Class A (34 page)

“Fucking Chávez,” Tamargo says, still looking at the horses.

“
Sí
,” Ilich says.

These are, of course, issues that the players like Erasmo are not aware of. No, that’s an unfair conclusion. They’re issues not openly discussed. An apolitical life seems almost a necessity among athletes, especially those athletes who haven’t reached any semblance of security, especially when the game becomes a life-dominating specialization from a very young age. Rationally, I can take all of this in and know that perhaps it is not the greatest help to the development of a human being, the
single-minded drive with which these boys play. In this way, Erasmo is a forced innocent. When I first met him, it was all pity that I felt, as if he were some lost pup, agreeable, exploitable. But more and more, and especially when I’m standing where he once did, part of me is jealous. It’s a monastic life, with fidelity to one thing. And so to watch Erasmo play baseball is to watch more perfection, more focused thought, than I will ever achieve in a lifetime of critical thinking.

A horse whinnies, and in the distance there is the sound of cleats on dirt, and Tamargo smiles at indistinguishable bodies. The Venezuelan Summer League Mariners are training before a game against the Venezuelan Summer League Pirates. At first, it looks like the scene before a Little League game—the baby faces, the small crowds consisting mostly of overzealous family members, the anonymous players cavorting in replica major-league jerseys. The main differences, of course, are in the thick Amazon tree line just beyond the outfield fence and the sometimes-stunning collection of raw talent on the field. There is something fierce in the concentrated eyes of the players, something that, in retrospect, I’m sure was noticeable in Erasmo and his Latin American teammates in Iowa, so different from those around them. Or maybe I just want Erasmo to represent everyone who comes to America from afar to play. It is easier to valorize and pity an unsubtle idea.

Either way, it’s impossible to ignore how the VSL Mariners look at coaches as if they’re deified, Tamargo in particular, who arrives every few months with those brightly colored index cards, the gatekeeper to the United States. He returns their worship with kindness. He roots for them, and I see on display the very best in his baseball knowledge, his ability to break down the smallest movements, to watch a swing over and over again and know when it has transformed into something worth praising.

“This is the way baseball was meant to be,” Tamargo says to me, making these players signify what he wants them to. “These boys are playing for their lives.”

“I’m hungry,” Erasmo tells me, which is nothing new. He’s done lifting for now, still soaked in sweat, needing to replenish.

“McDonald’s?” he asks. “You drive?”

Of course I will. He is learning who will do what for him. He is learning that he’s someone worthy of having things done for him. It’s a parched Sunday afternoon that has followed immediately on the heels of a morning filled with lightning sheets over the Mississippi and street-flooding rain. It’s one of those days when no player wants to play, when the idea of risking injury on a slippery infield in an A-ball stadium is a reasonable expectation only for brainwashed coaches’ sons or crash-test dummies. But there is no way this game will not be played. A weekend matinee always draws fans, and right now Ted Tornow has put on his Wellingtons and manned the John Deere, plowing the soupy mud of the bullpen himself. Tamargo has already been to his office saying the game should be canceled and then wandered back muttering. As Erasmo and I leave, the other players are busy parroting their manager, exchanging monologues of discontent.

There is no discontent in the McDonald’s. It’s just us and the after-church crowd. We are the youngest customers in here by two generations. Erasmo puffs out his already puffed chest as we walk into the air-conditioning, pushing his team logo toward the crowd, but he gets no response from anybody. We sit and I hardly see his face as he hunches over a stack of three cheeseburgers, an order of large fries, two apple pies.

Around us, people sit in groups, each with close ties, all connected. Men with thin white hair and pressed white shirts shake hands and remember things from before we were born. I watch the hands of a couple to my right, brittle fingers entwined as though they would be uncomfortable unattached, his free hand tapping on her knee with no rhythm. Erasmo follows my eyes, notices the people around him for the first time, and looks momentarily surprised.

“Old,” he says. “Very old. Like my grandmother.”

“You miss her?” I ask.

He shrugs. “Sometimes.”

“You must miss a lot of people,” I say.

He shrugs. “Sometimes.”

We sit in silence for a little while. He isn’t as pleasant to me anymore. That’s not necessarily a fair expectation, I know. But we spend a lot of time together, and at first he was happy to have the attention, and now he’s busy. When I first drove him home in the rain, he was willing, smiling,
and I set myself the task of finding the reality behind the rehearsed answers, as though I could free him from the fate of being blandly, productively likable. The first time I saw him, he walked onto the bus to go to Quad Cities in his striped polo and his too-long jean shorts. He smiled at me, a stranger, and pounded my fist. He walked down the aisle, and Chris, the bus driver, said with a strange pride, “Nicest boy you’ll ever meet. Don’t think he understands a word we’re saying, but damned if he ain’t happy to be here.”

Chris is an overbearing man who treats the players with a concerned care, and though he tried to bar me from entering the bus at first because of my bearded terrorist potential, I’ve never found any malice in him. Erasmo was always his favorite, perhaps because he lets him believe that he smiles through an inability to understand, even though he understands everything. Chris gets off the bus when Erasmo pitches, finds himself a seat in the front row, cheers hard. But I can’t ignore the heavy condescension in the way he speaks about Erasmo and his dutifulness, that adorably eager quality of a Sunday-school standout. And I don’t like it when people talk about him that way, because it often so closely echoes how I sound when I describe him to others—a story worth telling because of the shit that he’s mucked through, his silent perseverance, even though he is a goddamn professional baseball player, that identity that I still see as the pinnacle of awesomeness, and he has never once described any sense of having to persevere through anything.

The fact that he’s from somewhere far away and
needs
to be in Clinton, that’s the appeal. So the specifics of where he’s from don’t matter. On the first LumberKings trading card night, the Clinton fans got an Erasmo Ramírez card that claimed he was from El Salvador. He went to a sports academy there and was discovered there by scouts, but his only nationality is Nicaraguan. He was, of course, annoyed by the mislabeling and did, of course, nothing to correct it, fearing the reputation of someone who gets
difficult
—read
clubhouse cancer
, read
not worth it
—over inconsequential things. I still can’t be sure who is aware of the mistake, since, when I sat playing cards with the white pitchers in the Quad Cities clubhouse, they nodded at him and called him, with confidence, Dominican.

“Are you excited to see your family once the season is over?”

“Maybe I will.”

“Why wouldn’t you?”

He raises one eyebrow at me and smiles over a cheeseburger.

“Who do I train with in Nicaragua?” he says. “I have my one friend; he goes to the field and catches for me. He asks me to help him, too. He’s no good, though. He’s just around. There’s nothing for me.”

“So no home?”

“Maybe. Maybe a month. I’m going to ask the team if I can go to Venezuela instead. Stay at the academy. That’s good. That’s where I need to be.”

I don’t know what the academy means yet, so the intensity of what he wants doesn’t register fully. Later, when I’m snooping around the academy dorms, counting ten steps by eight across each shared cubicle, only a body’s length between iron bunk beds, I will think of Erasmo and how intensely he wanted to return here. When the Agua Linda gates close at nine every night, no danger coming in, no prospect of exiting, I will think of Erasmo again. And when I see players feeding continuous coins into the two pay phones outside the mess hall, I will see Erasmo’s face, his chubby hand cradling the receiver.

A stooped man with white wisps poking out under an unironic John Deere cap walks toward us, a round woman behind him. The man raises a half wave, and I think for a moment that he recognizes Erasmo, that he’s coming to pay respects. But he shuffles past to the table behind us, populated by women in dresses that look like wallpaper and their half-finished milk shakes.

“Did you go to Clinton High, missus?”

“Oh, a long time ago.”

There are laughs.

“Was it in ’55?”

“Yes, it was.”

The round woman steps up in front of her husband.

“I’m Janey’s sister.”

“Helen?”

A nod.

“Little
Helen
?”

There are noises that are happy and sad at the same time, trebly exclamations of what a small world it is, what a condensed but beautiful rush of time a life is. Erasmo and I watch.

“I
knew
that was you,” as though she’d been searching forever and had a feeling just this morning that she was almost there. The faces haven’t changed that much, it is decided. Amazing, isn’t it? Wrinkles like fingertips after a bath, a little sag, but once you really
know
a face, you know it forever. It’s a continuity that Erasmo gave up on at fourteen, when he first left for a dorm room crowded with itinerant jocks, one that I have fled, too, here in this town alone, but with much more trepidation. I think of Betty’s words the first time we met: “Where is your mother?” I crave stagnancy sometimes. It’s a choice, the selection of satisfied consistency above all else, one that is increasingly impossible here as the town shrinks and there are fewer opportunities to justify staying, but I don’t want to see that. Kids leave now, if they can. They’re told to.

Sometimes it feels important to try to get Erasmo to say that he’d like to stop for a little while, that he could be happy with some sort of settling. And for me, always so fascinated with those who are striving, worshipping them, pretending to live in emulation of them, it is tempting to change fascinations. To want a bland vanilla McDonald’s milk shake and a present life set on the exact same backdrop as my memories.

“Can I be honest?” a Venezuelan journalist asks me in a restaurant in Caracas. “The major leagues, the Americans, sometimes I think they look at us, and by us I mean Latin Americans, as some sort of uneducated animals.”

He is a pale man, this writer, doughy in a way that makes me feel solidarity. He is speaking to me in stylish English fashioned around a two-year stint in a digital journalism master’s program in London. He is part of a Venezuelan upper class that can obsess over and profit from baseball without ever playing at a high level, that can identify the game’s importance to the political, cultural, and national identity.

“Baseball is part of our spirit; it is who we are,” he says, and he slams the table. Soup sloshes. “Nobody feels the spirit of the game like a Latin player, and they treat us like we know nothing.”

“Yes,” I agree. “I love that spirit.” Or something awful like that.

It is a passion I have seen in every opulent place in Venezuela: the country club where the dentist who spends all his free time as a sports
radio host told me of his plans to become a scout; the thirty-million-dollar Polar Beer baseball complex where the locally famous agent showed me his portfolio, pictures of young men with dollar amounts written next to them, saying that he’s finding and making national heroes; the privately funded Venezuelan Baseball Hall of Fame on the second floor of a deluxe shopping mall, where pale historians tell me the narrative of the game; and now here in the only part of the capital where you can walk alone at night.

But I’ve never heard the grandiose talk from players themselves. And again, differentiation becomes nearly impossible. Boys become men become bodies. One of the most successful agents in Latin America told me while watching middle schoolers scrimmage under a Firestone tires sign that he planned to set up his new scouting office in the rural province of Oriente. When I asked “Why? Who have you seen there?” he said, “No one in particular, I just like how black they are. I like how black bodies project.”

The Chicago White Sox manager, Ozzie Guillen, got in trouble while I was in Clinton for saying that Asian players are pampered through the American baseball system compared with their Latin American counterparts, given translators at all levels, not just clubhouse Rosetta Stone lessons. But he was right, I say to this reporter, who replies, “
Sí, sí
, Oswaldo speaks the truth.” Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, they are relatively stable economies, and Japan’s own professional league can make a player a millionaire at home. They don’t
have
to be feeders into the promise of American ball.

Venezuela has been an oil country for a century, and so baseball came with American drillers and foremen, who taught the game to laborers. In Nicaragua, a country too small and too poor to ever produce a truly famous athlete, soccer reigns supreme, but more and more, like in all of Central America, baseball scouts will show up on small, dirt fields, and word will get around, and boys like Erasmo Ramírez will come to try to earn the chance to leave and go somewhere they can’t quite define. Or maybe that’s too simple. It’s true, yes, the desperation to leave. But does that take away the possibility for Erasmo to be a kid who plays and loves what he plays? It is too blindly cheerful to say,
Aw, he’s so happy to be here
, but just as pointless and narrow-minded to paint him a victim when, so far, he’s winning.

·   ·   ·

Erasmo tells me, in monotone, of the years and the travels that led him into a Sunday afternoon, post-church crowd at a Clinton, Iowa, McDonald’s. He has already told me because I always ask, and now I have asked again, hoping for more.