Hope in Baseball
Hope in Baseball
By Clayton Bradshaw-Mittal
In the locker room before the final game of the season, our team gathers around the soon-to-be fired manager who tells us that there is no hope in baseball, that money rules the game and the only teams destined for championships are those who can afford better players than the ones standing in front of him today. He takes a wooden bat, swings it at the metal supports holding the ceiling above our heads. The thud of the bat echoes dense in our bones. He swings again and again, quicker and quicker, until the wood cracks into a deep stain the length of the bat and again and again until the bat disintegrates into a thousand splintered shreds. He tosses the bat into an empty laundry bin and walks into the dark tunnel that leads to the field. We look at one another, our eyes fogged with the exhaustion of a losing season, shrug our shoulders, pick up our gloves off the benches, and walk out behind him.
The horizon glows orange through the chain link fence atop the hill at the other end of the stadium, the last pulsating crescent of the sun gasping just beyond our view. Barely legible dust floats through the humid air, chokes us, and the sweat begins to cool against our skin. It will be dark soon, and, despite our manager’s pessimism, despite the weight of our cleats sticking into the too-soft soil, despite our red, dry eyes from months of traveling across the country on a chartered jet airplane with duct tape stretched across a seam of the left wing, we are excited.
Our wooden bats make whoosh sounds in the air as we practice our swings, and the smacks of balls hitting leather gloves echo in the silence of dusk. The air chills. Our shoulders thaw. The first spectators trickle in; the fizz of beer and conversation drips in the stadium seats. The stands are full, though we don’t deserve a crowd, no matter how cleanly bleached the bases might be and neatly the chalk of the foul line has been poured. We suppose they’ve come to watch our dying heaves as we dissolve into the basements of the official record books. Our season will be over tonight, tucked into popular memory as the most losses suffered by a team in over a century, but playing here on this day, as in any ballpark on any day, is the dream we dreamt as children, tucked away in our beds, listening as televisions and battery-operated AM radios blared for our parents, for our grandparents, for our aunties and our uncles, Game Seven home runs and high-pressure strikeouts and sports show highlights from the first perfect game pitched in years.
We pile into the dugout and take our seats on the bench. Riley turns his cap around backward, and shotguns a Dr. Pepper he’s snuck into the game. He calls it a tradition. I’ve done this the last game of every season since Little League, he says and sits, legs splayed, next to Ortega. Petrie pours a cup of Gatorade on the ground, the stream of liquid painting a sad face into the dirt layered thin over the smooth concrete. He points to the face, says it’s art, but the batting coach tells him a sad face is not art just because Petrie’s wife caught him with his dick inside an Uber driver’s mouth and packed her bags; it’s a slipping hazard that needs to be cleaned up.
And kneeling, head bowed over the bench behind the manager, Alarcón rubs his fingers back and forth over a turquoise-beaded rosary, the Virgin Mary hidden under his thumb. Slater asks him why he bothers with superstition, even a win won’t do anything for them, but Alarcón replies that his faith in Mary’s virginity lends him undying hope in the game we all play.
The tension flows in waves amongst fans and players alike. We know the other team is still upset at us for beaning their right fielder a month ago with a poorly aimed fastball, an accident near the end of the game when our pitcher Vega’s arm had turned spongy after eight innings without the other team registering a single hit and twisted on the release and the ball had slipped through the sweat dripping down to his fingers before thudding into a batter’s chest, and while we feel their anger at this slip is justified, we are ready, according to the unspoken bylaws of baseball tradition, to dispute their inevitable, required response.
In front of the cage protecting the fans, the umpire says play ball and the opposing pitcher stands in a firm stance, legs slightly apart, looking between the catcher’s legs to see what pitch the catcher wants him to throw. But this decision, this pitch, begins with a conversation. The pitcher shakes his head at the first sign he’s given. We believe he’s refusing to start the game with a curveball. We know he wants to intimidate us, frighten us with something fast, something straight down the middle. This is a game driven by broken masculinity, where the old men still playing, still coaching, believe in a show of force to terrorize their opponents like they’re generals rampaging through the countryside.
It seems a quarter of the stadium has risen to their feet, expecting the fight to come early, to erupt sooner rather than later, and it dawns on us the only reason they’ve come to see the shit show of a team we’ve become, more than the free bobblehead doll in Ortega’s likeness with every purchase of an eight dollar beer and twelve dollar hotdog, is to witness the moment we finally collapse into pre-diluvian brutality. The few fans we’ve kept have lost hope for home-run races, for outfielders catching fly balls just as they tumble into the crowd, their lower backs crashing into low walls, for walk-off triples that drive in winning runs that sear into the hippocampus of every ten-year-old whose grandfather ever took them out to a game.
The pitcher winds up, brings his glove to his face, nearly kissing the leather housing for his thumb. He draws his front leg into his body and leans onto his back foot before pushing his entire body into a one-meter step forward, his right arm following the motion like a trebuchet until the ball releases parallel to the ground at the height of his eyeballs. The ball speeds through the air, just a little higher than the shoulder of our first baseman, Phillips, who has stepped up to bat, who refuses to swing because he’s played this game long enough to see a ball too high above the strike zone before it even leaves a pitcher’s hand. On the next pitch, another fastball, this one right in the middle of the strike zone, Phillips hits the ball high and arching into the glove of the right fielder.
This is the moment, as we keep our focus on the field, that Petrie walks backward over his own drawing and trips on a discarded plastic cup that’s fallen from the stands above us, and his head bangs hard against the concrete floor. The batting coach checks to make sure he’s okay, and when Petrie nods, the coach pulls him up, tells him, that’s what you get for acting like a little sad boy over something that’s very clearly your fault.
Another batter. Another pitch. Another video on the scoreboard of the mascot tipping over a stadium railing after being pushed by a half-drunk fan whose marriage proposal has just been rebuffed. We spend a moment, eyes glued to the stadium’s big screen television, marveling at how often this happens. This time, the pitcher throws too far inside, nearly clipping the lint hanging from Ortega’s chin. We stand up from the bench, ready to rush the field, ready to protect one of our own like Barbary lions, teeth flashing and claws extended, closing in around a cub to protect them. If the other team retaliates here, if they hit Ortega with a pitch now, we will have no choice but to respond in force, in anger, in a flash flood of cherry-eyed violence.
That is the only way such rivalries end with any degree of satisfaction. Retaliation breeds retaliation and crimson marks the shape of a baseball’s seam are left imprinted on the bridge of a broken nose which breeds another retaliation until the hostility overflows into a fight on the field. And our collected anxiety tells us that this fight will happen here today. After all, tomorrow, we will be home, ready to watch the playoffs from our posh, pleather couches, some of us never to return to this stadium unless in another team’s uniform.
The pitcher’s eyes, like polished porcelain in the shadow of his cap’s bill, moves towards us, seeming to take stock of our standing posture in the dugout, even as the rest of his face angles forward. The next pitch stays on target, through the middle of the strike zone, slaps against the oil of the catcher’s glove. Ortega does not flinch. On the next throw, the ball curves right, and Ortega drills the ball into the left field wall. Ground rule double. We advance to second base.
Alarcón kisses his rosary. Slater kisses Alarcón. Petrie says he used to kiss his wife like that. The batting coach hands Petrie a beer and slaps his ass.
Ortega takes a few steps towards third base, widens his legs into a modified sprinter’s stance, his shoulders squared in the direction of the pitcher. When Spears steps up to the plate, Ortega hops another inch or two toward third, prompting the pitcher to throw the ball to the second baseman, but Ortega’s already there, already safe, before the second baseman can tag him out. Ortega stands, brushes the dirt off his uniform with gloved hands, takes only a single step towards third base this time but blows a kiss to the catcher who hasn’t taken his eyes off Ortega.
The pitcher finally throws a pitch to Spears. Low fastball. Spears doesn’t swing. The umpire ticks the miniature device in his hand to count the ball as outside the strike zone, and Spears takes a step back, holds his bat against the forehead of his helmet, closes his eyes, mouths a prayer. Through the loose fit of his jersey, we can see his shoulders relax. He’s another old pro who’s remained in just enough shape to keep himself from demotion back to the minor leagues. He won a championship with Houston a few years back and doesn’t care about winning another one. Spears is the kind of athlete who wants to keep playing until his lower back grinds itself into a wheelchair on his last swing, and the way his spine has been popping lately, we wonder if that last swing, that final grinding rotation, will be here on this field today. Not that any of us believe he’ll go down without a fight.
The next pitch is when it happens. When the ball appears to slip and leaves the pitcher’s knuckles with a wobble through the ambient dust and stadium light into the base of the blue number seven on Spears’ back. We watch Spears’ body arch upwards and his shoulder blades fold inward and we run on the field, the dust rising further to obscure our advance.
We find ourselves in a clogged mass of sweaty bodies and discarded red shirts and bloodied fists. The skin on Ortega’s forehead has torn and will need stitches later, but in this moment, our collective knuckles scraping along high cheekbones, deep into a season of missteps and awkwardly missed swings, we feel like the baseball team we’ve trained to be, telegraphing our blurred fists into the other team’s teeth and stomping the mud off our cleats onto freshly mangled players, because one of our own has been hurt and the only way we know to express empathy, to show our solidarity, is to punish the other team as though we are mounting a teenage revolt, as though we imagine them to be the parents who dragged our kicking childhood selves away from the soil of broken fields when the night sky grew dark and celestially spotted, the parents who grew upset and beat us with thick leather belts whenever the rain fell in spring and we slid between the bases through the mud, tearing holes in the formerly sterile white pants they’d bought us just for games and practices (or for some of us our only remaining pair of intact blue jeans), and tonight we don’t care about the fines or getting booted from the game because we believe that in these moments, under the immortalizing rays of the field lights, the world peers into our baseball diamond to forget its problems for only a moment, just so it may focus on us playing our little game, to record how lost we find ourselves when fighting our miniscule battles under the bright lights of summer and spring, to escape the struggles of love lost and pain found, to live vicariously through our contests on fields they wish they could inhabit, to seek out hope in an eternal sport. After all, this game is not really ours. We only play it.
We know we’ll go home tonight, our collective identity shattered at season’s end. Spears will be demoted to the minor leagues, his age beginning to slow down his swing. Ortega will be traded to the Red Sox for two outfielders who will never step into the starting lineup and a draft pick slated for sometime in the future. Phillips will stay on for some degree of continuity going into spring. Other players will leave or stay or leave only return seasons down the road. Alarcón will be arrested for trying to smuggle an unvaccinated cat from the Dominican Republic. Jackson will be blacklisted from the league after a pitching coach discovers steroids and a semiautomatic pistol in his locker during a preseason practice. And I will be here in this stadium for another season because I’ve never been particularly good at the business side of baseball (the result of growing up too poor, without any money to learn how to manage), nor do I desire to be, and my lucky bat never fits in my luggage when I move. This team may be dead, ashes thrown into the off-season wind, but what I really want is to be part of its successor, one of the atoms pulled together to make up the molecules of the next iteration, to be a borrowed organ in the next Frankenstein-esque baseball body of this team, to take part in the next round of a Sisyphean pursuit of the playoffs.
The fight’s over. Ortega and the other team’s pitcher have been ejected, and the manager has left the game on his own accord, giving up on us before our final at-bat. On my way back to the dugout, I pick up the ball that beaned Spears and rotate it slowly in my hand until I can slip it into the plastic grocery bag of snacks I’ve left hanging near the tunnel door. Before I hide the ball away, I ask Spears to sign it, and he laughs before scribbling half his name, then asks why I want it. I say nothing and smile because he would never believe it’s because I still believe in this team, in what being part of what we’ve done together, what we will do in the few innings left to come.
Because, even in the closing exhales of an expiring season, I still dream of baseball, and others dream for us. Even if we are losing this game by ten runs, a few good hits in the last inning can land us a win and brighten the day of a teenager who’s about to get caught playing hooky from school, hold an oil worker breathless on his hour-long drive home through the West Texas desert, push two old soldiers closer together in their seats at dive bar somewhere in Dallas until their boots hook around one another’s. We might even tie it all up, take this game to overtime, extend the season by another inning or two. But no matter what, when tonight is over, there will be hope for next year.
***
The air is cold for an early Arlington October as I walk out the stadium doors well past midnight. Petrie’s puking into the dumpster. His beer comes back up yellow, steaming, smelling like warm bile. Alarcón pulls a blanket from the backseat of his car, wraps it around Petrie’s shoulders to keep him from a case of hypothermia. I consider offering to drive Petrie home, but his wife’s absence means he will guilt me into staying there while he downs a few beers, asks me about the last time I sucked another man’s cock, wants to know if I’ll suck his. Boundaries are not Petrie’s strong suit, nor is self-control. Besides, he’ll say, it’s not like we have practice or a game tomorrow.
I would tell him that I do, that my low orbit around baseball means I cannot halt in my life’s rotation around the sport for fear of crashing down to an Earth with real-world realities I do not wish to face, that I will be in the weight room tomorrow morning and at the batting cages by afternoon, that I will write out imagined batting orders for the team we could be next season while Bull Durham streams across my television. I have become a priest of my sport, celibate, studying, proselytizing. I want to be a conduit between the fans and the crack of a baseball bat because I’ve nothing else of quality to give. Besides, I’d tell him, in that moment his hand grazes the front of my pants, I prefer my men with coarse hair poking from underneath the top button of their shirts.
At home, I rub my thumb across the stitched seam of the baseball with Spears’ autograph, toss it in the air a few times. There’s a dent where the spike from someone’s cleat nearly pierced the ball and the dirt has mixed with sweat to turn it a dirty beige. A memory of a moment from the fight when I slipped on the ball and landed on my ass next to the pitcher’s mound connects to another of Phillips throwing his helmet at someone, missing, the helmet hitting my leg. My right hamstring suddenly feels hollow and numb, tomorrow’s soreness radiating along the edges. I turn on the television to highlights of the fight, listen to the alternating highs and lows of the talking head’s voice.
A trash year, the talking head enunciates, concludes in yet another dumpster fire, and the talking head says he cannot look away. But he has faith, he claims, that this team will rebuild and come back strong next season.
I can’t help but agree about the bad season, about the magnetism of such flame-outs. Mostly I agree that we, whatever iteration we return in, will grow beyond the bad year the old we just endured. Even when there’s no hope left, I still believe. I still aspire. I still drag my feet forward across the powdered red clay of the infield around the bases and toward home plate.
My thumb rests on the dent in the ball and suddenly I remember why I want it.
Because I’m playing the game I played as a child, and, as for so many others, the sandlots of home were the first step in buying a lottery ticket to a journey out of the soul-sucking poverty of my youth.
Because, as I switch channels to watch Kevin Costner smash home run after home run to a narrator who reminds his audience that no one will ever remember the minor league home run record of Costner’s record, I remember that no one will think of me tomorrow and anonymity is a necessary silhouette while waiting to be overtaken by golden flames on a new horizon.
Because no matter the pain, the drama, the absolute shit day I’ve had, there’s always just a tiny sliver of hope rooted in the green grass and loose dirt of a baseball field.
This story was nominated for Best of the Net.
Clayton Bradshaw-Mittal (they/them) is a queer, previously unhoused veteran who holds an MFA and a PhD in Creative Writing. They are a 2024 MASS MoCA Fellow and an alum of the Vermont Studio Center. Their fiction can be found in Story, Fairy Tale Review, F(r)iction, and elsewhere. Other work appears in the Rumpus, Barrelhouse, Consequence, and additional journals. Their work has won the Plaza Short Story Prize; been a finalist for the IHLR/TTUP First Book Prize, the Kinder-Crump Award for Short Fiction, and the Saints + Sinners LGBTQ Short Fiction Prize; and has been longlisted for the W.S. Porter Prize. They teach at the University of Cincinnati-Blue Ash and are the Managing Editor of New Ohio Review.
Yaleeza Patchett is an artist who finds the beauty in the dark macabre, and melancholy, with a dash of whimsy with her specialty in acrylic painting, graphite, and ink, she loves to create whimsical dark creations to decorate any eclectic home. Yaleeza resides in Greenwood, IN with her husband Jon, two cats, and a bloodhound. You can find her work on Instagram.
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