a cigar in the dugout and just looked as happy as he could be. He had already racked up three or four hits and could care less that we lost. I grabbed the cigar and took a big puff and choked a little, I was happy too.
By the time we left the field it was almost nine o’clock. On the ride back I was in the back of the van again with Willie, and he wouldn’t stop talking again. I just caught two games, can I get a little love on the seating arrangement? But, the more Willie talked, a funny thing happened, the more I liked him. I was tired but Willie had me cracking up. He said, “Hey Reg, the nigga’ in the back of the van wants to know why he ain’t playing mo’”, in a high soft voice. Willie knew he wasn’t there to play; he was really a base coach and was there to film. He had spent most of the day running around with his camera and tripod. He told me, “Man, I was so fuckin’ proud o’ you when you hit that triple. I knew you was gonna do it man. Did you hear me down at first base cheerin’ for you? Did ya?”
Willie wasn’t staying at Howard Johnsons with the rest of us. He had come with a friend and they were staying across San Juan in another hotel. He was on the phone with his friend saying, “We don’t deserve this shit man… Well I care. We paying money for that disgusting fuckin’ place man. We don’t deserve that shit”, but he wasn’t angry, more gentle and sincere. We got completely lost on the ride home and when Willie realized we had wound up by his hotel he proclaimed, “You see, g-d is always great. Y’all wait right here, I’m gonna go get my things, we’ll buy an air mattress and I’ll stay with y’all tonight”. We went to Walgreen’s for an air mattress and some snacks while Willie got his things from his room. I was really tired walking through the warm winding streets of Old San Juan. It had been twelve hours since our team meeting and spending that much time in a jock strap gets uncomfortable. I was shocked when everyone wanted to go Denny’s instead of back to the hotel, but I was just along for the ride in back with Willie, so we went to Denny’s in uniform.
I sat next to Hawk at Denny’s. By the time Hawk came out of the game earlier he and I were just looking at each other and laughing every time one of our guys made an error, what else could we do. Hawk is thirty six years old. He plays on eight different baseball tams, has had five knee surgeries, he teaches high school physics, works at several homeless shelters around Manhattan, coaches college baseball, and is one of the most curious and honest human beings I have ever met. He is largely the motivation for me to wanting to write this story. He told me he was half Puerto Rican, half Jamaican, and half Jewish, and if it’s possible, he actually looked it. He had brown skin and corn-rows and a big Jewish nose. He was smart, especially for a ballplayer. He started getting into his sexual exploits as we talked, all about these underground clubs he goes to in New York. “Yeah man, they just like old abandoned Warehouses. My niggas rent them out. Flat screen TVs, pool tables. Real nice. Bitches just walking around with nothing on. They text message me the password every Friday, a different word every Friday”. But he wasn’t a pervert; he seemed to know about everything. We had conversations about the crack era in the Bronx, Plate Tectonics, and how sad really the whole world is. By the time we left it was 1 a.m. We got back to the hotel; I iced my knees and arm for half an hour, took a shower, and passed out in my little corner bed.
When I woke up in the morning I felt stiff like wood. I slowly got up and walked past Hawk and J-Rod sleeping one at the top, one at the foot of the bed. We had a 12:30 game that we had to win to advance to the playoff round after loosing our first two. It was already 10 am and the other three were still sleeping. I woke them up, quickly put my uniform back on, and went to Seven-Eleven were most of the team was already in the parking lot. The little dog was sleeping by the door and the old bum was buying beer. Carlos arrived and translated his mumblings for me, “There’s nothing like a cheeseburger from the garbage. What, you’ve never had a cheeseburger from the garbage? It’s very good”.
I was surprised they let him live in the parking lot. He had a cardboard bed under the Seven-Eleven sign with his dog’s bowls near by. I reluctantly got the rest of the money I owed Reggie from the ATM leaving a well-rounded balance of zero, and I bought a pastry and coffee. Before I knew it, I was in the back seat next to Willie, and it was hot as hell. He asked me how I felt as Reggie drove back and forth from Seven-Eleven to Burger King making sure we had everyone and screaming because we were so late. We got to the field at noon. It looked just as pretty as the day before. We were playing another team from NY, J-Rod was pitching, and I was catching, again.
J-Rod started the game throwing lefty. He threw pretty hard and could locate, a real pro. Our defense continued to botch nearly every play. We were making the game look hard. Our short-stop was spending more time on the ground then on his feet and he took himself out of the game after an easy ground ball hit him in the bare hand and ripped off a nail. Guys were dropping balls, and everything hit to the outfield was bouncing over or past our outfielders and getting to the wall. In the fifth inning the score was 6-3, them, so J-Rod decided to switch hands. He threw exactly as hard and accurately with his right as he had with the left. The umpire asked me if they were twins. I smiled and said, “That’s the same dude”.
J was not happy about how the rest of the team was playing and he was pacing up and down the dugout in our offensive half of the inning ranting in Spanish. I had noticed a certain fierce distance in him, but now he was letting it shine. Hawk had said to me, “Yo, that nigga is crazy. He don’t know how to talk to people, he talks at people”. He added, “But he is my nigga though, so I help him out. I mean, the nigga only has an eigth grade education”, later after giving him five dollars to get some food. They knew each other well. J had even been living with one of Hawk’s friends in New York free of charge for a couple of years.
J had sufficiently pissed all of us off by the seventh inning, even me. I was behind the plate sweating my ass off, and calling a good game. I mishandled one pitch slightly, not even dropping it, but just catching it with too loose a wrist allowing the ball to move my glove when they connected, and J-Rod glared in at me and gestured with his glove how I should catch. I threw the ball back to him hard, as hard as I could. He was about half way between home plate and the pitchers mound; he easily snagged it out of the air and looked at me as if to say, okay poppy. I get the message.
In the bottom of the ninth inning J came up as the winning run. We had scored one more run making it 6-4. Everyone was in the dugout saying things like, “This mothafucka done lost his mind. No shit man, he’s acting crazy”. No sooner, he hit a ball of the scoreboard in left center field 400 feet away. He circled the bases like he had many times before, got back in the dugout, and started saying, “Fucka you, fucka you, and fucka you”, to everyone on the team. Then he went out and struck out three in a row in the bottom of the ninth. We won.
The next game was at 4, right after the first. The team we would be playing had watched us win from the stands behind the third base dugout. We cooled off in the AC and ate granola bars I had bought the night before at Walgreens. I started to feel really sick. I wasn’t fatigued, I was tired. I felt like sleeping and I had a sore throat. Reggie read off the line-up for the second game. I was behind the plate, and J-Rod was on the mound.
I’ve never in my life seen a man throw two complete games in a single day, but J-was acting like it was no big deal. In his first at bat of the game he hit another home run, this one from the left side of the plate. It cleared the outfield fence, the net behind the fence where home runs are supposed to hit, and the outer cement wall of the stadium. I have never seen a ball hit that far. Besides that, the game went just as the others had. Us making errors and rotting in the field, and them running around the bases scoring runs. I was two for three in the game. We managed to keep it close and actually had a chance to win. I sat in the dugout and secretly hoped we wouldn’t. I couldn’t catch anymore. I went out to the mound in the eighth inning to talk to J who had already switched hands twice and mentioned that my arm was killing me. He just said, “Whatthefuckpoppy. I can throw three games a day without my arm hurting. You got to push the arm when it’s tired”. I looked at him and said, “You should say nothing to me but ‘thank you’ for throwing those guys out”. He smiled.
In the dugout the guys were laughing about J’s performance. “That’s some 1925 shit right there”, and they were right, it was. The man had thrown two complete games using both his hands, and had hit a home run from each side of the plate. We agreed it could have only been his attitude that kept him out of the big leagues.
The game finally ended. We lost, and I didn’t have to catch anymore.
Everyone was making plans to go out that night on the ride back to the hotel. Hawk had already told me he had plans for us, “We going to Frenchy’s nigga”, he said. Reggie dropped us off and told us to be back downstairs in an hour. I showered and was ready to go. The only thing I had eaten all day was a pastry and granola bar. Reggie had said, “Nate, wherever we eat tonight, I got you”, because I had caught so many innings and played well for him. Hawk couldn’t stick within the time limit; he was just lying around the hotel room talking and laughing instead of showering, so we left him behind and went to the restaurant. I got rice, steak, and beans this time, and ate so fast that Reggie just looked at me and said, “Damn nigga, you was hungry”. I still can’t figure why Spanish people think it’s okay to use the word “nigga” as freely as black people do. Everyone, even well-mannered Mikey, said it constantly.
We rode up and down the strip with the sliding doors of the van open looking at the girls and waiting for everyone still in the hotel. I was tired and getting sick. I almost jumped out and went up to the room, but Hawk got in the van and excitedly said, “Let’s go nigga. What the fuck y’all waitin’ fo’”.
Frechy’s Le Club, was in a dark alley somewhere about twenty minutes from the hotel. Hawk negotiated a deal with the doorman for all eight of us, and we entered. A round bar was in the middle of the room. Booths lined the walls and the stage was at the far end of the room. We immediately saw players from other teams filling the booths. I went and said hello. A tall, brown, stripper with long curly hair was staring right at me. I looked away after a few seconds, took a drink, and when I looked back her eyes where still fixed on me except now she was smiling and gesturing, one hand making a circle, and the other pointing and moving in and out, the international sign for fucky fucky. I thought, holy shit, this is a freaky scene, and then actually said those very words out loud to Reggie. She wouldn’t stop. She was motioning for me to come to her, so I did. When I got near she grabbed me and just said, “I like to fuck”. I smiled and said, “So do I”. I had my hand firmly around her left ass and she was digging down my pants and grapping like crazy. All of a sudden a little old bald black man who looked like the kitchen cook from the shining jumped out of nowhere with a huge wad of money in his hand and started wildly licking the back of his own hand and humping the air while saying numbers in Spanish. “You want to fuck me?” the girl said, “One Hundred and sixty dollars?”, in a nice accent. I said, “No. Maybe later”, and I walked back to the booth sort of smiling, but she followed me and sat with us for an hour drinking with her legs across my lap and my hand on her ass. Eventually one of the guys did take her up on the offer and disappeared for ten minutes into the back room. I pretty much didn’t move from that spot until we left at 4am. The time turned into a dream like memory with me sitting half asleep slowly sipping Heinekens with an occasional lap dance bursting out on me or next to me. By the time we went to sleep it was 5 and hawk and I vowed to not wake up until afternoon.
When I did wake up I was full blown ill. My head was pounding, I was sweaty and cold, and I could barely swallow. Carlos said, “Hey man, you want some of the flu medicine I’ve been taking”, and I realized it was that fuckin’ cigar that got me sick. That, and catching all those innings. I spent the next day and a half laid up in the hotel under blankets. It was probably for the better. I didn’t have any money anyways. I only left to make trips to Seven-Eleven for medicine and snacks and to see the old bum. When Los and I pulled out of HoJos at 4 am in a cab five days after we had arrived, the bum and his little dog where the only living things on the street. He was walking slowly, drinking a beer, the dog scampering behind him. I said, “Los, look who it is.”
END
We went through security smoothly. I felt experienced. We sat at the gate across from ours in the row of seats facing the walkway to view scrambling families, overdressed couples, and of course to judge the female travelers. Some of my past teammates had devised a number scale to accurately appraise the sexual value of each woman at the airport, not nearly as scientific as I’m making it sound, simply how much money you would pay to sleep with her, 100 being the most. In the end this game reflects more the mind state of the judge, and less the attractiveness of the woman. Now, whenever I’m at the airport, I can’t seem to avoid playing the game in my head. I’m awful.
Carlos said he needed a drink so we went to the bar. It didn’t open until four, and by then our plane would be boarding. The bartender just stood behind the bar and told us, “No drinks, just beer”, as he pointed to a cooler with a, fuck you. I’m at work, look in his eyes. Carlos said, “This dude is pissing me off. Hey, they have Pac-Man. I’ll just play Pac-Man”.
A younger girl was roaming around our gate waiting to board. Carlos started talking to her in Spanish. We had to take a bus to the plain out on the tarmac. It was very full on the bus and the girl and I stood close together, me holding the overhead bar and her clutching the pole I was standing against. We were lying comfortably, but standing. When we got to the plain Carlos asked her to sit between us, and told her we’d get the person whose seat it was to switch. A big Spanish man came up and said, “Naw, Naw. I want my window seat”, in English. Carolina went back, and I was left between Carlos on my right and the muscle man with poor sense of personal spacing on my left. Discomfort was to become a theme of the trip.
When we landed in San Juan we met up with well-mannered Mikey, and went outside into the warm moist air we had talked about back in New York to wait for Reggie, our coach, and his blue van. I had met Reggie once before, but besides he and Carlos, I would be meeting everyone on the team for the first time. We waited almost an hour while other flights landed and more guys arrived. Reggie told me I owed him $265 for league fees, hotel rooms, and uniforms. I gave him 150 and told him I would get the rest to him by the end of the weekend and thought, shit man, that’s all my money in the world. Can’t someone with a job and lesser baseball ability just pay for it?
We pulled into Howard Johnson’s around 10pm, dropped our stuff in the room, and walked down the strip the hotel was on looking for food. Los Pinos Restaurant was a few doors down between Seven-Eleven and Burger King. San Juan was nothing like Santa Domingo where I had played last summer. It looked more like Florida, All-American. On the walk we noticed a small bum in shorts and a t-shirt. He was leather tan with straight brown hair coming out of his baseball cap. He and his little dog were sleeping outside the entrance of Seven-Eleven, a little authenticity. I ate chicken, rice, and beans, and had my first Medalla, the delicious Puerto Rican Beer. It came to twelve dollars. With my outstanding balance to Reggie, I knew it would be the best meal I ate all weekend. It was budget ball for me again.
When we got back to our room I met my other roommates, Hawk and J-Rod. They had been in Puerto Rico for a long time already having played in a tournament the week before for other teams. J-Rod was on the phone, eating ice, and dipping, hotel hobbies of the ballplayer. There is nothing better then a ball hotel room, and nothing at a more perfect ease than a ballplayer on the road. J gave me a slight, “Hey” that sounded more like “A”. Los had told me about J-Rod on the plain. He played several years for the Marlins and Angels, but he had never made it up to the big leagues. “He hits a ton and can pitch with either hand”, Los said. I had never actually met anyone that could throw equally well with both hands and I was suspicious as to whether he could actually do it.
Hawk was much more personable. He wore corn row braids and spoke in a heavy New York accent. All three of my roommates were born in Puerto Rico and moved to New York at various times in their lives. J-Rod did not speak good English even though he had been living in the states since he arrived to play ball 10 or more years ago when he was 17.
Four dudes. Two beds. I turned the little desk sideways and carried the chair out to the hallway, called for extra blankets and pillows, started making a nice bed for myself in the corner. The other three looked at me like I was crazy. Hawk and J-Rod were going to share the bed and they were surprised I planned to stay on the ground as opposed to sleep with Carlos. But I had been doing it for years; two on the beds, two on the ground. We were supposed to have a team meeting in the morning at nine so we all went to sleep.
Guys slowly arrived half uniformed anywhere between 9:30 and 10am , and the meeting didn’t actually happen till almost 10:30. I was meeting everyone as they arrived; John and his girlfriend, Willie, Snoop, Geo, Angel, Jose. This was my second experience playing on an all Spanish team in a Spanish speaking country and I have learned that time is more an abstract concept to them, not a hard reality to which one must adhere.
Our team had won this tournament the year before so Reggie just thanked everyone for getting there, went through some quick introductions, and talked briefly about how playing time would work. “Everyone paid so everyone’s gonna play”, Shit, I still owed Reggie 150. We left for our game in the Puerto Rican sun.
Reggie told me when he picked us up at the airport, “Fish, you’re gonna sit game one, and John’s gonna catch. I’ll Be straight up with you, you’re the better catcher, but we’re playing a stronger team in the second game so I want you to catch that one, and I want you to play short one game. I’ll probably have you pinch hit in the first game after we get through the order once, so be ready”.
I was relaxed on the ride to the park, I expected to just take ground balls and some swings. I sat in the back of the van next to Willie. He was the only black man on the team. He looked around 50 years old. His hair was an old shape, he had two wild bugged eyes, a little mustache, and wore the 1985 Barry Bonds Pittsburg Pirates gold stud earring with a chain hanging down to a cross. He wouldn’t stop talking to me on the ride over. His breathe smelled bad. He was annoying.
The park was beautiful when we got there. The stadium looked like 1960s or 70s architecture. The Roof angled back over the seats. It was cement, red, and yellow. We entered from behind home plate and saw the field for the first time (the best way to enter a ballpark). We walked behind the first base dugout and went down through the club house and out onto the field. Sunlight. Bright Geen Sunlight coming from the ground. Hot. So hot you could see the heat rising from from the field when you stood eyes at ground level in the dugout. So hot your feet actually burned inside your spikes. 100 degrees.
It didn’t take much to get loose, and we started taking ground balls. I felt good at short stop. The surface was the new artificial grass. The “soil” is rubber pellets that settle between the blades, leaving perfect inch and a half matted plastic grass. Everything was fast and bouncy and honest. My legs felt good and my arm felt like it was two hundred feet long.
Reggie read off the lineup and our team took the field; we were the home team. K.C. was pitching.
We had been taking swings before the game when K.C. was warming up in the bullpen. Almost every ball was getting past John, the catcher, and skipping down to us in front of the dugout. K.C. was throwing hard, but not that hard, around 80 mph I guess, but John clearly could not handle it. He did not look good going out to catch the first inning and he was already complaining about the heat.
We struggled badly in the first. K.C. gave up three runs, we made two errors, and John was only catching half the pitches. When they finally got back in the dugout John said a foul ball had hit him in his bear hand, that it hurt, and he had to come out of the game. That was fine with me. I was already putting on the catchers gear and telling Carlos I was going to throw out the first guy that tried to steal by the time Reggie told me I was going in. We had a quick 1,2,3 in our half of the inning and the next thing I knew I was trotting out to home plate to catch my first game in four years. I jogged out to the mound to talk to K.C. for a moment, took a good look at the eleven people in the stands, and jogged back to the plate where I gave the ump a smile and an hola.
The first hitter of the inning reached on another error and tried to steal second two pitches later. The ball travels from my hand on a downward plane to second base one hundred and twenty three feet away. Out.
It was hot though, and the more errors we made the longer we stood out there. I was wearing; two knee high socks, a long pair of tight pants over jock and sliding shorts, a belt, a red t-shirt under a vest jersey, covered by a chest protector and two knee-to-toe leg guards. My head was in a backwards baseball cap and face mask. My feet were in two tightly tied black metal spikes. I felt as good as a properly functioning robot, happy to be playing, and happy I had put myself through all those workouts.
I was hitting twelfth. One of Reggie’s, “everyone plays policies”, was that fourteen hit in the early games instead of nine, “to see who’s hot”, and get everyone at-bats. My first time up was against an old lefty throwing what we call puss, not very hard. He started me of with a fastball down the middle a bit on the inner half. I had made my mind up not to swing at the first pitch in my first at bat, to give myself at least one look before I started hacking, and of course he grooved me one. The next pitch was a brutally slow change up down the middle. Crack, a knuckling one hop line drive right at the short stop. He did a good job of staying in front of it, pinning the ball to his stomach with his glove and bare hand and getting the lead runner at third base. It felt good, a hard hit ball. I eventually scored after a walk and a single
We continued to make errors in the field and the other team continued to score runs. By the seventh inning the mercy ruled was in sight. Our team was old, slow, and sloppy. Our third baseman, Temple, made four errors in the first game alone. Easy ground balls were missed completely or thrown away to first base. K.C. only made it into the fifth inning, and maybe worst of all, I realized John had no intention of going back out there in that heat and catching anymore then he already had. I went into the clubhouse after the sixth inning to cool off in the AC, and there he was actually drumming a beat on a chair with his hands. I thought, The hand doesn’t look so bad to me. But I didn’t care, I was really having fun out there.
In my second at bat I faced a big righty throwing a bit harder. I got to three and 0 and looked down to Reggie for the green light to swing away. A fast ball down the middle. I skied it into shallow center field. My swing felt long. “Just missed it”, everyone in the dugout said. Our dugout had already taken on its own identity. Snoop brought a ghettoblaster and was playing Hip-Hop, Reggae Ton, or Spanish House music for the hitters’ walk to home plate. Some guys sat and talked and some guys went in and out of the clubhouse to sit in the AC. Snoop brought his kids down into the dugout, everyone watched there mouths at first, but by the fifth inning it was all “Fucks”, “Bitches”, and screaming at the other team. I would say we were a certifiable Bush League team.
We did get mercy ruled, thank g-d for my knees and Snoops little twins. We went to Applebee’s for lunch between games. The other guys ordered all kinds of deep fried food. I ate a turkey wrap with a side of broccoli, took a multi vitamin and some glucosomine, and drank a ton of water. When everyone else went to walk around the mall, I laid in the van. For those who have never experienced the pleasures of catching a full nine inning game, stand with your feet shoulder width apart, squat down until your but almost touches the ground in back, keep your shoulders tall so you can see the ceiling, and then explode back up to a standing position and repeat two hundred times. You should also have some one there occasionally throwing a rock off your face or hitting you in the back of the head with a bat. Don’t forget to throw a ball as hard as you can each time you stand. And that is pretty much what catching a single nine inning baseball game is like. I needed the rest.
It cooled off beautifully for our 4:30 game. We were in the third base dugout now, the shade dugout. Warming up on that perfect field in the cool air was enough to get me moving again and I jogged out to the center field fence with the clouds turning pink above me. We were playing the White Sox, a team made up of mostly Spanish guys recently released from there minor league contracts. The best team there.
Hawk was pitching. When I went out to talk to him in the bullpen about what pitched he throws and how we are going to work the game he just said, “It’s like some Gregg Maddox shit. Just put the glove up and I’ll hit it. Everything is side arm. The slider is straight nasty.” I liked his attitude but the lack of science worried me. Hawk knew everyone on the field from both teams, and he was completely intent on winning the game.
We hit first. I was hitting fifth now, behind J-Rod. We went down 1,2,3 in the first and had only scored one run in the first game. We weren’t playing real well. Hawk got us through the first despite more errors. I flew out to left field in my first at bat and was off to an o for three start to the weekend. In the second inning they scored three runs. We made two errors in the field and hawk threw a fit on the mound after Snoop dropped a ball in left field. By now we had made more errors then clean plays. I threw someone out trying to steal. When we got into the dugout hawk was screaming, “Come on now. We’re grown men out here. Play the game the right way. Shit, we ain’t kids no’ more, if this is the game you love, play it the right way. I don’t even want to pitch no’ more.” I had to take him to the end of the dugout and calm him down and tell him that getting mad about errors wasn’t going to help anyone make plays and it wasn’t going to help him on the mound. In baseball. You can only concentrate on those things you can control. There is a lot going on in the game, so the worst thing to do is think about it all at once.
They scored more runs in the third and hawk developed a blister on his left foot that was bothering him. He started the fourth but motioned to Reggie and said he had to come out of the game, that the blister hurt too much.
Carlos finally got something started for us on offense when he led the seventh inning off with a double off the left field fence. He was excited out there on second base. He is about 5 foot six inches tall and weights over two hundred pounds. He played pro ball straight out of high school, but had since married, had two kids and put on about fifty pounds. We waddled around first base, hesitated, not sure if he could get a double, then ran the rest of the way to second coming in standing up. He looked into the dugout and clapped his hands as if he had proved to himself and the rest of us that he could still play. He scored on a single. Now we had one to their seven. We kept rolling back through he top of the order and by the time I was on deck, J-Rod was up with two outs and runners on second and third base.
Everyone knew J-Rod is a beast, and no one knew who the hell I was so I wasn’t surprised when they intentionally walked him loading the bases to pitch to me. I quickly went to 0 and 2 after fouling a pitch off and trying too late to check my swing on a curve ball. I stepped out of the batters box and told myself, you can still do this. This dude has nothing to beat you with. See it and touch it with your hands. We got to two and two. He threw a fast ball down and in, barely missed. It was too close to take and could have been called a strike, but that’s what I get for being a catcher. Three and two, bases loaded. Two outs. Another fast ball, crack, I didn’t even feel it leave the bat. I looked up and saw a line drive sail about twenty feet over the short stops head and I got moving. A base clearing triple. I slid head first into third base even though the base coach was motioning”up”, not to slide. I couldn’t help myself. The score was now seven to five. The next hitter flew out to right field, and that was as close as we got.
After the game Carlos was smoking a cigar in the dugout and just looked as happy as he could be. He had already racked up three or four hits and could care less that we lost. I grabbed the cigar and took a big puff and choked a little, I was happy too.
By the time we left the field it was almost nine o’clock. On the ride back I was in the back of the van again with Willie, and he wouldn’t stop talking again. I just caught two games, can I get a little love on the seating arrangement? But, the more Willie talked, a funny thing happened, the more I liked him. I was tired but Willie had me cracking up. He said, “Hey Reg, the nigga’ in the back of the van wants to know why he ain’t playing mo’”, in a high soft voice. Willie knew he wasn’t there to play; he was really a base coach and was there to film. He had spent most of the day running around with his camera and tripod. He told me, “Man, I was so fuckin’ proud o’ you when you hit that triple. I knew you was gonna do it man. Did you hear me down at first base cheerin’ for you? Did ya?”
Willie wasn’t staying at Howard Johnsons with the rest of us. He had come with a friend and they were staying across San Juan in another hotel. He was on the phone with his friend saying, “We don’t deserve this shit man… Well I care. We paying money for that disgusting fuckin’ place man. We don’t deserve that shit”, but he wasn’t angry, more gentle and sincere. We got completely lost on the ride home and when Willie realized we had wound up by his hotel he proclaimed, “You see, g-d is always great. Y’all wait right here, I’m gonna go get my things, we’ll buy an air mattress and I’ll stay with y’all tonight”. We went to Walgreen’s for an air mattress and some snacks while Willie got his things from his room. I was really tired walking through the warm winding streets of Old San Juan. It had been twelve hours since our team meeting and spending that much time in a jock strap gets uncomfortable. I was shocked when everyone wanted to go Denny’s instead of back to the hotel, but I was just along for the ride in back with Willie, so we went to Denny’s in uniform.
I sat next to Hawk at Denny’s. By the time Hawk came out of the game earlier he and I were just looking at each other and laughing every time one of our guys made an error, what else could we do. Hawk is thirty six years old. He plays on eight different baseball tams, has had five knee surgeries, he teaches high school physics, works at several homeless shelters around Manhattan, coaches college baseball, and is one of the most curious and honest human beings I have ever met. He is largely the motivation for me to wanting to write this story. He told me he was half Puerto Rican, half Jamaican, and half Jewish, and if it’s possible, he actually looked it. He had brown skin and corn-rows and a big Jewish nose. He was smart, especially for a ballplayer. He started getting into his sexual exploits as we talked, all about these underground clubs he goes to in New York. “Yeah man, they just like old abandoned Warehouses. My niggas rent them out. Flat screen TVs, pool tables. Real nice. Bitches just walking around with nothing on. They text message me the password every Friday, a different word every Friday”. But he wasn’t a pervert; he seemed to know about everything. We had conversations about the crack era in the Bronx, Plate Tectonics, and how sad really the whole world is. By the time we left it was 1 a.m. We got back to the hotel; I iced my knees and arm for half an hour, took a shower, and passed out in my little corner bed.
When I woke up in the morning I felt stiff like wood. I slowly got up and walked past Hawk and J-Rod sleeping one at the top, one at the foot of the bed. We had a 12:30 game that we had to win to advance to the playoff round after loosing our first two. It was already 10 am and the other three were still sleeping. I woke them up, quickly put my uniform back on, and went to Seven-Eleven were most of the team was already in the parking lot. The little dog was sleeping by the door and the old bum was buying beer. Carlos arrived and translated his mumblings for me, “There’s nothing like a cheeseburger from the garbage. What, you’ve never had a cheeseburger from the garbage? It’s very good”.
I was surprised they let him live in the parking lot. He had a cardboard bed under the Seven-Eleven sign with his dog’s bowls near by. I reluctantly got the rest of the money I owed Reggie from the ATM leaving a well-rounded balance of zero, and I bought a pastry and coffee. Before I knew it, I was in the back seat next to Willie, and it was hot as hell. He asked me how I felt as Reggie drove back and forth from Seven-Eleven to Burger King making sure we had everyone and screaming because we were so late. We got to the field at noon. It looked just as pretty as the day before. We were playing another team from NY, J-Rod was pitching, and I was catching, again.
J-Rod started the game throwing lefty. He threw pretty hard and could locate, a real pro. Our defense continued to botch nearly every play. We were making the game look hard. Our short-stop was spending more time on the ground then on his feet and he took himself out of the game after an easy ground ball hit him in the bare hand and ripped off a nail. Guys were dropping balls, and everything hit to the outfield was bouncing over or past our outfielders and getting to the wall. In the fifth inning the score was 6-3, them, so J-Rod decided to switch hands. He threw exactly as hard and accurately with his right as he had with the left. The umpire asked me if they were twins. I smiled and said, “That’s the same dude”.
J was not happy about how the rest of the team was playing and he was pacing up and down the dugout in our offensive half of the inning ranting in Spanish. I had noticed a certain fierce distance in him, but now he was letting it shine. Hawk had said to me, “Yo, that nigga is crazy. He don’t know how to talk to people, he talks at people”. He added, “But he is my nigga though, so I help him out. I mean, the nigga only has an eigth grade education”, later after giving him five dollars to get some food. They knew each other well. J had even been living with one of Hawk’s friends in New York free of charge for a couple of years.
J had sufficiently pissed all of us off by the seventh inning, even me. I was behind the plate sweating my ass off, and calling a good game. I mishandled one pitch slightly, not even dropping it, but just catching it with too loose a wrist allowing the ball to move my glove when they connected, and J-Rod glared in at me and gestured with his glove how I should catch. I threw the ball back to him hard, as hard as I could. He was about half way between home plate and the pitchers mound; he easily snagged it out of the air and looked at me as if to say, okay poppy. I get the message.
In the bottom of the ninth inning J came up as the winning run. We had scored one more run making it 6-4. Everyone was in the dugout saying things like, “This mothafucka done lost his mind. No shit man, he’s acting crazy”. No sooner, he hit a ball of the scoreboard in left center field 400 feet away. He circled the bases like he had many times before, got back in the dugout, and started saying, “Fucka you, fucka you, and fucka you”, to everyone on the team. Then he went out and struck out three in a row in the bottom of the ninth. We won.
The next game was at 4, right after the first. The team we would be playing had watched us win from the stands behind the third base dugout. We cooled off in the AC and ate granola bars I had bought the night before at Walgreens. I started to feel really sick. I wasn’t fatigued, I was tired. I felt like sleeping and I had a sore throat. Reggie read off the line-up for the second game. I was behind the plate, and J-Rod was on the mound.
I’ve never in my life seen a man throw two complete games in a single day, but J-was acting like it was no big deal. In his first at bat of the game he hit another home run, this one from the left side of the plate. It cleared the outfield fence, the net behind the fence where home runs are supposed to hit, and the outer cement wall of the stadium. I have never seen a ball hit that far. Besides that, the game went just as the others had. Us making errors and rotting in the field, and them running around the bases scoring runs. I was two for three in the game. We managed to keep it close and actually had a chance to win. I sat in the dugout and secretly hoped we wouldn’t. I couldn’t catch anymore. I went out to the mound in the eighth inning to talk to J who had already switched hands twice and mentioned that my arm was killing me. He just said, “Whatthefuckpoppy. I can throw three games a day without my arm hurting. You got to push the arm when it’s tired”. I looked at him and said, “You should say nothing to me but ‘thank you’ for throwing those guys out”. He smiled.
In the dugout the guys were laughing about J’s performance. “That’s some 1925 shit right there”, and they were right, it was. The man had thrown two complete games using both his hands, and had hit a home run from each side of the plate. We agreed it could have only been his attitude that kept him out of the big leagues.
The game finally ended. We lost, and I didn’t have to catch anymore.
Everyone was making plans to go out that night on the ride back to the hotel. Hawk had already told me he had plans for us, “We going to Frenchy’s nigga”, he said. Reggie dropped us off and told us to be back downstairs in an hour. I showered and was ready to go. The only thing I had eaten all day was a pastry and granola bar. Reggie had said, “Nate, wherever we eat tonight, I got you”, because I had caught so many innings and played well for him. Hawk couldn’t stick within the time limit; he was just lying around the hotel room talking and laughing instead of showering, so we left him behind and went to the restaurant. I got rice, steak, and beans this time, and ate so fast that Reggie just looked at me and said, “Damn nigga, you was hungry”. I still can’t figure why Spanish people think it’s okay to use the word “nigga” as freely as black people do. Everyone, even well-mannered Mikey, said it constantly.
We rode up and down the strip with the sliding doors of the van open looking at the girls and waiting for everyone still in the hotel. I was tired and getting sick. I almost jumped out and went up to the room, but Hawk got in the van and excitedly said, “Let’s go nigga. What the fuck y’all waitin’ fo’”.
Frechy’s Le Club, was in a dark alley somewhere about twenty minutes from the hotel. Hawk negotiated a deal with the doorman for all eight of us, and we entered. A round bar was in the middle of the room. Booths lined the walls and the stage was at the far end of the room. We immediately saw players from other teams filling the booths. I went and said hello. A tall, brown, stripper with long curly hair was staring right at me. I looked away after a few seconds, took a drink, and when I looked back her eyes where still fixed on me except now she was smiling and gesturing, one hand making a circle, and the other pointing and moving in and out, the international sign for fucky fucky. I thought, holy shit, this is a freaky scene, and then actually said those very words out loud to Reggie. She wouldn’t stop. She was motioning for me to come to her, so I did. When I got near she grabbed me and just said, “I like to fuck”. I smiled and said, “So do I”. I had my hand firmly around her left ass and she was digging down my pants and grapping like crazy. All of a sudden a little old bald black man who looked like the kitchen cook from the shining jumped out of nowhere with a huge wad of money in his hand and started wildly licking the back of his own hand and humping the air while saying numbers in Spanish. “You want to fuck me?” the girl said, “One Hundred and sixty dollars?”, in a nice accent. I said, “No. Maybe later”, and I walked back to the booth sort of smiling, but she followed me and sat with us for an hour drinking with her legs across my lap and my hand on her ass. Eventually one of the guys did take her up on the offer and disappeared for ten minutes into the back room. I pretty much didn’t move from that spot until we left at 4am. The time turned into a dream like memory with me sitting half asleep slowly sipping Heinekens with an occasional lap dance bursting out on me or next to me. By the time we went to sleep it was 5 and hawk and I vowed to not wake up until afternoon.
When I did wake up I was full blown ill. My head was pounding, I was sweaty and cold, and I could barely swallow. Carlos said, “Hey man, you want some of the flu medicine I’ve been taking”, and I realized it was that fuckin’ cigar that got me sick. That, and catching all those innings. I spent the next day and a half laid up in the hotel under blankets. It was probably for the better. I didn’t have any money anyways. I only left to make trips to Seven-Eleven for medicine and snacks and to see the old bum. When Los and I pulled out of HoJos at 4 am in a cab five days after we had arrived, the bum and his little dog where the only living things on the street. He was walking slowly, drinking a beer, the dog scampering behind him. I said, “Los, look who it is.”
END
posted by Dr. Fish | 12:32 PM
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