Class A (41 page)

“We want it,” Brad says sometime around the eighth inning. “We want it more.”

He looks to me for agreement.

“Yeah,” I say, surprised at how easy I say it. “Looks like we do.”

But whether or not the want was ever there, the results aren’t. Six to four Burlington. Nick Franklin strikes out to end the game, walks off, and doesn’t look up at us.

In a Mexican restaurant next to a Taco Bell, we find out that the LumberKings grabbed the last spot in the play-offs. Despite their losing streak, the LumberKings managed to blow it less than the Beloit Snappers. We’re eating enchiladas. Dave is clicking refresh, refresh on his BlackBerry, updating the Midwest League scoreboard every couple of minutes. Brad has been monologuing about how he doesn’t want to back into the play-offs. I’ve already gotten a call from Tim saying just about
the same thing. Dave, the most professional one here, says don’t be ridiculous. You get in how you get in. Something as concrete and awesome as a play-off berth can’t be judged on sentiment, whether things
feel
right. He admonishes the table with his eyes, continues. There’s a system in place. If you make it, then you earned it. And by that logic, the LumberKings did earn it, and so we all did. Because after Dave’s final refresh, the results are there, Internet-voiced and thus true. Dave raises his BlackBerry up like a chalice, gives a whoop before catching himself and saying, knowingly, “It ain’t over, folks.”

I go to meet the Franklin family in the lobby of the Pzazz! FunCity for a celebratory talk. I have been deemed by the parents to be an adequate instrument to record their son’s moment of achievement. The four of us sit right outside the Boogaloo Cafe. It’s packed for Labor Day weekend. Nobody notices us, none of the families, none of the gamblers or the tweens streaming in to ride bumper cars. My notebook is out, my eyes reverent on Nick, and that is the only signal that something worth noticing might be happening.

Finally, a little boy tugs his father over, stands at Nick’s shoulder.

“Are you a player?” he asks.

“Yes, he is,” Nick’s mom answers.

“Cool,” the boy says, and Nick says nothing and the boy leaves.

“The Clinton people think Nick’s really special,” I say to the parents.

“Oh, I know it,” his mom says.

“It’s good for them to have him here,” his dad says, and Nick says nothing.

It’s time for the origin tale. His mom begins, well-rehearsed. This day, this glory, can be traced, she tells me, back to the yard behind their house in Florida. Nicky would run back and forth through the grass, as though there was always a throw to beat. Debbie sat reading on the porch, looking up occasionally, and once when she looked up, honest to God, she saw the little guy executing a perfect pop-up slide. She asks if I know what a pop-up slide is, then explains before I can answer: when a player is running full speed, then folds his legs to slide feetfirst, but as soon as his heels hit the base, he uses his momentum to raise his body, as though a reanimated puppet, standing in one fluid movement ready to run again.

“Nicky was three,” she says. “Maybe four. No, definitely three.”

She was raised in a baseball family. Her dad played in the minors. Her brothers starred in high school. She married a baseball man, who always said that all his sons would play the game right. Her eldest son pitched for the University of Florida. But she felt a new excitement with Nick, her baby boy, something heightened, hallowed from toddlerdom.

She keeps going.

Nick was a freshman on his high school varsity team, all of five feet nine inches and 120 pounds if you were being generous. The scouts were there to watch his older brother pitch. Nick was catching, just for kicks. He threw the ball down to second a couple of times, stung the shortstop’s hand as he caught the throws. The scouts all wanted to know who that was, where that arm came from. The parents had to tell them,
He’s fourteen, fellas, you’re going to have to wait
. Everybody chuckled.

I’m pretty sure I look bored. Nick’s mom is leaning farther forward, disappointed with my boredom. His dad’s arms are folded the way they always are when somebody isn’t fully appreciating what must be appreciated. But the memories that make any one boy unique blend with the memories of every boy who is unique in the same way. Looking at the Franklins, I think of Danny, the first long talk I had with him, when I began with “How did you know—” and he was ready to finish my sentence for me. “How did I know I was gonna be a baseball player? Well, my parents sent me and my brother away to camp for a week. My brother’s older than me, but he cried and cried. I didn’t even notice that I was gone. I ran all day until the counselors got worried.” And then he smiled, so I felt compelled to, and that was the end of it. Nice and tidy. The boy born to run and not be scared, so he did and he wasn’t.

Tamargo shuffles over holding a whiskey on the rocks, clinking it, watching the ice cubes bob. He nods at the parents.

“Sorry to interrupt,” he says. “Nick, you’ve got to go.”

“Huh?” Nick says.

“Well, I mean, congratulations,” Tamargo says, and then he smiles a bit too late. “Double-A. Shortstop broke his leg, so, you know, it’s time.”

The Franklin parents look to each other, and their son looks to them for how to react to this moment. The parents decide to stand and hug in celebration, but Nick holds back.

“JT, we’ve got play-offs,” he says.

Tamargo looks at him the way one might look at a small, un-housebroken
dog. “I know,” he says. “We’ll have to manage without you. Congratulations.”

More emotions move through Nick’s smooth, symmetrical face than I have ever seen on him. They move in pulses, surprisingly easy to identify. There is indignation, then pure anger, then fear, then a forlorn sadness, the kind you see on children tired at the mall, silly and heartbreaking all at once.

He sputters out, “B-but,” before catching himself, straightening his posture, looking Tamargo in the eye, looking his father in the eye.

“I want to say good-bye to people,” he says. Nobody responds.

“I should be able to say good-bye to people,” his voice higher than I imagine he wanted it.

Of course, he is told.

So Nick Franklin wanders the city of fun, and I trail him. It is a sitcom montage, his expensive loafers dragging on the tacky carpet with a dollar-sign pattern, lights flashing, people together at blackjack tables, restaurant tables, Nok Hockey tables, and he, the self-obsessed, just slouching by them all. Harry Nilsson should be playing or Tom Waits, the kinds of men I put on the jukeboxes of Clinton dive bars before driving home, musicians Nick has never heard of and would describe as providing both no rhythm and no fun.

His teammates are scattered everywhere, and he is determined to find them. At the sports bar, some pitchers who know they won’t be throwing for a few days are drinking, watching opening-week football highlights on TV, laughing. Nick walks up, stands at the edges of their conversation, tells them he won’t be able to help them in the play-offs. “Congrats,” they say, and, “It’s about time.” Because it is. They shake his hand, raise their bottles to him, turn away. He stands unsure and then moves on. At the velvet rope security check before the casino entrance, he’s stopped, underage. He must lean over the velvet rope, yell to his teammates at the tables, Dwight sucking down a cigarette at the bar.

“I’m leaving,” he yells.

They wander over. There is the same process. Well-wishes, bottles raised, turn away, silence. Somebody blurts out, “Yo, Morris just won three hundred dollars at blackjack,” and Nick manages a “Whoa, crazy.” This moment isn’t enough for Nick. He doesn’t say it out loud, doesn’t say anything out loud, really, but this send-off isn’t worth remembering.

All of Nick’s gear is still in the visitors’ locker room at the stadium, so we have to drive over. The lights are off. Teenage interns, Nick’s peers, are carrying blue recycling bags full of Bud Light bottles out into the parking lot. Men with caked, patchy hair and sole-less shoes wait for them. Burlington is right behind Clinton with Iowa’s second-highest unemployment rate. The Franklins look at their own shoes walking past. I do, too.

“Well, doesn’t this place look different now?” someone says.

I take a quick detour up a ramp into the bleachers, stare out to left field, the spot where Nick’s record breaker disappeared over the wall, but there’s dusky shadow from the woods behind and nothing is recognizable.

A guy my age with red hair and a round face, perhaps actually on salary, opens the clubhouse, flicks on the lights.

“You’ve got about ten minutes to get your stuff together, so no rush,” he says. “Congratulations on the play-offs.”

“He set the home run record for Clinton,” Nick’s mom says.

“
Mom
,” Nick says. There are nervous chuckles.

“Yes, I think I heard that,” the red-haired guy says.

Nick picks up his jockstrap first, not yet washed, shoves it quickly into a bag. Then some Under Armour, his glove.

“Your bats,” his father says.

“I
know
,” he says.

He grabs his hats instead, four different ones. Special breast cancer awareness hat with the pink brim, black hat, gray hat, green hat. All of them adorned with Louie the LumberKing, with his beard and club and rippling muscles, his maniacal grin. Nick stacks them neatly, gives a quick tweak to the brims. He looks up. He seems to be trying to weigh the nostalgic value of these items that have become instantly useless. He grabs the gray cap because it’s newest and cleanest. He could wear it at home, to a party, something.

“You want one?” he says to me. It is generous. He is offering me an item that was once his and thus must be worth something. But I hold back and feel a strange pride in that, maybe because his eyes have been hovering near tears for an hour, because he is just a nineteen-year-old boy packing up a dirty jockstrap, missing friends who he didn’t quite realize were his friends until now. I have an overwhelming desire to add
little exclamations to whatever pain he is feeling. As though I, as a representative for everyone who has felt small near him, deserve that. I will not run to reassure him.

“I’m good,” I say, and he shrugs, tosses the remainder on the ground. I could tell him that Joyce would take each one. Tell him that if he wrote a message on one of them—
Great knowing you! Miss you! Go LumberKings!
—the hat would remain pristine and displayed until long after he played his last game of baseball. And I should say something. I’m aware that I should. Any of his hats is a relic of a day that some people will think of as important for a long time, certainly longer than Nick will. Joyce can have it and treat it with more respect than has ever been given a hat. But I say nothing. Stubborn. Jealous, maybe. Or protective. Because I think he will laugh at the notion of Joyce’s care and I’ll feel compelled to laugh with him.

“Nick’s a real teammate,” his mother says as we head back to the hotel. “Now that he’s been here, gotten these guys to the play-offs, he wants to take it to the end with them.”

“If they were going to make him stay here, I don’t see why they couldn’t let him finish it,” his father says. “This is another reason why he should’ve been up and out in June.”

This is the party line, but there is something else to it now. Dad is being defensive not only of the brand—
“Franklin, Est. 1991”
—but also of the boy. Nick Franklin will miss this place, even if he is too much for it, even if it is baseball purgatory. Nick Franklin in his loafers, with his strut, with those fast hands, wants nothing more right now than to play the game for two more weeks the way every kid is told one should play it, the way the highest-paid stars claim to play it and the way we choose to believe they do. He wants to win a championship and then share that with those who won with him. That shouldn’t be shocking, but it is. It’s the first time I have ever watched him behave with the motivation that everyone projects upon him, and now, after he has stumbled into this moment of purity, it is being snatched away.

Can I pity an athlete? In the lobby of the Pzazz! FunCity, can it feel tragic for ten minutes that Nick Franklin is having no fun?

I have a habit that’s more than a habit. In the morning, over coffee, I find the most contentious stories on ESPN.com and skim the content, rushing to get to the comment section, usually numbering in the thousands
of individual opinions, always alive, generating new responses each second, sometimes freezing my computer with the speed of the virtual conversation. I love the voyeuristic tingle of reading the homophobia ever present on-screen, sure, and the racism, too. But more than that, I’m drawn to the general, frantic certainty that all the comments coalesce to create. One voice of divisive yet unifying fandom, a shared belief that these athletes are of the utmost importance and thus should be worshipped until the moment they fail to live up to the worship and reviled ever after.

When professional jocks are quoted as complaining, I particularly revel in the responses. In between “fuck you, you boston c*cksucker,” and “your mother likes to suck on ARod’s bitch tits!!!!” there are moments of raw hurt, profane and misspelled versions of the same implied question:
How dare this person who lives the life that I want complain?

Nick Franklin is young and beautiful and rich and sometimes cold. And when he is not cold, I admire him for the capacity to be polite to somebody as insignificant as me—somebody born with middling fast-twitch reflexes—in a way that I never would anyone else. He is leaving a place that he never particularly wanted to come to, jumping up two levels to be the youngest person on a team where guys have a legitimate shot of getting a late-night text saying that they are wanted in the major leagues. Hank Contreras is up in his room right now talking to his girlfriend on her work break, planning an off-season of labor next to his father, who is gentle and does not ask things out loud like,
When are you going to start life?
He considers AA to be a goal so barely reachable that he refuses to say that he deserves to be there, with a livable wage and extra legroom on the bus, a chance to get called on to be a third-string, last-minute substitute for one day for an injury-ridden major-league squad.