On Disappearing
On Disappearing
By Malavika Praseed
In 2021, pitcher Kumar Rocker does not sign with the New York Mets, who have drafted him in the first round of the MLB draft. Instead, he signs the next year with the Texas Rangers, seven spots higher. His father is Tracy Rocker, an African-American former NFL lineman. His mother’s parents are from India. In baseball, African Americans are disappearing. In all sports on this soil, Indians exist in a constant state of disappearing, if they have ever once arrived.
Kumar Rocker at Vanderbilt University: 2.89 ERA, 28-10 record, 2 complete games.
My academic resume in hopes of the Vanderbilt University biology program: 4.75 GPA, 34 ACT, a smattering of extracurriculars, application denied.
Cricket exists as a parallel state. My father plays games with his classmates after school and on Sundays. Saibaba Colony, Coimbatore is one of the largest districts in the city, and by all metrics, it boasts many parks. But I see these games on dirt. Clouds of dust kicked up as the stitched cork ball hits dirt and spins, whirls, past the batsman through the wickets. Or makes contact against the broad wood bat and sails over fences. “If you threw like in baseball,” my father tells me, “everyone would crush them.” I imagine baseball players wielding cricket bats like caveman clubs behind their backs.
Along with the pitches, my father scoffs at gloves. In cricket, you catch barehanded. You may break fingers, the game goes on. He scoffs, especially, at spectators with gloves in the stand. 2010, we stand past the right field foul pole at Tropicana Field. He reaches out and snags an arcing foul ball. The crowd roars and screams. I clamor for the little white jewel in his hand, which he offers to a five-year-old on his left. I am fifteen and too old to cry for justice.
Two of the sports my father learns to love in Tampa are sports that should not exist in Tampa. Because it rains nearly daily in the summer, they build an ugly tin dome in the shape of a sliced orange and play baseball on artificial grass. Because it is warm in Tampa, they create an indoor freezer and the ice skates come out for hockey. Basketball, he says, was once beautiful. He immigrated to America in the early 1990s, Chicago, Illinois. His first impression was peak MJ soaring through the sky.
Football is the least intuitive sport. To teach it to me, my father draws the field on a yellow piece of paper. Thin black lines, broad sketches. Years before, his father teaches me how to draw with those same black lines. Years before, his father-in-law makes me practice writing with those same black lines. Years after all of this, my father will try to recreate football again for my sister. It doesn’t take, though she does learn to draw, and I learn to write.
In 2021, I interview sportswriter Jeff Pearlman for my fledgling podcast with fifty-five listeners on a good week. Jeff is incredibly kind, and there’s a catch in his voice, almost disbelief, when I tell him I am twenty-five. I am twenty-five and have read Ball Four and The Natural and understand the significance of bird dogs in Pat Jordan’s A False Spring. These are references outside my context, in youth and in skin. They are not written for me. Jeff is only a little younger than my father, and has the career I aspired to had I not been afraid. His first claim to fame was the 1998 Sports Illustrated expose of the bigoted former pitcher John Rocker. No relation to Kumar.
Sportswriter Kavitha Davidson has a tattoo of the New York Yankees logo. She co-wrote the book Loving Sports When They Don’t Love You Back. For this book I forgive her heretical fandom. People pronounce her name Kah-VEE-tha, rather than the first-syllable emphasis KAV-ih-tha. Translated from the Sanskrit, her name means poetry. We all make these concessions.
It is not Kavitha or Jeff I idolize as a child, but Hannah Storm. She stands in front of the screen in her smart dresses and lays out the game in front of us. I watch her every morning with a bowl of cereal between my knees as I wait for the bus. She has a deep voice and short hair and is not classically, blondly beautiful. This signals that we are to take her seriously. I imagine she writes all her own coverage and tears through stadiums for the story, even though this is not true. I google Hannah Storm clothes and look like a corporate lawyer in my ninth grade classrooms. Smart pencil skirts above knobby, hairy legs. I walk across classrooms in my heels, and boys in their seats clomp-clomp their feet to the time of my steps. I retreat into t-shirts. My short hair and deep voice mean nothing.
Total population of India: 1.408 billion
Total Olympic medals won: 35
Total golds: 10
My only athletic feat is memorization, better suited to spelling bees. Beyond my father and I playing catch in our backyard, I wilt and crumble when faced with a ball. The first time I faint is on the tennis court. The second time, at fifth grade softball tryouts where I am the only one not to make the team. I will faint several more times between then and now, the worst of which occurs on an underground train in Barcelona, where I am coaxed awake by a donut shop employee with a cup of sugar water. There was no ball then. No real excuse.
Total population of India: 1.408 billion
Males in excess: 54.2 million
My father claims he has never wanted sons. He wanted two daughters and received them, my sister and me. But eventually someone takes my place in bat and ball games. My father swings wildly, launches the yellow softball against purple metal bat, and his companion runs to retrieve. Butter leaps across the grass, grabs and fetches, then he rears up for the next swing. All four yellow legs bound off the ground. Butter’s successor, Biscuit, is more of a soccer player, a wrestler, an overall ne’er-do-well. My father wants for nothing, not even sons.
In 2008, right fielder Rocco Baldelli cannot recover from injury, cannot run the bases, cannot perform at the standard set by his position and salary. He peters out of the lineup, sees specialist after specialist, is made a free agent by the Tampa Bay Rays, and is later diagnosed with a rare mitochondrial channelopathy. In 2008, a thirteen-year-old girl develops a nascent interest in medicine. She will write her undergraduate thesis on the care and treatment of mitochondrial disease, and present her paper with Rocco’s face attached. She will cite him whenever asked in all her interviews for genetic counseling school, and she will think about him as she guides patients through the uncharted waters of unknown diagnoses. She will wonder if he faints.
His disappearance from athletics will lead, indirectly, to the appearance of an Indian elsewhere.
Total number of active Major League Baseball players: 975
Total number of certified genetic counselors: 5,629
The hardest session of my career concerns a young Indian couple seeking elective twin reduction in the first trimester. Their reasons are unspoken, their reasons are not my business. They ask few questions during the bulk of the session, only to ask, more than once, if it is true that both fetuses are girls. Can we be sure? The session is hard because I am young, inexperienced, and cannot compartmentalize myself. Our professional creed is nondirectiveness. I summon almost none for this couple. My voice is flat, matter-of-fact, my vowels clipped. I wonder if the two of them stem from some princedom where only male heirs can inherit the land. Or if it’s sports. Either way, this father wants sons. Get a dog, I want to say. Or teach your girls to play.
In 2023, the Toronto Blue Jays select third baseman Arjun Nimmala in the first round of the MLB Draft. He is seventeen years old and boasts Indian heritage on both sides. Like my father, he grew up playing cricket. Like my father, he is full of hope. His name means archer, warrior, harking back to the mythical Arjuna of Mahabharata fame. Hero of heroes. His name is one my husband and I have considered, in the future, for a boy.
Baseball stadiums I have seen with my father: 4 (Tampa, Chicago, Chicago, Cleveland).
Baseball stadiums I have seen with my husband: 8 (Tampa, Chicago, Chicago, Cleveland, St. Louis, Milwaukee, New York, New York).
In 2023, Kumar Rocker leaves single-A ball in need of Tommy John surgery, ending his season, possibly ending his career. The repair of the UCL remains the most tenuous procedure in all of baseball. It is unknown if, even with this surgery, if he will rise to visibility. As fast as we appear, we disappear.
Malavika Praseed is a MFA candidate at Randolph College. Prior to this, she graduated from the University of Notre Dame with a bachelor’s degree in English, and been published in Cuckoo Quarterly, Re:Visions, Khoreo, and others. She currently works as an oncology genetic counselor, reviews books for the Chicago Review of Books, and formerly ran the literary podcast Your Favorite Book.
Elliot Lin is a college student who spends their free time musing about sports and how they shape or reflect identity. You can find their other baseball-related illustrations here, or on Twitter @hxvphaestion and Tumblr.
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