Class A (2 page)

On the pitcher’s mound, Erasmo Ramírez begins to warm up. He reaches down with his right arm and does one last check of his pants. He’s satisfied. There’s a perfect crease of polyester folded over onto itself, making a straight line of fabric just below his knee.

A minor-league baseball player has an absurd amount of time in the clubhouse before the game. When Erasmo comes in at noon to lift weights alone, he sits for four hours before batting practice, then another two between when he’s done shagging balls and the game begins. How many granola bars can you eat? How many highlights can you watch?
How many times can you scroll down a Facebook page, pausing at pictures of your ex on Venezuelan beaches, barely covered, her teasing eyes so far away? So you have to switch your attention to your look.

Erasmo’s pants are tight around his thighs and his ass because he likes his legs. His shirt balloons out, highlighting the hard width of him. He was never as tall as he should have been. He used to sit in dorm rooms at sports academies, in dugouts all around Latin America, wishing for a growth spurt, some miraculous transformation into a young man with an elegant body, long and broad and thin, primed with wide-open spaces to fill up. A transformation that felt earned. Now he’s realistic, and he bulks up his squat five-foot ten-inch frame until there’s nowhere else to fit the muscle.

On the mound, he rotates his arms in a windmill, and the clumps of muscle on his shoulders pulse. He flicks his glove toward the catcher, which means fastball coming. He exhales and then fills his acne-scarred cheeks with heavy, humid air, a move designed to be intimidating.

Betty taps Bill. “Look at his cheeks,” she says. “Isn’t that cute?”

Erasmo lifts his left knee slowly, deliberately, watching his pointed foot rise and then setting it down in front of him. He looks for a moment like an overweight ballerina. His movements are remarkable only in how unnoticeable they are. At this level of the minors, you’ll see flamboyant young men jerk their legs up near their chins, rock their bodies back, shoot their arms down behind them so that they can whip forward at the hitter. Some stomp around the back of the mound, unhinged, posturing like fighting bulls. Erasmo is boring except for the burst that comes when his foot hits the dirt, a blur of rotation, until the ball spins out at ninety-two miles per hour and burrows into the catcher’s mitt.

His favorite part of pitching is the eyes on him.

“Nobody looks at left field,” he told me hours before the game as we sat under the Coors Light sign beyond the outfield wall, staring at the freshly mowed grass, shrugging at a plume of black smoke rising into the clouds from somewhere. “Nobody looks at first base; nobody looks at the coach. Everybody looks at me. All these people”—he gestured his pitching hand toward the bleachers that were empty and will always be more empty than he pictures them—“all these people and they see
me.” He smiled, a soft and young smile, the baby fat that still coats his face bunching under his eyes. Off the field, he is shy. He sits alone a lot. He listens when others have a conversation. Sometimes he laughs. He turned twenty a few months ago and celebrated in the clubhouse by eating a Hostess cupcake from a gas station.

I duck through the gate by third base to mingle in the stands. I’m greeted as both a friend and a celebrity. I hear everybody. Hi, Louie, hey, Louie, Louie, it’s you again, Louie, my friend, Louie, I love you, Louie, our wives want to give you a big hug, would you like that, Louie, would you?

The wives sandwich me. I think there’s a hand stroking my face for comic effect, but of course I can’t feel. Breasts collide with me and conform to my plastic torso.

“You’re so stiff,” I hear a voice say. And then, “I remember this from when I was a little girl.”

A good mascot is mute, so I just nod.

Muteness is key, but that’s not the only guideline. I’ve done my research on my precursors. The need for a mascot’s presence is almost as old as the game. The first mascots in professional baseball were also the first black men in white professional baseball, and their forced minstrelsy, the way the audience was allowed to feel wholly superior to them, was considered good luck. “Whenever anything’s wrong,” the Cincinnati Reds told their fans a century ago, “it is only necessary to rub Clarence’s wooly head to save the situation, and call on one of his celebrated ‘double shuffles’ to dispel all traces of care, even on the gloomiest of occasions.” Then there were the Philadelphia A’s, who collectively decided that a disabled, hunchbacked batboy was charmed and that the perceived kindness toward such a ludicrous creature would be endearing. Before big moments, fans could watch their boys touch the hump.

And there are still all the Native American mascots, from Redskins to Redmen to Braves to Chiefs. That’s a subtle shift, I think, away from pure ridicule. Yes, these mascots are totems of bigotry, but they’re supposed to be frightening, coarse and powerful presences that help a team toward a winning identity. The Peoria Chiefs still exist here in the
Midwest League, a rival of the LumberKings. They kept the name but changed the mascot to a lanky, upright Dalmatian dressed in a fireman’s helmet.

A LumberKing is more. I might be goofy, but I’m an ideal. I’m no mutated animal or anthropomorphized concept. I’m just a man larger than the rest, always smiling. And I have my LumberKing crown, a sewn-on reminder of a time that nobody alive can remember but everyone talks about as if it could still be here.

Erasmo falls behind the first batter and has to groove a fastball. The result is a line drive that hisses back at him and catches the knuckles on his right hand, tearing the skin with its seams. He gives a yelp and watches the ball ricochet off him into the outfield. For a moment, even looking out of my own mouth, I can see worry in his narrowed eyes. Everything can end so quickly. Danny Carroll, the LumberKings’ center fielder, broke a bone in his hand a year ago, and it’s not lost on Erasmo that he sits now as much as he plays. That the manager looks irritated or, worse, bored when Danny takes batting practice. A piece of him is flawed. His swing isn’t the same.

“Any little thing can go wrong,” Erasmo told me once, then gave a falsely cavalier shrug.

A good mascot is supposed to direct eyes away from bad things. Right now, I should jump on top of the dugout and be remarkable, whip fervor from nothing, but I lurk in the stadium walkway, peering out at the LumberKings’ best pitcher, as worried as everyone else. BJ, the trainer, presses a towel around Erasmo’s middle and index fingers, and he tries not to flinch. Later, BJ will congratulate him on not being a huge
chocha
, just a little one. He will say that the most irritating part of his job is the big
chochas
, the pussies who complain. He will hold his fingers in a narrow diamond by his crotch to emphasize his point.

Erasmo has never complained about anything physical in his career as a baseball player, one that began professionally at seventeen. People seem to like him for that.

“We don’t quit in Clinton, Iowa,” yells Matt, the mailman, a peripheral but boisterous member of the Baseball Family. He has an extensive list of dos and don’ts for baseball in this town. We certainly don’t quit.
We get dirty. We run hard. We play the game right. Each mandate is trumpeted from his seat in the front row, an arm’s length away from the players as they trot into the dugout.

“Attaboy, Ramírez,” he continues now. And then, as though he is quoting something famous, “Excellent. Excellent. This world rewards tough men.”

Erasmo hears him, but he doesn’t respond. He knocks his heels against the sterilized white of the rubber, and he goes back to work. Today it’s the hard labor of trying to win when it’s apparent that whatever odd bit of magic gives a pitcher his best stuff isn’t there. He surrenders another single and walks a circle around the mound as though alone. He breathes deep, and he throws the fastball that he wants to throw, boring in on the handle of the bat, eliciting a hollow crack and a weak ground ball to Noriega, the second baseman, but it kicks off his foot and into right field. A run scores, two men stand on base, and Erasmo Ramírez, for the next few minutes, looks petulant and confused and twenty years old. Four runs later, the inning is over, and he walks back to the dugout.

He glances up to the stands. Worn white faces look back at him. When he got called to Class A ball in a place he’d never heard of, Erasmo didn’t realize that it would be the same people here each night in this small stadium, that it would be so easy to pick out individuals as they call his name. Sometimes his BlackBerry rings, and it’s reporters from the biggest newspapers in Nicaragua. They want to know everything because he’s important now. On his laptop screen is an article from just a week ago, telling the nation that Erasmo Ramírez is the best pitcher in a place called Clinton, Iowa, that even in America he has his control. When the readers in his home city of Rivas imagine him, thousands of miles away, basking in all of his accolades and wishes fulfilled, they don’t think of this: semicircular bleachers with a few rows of dark green seats, above which it’s just metal benches, long and low, with the usual bodies dotted along them at various points like a bored student’s pencil marks on a clean page. Green poles rise up between the fans and hold a tin roof that hums when wind blows hard off the river.

If you took a picture of this scene, tinted it sepia, and burned the edges, it would be believable as something pulled from a time capsule of the game, from rubble, from ash. This is a Depression-era building,
a WPA initiative, one of thirty-three hundred stadiums built in a two-year sprint, all virtually identical, now mostly gone. The crown jewel of the project, Tiger Stadium in Detroit, was bulldozed into a parking lot two years ago.

I wander through the fans.

Children ask me to sign things. A man named Kevin who has come to the games for twenty-seven years for the sole purpose of dancing the chicken dance in front of a crowd turns to me between innings and announces, “Louie, it’s time for the chicken dance.” A toddler sitting in the front row reaches out to me, blue tendrils of cotton candy covering his cheeks. He’s the son of one of the team’s catchers. Born in Venezuela, he’s spent ten of his first eighteen months in basement apartments of American houses and in stadiums. I see his mind begin to work on centering himself when he notices me, a landmark for where he is and what’s happening. I’m not the portly bee in Burlington or the ear of corn with arms and legs in Cedar Rapids or the stupid firefighting canine of Peoria.

I am Louie, and he is home.

I hold him so that people can take pictures of his little head pressed against my enormous one. People like the way that he’s fascinated with me, overwhelmed by me. I like it, too. It’s so easy to trust my own significance in the suit and in the stadium, to be sure that he will remember me and remember this whole tableau, always, even if soon he can’t quite place the memory. His mother urges him to tell me, “
Te amo, Louie
,” but the boy has been mute since he got here.

By most standards, Erasmo has had a fantastic season, but he’s failed to win two of his past four games, due to a combination of opposing players walloping his fastballs for disconcerting home runs and his teammates’ inability to score. This quasi-failure has contributed to a change in his demeanor. He arrived as the grinning, agreeable little brother of the locker room, but now his quiet is the sullen kind, even as his team is slowly pulling itself into the play-off hunt. He sucks down fruit cups and wanders around, ending up back in the weight room, staring at himself as he hoists dumbbells over his shoulders, ignoring coaches who tell him that’s enough.

Tonight, he wills himself back into the game. In the third inning, he begins to feel his changeup working, a pitch relatively new to him, and he throws it again and again. He gets the massive Dominican prospect Rainel Rosario to freeze and watch a changeup float past him, his legs unsure, his face frantic. Erasmo lets himself crack a quick smile before bouncing off the mound. Brad in the public address booth presses the button that delivers the
ha-ha
sound, like in
The Simpsons
, and everybody laughs at Rainel Rosario.

In the middle of the fifth inning, I judge the miniature John Deere tractor race. Two brothers, four and five, struggle to pedal rusted tires on the grass by the dugout. I hold out my hands as they finally pass me, and I indicate, lying, that the race was a tie. I’m cheered by most for my benevolence and booed by two drunk men with thin facial hair around their jaws and indecipherable neck tattoos. They believe in hard truths.

They throw peanuts shells, try to get them stuck in my crown. Betty comes to my defense. There’s a sense of etiquette here, woven into the boring spaces of every home game. For fans who’ve come year after year, fifteen, twenty, thirty years, seventy home games each year, until thousands of innings run together in memories, all from the same view in the same seat in the same park, there is pressure to represent all of the noble tradition that should be, that is, still here.

“Why on earth would you do that to Louie?” Betty asks these drunken man-children. And they can’t answer her. It’s the same as when she’ll whip her head around toward the sound of fans who’ve come, it seems, only to feel the rush of insulting the home team. She admonishes them without a word.

The nasty fans aren’t crazy. It’s intoxicating here—the proximity to the players and their proximity to failure. When I used to sit high up in Yankee Stadium with my father, a heckle could earn you, at best, an agreeing nod from the drunks around you, but the players I irrationally hated were bulletproof. They were so markedly better than me and everyone I knew that even when they failed, there was no power to be found in aiming cruelty in their direction. Here, you can hurt them if you want to. Every voice is distinguishable, and the players listen even as they pretend that they don’t.

But the idea among the loyal fans, I’ve come to believe, is to provide something of the best of yourself. Treat them as though they will be great so that they might remember. And isn’t the idea of greatness enough? The closeness to the promise of something extraordinary? The possibility that here, right here where you’ve always been, you cared for them first, before anybody else decided to give a shit?