The Shift (a short fiction)

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.