6.21.02 JAMESTOWN JAMMERS vs AUBURN DOUBLEDAYS
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Of all the world’s great mysteries, the one that seems most striking to me
right now is the failure of anyone at ESPN to conceive and develop a reality-based
television show centered around the lives of first-year minor leaguers. A
baseball Real World, if you will. I’ve seen said world first-hand now,
and I’m here to tell you, it’d be a hell of a lot more entertaining to watch
than the latest group of self-absorbed dopes MTV’s rounded up.
Nick and I drove down to Jamestown tonight to see his buddy Evan’s professional
debut. Pause to appreciate this. You’re just out of school, you’ve been drafted
by a major league organization, you’ve shipped off to some podunk town you’ve
never heard of before in a part of the country few people outside of which
will ever go, you’re starting your very first game as a professional ballplayer
and a guy you grew up playing Little League with three thousand miles away
is here to cheer you on.
We arrived at beautiful old Deithrick Park a bit early, unnecessarily so
as it turned out, as a passing storm delayed the game’s start by a half
hour or so. It gave us a chance though to take in the classic small-town atmosphere
typical of a New York–Penn League game, the freak-show aspects of which
were a bit more pronounced here in Jamestown than the other night in Batavia.
I ended up with a great photograph of the stands to our left, in which the
three most prominent figures are a morbidly obese man in sweats and a polo
shirt holding a scorecard; sitting in front of him, an attractive young woman
with long blond hair and stylish baby-blue workout gear, staring straight
ahead; and behind her, off to the side, the apron-clad stadium worker whose
impaired motor skills and slurred speech made it difficult for spectators
to understand what he was asking of them when he earlier had tried to get
everyone off the metal bleachers and out of the lightning storm. Not that
these people were freaks, necessarily. Taken separately, in fact, you’d
hardly give any of them a second glance. But something about the three of
them in such close proximity was undeniably weird. I kept waiting for Divine
to show up.
At last it was time to get the game underway. Evan went to work. The first
batter for the Auburn Doubledays was Russ Adams, a first-rounder from North
Carolina. Russ Adams belted a triple to deep right field, the first of his
four hits for the evening. Undeterred, E., as Nick called him, in the adorable
fashion of jocks addressing fellow jocks, came back and fanned second baseman
William Rivera for the first out, and after walking the number three hitter—“You’re
squeezin’ him, blue,” Nick protested—retired the next two batters
with another strikeout and a fly to left.
The Jammers got a couple of runs in the bottom of the first as the Doubledays’
flamethrowing starter Vince Perkins also struggled with the plate umpire’s
unforgiving strike zone, and over the next 3 2/3 innings Evan kept things
steady at 2–0, allowing just four hits while striking out six and walking
one. He used an effective curveball as his out pitch, one he could drop in
for strikes at will and which froze just about everyone he showed it to. “That
deuce is awesome,” Nick muttered after one such strikeout. I was confused.
Looked like a curve to me, I said, as, no sooner than the words had left my
mouth, an image formed in my head of a catcher’s two downthrust fingers,
the universal symbol for, duh, curve. Deuce. Right.
I couldn’t help but feel the eager initiate as again and again Nick
revealed for me the secret codes and handshakes of this world that was at
once so familiar and, for me at least, at its core, so mysterious. See how
the pitcher waves his glove in front of him before each warm-up pitch? He’s
telling the catcher what’s coming. You watch him before the game and
you’ll see his whole arsenal, know everything he’s got, what he
likes to throw, what he thinks he needs to work on. I hung on every word.
Tell me more, sensei!
Evan got pulled after giving up a two-out RBI double in the fifth, and a
little later came and joined us in the stands as the Doubledays piled up runs
on Yorman Bazardo, the 17-year-old we saw the other night. We listened as
a roving pitching instructor from the Marlins sat with us and critiqued Evan’s
performance. They’ve completely refashioned his mechanics in the brief
time he’s been here, and there were aspects of his delivery Marlins-guy
wasn’t yet quite satisfied with. “It felt better with the curve,”
Evan said. “You like throwing that pitch,” came the reply, along
with a pat on the back.
Game over, we waited out in the parking lot near the “hooptie,”
the maroon and rust, early ’80s-vintage Ford Escort Evan and his roommates
had wrangled off a local lot. We’d been invited to join them for a post-game
meal. Bunch of 22-year-old kids, I figured they’d wanna go out and have
a few beers, eat some burgers, watch SportsCenter—so what, Chili’s?
Friday’s? Well, not quite. We piled in the Saab—“Nice to be
in a car that goes more than 40 miles an hour,” someone said—and
headed up the street to Wendy’s.
They’d been coming here every night, it turned out, the whole team arriving
five minutes before the eleven o’clock closing time and taking over the place,
jumping behind the counter, donning the headphones and calling out orders
to the folks in the back, while bemused counter workers teased and flirted.
They’d known each other barely more than a week, but already you could see
the easy camaraderie with which they’ll regard one another over the coming
months, the bullshitting, the grabassing, the merciless but benign razzing
as they scarfed down double cheeseburgers like starving men and placed cellphone
calls to their moms and girlfriends back home. It looked a little like what
I’d imagine boot camp might look like, but more like something with which
I was more familiar. And that’s when it hit me.
Q: What’s the difference between being a 22-year-old spending your first
post-collegiate summer playing rookie-league baseball and being a 22-year-old
spending your first post-collegiate summer touring in an indie-rock band?
A: __________________. (Which is to say, there isn’t any.)
The same constants apply: You’re always tired. You’re always hungry. There’s
endless downtime punctuated by the weird experience of going out every night
and performing for strangers. There’s the odd combination of being in competition
with the people you encounter and yet, everyone being in the same boat, inevitably
befriending them. There are the inside jokes, the linguistic invention, the
extraordinary camaraderie that comes only from spending countless hours a
day in close company with the same people for weeks on end. There’s the opportunity
to hook up with fawning and otherwise bored locals. There’s missing home,
and occasionally feeling like shit, and the overarching, immutable awareness
that this might just be the most goddamn fun you will ever have in your entire
freaking life.
I drove home conflicted. How can I root for Batavia now, when Jamestown guys have knocked my fist and called me “bro”?
FINAL SCORE: DOUBLEDAYS 7, JAMMERS 3
LIFE DURING WARTIME: Another war was called to mind by a drunken fan behind us, riffing on the name of Auburn batter Cesar German. Ignoring German’s preferred Spanish pronunciation of his name, the guy launched into a tirade of good old-fashioned kraut-baiting, culminating with a line equally unbelievable and immortal: “Send him to the showers!”