Michael Schein
Baseball Forever
I was just hangin out the way you can hang out in baseball, which is loose jointed and knowing nothin’s gonna change for about the next lifetime or two. There was some sun and some clouds but mostly the sun was winnin that contest, so’s our game looked like a go. The fans weren’t around yet, not even the ones that were more family than family, since we saw them more’n our own wives.
I’m no big cheese, just the pitchin coach for a double A team in a burg barely big enough to make smog, and it suits me fine. But I’m not here to bore you about me. I’m here to tell you about our new prospect, Jagger Fin, whose 96 mile an hour fast ball is wild as he is stupid, and who won’t never amount to shit unless he stumbles on a brain and a good change up somewhere down the line.
But I’m not even here to talk about the kid’s pitchin, and fer me that’s rare, since I don’t talk about nothin else never.
You see, as I was leanin out by the bullpen, which in our league is a patch of extra scrawny grass with a coupla old warped rubbers nailed in a ditch right where the worst screamers fly off the bats of lefties, I looked up and saw Jagger wandering my way. Now most times Jagger was a swaggerer, not a wanderer, and the dazed look on his face made me look around for the ball he’d just caught between the eyes, but no one was battin and no one was anywhere in sight cept a coupla the guys stretching and playing catch way off towards the other side of the field.
Well, it ain’t my idea of heaven, but I guess nanny comes with the job description, so instead of sneakin off as I’d like to’ve done, I went over and placed a hand on his shoulder. “What’s eatin’ you, son?” I asked.
Slowly, his eyes came into focus, and he just looked at me like I was the purtiest girl at the dance. “Deke,” he croaked, and he reached up to touch my face with both hands, “Deke, that you? Great to see you,” and he started laughin and huggin and slappin me on the back.
“Settle down, boy,” I said, slippin his grip and leadin him over to the bullpen bench. “Now tell me, what the hell’s got into you.”
And then he told me the strangest tale I ever heard.
“Well, Deke,” he began, “you’re not gonna believe this, but when I came to the ballpark today, well, I never got here,” he began, an I just rolled up inside my cap, thinkin I don’t get paid enough for this shit.
Then, realizing the idiocy of what he’d just said, Jagger did himself one better: “No, Deke, I’m here now, but where I got to was the bigs, you know, the Show.”
He musta been dreamin, cause he knowd and I knowd he warn’t ready fer triple A let alone the Show. You can fool the farm boys with straight heat, least most of the time, but in the bigs he’d be pickin yarn outta what’s left of his teeth after a third of an inning.
“Except, Deke, it wasn’t our bigs, at least not as we know it. You see, first I showed my pass, and the feller just laughed at me: ‘Good clong,’ he said, ‘now go get a ticket like everyone else.’ So I saw a guy holding up a ticket which he said was a gonzi seat 8 rows back behind the home dugout, so I pulled out 2 crisp 20s, and the guy’s eyes about popped outta his head. ‘Where’d you get those things?’ he asked me, but before I could answer he snapped em up and said, ‘I’m breaking code here, doppler, but these’ll go great in my coin & bill collection, so here’s your ticket.’ And he was gone.”
“So what’s the big thrill?” I asked him, starting to get impatient; “you ran into a coupla head cases in Bean Town. Kinda comes with the job description up there, don’t it?”
“Well, Deke, I’m thinkin so, till I began to study that ticket.”
“Not the old wrong day switcheroo?” I asked him. “You know, he sees the game then sells you yesterday’s ticket.”
“Not even close,” said Jagger. “The date on that thing was July 28th – 2104.”
I didn’t say nothin. I mean, the kid was serious. Let him talk I figured.
“But you know, I got a good deal. That darned thing had a $4,000 face value to it. So I didn’t complain; I went up to the gate, and sure enough they let me in with it.
“Well, there I was, at the ballpark, so I figured heck, I know how to do this. So I headed to my seat. But by the time I got there, well . . .”
His voice trailed off, and he began to get that far away look again, so I nudged him with my elbow. “Good one, kid,” I said, “you had me goin there for a minute.”
“What?” he said, comin outta his trance. “You just listen to what I saw,” he said, “they see if I got you.”
I listened.
“First of all, every seat is a self-enclosed luxury cubical encased in some kinda plexiglass. It plays the music you want, everything from Mozart to Beatles to hip hop to stuff you wouldn’t believe that sounds like cats getting their heads ripped off. I figured what the heck, so I sat down, and next thing I know that damn seat grabbed me and was givin me a massage acupuncture a manicure a tattoo an some kinda liquid pizza all at the same time. It also picked my pocket and sucked up every one of my credit and debit cards. I think it was the debit that covered the tab, thanks to 100 years of interest.”
“You mean to tell me you think you were at a game 100 years from now?” I said, still thinkin that any minute the guys would jump out with the camcorder and sucker sign to pin on my butt.
“I was there,” Jagger said. I didn’t know if I believed him. But he sure believed himself. So I listened some more.
“It was the Microsoft Mariners versus the Genentech Red Sox. The game was a little late startin, cause the players all had to renegotiate their contracts based on their performance from the day before, and a few of the new additions from the daily trades got hung up in transport. It gave me time to survey the field. That beautiful green diamond was about the same, ‘cept the pitcher stood in a hole, not on a mound. Beyond the infield, the walls were like closing in at 250 feet down the lines, and 300 feet to straightaway center.
“The first batter came up. He worked the count full, 3 and 3. Oh yeah, they added the fourth strike, I think it was about 2050 when they did that. Then crack! A home run!
“Course, the batter didn’t really have to run. His designated runner made the circuit for him.”
“Designated runner?” I cried. “What the hell’s that?”
“Just what it sounds like. He runs for the batter. They each got one.”
“And they don’t get pulled?”
“Nope.”
“What about the DH,” I asked. “They got rid of that fool thing yet?”
“Heck no. It’s tradition. They don’t mess with tradition. They just make it better. Everyone’s a DH now, except the fielders of course, and the pitchers, and –”
“—the DRs,” I said, finishing his sentence for him. For a nightmare, this sounded mighty real. Course, most of them do.
“So after a few more home runs, a little pipsqueak came up, and he shot one deep into the gap, around 280 feet.”
“Piece of cake.”
“Well, that’s what I figured, till I saw what was out there. You like golf?”
What’s that got to do with baseball? “Yeah, it’s okay.”
“Good. Cause in about 60 years they’ll be adding water traps to the outfield. And that’s where the center fielder and the ball disappeared on that hit.”
“Jesus, what a circus,” I said, picking up a stray ball. “Do these things even float?”
“Well I don’t know about those things, but the rubber balls they’re gonna use in 2104 sure do.”
“Rubber balls?” I cried.
“Batters complained about brush-backs, so they softened the damn thing up,” said Jagger, scowling. “I’m afraid we might both live long enough to see that one.”
“Not so long as I can get a pistol and a few bullets,” I said, and the kid nodded solemnly. “How the hell can the pitchers stand it?”
“Well, I heard tell that the lefty I was watching signed for 2% of the inner asteroid belt. That’s a lot of mineral rights. And he gets a bonus if he has to pitch more than 18 innings.”
“A week?” I asked.
“A season.”
I just blinked; then I realized I was starting to look like this goofy kid. “Anyhow,” the kid continued, “after the first inning it was 18 to 14 --”
“Sweet Lord save us,”
“—so then they brought in the second inning specialists --”
“The what!?”
“Second inning specialists. Each inning – all six of ‘em, anyway, since they cut out the last three -- has its own specialists. They’re all a different situation, you know. There’s the first third, the half-way point, the transition to last third, the closer, I mean come on, you can’t expect guys to go out day after day and play more than an inning? They might get hurt!”
“Well, what do the fans think about this?”
“You mean the Designated Fans. Buncha guys with data processing-communication chips implanted in their heads who work while filling the corporate ballpark seats since there’s no room in their companies’ offices. You think fans can afford the ballpark? No, I didn’t talk to nobody who knew a box score from a box car till I hit the bars after the third inning.”
“You left after the third inning?”
“Well, that was 3½ hours in, and I’d seen enough. But you know, the strangest thing about what the DFs didn’t know is that they damn well shoulda known some baseball history, cause every player down there was a Hall of Famer from the first 150 years of the game. I saw Kofax, Mays, Ted Williams, Mantle, Hank Aaron, Ty Cobb, Satchel Page, Ruth, Ichiro, Robinson, Johnson (both Walter and Randy), Nolan Ryan, Ricky Henderson, Grover Alexander, DiMaggio, McGuire, Ripkin, Gehrig, Bonds -- the whole bunch, plus a few more I’d never heard of who’re probably pooping in their diapers right about now. All clones, Deke, not even a team, really, just the best freakin baseball gene pool of the first five generations of the game. But no one cared. No one knew to care.”
Jagger fell silent. Neither of us really knew what to say. We just shifted around, kinda embarrassed to share this dirty secret, even if it was just some weird hallucination. I looked out over the ballpark, the four base paths 90 feet apart, the mound 60 feet 6 inches away, the green expanse of the outfield, the fans just beginning to trickle in, the flags waving in the breeze against the ancient sky.
“Well,” I said at last, “at least this old game survived another hundred years.”
“Sure,” said the kid, “this game’ll never die.”
©2004 by Michael Schein
