“You a ballplayer?” Bo Duke asked from the window seat. He motioned toward my glove.
“Yeah,”
“College?”
“No, professional”
“Really?”
“Yeah, I’m reporting to spring training today.”
“Oh, right on, man. What position do you play?”
“I’m a pitcher.”
“Righty or lefty?”
“Righty, unfortunately.”
“How long you been playing?”
“This is my fifth year.”
“Hey Luke, this guy plays professional baseball, how about that?” He called to his buddy, but there was no way he couldn’t have heard me as tightly as we were packed in.
“Oh yeah?” Luke Duke said from the aisle seat. “What position do you play?” he asked me, but the guy by the window answered.
“He’s a pitcher”
“Righty or lefty?”
“He’s a righty who wishes he were a lefty,” Bo said.
“How long you been playing?”
“He’s been playing for five years, Luke.” I didn’t even know the guy sitting next to me and already he was talking as if he edited my Wikipedia page.
“Got any time in the big leagues?”
“No, no time yet.” I answered for myself.
“So you’re just a minor leaguer then?”
What’s that supposed to mean? “Just a minor leaguer?” What are you, just a vacuum cleaner salesman? “Yes, sir, I’m just a minor leaguer.” I exhaled.
“Well, keep playing, never give up. You’ll hate yourself for the rest of your life if you do. You’ll wake up every day and feel terrible about it.” He said it, and then sighed, shaking his head as if I just brought up a dead relative.
How was I supposed to respond to that statement? Did he really need to drop the “hate yourself for the rest of your life” line? There are a lot of people out there with sports-themed regrets, but this was a tad excessive. I nodded very mime-like.
“I’d still be playing today if I hadn’t had kids,” he continued, forcing an empty laugh before elbowing me in a “know what I mean” type way, but I didn’t.
“Did you play pro for a while?” I asked.
“No, I got my girlfriend pregnant in high school and had to quit ball to get a job. The kid ruined my dreams of playing. Don’t have kids. They wreck your life!” Again he laughed in an inside-joke kind of way, and again I didn’t feel as if I was on the inside. I laughed with him to make him feel better.
“Yeah,” he continued, “I was one of the best players on my high school squad. I was looking at colleges and was going to try for the pros, but life gets in the way, you know?”
“Yeah, that’s a shame,” I said. “Someone should really tell life to quit doing that.”
“I had a knockout curve,” he continued, staring off into dreamland, “and I had to have been throwing at least ninety miles per hour. We didn’t have radar guns or nothing, but all the guys told me I was throwing real hard.”
“Oh. Wow,” I said, highly doubtful but mastering it.
“Yeah, she said she was on birth control, but I don’t believe it. She knew I was going to be something special. She thought she’d just lock me down, you know?”
“Hmmm.”
“My advice to you, buddy, don’t trust women.” He stopped and looked at me with a queer smile. “I’ll bet a guy like you gets women after him all the time, what with being a ballplayer and all.” He stared at me as if I had the power to possess women with my uniform. I thought about the only woman in my life, my grandma, and felt the urge to tell him she was available. Instead I said, “Oh you know it, man! All the time,” and elbowed him back.
“Attaboy! Don’t ever give it up son, trust me. Say, you know my cousin’s kid has one hell of an arm. Do you think you could get me in touch with a scout to come watch him? I think he’s got what it takes. I’ve been working with him. Taught him the old hook.” He wrung his arm as best he could in our tight seating to demonstrate.
“Looks like a good one.”
“Yeah, it’s nasty.”
“I’ll bet.”
“So, can you get me in touch with a scout?”
“Yeah, sure. We do that all the time.” We never do that.
“What do I do, just give you my info then?”
“Yeah, I’ll pass it on to the Padres for you.”
“Ooh, the Padres?” he cringed.
“Yeah, why?”
“Um…I was hoping you could get the Yankees.”
“…”
I spent forty-five minutes I’ll never get back listening to Luke’s life story before the plane touched down in Chicago. He handed me his card as we exited the plane. I threw it away as soon as he was out of sight.
The long connector flight to Phoenix had me sitting next to a senior couple. They wore big, Terminator-style sunglasses that covered up their whole head. They had to use the bathroom every fifteen minutes and kept complaining about how much they hated today’s music compared to the good ol’ days when you could understand lyrics and women didn’t dress like hussies. When they saw my mitt, they asked me if I was a ballplayer. I told them it was a present for my kid brother in Arizona. I told them he was having an operation due to a rare disease called turf toe, and he was going to be off his feet for a while. Baseball was his favorite sport, so I got him the glove from this really nice, caring, and handsome pro pitcher named Dirk Hayhurst, who played for the Yankees. They said they’d keep an eye out for him. I told them my name was Eric Heater. They said it was shame I didn’t play baseball with a name like that.
Chapter Six
Car after car came buzzing around the Phoenix terminal while I lingered in the shade, hiding from the high-voltage sun. Cops made people who loitered too long move; families hugged hello and good-bye. I stood curbside with my luggage looking for the Padres shuttle van, a plain, white, eighteen-passenger van, with one small sign that read Padres printed out on standard computer paper and taped to the bottom right of the windshield. About a half an hour after I landed, it scooped up me and a few others and whisked us to our team hotel.
The Padres’ spring training hotel is a Country Inn and Suites nestled right up against the highway about fifteen minutes from the Peoria Sports Complex. It’s a nice place, and everyone who was with the Padres before it relocated to the Inn and Suites says it’s a palace compared with the dump the team used to be put up in.
I liked the hotel because it had free, fresh-baked cookies in a glass jar at the front desk. This year, the hotel desk also featured an eye-candy dish courtesy of a well-stacked blonde sporting a tight Padres’ T-shirt. She smiled as I approached, my luggage in tow. Undoubtedly, she would become the object of regular player attention, fielding stupid questions, direction requests, package inquiries, pillow-fluffing needs, mattress-fluffing needs, and other after-hours activities.
I, for example, led off with, “Hi, I’m a player with the Padres. Can you tell me where the check-in is?” even though there were a series of bold signs clearly directing new arrivals, besides my previous years of check-in experience. Nevertheless, she gave me thorough directions in a giggly, bouncy