Part One: The Shift
Jimmy D. dug into the left hand batter’s box carving a
trough in the dry infield dirt. Although not a superstitious man he had
maintained his elaborate at bat ritual throughout his career: holding out his
hand in petition as he cleared the dirt from around the plate. Finishing, he
adjusted each batting glove, right, and then left. Some said these mannerisms
infuriated opposing pitchers but it had certainly never been his intent. Part
of it he had done ever since Little League, maybe before, and the other part
helped his loading mechanism giving the leg drive to generate power. As an
older player, generating power and driving the ball was essential once the
trim, svelte days of youth had passed like a wisp of a cloud in the clear blue
sky.
The pitcher was a young dark-skinned man (man? Try boy) who
looked to be half of his age. A lefty, he threw from a ¾ arm angle that made it
difficult to pick up the ball leaving his hand. He threw consistently from the
same keyhole, never changing his release point. In short, the kid would
probably do well in the league. “Not today though,” Jimmy told himself. He was
not going to get shut down by a seemingly pre-pubescent boy whom he could have
conceivably sired after seventeen years of professional baseball, at least not
in this at bat.
In the brief seconds during the pitcher’s wind-up, Jimmy
Darnell Leamington surveyed the field as a cartographer might survey a hitherto
unexplored valley. The second baseman was positioned close to first and the
shortstop had shifted over and was standing nearly on second. Only the third baseman, a former teammate of his a
decade before was playing the left side of the diamond, about midway between
second and third. This was the way baseball was these days. Unless you proved
yourself able to spray a single anywhere at any time, teams were going to shift
you. In the age of statistics and sabermetrics, the facts were simply
incontrovertible. If you shift pull hitters, especially left-handed hitters,
you are going to get outs. Jimmy couldn’t refute this. He had seen it work too
many times against him to believe otherwise. However, he could not bring
himself to act accordingly. If you’d drop a bunt down the third base line, a
former manager had told him in a moment of dugout tension years ago, they pull
back and play you straight away. The truth was though that Jimmy couldn’t bring
himself to do it. He wasn’t a great bunter but he was serviceable. He certainly
wasn’t too proud to drop one down if it meant helping the club win. What he
couldn’t abide however was the thought that the other team had him beat. If he
dropped one down he’d make it to first easily, but he’d lose something too,
something he had kept intact after seventeen years of baseball when seemingly
everything else had been taken from him. Even the game itself had been taken
from him for a time. No, there were some things that were too precious; too
pure to relinquish. “Let them take it from me,” he thought, “let them try.”
He grew up in a middle-class neighborhood with middle-class
parents in a suburb of Detroit. There were plenty of kids around his age so he
never had any trouble fielding a team. He was particularly outgoing during his
younger years (this would fade in middle-school) and he formed friendships
easily. Most of these were on the diamond but many carried over into school and
other areas of his life. He was a boy always at the center of activity and his
house a hub of social contact (much to his mother’s chagrin sometimes). Once, a
spaghetti dinner was interrupted by the crash of a tree limb against their
house and a frenzy of boys scattering in all directions.
His town had a history of a significant Hasidic Jewish
population and they could be seen walking to synagogue in their shtreimel and
rekel. His two closest friends, Jered Racklin and Matt Trater were both Jews
although not of the Hasidic temperament. For nearly five years they were
inseparable and for five years the three formed the core of some spectacular
city league teams. Jered dominated opposing hitters (he would go on to play
ball at Western Michigan). Jimmy largely played short (even then he wasn’t a
particularly great fielder) but he could destroy a baseball with such skill and
force for his age that by the time he reached high school, scouts warily could
be found sitting behind home plate. Matt was the least accomplished of the
three, usually serving as Jimmy’s double-play partner. Even in Little League he
never hit much, but what he lacked in offense he made up for in defense. He
prided himself on his ability to reach any ball hit in his direction. After
school he used to make Jimmy hit grounder after grounder forcing him to range
far to his right and left before he had to go to Hebrew school. At the time,
Jimmy couldn’t understand Matt’s devotion to anything but baseball. Baseball was Jimmy’s world. The sun, the moon,
the stars all orbited the plain chalk diamond. Nothing mattered more that the
game. That is what probably precipitated the slow dissolution of their
friendship in middle-school. As Matt drew deeper into his faith and heritage,
Jimmy couldn’t help but view it all with scorn. If there was a god then surely
he would understand the need to practice every
day.
In the end, the friendship faded not out of any slight or
infraction but simply because it was always shrouded in the shadow of the great
monolith that was home plate. This was a deeper faith and its god too, required
sacrifice.
He takes a pitch on the inside corner for a strike and steps
out of the box. Jimmy scans the beautifully verdant field from right to left.
The tall light towers illuminating the impending twilight. Night came quickly
to Traverse City even in late May. The smell of the lake came wafting in from
left field and vast squadrons of fish flies dart about in the air above like
drunken dancers enjoying the cool evening. It wasn’t long ago that this field
sat empty and derelict, a product of the game’s precipitous decline. Much of
what had been had been lost, abandoned. Historic stadiums left crumbling like
the memories they represented. For Jimmy, who got called up to play for the
Braves in ’21, there was always an ache of what might have been. What if, he
pondered in his honest moments, what if I had got another chance at the bigs?
The 21 games in which he appeared (mostly as a pinch hitter) never gave him the
chance, he reasoned. After starting the next year at AAA, he hit well, but by
August the corruption that had infested the sport became too top-heavy to
ignore. At the age of 26, that October, just when he was entering his prime,
the owners (many of whom were themselves were under indictment) gave up the
league that long had been an American institution. The collapse left a hole not
only in a country’s consciousness but also in the hearts of the men whose lives
were dedicated to it.
That offseason was the longest of Jimmy Leamington’s life.
He was an eight year veteran of the minor leagues and found himself firmly
resting upon the seat cushions of his couch. Never had felt less sure about his
future; less confident about his prospects. It wasn’t that he wasn’t
considering other career options, but rather that he couldn’t even conceive
that there were other options.
As a boy eminently talented, he progressed through each
level of ball with the unwavering confidence of the next step; the next
inevitable goal. Whether it was the Varsity team, or the draft, or rookie ball,
there was never a doubt in his inner mind. Yet there he was, a man who had
devoted his life to one singular end, left without a path to follow.
The world was alive with sound; a cacophony of noise
pressing in upon him from all sides. In Atlanta, during his time there, the
volume had been oppressive, enveloping, but one could at least lose themselves
in it, normalize it away, like diving underwater, blocking it out, like a
pristine island rising from a tumultuous sea. Even in Gwinnett this had been
manageable with the drone of the carousel’s calliope music dulling the noise of
its edge. Here though, he could make out each voice, distinguishing tones if not
entire conversations.
Here on the shores of Lake Michigan the game took on a
different feel. It was as if you were
trying to complete complex mathematical equations in your living room. Your
father and mother might be discussing AARP benefits with the TV blaring. In
fact, Jimmy could almost make out a couple having that very discussion seated
behind home plate. He would never complain, he had been through too much to
complain. In fact the beauty (if it could be called beauty) of baseball’s
demise and rebirth was that it ignited a passion in its fans; a passion for the
purity; the simplicity of the game. From those whom he had talked with (there
were few divisions between player and fan these days) there was a longing for
the simplicity of a game of baseball; the pitcher’s wind up, the arc of the
batted ball, the leathery slap of ball against glove. Much of the commercialism
that had defined the game in the late 2020’s had abated, leaving a population
which craved (and appreciated) the very existence of an organized league even
if it existed only in cities like Elkhart, Dayton, or Traverse City. No, he
could never resent the evolution of the game. Instead, he simply evolved
himself, incorporating a tuning-out ritual into his loading mechanism. “The
world swirls around, but never in,” he told himself before each pitch, “always
out, never in.” Slowly he let out his breath.
The pitcher released the ball, a white speck against the
navy blue backdrop of his uniform. A batter has approximately ¼ of a second to
decide to swing or not. Only ¼ of a second to think: “fastball? Change-up?”.
Beyond that it is simply an issue of bat speed. Can the bat reach the ball
(with the correct placement) to successfully transfer the energy of the 95(ish)
mph ball back outward. Truly, Jimmy had once (drunkenly) pondered, it is a
miracle that anyone could catch up to a pitch let alone direct it with any
skill or precision. Yet he had watched and played with ballplayers that could
place a ball seemingly wherever they desired. Jimmy D. had never had, nor
claimed to have that level of proficiency. In truth, Jimmy simply let his hands
and muscles direct the outcome. For seventeen seasons that had been enough. No
overthinking, no calculated plans of attack, simple physics and luck.
Tonight; at this moment, when the last of the pigeons and
gulls were settling in on the exposed girders and wires; the pedestrians with
their paper bags full of trendy apparel slowed to catch a glance, Jimmy swung
with the intensity he had managed to maintain throughout his career from Little
League to college to the minors, the majors, Japan, and back again. He swung
with such bestial ferocity that his eyes momentarily shut and the world for a
moment stilled. They opened again, as he broke for first, he saw no indication
that anything had occurred or that any time had passed. The night seemed to
slow and exhale laboriously. His feet dug in the soft clay composite and he
pushed off with his tremendous calves. It was only when he saw the back of the
pitcher unceremoniously turned toward him, with his head tilted upwards as if
in prayer to the northern night sky that he broke into his customary trot. The
ball flew, a pin-prick satellite in the night sky, out past the fence in
right-center (390ft) and was momentarily lost to most observers before landing
in an aisle way about twenty rows up into the bleachers. In the silence, Jimmy made no conscious
thought, no jubilation, no contemplation. It was all still part of the
mechanism--- the drowning out. Passing second he caught the gaze of the
opposing shortstop. No malice, he noted. Still he continued, unencumbered in
his home run celebratory rounding of the bases. It was only when he saw Javier
Deville, the on deck batter; standing at home plate that he had any conscious memory.
It was simply a number: 480.
Four hundred and eighty, generally a number of little
significance. However it had over the last two years become the focal point of
Jimmy Leamington’s public life. It was, of course, the number of home runs he
had amassed over his seventeen year minor league career. To some, minor league
home run totals might be a point of derision rather than acclaim but this
particular number’s significance came because it fell one short of 481--- the
career minor league record set by Hector Espino. Espino (June 6, 1939 –
September 7, 1997) was considered the greatest player in the history of the
Mexican Leagues, sometimes called The Babe Ruth of Mexico. He played in both
the Liga Mexicana de Beisbol during the summer and the Liga Mexicana del
Pacifico during the winter. During the course of his storied career in which he
became a Mexican sports icon he rejected offers from the Cardinals, Mets,
Padres, and Angels. Over his long career he accumulated many records most of
which had already fallen before Jimmy had even begun playing but no one had
gotten within ten of his home run record.
No one, until Jimmy did it last August, on a hot, sweaty
night in Covington, Kentucky. Since then race for the record had become the
focal point of Leamington’s career and the Traverse City Plover’s marketing
dollars (which largely consisted of billboards along M-37 and his regrettably
larger-than-life face on local busses).
He had tried to not let it affect him; not let it affect the
way he played or the play of his team, but it was inevitable. Everyone was
aware of it. Attendance figures, which had never been astronomic since MLB’s
collapse, rose markedly since the race began (although you could say the race
had been on for 17 years). His teammates stopped chiding him for strikeouts or
grounding into a double play as they had years before when his age and physical
limitations had been sport for an array of dugout humor. This fact seemed to frustrate Jimmy the most
since he prided himself on being an unselfish player willing to give himself up
for the team. Nothing infuriated him more than grounding into a double play. He
felt like it was letting his team and himself down. Yet despite his attempts to
stay on point, the race had affected him. Though he would never admit it, he
took deeper cuts at fastballs; he expanded the strike zone when he chased juicy
hangers around the letters. He was after all, a man like any other. His failures stung like any man’s. His
victories were as sweet as any. As he stepped on home plate after slapping
hands with a dozen cheering teammates he wasn’t tallying his wins and losses on
a scoresheet or mentally marking the location of the pitcher’s fastball (just a
bit up and out of the strike zone) he was basking in the glory or mankind,
which though fading is nevertheless intoxicating.
