the lyricwheel fic is done. and posted. and now i can die? something like that.
Can't believe I'm finally posting this. Neverrrrrrrr again.
Strike out looking.
Tom Glavine/David Cone
rated R
18,489 words.
Story notes can be found here, but they are meant to be read after you have read the fic. They're, like, endnotes. There are pictures.
Beta by the incomparable ninastasia. She is a fucking hero who battled through my many, many words many, many times and who fearlessly told me when I was having my boys say stupid things, or when I was telling where I should be showing, or when things just needed to be cut. Any and all remaining mistakes are mine alone; if you, the reader, see anything that you think needs concrit, please do not hesitate to say so!
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. It is in no way a reflection on the actual life, behavior, or character of any of the people featured, and there are no connections or affiliations between this fictional story and the people or organizations it mentions. It was not written with any intent to slander or defame any of the people featured. No profit has been or ever will be made as a result of this story: it is solely for entertainment. And again, it is entirely fictional, i.e. not true.
Strike out looking.
It was an evening home game: a solid, uncomplicated win over the Rockies that kept them nice and easy on top of the division. It wasn’t his start-it was Merck that night-so he just relaxed on the bench, idly dissected Merck’s delivery with Smoltz for the hundredth time, teasing Javy about his pitch calling every half inning. It was a hot night, mid 80s, but that wasn’t anything remarkable in Atlanta in June.
He walked in the door and smiled at Carri, who had waited up for him, which she sometimes did if the game didn’t run too late. She kissed him, just hard enough to drive him crazy, and pulled back a little to say, “Don called.”
“OK,” Tom agreed. “Don called.” He kissed the side of her neck, already thinking about where he could kiss her next.
Laughing, she leaned back and got her hands around either side of his face, holding him in place. “Don called. He sounded upset. He wanted you to call back right away.”
“It’s late. It can wait until tomorrow.”
“Tom, he said as soon as you got home.” She kissed him on the tip of the nose and executed the little wriggle and twist that somehow always got her out of his hands no matter how tightly he was hugging her. She was still been smiling playfully at him, which was just plain old unfair.
But Fehr must have sounded really upset, for her to insist, so Tom sighed and went into the kitchen, sat down next to the phone. There were phone numbers taped up on an oversized index card next to it: his parents, hers, the ballpark family emergency line, the kids’ school office, the pediatrician’s office, and Donald Fehr.
Fehr picked up on the first ring. “The bastards are doing it,” he said, before Tom could even get out a ‘hello’. “The bastards are actually gonna do it.”
And Tom knew why Carri had insisted he call right away, because Don sounded furious, but happy-furious, predatory, the kind of furious that was gearing up for a huge fight. The kind of furious that enjoyed a huge fight. God help them all, but Fehr did love a good fight, and they’d been angling towards this one ever since the words ’salary cap’ had first been uttered way back in January.
“What’s the damage?” Tom asked.
“No salary arbitration. Six-year free agency knocked down to four, and the bastards can keep a player on if he’s a four or five-year guy and they match his best offer. Can you even fuckin’ believe that? And the revenue-sharing, of course, and the fucking salary cap.”
That was when Tom started to realize the kind of trouble they were in, because that was-god, it was so much more than he’d been expecting, that was everything, that was such a violation of player rights that he was stunned to hear it, right there in his kitchen, sitting there with his mouth hanging open in amazement.
“I know,” Fehr said, more softly, apparently in response to the silence. “Trust me when I say I know.”
“We can’t…” Tom started, then stopped. We can’t let them do this was what he had meant to say, but he didn’t finish the thought, because what could they do?
----
There are meetings, of course there are meetings, there are always meetings. It’s the middle of June, middle of the season, not everyone can get away on the same days. There’s no way to get all the team reps together in the same room to talk it over, so Fehr does it in bits and pieces and informs each group of what the others said as best he can. It’s not easy, Tom knows, and he does appreciate it, remembering all over again why they have Fehr in charge of this massive organization.
In July Fehr calls him and tells him that he’s going to have to spend his next off-day in New York, because it’s union business and it’s too important to do over the phone. Tom assumes that he’ll be with whatever number of player reps share the off-day, but when he gets to the cheap offices the MLBPA rents in the middle of a bland New York skyscraper, he finds himself ushered into a room with only one other guy in it.
It takes him a minute, because the other guy has aged fast, his face a lot narrower than it was the last time Tom had seen him, the marks digging in under his eyes more pronounced. Eventually he realizes that it’s David Cone, no longer a Met and showing that American League wear more than Tom had expected. The last time he saw Cone, the Blue Jays were jumping all over each other, celebrating a World Series while the Braves slunk off the field.
“Hey,” he says, but he’s already hesitated long enough to make it obvious that he didn’t recognize Cone right off. Just long enough to make it obvious he hadn’t forgotten the ’92 Series. Just long enough to make it awkward.
Cone cements it by inclining his head towards Tom with a sardonic smile. Tom doesn’t do sardonic himself, not really, but he’s never had a problem recognizing it on other people, seeing it for the wordless rebuke it often really is. He also notices, way too slow, that Cone is wearing a collared shirt and suit pants, his jacket stretched across the back of his chair. Tom is wearing a t-shirt and jeans, and his hair is longer than Cone’s, curling against the back of his neck. He sits down across from Cone, keeping his eyes on the table, feeling guilty although, really, it’s not like anyone told him this was a formal kind of thing.
They sit in dense silence like that for another few minutes until Fehr bursts through the door. He’s wearing a rumpled t-shirt in an offensively loud print, and his hair is flopping down over his forehead like usual. Next to him, Cone looks practically military, and Tom immediately feels better.
Fehr dumps an armful of folders onto the table between the two of them and rubs his hands together briskly. “OK, so, you guys have been real active in the union and you’ve shown a lot of dedication to the cause and yadda yadda. You’re the new league reps. It doesn’t really mean anything except that you’re the new league reps.”
Tom’s already nodding, smiling at Fehr, he’s very thankful for the recognition, but Cone pokes a finger at the mass of files. “What’s all this?”
“These are the details of the new owner proposals.” Fehr flips a few open until he finds the one he wants, pulling papers out with medical precision, eviscerating and laying them out in order. “Elimination of the arbitration process. Adjustments to the free agency system. Alleged impact to salary.” He taps each one as he mentions it. “Salary cap.” This one he grabs and scans with a look of disgust before tossing it back down on the table. Cone reaches over the discarded files and picks it up, reading it more carefully.
“What do we have to do?” Tom asks. The union isn’t going to agree to the proposal. He doesn’t have to read the details on the papers to know that. “I mean us, me and Mr. Cone.” Cone looks up from the paper in disbelief, silently mouthing, Mr. Cone?, but Tom ignores him, because Fehr is not exactly meeting his eyes.
“Why designate new league reps right now?” Tom asks, leaning forward, trying to catch Fehr’s eye, but even as he asks he realizes the answer. He sits back slowly. “Ah.”
Cone is still holding the paper, half of his attention on the information it contains, but he glances up at Tom again. “Ah, what?” He follows Tom’s gaze to Fehr, then looks back.
“Media,” Tom says softly.
“The union has to have a face for the people, the fans.” Fehr sounds a little defensive, a little defiant. “Someone they can look to for, whatever, quotes on this. Someone to tell them what’s going on. Someone they can trust. It’s no good having different guys talking to them all the time, it just confuses things and makes it hard to connect. Public opinion, boys.”
Cone finally puts the paper down. “And, what, we were the most trustworthy-looking faces out there?” Fehr shrugs. “What about, what about someone like Molitor? Hershiser?”
“Hershiser’s on the executive committee, you’ll be working plenty with him. Molitor…” Fehr rubs the back of his neck and shrugs again. “He’s a good guy, and I’m glad he’s a rep, and I’m glad he’s on the negotiating committee, but he just doesn’t do media so hot all the time.” He makes a face. “Hitter thing.”
Which, well, sure. Pitchers are traditionally better at this kind of thing; it’s one of those baseball constants that has no real reason to persist, but does anyways.
Cone’s not a dumb guy, and he gets it fast enough. “So we’re, what? The sacrificial lambs? Throw us to the fucking wolves?”
“Someone has to do it,” Fehr says. “Someone always does.”
----
They reject the salary cap. They reject the proposal. They know they won’t get help from the Senate Judiciary committee, not that anyone put much stock in that to begin with. They put a date on it.
Fehr stands at a podium, looking flabby-cheeked and pale in the harsh video camera lights. “If the owners are not willing to back down on these issues and to address our concerns, it is my unfortunate duty to announce that the players will be going on strike, effective August 12.” The noise in the room swells as every reporter there starts trying to ask questions all at once.
Tom, sitting at home and watching on TV, can’t stop himself from wincing in sympathy. Carri rubs his arm until the phone rings and she gets up to answer it. After a moment she waves Tom into the kitchen and hands him the receiver.
It’s Cone, sounding tense. “We’re really in for it now,” he says.
“I guess so.” Tom leans against the kitchen wall, watching the TV across the living room, where Fehr is patiently answering questions. He idly wonders why Cone would call him, some guy he barely knows, some Brave he used to pitch against, and not one of his own teammates.
“We’re really in for it,” Cone repeats. “You and me, Glav.”
“We’re all of us in for it. Everyone in the league,” Tom gently corrects, although he knows what Cone means. They’re all in for it, for the duration, but he and Cone are really in for it, because they’re about to become the faces that the fans see whenever they think about the strike.
“You think we’ll actually do it?”
Tom looks down. It’s just his kitchen floor down there, the same floor that he’s seen for eight years now. Linoleum, yellow and white, stubborn dust and crumbs along the seam where it meets the wall, even though Carri is pretty obsessive about vacuuming and mopping. The only way they could ever get those crumbs would be to rip up the whole floor and clean it all out. And no sane person would ever do that, not unless the crumbs were becoming so poisonous that they had to be taken out, or the kitchen would become completely uninhabitable.
People will say it’s about the money, but it’s not, at least not so far as Tom is concerned. It wasn’t all that long ago that baseball players were hardly better than slaves under the owners. Things have changed since they unionized, since free agency began, but baseball contracts still restrict what a player can do with his own body, because in some ways it’s still the team’s body. Even the smallest step backwards could be the start of that dreaded slippery slope. Tom would be going into this exact same fight regardless of what the league average salary was. It’s the principle… no, it’s the owners screwing over the players, putting the bottom line first, company over team. It’s about fighting back for baseball itself, the game against the corporation.
Of course Tom likes money, but he believes in baseball.
Which is a big part of why Fehr named him the NL representative. He’s spent some time, in the past few days, wondering what made Cone the man for the AL position.
“We’ll do it. If they don’t compromise, we’ll do it.”
“I keep hoping I’ll hear something different.” Cone sighs, just a little. “But it sure doesn’t look like they’re gonna back down, huh? Not so easy.”
“Not so easy. No.”
“I picked a bad year to have a good year,” Cone says, and finally Tom has to smile to himself. A little reluctantly, because he’s not so sure he even likes Cone as a person much, but they are going to be working together, and Cone is audibly making an effort. Meeting him halfway is the least Tom can do.
“It’ll probably only be a few days. Maybe a couple weeks. Once they see we’re serious, it should straighten out pretty fast.” He means to say it to reassure Cone, who really is having kind of an amazing season, but as soon as the words are out of his mouth he wonders who he’s actually trying to convince. He believes it, he does; he doesn’t see how it could be otherwise. It’s the only outcome that makes any sense. They’ll lose a few weeks from the season at most.
He looks back out into the living room, where Fehr is still fending off questions from reporters, the word strike on his lips seemingly every time he opens his mouth, almost obscene, and it wouldn’t make sense for the cold feeling stealing over his body to be fear, but maybe it wouldn’t make sense for it to be anything else.
----
It’s not as though they announce the strike and suddenly they’re striking; they announce the strike in advance. Well, they have to. The delay between the announcement and the actual beginning of the strike is supposed to give them time to negotiate and, if all goes well, avoid the strike entirely. The date of the strike is really just a deadline for talks with the owners. Fehr is still talking about the rest of the season like he’s fairly certain it’s going to happen, and regardless of whether or not the strike actually goes off, they still have a number of games to play before the announced date.
Tom’s thankful that he doesn’t have to pitch the first game after the strike announcement, because he’s up the whole night before, fielding calls from reporters, then family and friends. He doesn’t tell them anything that Fehr hasn’t already said, but they keep calling, looking for something. Reassurance, he assumes, so that’s what he gives them. The same stuff he told Cone; the same stuff he’s telling himself.
When he gets to the clubhouse before the game, it’s more of the same. Guys crowd around his locker and want to know what the hell is going on. As a player rep it’s Tom’s job to relay as much information to his team as he can, something he takes very seriously (these guys trusted him enough to nominate him, after all, they have faith in his abilities, and he knows it’s an honor), but they want details, specifics, and he doesn’t really have much to give them.
Most of the younger players wander off after Tom repeats the same story two or three times, but the older players are not so easily moved. Fred McGriff especially won’t give up, leaving to get his glove and coming right back, pulling a stool over right in front of Tom’s, untying and retying all his glove laces.
“You guys know this ain’t gonna go on long, right?” he says, his voice twitching up at the end with a kind of hopefulness. “I mean, you cats got some information, right, the owners ain’t as stubborn as they’re makin’ it out to be, right?”
Tom shrugs one shoulder, wishing he could reach into his locker and dig his glove out for maintenance, just something to do, but he’s not getting into the game today.
McGriff leans forward, speaking in a low, urgent voice. “It really ain’t gonna be more’n a few days, right? Once they see we’re actually gonna strike an’ it ain’t just words, right?”
“Yeah. That’s the thinking.”
“Well, it can’t be more’n that, right?”
“Sure,” Tom says. “I mean, technically. Of course it can be, it can be as long as we make it, but I can’t imagine…” he trails off, thinking of the pale determined clench of Fehr’s jaw when he gets his mind set on something. He can’t imagine, really, or maybe he just doesn’t want to try.
McGriff sits back, probably realizing that that’s as good an answer as he’s going to get from Tom today. He tugs down the last of his glove’s laces and punches the pocket a few times, making the leather pop.
“Dunno what I’d do,” he says. He doesn’t have to say anything else, because it’s the same for Tom, the same for all of them. What I’d do without baseball, that’s the rest of it, but nobody has to tell anyone else that some things are better left unsaid.
Tom falls asleep in the dugout in the 6th inning, but it’s fine. Nobody even wakes him up until the top of the 9th, and then it’s just Cox telling him that he may as well get into the clubhouse now if he’s gonna bum around on the bench. Avery’s on a roll, and they don’t even have to go to the bullpen to finish the game.
----
He tries to catch up on sleep the next night, he really does, but the phone calls don’t stop. Most of the reporters have found out that he’s taking his new union role seriously, willing to answer the phone, and they’re all looking for quotes. He doesn’t want to give anyone a reason to write something bad about him, so he tries very hard to give a quote to every reporter who calls.
The owners are trying to take us back to the days when ballplayers were hardly better than cattle, and we won’t go back to that,
and
Of course this isn’t sudden, not at all, not to us. We knew it might come to this. We hoped it wouldn’t, but we knew it might,
and
Everyone in the union voted, so it’s not like this was something decided at the top without anyone having their fair say. This is what we all decided together was the best possible course of action,
and
Nobody wants a strike, none of us do, but we’d rather strike than let baseball go where the owners are trying to take it,
and on and on.
By 4 am he’s shaking from exhaustion, hunched over a glass of bourbon. It’s just something to keep him calm, and he’s at his most alert when the warm burn down the back of his throat wakes him up a little. Carri's been in bed for hours. She tried to stay up with him, then tried begging him to come to bed, to ignore the phone, but he can’t. He’s the league rep. His eyes are closing of their own accord, but when the phone rings again, he picks it up and says hello.
“Thought so,” says a rough voice. “Take your fucking phone off the hook and go to bed.”
He blinks into the bourbon, his own reflection squiggled back at him. Everything sounds kind of fuzzy, cotton in his ears, but. “Cone?”
“I kept seeing stories. On the AP wire, there’s new stuff coming out, new quotes, and I thought, that fucker better not still be up, and sure enough I call and you are.”
“I. What are you doing up watching the presswire?”
Cone laughs, a short bark. “Same thing you are, fucker. Difference is, I’m not pitching tomorrow.”
“Right.” Tom puts his head down on the table, keeping the headset pressed to his ear with one hand. The tablecloth smells faintly of lemons and pine, whatever Carri uses to clean it, and the plasticky weave is cool under his cheek.
“Go to bed.”
Tom starts to protest, he can’t, he just can’t, but Cone talks right over him. “There’s two of us for a reason, if someone wants a soundbite they can call me as well’s they can call you, and it’s 3 in the fuckin’ morning.”
“Four.”
“Really?” There’s a pause while Cone presumably checks the time, then a low whistle that somehow sounds as tired as Tom feels. “Shit, it is. When did that happen? Never mind, that’s not the point.”
Tom smiles in spite of himself, eyes closed. “Was there a point?”
Another short chuckle, raspy with lack of sleep, and then Cone lowers his voice, talking quiet and close to the receiver, right in Tom’s ear. “You don’t help anyone by being too tired to pitch. OK? Go to bed, ace.”
Tom can’t remember the last time anyone sincerely called him ‘ace’, not on this staff with Maddux and Smoltz, but it doesn’t sound insincere from Cone. He probably can’t even lie at this level of exhaustion; Tom’s pretty sure he couldn’t. It’s all he can do to make his mouth fit properly around the truth, and the truth is just what is, it’s nothing he has to invent on his own.
He doesn’t remember what he mumbles to Cone, but it probably amounted to something like ‘thanks’, or maybe just ‘good night’.
It’s only later that he stops to wonder why Cone, indisputable ace but a hundred percent AL now, even knew he was pitching the next day.
----
It’s 95, 100 degrees in the ballpark, what they call real Atlanta heat. It should be an advantage because they’re used to it and the Phillies aren’t, or at least that’s what the radio guys say and what the team tries to believe.
The brim of his cap soaks up sweat for the first couple of innings, but then it gets saturated. It sits heavy on his forehead and sweat drips down into his eyes no matter how many times he steps off the mound to try and wipe it away. The hair at the back of his neck curls crazily in the heat, sticking close to his skin. Every pitch he throws makes the collar of his jersey drag in the sweat, driving him crazy in tiny pieces.
He comes out of the 4th shaky. Every time one of the Phillies gets on the basepaths Tom has to throw from the stretch, his rhythm all fucked up and everything blurry at the edges. Cox takes one look at him when he gets to the dugout and immediately turns to the trainer, who nods and trip-runs down the steps to the clubhouse much faster in his sneakers than any of the guys can in their spikes.
Javy sits down next to him, unbuckling his shin guards. It must be a bad day to be a catcher, this heat. Tom sticks his pitching arm in the sleeve of a jacket when he’s not on the field even in July, but today the very thought of it makes him breathe fast, fighting nausea.
“OK?” Javy asks, in that quiet directed voice he uses with his pitchers, his for-your-ears-only voice.
“Yeah, OK,” Tom says. He sounds thready and unreliable even to himself. Fehr’s announcement was only a couple of days ago, surely he shouldn’t be this wrecked already, but Tom has never had much tolerance for sleep deprivation. In the minors he was almost always the guy first back at the motel, needing his 7 hours at least.
The trainer comes back with an old Gatorade bottle half full of water, the rest blocked up with ice. Tom takes it and presses it against his forehead, letting his eyes fall shut. The ice is so cold that he almost can’t feel it, fresh from the freezer and not melted yet, although that won’t take long.
He opens his eyes when Javy knocks his knee against Tom’s. “Hand,” Javy mutters, looking vaguely out at the field. Tom gives Javy his hand without thinking about it, and Javy slips something into his palm so fast he can’t see it, registering the slick slide of another palm against his own only after it’s already gone.
Pretending to yawn, bringing his palm to his mouth, it’s the oldest trick in the book, except for maybe the spitball. It would be so easy for a catcher to kill his pitcher this way, he thinks, chasing the pills down with the water without looking at them, because what pitcher would stop to check out something his catcher had given him? No pitcher on a winning team, that’s sure enough.
Of course Javy isn’t trying to murder him, and neither is the trainer, who slipped the pills to Javy in the first place, probably when he brought Tom the water. The greenies will take a little while to kick in, but his team’s got his back, fighting Schilling for every pitch of every at-bat, giving him extra time. Schilling has almost as much hair as Tom does, curling everywhere under his hat, but his is bright blonde instead of water-logged black. He knows he should watch, but the sun behind Schilling’s head today is more than Tom can take.
He’s just beginning to feel the effects of the greenies when he takes the mound for the 5th inning. He strikes out two Phillies, 1-2-3, 1-2-3. The greenies are really hitting his bloodstream now, and the heat feels like it’s jittering at the back of his neck. Things look less blurry, which is definitely an improvement. He can actually see the signs Javy is putting down. He doesn’t feel precisely like an ace, but at least he feels a lot more like himself.
There are 12 days left until the proposed strike date. He can do this.
----
The reporter from the New York Times wants to know if he’s personally talked to the owners’ representation. The reporter from the Wall Street Journal wants to know if he’s considered the impact of a potential strike on the paychecks of the youngest, lowest-salaried ballplayers. The reporter from the Washington Post wants to know what percentage of ballplayers were in favor of the strike. The reporter from the Atlanta Journal Constitution wants to know if his pitching is being affected by union business.
Of course it is! Tom wants to scream. It’s midnight and you’re calling me asking this, what do you think?!
“It’s not a problem at all,” he says. “On the field is on the field, off the field is off the field. I never even think about it when I’m on the mound. I’m sure any other ballplayer would tell you the same.”
----
The night of Cone’s first start since they announced the strike is right in the middle of Tom’s off-time-another Merck start. They lose fast and nasty to the Mets, so fast that when Tom gets back to the hotel and turns on the TV, he finds the Royals game still going and Cone still pitching.
It’s something else, watching Cone pitch. Tom has been around baseball long enough, he can usually tell what a pitcher is about to throw, but with Cone he sometimes has no idea. Tom himself has a lot of pitches: his bread-and-butter pitches, the four-seamer and the change; a curve when he needs it; a slider if he feels good about it; a two-seamer that trails off like a pretty little afterthought. Cone, though, he’s no bread-and-butter kind of guy. He throws everything: two-seam, four-seam, splitter, curve. He throws change-ups and sliders and pitches that people call screwballs with a what-can-you-do shrug, because they aren’t really screwballs, but who knows what they really are.
He’s small on the hotel TV, a little fuzzy in RGB resolution, but Tom can still see the ball dancing in on the batters, sailing up, diving down at the last possible second. He keeps looking for a knuckleball, but it must be the only thing that Cone doesn’t throw.
It seems impossible that the A’s have gotten four runs off of him, but that’s what the network graphics say. Mark McGwire steps up to the plate, hulking and huge about the shoulders in a way most hitters in the NL just aren’t, and upon reflection Tom decides that maybe it’s not so crazy after all.
After the game he waits a decent amount of time before calling. The Royals are at home, so it’s perfectly possible that Cone has plans of some sort-a bar out with the guys, a night in with a groupie or two, whatever it is that he usually does after pitching 8 innings and getting a win. And it’s not like Tom has anything in particular to talk about-they probably discussed everything that it was possible to discuss about the latest strike-related developments during Fehr’s last union-wide conference call.
So when Cone picks up right away and says hi, Tom is temporarily at a loss. He expected… he’s not quite sure what he expected. For Cone to not pick up, apparently.
Cone waits for a moment, then inhales sharply. “Hey, is everything OK? The owners didn’t…”
“No! God, no, nothing happened.” Tom winces, glad that he’s alone in his hotel room. “I just… wait, how did you even know it was me?”
“Caller ID, ace. Who else is gonna be calling me from the ballplayer hotel in New York?”
“Right.” Of course. Perhaps he could just sputter pointlessly down the line for a few minutes.
There’s another pause, Cone probably politely waiting to see if he actually has anything to say. When it evidently becomes clear that he doesn’t, Cone just starts talking about the A’s. About what it’s like to face McGwire, and did you ever? (Tom hasn’t, of course, and shudders a little to think of it.) About Steinbach, the catcher, a union guy and member of the negotiating committee, what a wry sense of humor he has. Cone tells him about hunkering down on a single bed in a Kansas City hotel room with Steinbach and the other A’s rep, Mike Bordick, all three of them trying to stay close to the speakerphone so that they can be in on the union conference call, way too much ballplayer on one bed, Cone at one point shifting too quickly and falling right off the side, straight down to the floor, thankfully landing on his left shoulder.
Tom ends up telling him about the Atlanta hotel where the Phillies were staying, going up to meet Schilling so they could help cut down the number of phones involved in the conference call, Schilling’s unbelievable excitement at getting to sit in on the executive league rep meeting, even though Tom told him at least three times that it wasn’t really any different from the regular meetings. Of course Cone was there-in Kansas City, but there in telephonic spirit-but nobody else gets excited about a thing like that the same way Schilling does.
“How much’ve you talked to that kid?” Cone asks. “I swear to God it’s his life’s goal to put as many people as he possibly can in a position where they have to sit and listen to him flap his jaw. Can you imagine him as Commish?” He pauses while Tom laughs in a horrified kind of way. “Executive rep meeting, to you and me and sane people, it’s just a boring thing to get our shit straight before we talk to the rest of the union. To a crazy fucker like Schilling, it’s probably like getting admitted to a top secret government society.”
Tom laughs helplessly, almost bent double over the phone. He’s still not sure why he called Cone in the first place-he certainly wasn’t expecting this, or anything at all-but it’s OK now that Cone’s got them going. It’s good. He feels better, more grounded, somehow, without even having realized that he was feeling adrift.
----
Cincinnati is a lot cooler than Atlanta, but Tom’s head still fuzzes on the field with lack of sleep, too much to think about, too much information or not maybe not enough, something. Javy comes trotting out to the mound after Tom shakes him off for the fourth time in a single at-bat.
“What’s up, ‘migo?” Javy asks, curving an arm around Tom’s waist.
“Nothing. I.” Tom closes his eyes and takes a deep breath, concentrating on Javy’s arm, trying to block out everything except for the warm weight across the small of his back, the gentle press of Javy’s catcher’s mitt against his side. It helps, a little.
When he opens his eyes again he finds Javy peering closely at him. “You need…?”
He thinks about it. A couple of greenies would sharpen him up, for sure, and he should be sharp out here. That’s what they pay him for; it’s his responsibility to the team, just like it’s his responsibility to his fellow players to be as sharp and alert as he can during union negotiations. The problem is that he already took a couple of greenies, two hours before the game started, and he never takes more than two at a time.
He opens his mouth to tell Javy that he already took some, that he’ll make do as best he can out here, and finds himself saying, “Yeah, maybe I should.”
Javy clenches his hand inside his glove momentarily, loosely closing around Tom’s hip in a reassuring squeeze before letting go. “OK. We strike this pendejo out, get back to dugout, we get you some before next inning, vale?”
Tom nods. Javy gives him a bracing smack on the ass with his glove and lopes back towards the plate, where Bret Boone is tapping his bat against his cleats impatiently. Terry Pendleton comes over from third and picks up the rosin bag, squishing it to make the white dust curl up between his fingers.
Tom waits for him to throw the bag down and go back to third, but instead Pendleton edges up the side of the mound. He cocks his head at Tom and closes one eye, which, Tom knows from several years’ experience, is what he always does when he’s carefully examining something.
“Look like shit, man,” Pendleton says, still squeezing the rosin bag.
“Thanks, Terry. That’s very helpful.”
Pendleton shrugs. “Just sayin’.” He lets the bag roll off his fingers, and it lands with a dead thump on the backside of the mound.
Tom strikes Boone out, although he has to concentrate so hard on Javy to get it done that the base of his skull is throbbing, afterimages of the pocket of Javy's mitt burned into the backs of his retinas. He stumbles over the place where the infield grass gives way to dirt on his way back to the dugout and it's only Pendleton's quick infielder hands, grabbing him by the back of the belt, that keep him from falling. Pendleton doesn't let go of him until he's safely deposited on the bench.
Javy comes over with his hand cupped in a careful loose fist. Tom is so, so happy to see him, to see the two or three of him that waver into and out of each other as they approach. "You sure he should be takin' that shit?" Pendleton asks. "He really don't look so good."
"He say he want to." Javy looks down at Tom dubiously. Tom looks back up at him as steadily as he can. He's fine, he's really fine, he's just a little tired. He just needs a little boost to keep him in the game.
Pendleton shrugs again and wanders off to the other end of the dugout, where the rest of the infielders are. Under better circumstances Tom would appreciate his concern, probably, but right now he just needs to get through this game. He just needs to do his job.
Javy sits on the bench next to him. "Hand," he mutters, looking in the opposite direction, and Tom offers up his palm.
----
Cone loses his last start, five days before the strike date. Tom loses his last start, two days before the strike date.
"No big deal," Cone says. It's the night before the strike, August 11. Cone is in Kansas City, and Tom is in the team hotel in Denver, just a little bit drunk off their last win, 13 to 0, Maddux going the full nine innings, the way that the post-game alcohol (all of it on the bullpen's dollar, which is what a complete game from the starter will get them) hits him harder than usual this high above sea-level. Tomorrow they'll both be in New York City, along with Fehr and most of the other player reps. "No big deal. We'll be back before we know it."
"What if we aren't?"
Cone snorts. "Oh, c'mon. Nobody's gonna let it get too bad. It's all just a bunch of beatin' our chests like gorillas at each other 'til we all understand that everyone's serious."
"What if that was the last game of baseball you ever got to play?" Tom is, maybe, more drunk than he should be. "What if this, this strike, it killed the league. I know it won't, I know, but what if. Just, what if."
There's silence on the other end of the phone for a long while, so long that Tom starts to wonder if Cone has hung up, but of course not, there's no dial tone, and if he listens really carefully he can hear breathing that isn't his. Eventually Cone sighs. "I don't know. Woulda liked to win my last one, I guess. I'd have to... we'd all have to just. Do something else."
"I used to think I could, I don't know. My dad does construction, I could have done that. I'd be at home every night for Carri and the kids. Work for my dad, bring the kids up Red Sox fans. I've traded everything," Tom says. "It's like. Sometimes I think. Everything that I love, for this one thing."
"Yeah," Cone says, quietly. "Yeah, but it's a pretty big thing."
"The biggest," Tom agrees.
There isn't really much else to say, after that. They sit for another minute in silence, the hotel room lurching around Tom in fits and starts, everything slowed down with the air too thin. He'd really like a greenie, just to counteract the depressive edge of the alcohol, but the trainer has them all. He has to remind himself to get some before he goes to New York.
"I'll see you tomorrow, right?" Cone eventually asks.
"Yeah. ‘Course. Wouldn't miss it, wouldn't miss it for the world."
"The big day." He can't see Cone's sardonic grin over the phone, but he can picture it. "The start of the early end. Fehr's gonna be shitting himself all night."
"If the season ended today, you'd probably win the Cy Young," Tom says, fast and almost all in one breath. He has no idea where that came from-- it's not what he was planning to say, not at all-- but it's true. He's been checking the AL numbers in the paper, and there's nobody like Cone in that league, not this season.
"Yeah, well. The season ain't ending today, ace, so don't go slackin'. We'll be back on the field before you can say, 'sucks to be an Expo.'" There's a shuffling sound on Cone's end. "Look, I gotta go pack. I'll see you. Tomorrow, OK? I'll come find you when I check in."
"Sounds good," Tom says. And it does. It's all finally happening, the strike and the season stopping and it's only August, and he'll be in New York with guys who aren't his teammates, eating dinner at night with people who aren't his wife. Maybe it won't be quite so bad if there's someone looking to find him when he gets there.
----
They send Mike Mussina, the youngest player rep, out to meet him at the airport. He seems a little grumpy, which is odd, because the last few times Tom had met with him he'd seemed pleasant enough, if a bit distracted. Mussina shoulders Tom's bags in the luggage claim without even giving Tom a chance to pick them up. When he asks Mussina how many union guys he's picked up since he got here, Mussina mumbles, "Twelve," and looks even more surly.
Tom follows him out of the airport, smiling just a bit. It's somehow comforting to know that rookie hazing goes on even without the ballgames.
----
He wakes up the next morning to a knocking at his door that turns out, when he drags himself out of bed and squints blearily through the peephole, to be Cone. He opens the door and runs a hand backwards through his hair, knowing that this makes it stick up even more crazily, but he's somewhere far beyond caring right now. Cone is wearing a bright blue button-down shortsleeve shirt with his hair already post-shower damp and neatly combed.
“Please tell me,” Tom says, “that this isn’t official union business.”
Cone laughs. “This early? With the place full of lazy-ass ballplayers? Not likely. No, the hotel restaurant stops serving breakfast at 10, and it’s already 9:15. Just thought I’d come drag you down.”
“Coffee. Yes.”
“Thought so.” Cone makes a shooing motion with his hands. “Go stick your head under the shower for a minute or something, I ain’t carrying you if you fall asleep in the elevator.”
Tom cleans up fast and Cone leads the way to the elevator and then through the lobby. He snags a local newspaper and waves Tom up to the buffet while he sits and pages through it.
When Tom sits back down, Cone casually flips a fat section over to him. Tom manages to grab it half a second before it would have ended up in his cereal. It’s the New York Daily News, just the sports section.
The headline is, simply, the word WHINERS? in huge block letters over an equally huge photo of Orel Hershiser looking vaguely perplexed.
“Oh my god,” Tom mutters. He stares at the page in horror for a minute before he can bring himself to open the section and read the article.
Cone reaches across the table and steals a banana slice from his cereal bowl. “Yeah,” he says, “welcome to New York.”
----
They fall into a routine quickly enough. Cone comes by and knocks on Tom’s door every morning, which wakes him up. In a normal season he would wake up early on his own, without even an alarm, but he’s all screwed up, the weather still hot and no previous night’s-worth of baseball wearing him out.
“Would you even bother getting up if I didn’t come by?” Cone asks. “Or would you just sleep straight through ‘til, like, 2 pm?”
Tom shrugs.
They eat breakfast together every day. Cone complains about the coffee but always drinks it anyways. Often Hershiser joins them. Sometimes Jay Bell does, or Joe Girardi. Sometimes Cecil Fielder shows up, carrying over as many plates as he can at one time. Once they all stop treating him like a September call-up, sometimes Mussina sits with them, stealing the crossword out of the paper and filling it out in pen.
After a few weeks Tom is the only one who reads the sports sections of the New York newspapers every morning. There is always, always something there about the strike, usually on the front page, usually (if it’s the Post or the Daily News) with some sort of awful, inflammatory headline.
FEHR CALLS OWNERS CHEATERS
and
OWNERS CALL FEHR CHEATER
and
PLAYERS FOR PLAYERS: WHO’S FOR THE FANS?
It always gives him a kind of hot, sick, swooping feeling in the pit of his stomach when he opens the paper, and he knows he shouldn’t bother, no one else does, but he can’t help it. He has a duty to know what the people are saying. He has to know.
He goes back to his room to shower properly after breakfast, because he doesn’t like to keep Cone waiting beforehand. Then he checks in with Fehr to see what he needs to do that day. Sometimes they have meetings set up with owner representatives, or meetings within the union, various groups of player reps getting together to discuss the latest offers and news. Sometimes they have press conferences set up, and if it’s one of those days he knows he’ll be seeing Cone again soon, because he and Cone are still the faces Fehr wants in front of the cameras and microphones and tape recorders.
If it’s one of those days, Tom will sometimes dissolve a greenie in his morning cup of coffee. Just one, just to give him a little bit of a boost, just to keep him on the right side of alert. He’s fairly discreet about it; one thing he learned from Javy was how to properly palm a pill. Sometimes he thinks Hershiser notices and frowns at him, but Tom has seen Hershiser put Tabasco sauce in his own coffee and actually enjoy it, so he can’t really talk.
If Cone has noticed, he certainly hasn’t said anything. Sometimes, in the back rooms and hallways they all haunt right before press conferences, Tom is pretty sure he sees Cone drinking something out of a flask he keeps in his coat pocket. It’s none of his business, and it’s not like Cone is staggering around, seriously drunk in public, so he doesn’t see any reason to mention it.
Nights are the worst. They don’t usually have anything planned for them at night, so the younger guys will go out and do whatever it is that young ballplayers do at night in New York City. Most of the older guys go out too, probably, but Tom wouldn’t know. Tom usually sits in his room and looks over papers, contracts, legal documents five inches thick. He watches TV and misses the hell out of Carri, who’s certainly not going to leave Atlanta while the kids are in the midst of their summer camp rotation.
Sometimes he goes down to the hotel bar and has a few drinks. Sometimes he’s by himself. Sometimes Hershiser is there, and sometimes Cone is there too. Sometimes Schilling is there, and on those nights he leaves the bar as soon as he finishes his first drink, claiming exhaustion, because there aren’t enough drinks in the world to make talking to Schilling for an entire night survivable.
He can never sleep properly at night. It’s too loud in the city, no matter how well-sealed the hotel windows are, and it’s always been tough for him to sleep without Carri in his bed, home series always preferable to playing on the road. Most of the problem, though, is that he just doesn’t get tired out right during the day. He works out in the hotel gym as often as he can, but it’s not the same as pitching 7, 8, 9 innings, it’s not the same as sweating for 3 or 4 hours in a dugout with his team all around him. It’s not the same at all.
So he wakes up tired in the mornings, and coffee doesn’t quite cut it. He’s still got a good-sized supply of greenies, though. He won’t have to try to find more for quite a while yet.
----
Maybe it was naïve of him, but Tom thought they would be closer to a resolution by now. September’s just beginning, and they have a meeting with some of the owner reps and their lawyers. It’s a formal meeting, so Tom and Cone and Hershiser and Fielder are all in suits, even if their suits aren’t as severe as the ones worn by the owner reps. Fehr’s also dressed up for the occasion, although he manages to make even a basic suit look rumpled.
The owner rep lawyers start the meeting off with a long litany of legal jargon. Tom tried to pay close attention to this, in the first week, but he’s long since given up (That’s what we got Fehr for, ace, Cone had said) and these days just tries to not look too glassy-eyed. Hershiser and Fielder make similar efforts, but Cone doesn’t even bother to pretend, blatantly staring out the nearest window.
They work around to the pith of the meeting eventually. The lawyers produce a bunch of precisely stapled packets and pass them out. Tom flips past the cover page and bends over his copy, the room silent except for the shuffling of papers and the small sounds Hershiser makes as he wipes the lenses of his glasses carefully with a tissue.
The new proposed agreement takes a softer stance on arbitration and has a much more reasonably-worded policy on players who’ve been with a team for five years. But the salary cap is still there, the wording exactly the same as it was the time before this, and the time before that.
Tom sits back in his seat. He doesn’t have to read the rest of the document to know that they’ll reject it. One his left, Fehr is making angry hmmming noises, his eyes darting side to side over the pages. On his right, Cone is ripping off the cover page of his document. As Tom watches he cleans up an edge by tearing it against the table and starts folding, while the owner rep opposite him looks on in something like disdainful horror. Hershiser makes a quiet disapproving throat-clearing noise, but whether this is directed at Cone or at the owners, Tom can’t tell.
“Look, you guys know we aren’t going to accept this,” Fehr says, pushing at his hair with his fingers, trying to get it flop somewhere other than in his eyes.
Cone bends the nose of his paper airplane, carefully curving it up. He throws it in the air, straight across towards the nearest owner rep, but it soars up on a big arc and inscribes a vertical circle over the conference table, ending up right back in Cone’s hand. Fielder snorts, loudly and unconvincingly suppressing a laugh. Hershiser looks over at Tom in mute appeal, but Tom looks up at the ceiling. This is a serious meeting, a serious matter, and it shouldn’t be funny, but he’s having an awfully hard time keeping the smile off his face.
The head lawyer for the owners waits for this little drama to be over, then shuffles the papers in front of him loudly. “I think,” he says, “that we should really talk about this. The commissioner is talking about…”
“We’re already on strike,” Hershiser says. He lays a hand on the front cover of his packet. “Do you really think we care about what the commissioner is saying when we’re already on strike?”
The lawyer stiffens up in his suit, like he’s being starched from the inside out. “You should think about what you’re saying. This is your livelihood you’re talking about here. This is the livelihood of all professional ballplayers that you’re talking about here.”
“You think we don’t know that, huh?” Cone asks, idly twisting the nose of the airplane back and forth between his fingers. Tom glances at him and has to drag his eyes away; the sight of Cone’s fingers playing across paper as they do across stitches on a baseball is disturbingly compelling.
The lawyers and owner reps all glare across the table. Tom opens the packet again. It’s going to be a long meeting.
----
They’re in Cone’s hotel room, everyone just a little bit tired and a little bit drunk. It’s two in the morning, or maybe three, something in that vicinity. Tom’s watch is back in his own hotel room, and Cone has for some reason turned the bedside clock so that its face is down on the tabletop. Late, anyways.
Cone is there, of course, sprawled proprietarily across the bed. Tom, having come up from the bar with Cone, has possession of the big armchair next to the bed. Hershiser is sitting in the desk chair, turned around so that he can rest his forearms across the top of the chairback. Girardi is perched on the edge of the desk, tapping his heel against one of the table legs. Mussina is sitting on the floor, back to the wall and pretending to ignore everyone with his nose buried in a travel book of crosswords, although everyone knows perfectly well that he’s excited to get to hang out with the older players.
“You think they’re really gonna do it?” Girardi asks. Nobody has to ask what he means.
Cone scoots up the bed to lean against the headboard, shoving pillows out of the way. “Not like we’re giving them much of a choice.”
“They’re not giving us much of a choice,” Tom corrects. They’re not responsible for this, not really; it’s the owners who have forced them into it with their greed and their hubris and their collusion.
“You know how many years it’s been since I last spent a September not pitching?” Hershiser asks. Everyone looks around at him, Mussina even peeking over the edge of his book. Hershiser shrugs. “I don’t even know. Years and years.”
“You broke into the majors in ’83,” Tom says, then immediately turns bright red with embarrassment.
Hershiser smiles at him, but it’s more kind than mocking. Cone is making gagging noises from the bed, but Tom is getting much better at ignoring him through sheer force of habit.
“So ’83. But I was drafted in,“-- an infinitesimal pause-“ ’79. And before that, I was pitching for Bowling Green, little bit. And before that, in high school…”
“Back before the dawn of time, when dinosaurs roamed the earth,” Cone intones, doing a very passable imitation of a TV science show narrator. Mussina snickers and immediately drops his eyes back to his crossword.
“So at least since the mid-70s,” Hershiser finishes, also ignoring Cone with practiced ease. “Figure 19, 20 years.”
Everyone is silent for a moment, digesting that. Mussina is staring down at his book, but his eyes are bugging a little. Tom can’t really blame him: Hershiser has been pitching in a serious way for almost as long as Mussina has been alive. “And here we are,” Tom says quietly.
“Here we are,” Hershiser agrees.
Cone thumps a hand against the headboard. “Dammit, I didn’t play ball with Abner fucking Doubleday like four-eyes over here, but it’s been a a long fucking time for me too. I mean, when was the last time we even just tossed a ball around? In September, not playing ball, that’s fucked up.”
“We could,” Tom says. Everyone looks at him, Mussina again peeking from behind the crossword pages. “Well. We’re all here. We’ve got… I have my glove packed, anyways, I’m sure between the five of us we can find a couple of baseballs…” He trails off, but as soon as he’s said it it seems perfect. They can’t get a proper game going, not with four pitchers and one catcher, but they can certainly throw a ball around.
Everyone, as it turns out, has brought their glove and at least two balls with them, hopefully stashed at the bottoms of suitcases, balls wrapped in socks, gloves wiped in neatsfoot oil and stuffed in plastic bags so they don’t make everything else all greasy. Tom supposes he should have figured on that: everyone knew they weren’t going to be playing ball, not that kind of road trip, but what kind of ballplayer travels anywhere without his glove?
He briefly wonders if any of the position players brought along their bats, considers tracking down Molitor or Fielder or Jay Bell to ask, but it’s fine like this, just them. They’ve got everyone and everything they need. It’s good.
----
There are a bunch of empty conference rooms on the second floor, so they reconvene down there. Mussina moves the chairs and tables away to the sides of the room without being asked, which is good, because they were probably going the make him do it anyways.
“So, catcher, you gonna catch?” Cone asks, lazily flapping his glove at Girardi. Tom has never seen Cone wearing a glove off the field in person, and it’s weirdly captivating. Cone’s usual lazy grace looks almost dangerous with a glove, like that attitude has a new and deadly sense of purpose.
Girardi makes a face. “Uh uh. Don’t think so. Four pitchers, one catcher? That’s practically a baseball gangbang.”
Mussina has a violent and embarrassed coughing fit at this. “Oh for god’s sake…” Hershiser mutters, going over to pound him on the back.
“The room’s big enough,” Tom says. “Five-man around-the-horn? Unless someone has a better idea.”
Nobody has any better ideas, so five-man around-the-horn it is. They arrange themselves in a loose pentagon about the room and snap the ball around to each other like they’re between innings in a game they’re all starting.
Tom fumbles the ball a few times early on, a deeply mortifying thing, but a couple cycles later Girardi drops it, and a few throws after that Cone throws the ball low, forcing Hershiser to field it like a shortstop. It’s been too long for Tom. It’s been too long for all of them.
There’s some chatter, especially from Mussina and Hershiser, who both manage to field the ball perfectly every time it comes around to them, but as they keep throwing and everyone gets into the rhythm of it, they quiet down. Soon enough the only sounds in the room are the solid thock of a baseball into the pocket of a well-cared-for glove, the shifting of sneakers over hotel carpeting, easy breathing, the tiny but distinct noise a baseball makes when its leather hide is pushed off of callused fingertips.
As they warm up to it, the mistakes get fewer and farther between. They start snapping the ball harder, more quickly, grinning at each other like idiots. Tom’s arm loosens up so beautifully that he can’t believe he hadn’t really noticed it was tight before.
The carpeting has a truly hideous swirly pattern in brick red and dirty yellow on it. The wallpaper is one of those subtle stripes that was probably designed to be soothing but actually isn’t. The chairs and long tables are pushed up against the walls in a messy jumble. It’s maybe the least baseball-like environment imaginable, but Hershiser’s mixing in pitches that slide now, Mussina is beaming nonstop, Girardi is firing the ball around like it’s the bottom of the 9th, Cone keeps trying to fake them out with screwballs, and for just a little while, the hole in Tom’s heart where baseball goes is perfectly filled.
----
They get a couple more weeks of negotiation, September wearing inexorably on. When they fail to reach an agreement with the owners, Bud Selig, acting commissioner of Major League Baseball, regretfully informs the public that the World Series is cancelled.
“Regretfully!” Cone snorts. “Shit, I’m glad he’s not doing it gleefully.”
Tom nudges him sharply in the ribs. They’re at the press conference; sitting in the back, true, but still, people can probably hear them.
Cone snorts again, not much more quietly. Tom catches a whiff of something sharp and boozey on Cone’s breath. It’s not even lunchtime yet, and normally Cone wouldn’t… but this is it, this is the official cancellation of the season. Normally doesn’t mean a whole hell of a lot, right now.
“So much for back on the field in a couple of weeks,” Tom mutters, trying to direct his voice out the corner of his mouth.
“Yeah. God.” Cone slouches down in his seat a little. Everyone’s looking at the podium, at Selig, but all they’d have to do is turn around to see Cone, one of the faces of the players union, for God’s sake, squinting angrily up through the rows of heads bent over notebooks, listing a tiny bit in his seat. He doesn’t look drunk, but he also doesn’t look particularly sober. Tom wants to cover him with a jacket, hide him from the reporters and the world.
“Nineteen-oh-four,” Mussina says, very softly, sitting on Tom’s other side. Tom puts a hand on Cone’s arm to keep him from leaning any further and glances over at Mussina. Mussina shrugs one shoulder, eyes on the podium. “That’s the last time they had to cancel a World Series. Not since 1904.”
“Christ,” Cone mutters thickly. “Go Team Us.”
No World Series. No rest of the season. Not now, maybe not ever. Tom tries to imagine it, to wrap his mind around the idea of it, but he can’t. Every time he tries to really think, that was it, the last season of Major League Baseball, his brain skitters away, circles around, refuses to look at it head-on. It’s monstrous; it’s impossible.
It’s our fault, and no, no, he can’t even begin to go there, not now, probably not ever.
He sneaks his hand around Cone’s arm until he’s got a solid grip, right around his bicep. He tugs lightly. “C’mon, we better get you back to the hotel before the presser ends and you have to talk to the media.”
“Oh, but I want to talk to the media. Right now, right now I really want to talk to the media.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Tom says, tugging harder and rolling his eyes for Mussina’s benefit. “We’ll see you back there.”
Mussina nods. He doesn’t shift his eyes away from the podium. It’s probably just the harsh TV lights, patchy this far back and partly blocked by the crowd, that make his face look older than Tom’s ever seen it look before.
Outside, Cone doesn’t stumble, but he weaves around the sidewalk enough to make Tom grab for his arm again. He’s never seen someone wander around like that while walking like he’s sober, but then again he’s never seen Cone this drunk before.
“Never seen you this drunk before,” he mutters, because he can’t think of anything to do, aside from stating the obvious.
“Special occasion, ace,” Cone says, slipping his arm out of Tom’s grip and walking, perfectly upright, into the side door of a parked car.
On to Part 2.
Strike out looking.
Tom Glavine/David Cone
rated R
18,489 words.
Story notes can be found here, but they are meant to be read after you have read the fic. They're, like, endnotes. There are pictures.
Beta by the incomparable ninastasia. She is a fucking hero who battled through my many, many words many, many times and who fearlessly told me when I was having my boys say stupid things, or when I was telling where I should be showing, or when things just needed to be cut. Any and all remaining mistakes are mine alone; if you, the reader, see anything that you think needs concrit, please do not hesitate to say so!
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. It is in no way a reflection on the actual life, behavior, or character of any of the people featured, and there are no connections or affiliations between this fictional story and the people or organizations it mentions. It was not written with any intent to slander or defame any of the people featured. No profit has been or ever will be made as a result of this story: it is solely for entertainment. And again, it is entirely fictional, i.e. not true.
Strike out looking.
It was an evening home game: a solid, uncomplicated win over the Rockies that kept them nice and easy on top of the division. It wasn’t his start-it was Merck that night-so he just relaxed on the bench, idly dissected Merck’s delivery with Smoltz for the hundredth time, teasing Javy about his pitch calling every half inning. It was a hot night, mid 80s, but that wasn’t anything remarkable in Atlanta in June.
He walked in the door and smiled at Carri, who had waited up for him, which she sometimes did if the game didn’t run too late. She kissed him, just hard enough to drive him crazy, and pulled back a little to say, “Don called.”
“OK,” Tom agreed. “Don called.” He kissed the side of her neck, already thinking about where he could kiss her next.
Laughing, she leaned back and got her hands around either side of his face, holding him in place. “Don called. He sounded upset. He wanted you to call back right away.”
“It’s late. It can wait until tomorrow.”
“Tom, he said as soon as you got home.” She kissed him on the tip of the nose and executed the little wriggle and twist that somehow always got her out of his hands no matter how tightly he was hugging her. She was still been smiling playfully at him, which was just plain old unfair.
But Fehr must have sounded really upset, for her to insist, so Tom sighed and went into the kitchen, sat down next to the phone. There were phone numbers taped up on an oversized index card next to it: his parents, hers, the ballpark family emergency line, the kids’ school office, the pediatrician’s office, and Donald Fehr.
Fehr picked up on the first ring. “The bastards are doing it,” he said, before Tom could even get out a ‘hello’. “The bastards are actually gonna do it.”
And Tom knew why Carri had insisted he call right away, because Don sounded furious, but happy-furious, predatory, the kind of furious that was gearing up for a huge fight. The kind of furious that enjoyed a huge fight. God help them all, but Fehr did love a good fight, and they’d been angling towards this one ever since the words ’salary cap’ had first been uttered way back in January.
“What’s the damage?” Tom asked.
“No salary arbitration. Six-year free agency knocked down to four, and the bastards can keep a player on if he’s a four or five-year guy and they match his best offer. Can you even fuckin’ believe that? And the revenue-sharing, of course, and the fucking salary cap.”
That was when Tom started to realize the kind of trouble they were in, because that was-god, it was so much more than he’d been expecting, that was everything, that was such a violation of player rights that he was stunned to hear it, right there in his kitchen, sitting there with his mouth hanging open in amazement.
“I know,” Fehr said, more softly, apparently in response to the silence. “Trust me when I say I know.”
“We can’t…” Tom started, then stopped. We can’t let them do this was what he had meant to say, but he didn’t finish the thought, because what could they do?
----
There are meetings, of course there are meetings, there are always meetings. It’s the middle of June, middle of the season, not everyone can get away on the same days. There’s no way to get all the team reps together in the same room to talk it over, so Fehr does it in bits and pieces and informs each group of what the others said as best he can. It’s not easy, Tom knows, and he does appreciate it, remembering all over again why they have Fehr in charge of this massive organization.
In July Fehr calls him and tells him that he’s going to have to spend his next off-day in New York, because it’s union business and it’s too important to do over the phone. Tom assumes that he’ll be with whatever number of player reps share the off-day, but when he gets to the cheap offices the MLBPA rents in the middle of a bland New York skyscraper, he finds himself ushered into a room with only one other guy in it.
It takes him a minute, because the other guy has aged fast, his face a lot narrower than it was the last time Tom had seen him, the marks digging in under his eyes more pronounced. Eventually he realizes that it’s David Cone, no longer a Met and showing that American League wear more than Tom had expected. The last time he saw Cone, the Blue Jays were jumping all over each other, celebrating a World Series while the Braves slunk off the field.
“Hey,” he says, but he’s already hesitated long enough to make it obvious that he didn’t recognize Cone right off. Just long enough to make it obvious he hadn’t forgotten the ’92 Series. Just long enough to make it awkward.
Cone cements it by inclining his head towards Tom with a sardonic smile. Tom doesn’t do sardonic himself, not really, but he’s never had a problem recognizing it on other people, seeing it for the wordless rebuke it often really is. He also notices, way too slow, that Cone is wearing a collared shirt and suit pants, his jacket stretched across the back of his chair. Tom is wearing a t-shirt and jeans, and his hair is longer than Cone’s, curling against the back of his neck. He sits down across from Cone, keeping his eyes on the table, feeling guilty although, really, it’s not like anyone told him this was a formal kind of thing.
They sit in dense silence like that for another few minutes until Fehr bursts through the door. He’s wearing a rumpled t-shirt in an offensively loud print, and his hair is flopping down over his forehead like usual. Next to him, Cone looks practically military, and Tom immediately feels better.
Fehr dumps an armful of folders onto the table between the two of them and rubs his hands together briskly. “OK, so, you guys have been real active in the union and you’ve shown a lot of dedication to the cause and yadda yadda. You’re the new league reps. It doesn’t really mean anything except that you’re the new league reps.”
Tom’s already nodding, smiling at Fehr, he’s very thankful for the recognition, but Cone pokes a finger at the mass of files. “What’s all this?”
“These are the details of the new owner proposals.” Fehr flips a few open until he finds the one he wants, pulling papers out with medical precision, eviscerating and laying them out in order. “Elimination of the arbitration process. Adjustments to the free agency system. Alleged impact to salary.” He taps each one as he mentions it. “Salary cap.” This one he grabs and scans with a look of disgust before tossing it back down on the table. Cone reaches over the discarded files and picks it up, reading it more carefully.
“What do we have to do?” Tom asks. The union isn’t going to agree to the proposal. He doesn’t have to read the details on the papers to know that. “I mean us, me and Mr. Cone.” Cone looks up from the paper in disbelief, silently mouthing, Mr. Cone?, but Tom ignores him, because Fehr is not exactly meeting his eyes.
“Why designate new league reps right now?” Tom asks, leaning forward, trying to catch Fehr’s eye, but even as he asks he realizes the answer. He sits back slowly. “Ah.”
Cone is still holding the paper, half of his attention on the information it contains, but he glances up at Tom again. “Ah, what?” He follows Tom’s gaze to Fehr, then looks back.
“Media,” Tom says softly.
“The union has to have a face for the people, the fans.” Fehr sounds a little defensive, a little defiant. “Someone they can look to for, whatever, quotes on this. Someone to tell them what’s going on. Someone they can trust. It’s no good having different guys talking to them all the time, it just confuses things and makes it hard to connect. Public opinion, boys.”
Cone finally puts the paper down. “And, what, we were the most trustworthy-looking faces out there?” Fehr shrugs. “What about, what about someone like Molitor? Hershiser?”
“Hershiser’s on the executive committee, you’ll be working plenty with him. Molitor…” Fehr rubs the back of his neck and shrugs again. “He’s a good guy, and I’m glad he’s a rep, and I’m glad he’s on the negotiating committee, but he just doesn’t do media so hot all the time.” He makes a face. “Hitter thing.”
Which, well, sure. Pitchers are traditionally better at this kind of thing; it’s one of those baseball constants that has no real reason to persist, but does anyways.
Cone’s not a dumb guy, and he gets it fast enough. “So we’re, what? The sacrificial lambs? Throw us to the fucking wolves?”
“Someone has to do it,” Fehr says. “Someone always does.”
----
They reject the salary cap. They reject the proposal. They know they won’t get help from the Senate Judiciary committee, not that anyone put much stock in that to begin with. They put a date on it.
Fehr stands at a podium, looking flabby-cheeked and pale in the harsh video camera lights. “If the owners are not willing to back down on these issues and to address our concerns, it is my unfortunate duty to announce that the players will be going on strike, effective August 12.” The noise in the room swells as every reporter there starts trying to ask questions all at once.
Tom, sitting at home and watching on TV, can’t stop himself from wincing in sympathy. Carri rubs his arm until the phone rings and she gets up to answer it. After a moment she waves Tom into the kitchen and hands him the receiver.
It’s Cone, sounding tense. “We’re really in for it now,” he says.
“I guess so.” Tom leans against the kitchen wall, watching the TV across the living room, where Fehr is patiently answering questions. He idly wonders why Cone would call him, some guy he barely knows, some Brave he used to pitch against, and not one of his own teammates.
“We’re really in for it,” Cone repeats. “You and me, Glav.”
“We’re all of us in for it. Everyone in the league,” Tom gently corrects, although he knows what Cone means. They’re all in for it, for the duration, but he and Cone are really in for it, because they’re about to become the faces that the fans see whenever they think about the strike.
“You think we’ll actually do it?”
Tom looks down. It’s just his kitchen floor down there, the same floor that he’s seen for eight years now. Linoleum, yellow and white, stubborn dust and crumbs along the seam where it meets the wall, even though Carri is pretty obsessive about vacuuming and mopping. The only way they could ever get those crumbs would be to rip up the whole floor and clean it all out. And no sane person would ever do that, not unless the crumbs were becoming so poisonous that they had to be taken out, or the kitchen would become completely uninhabitable.
People will say it’s about the money, but it’s not, at least not so far as Tom is concerned. It wasn’t all that long ago that baseball players were hardly better than slaves under the owners. Things have changed since they unionized, since free agency began, but baseball contracts still restrict what a player can do with his own body, because in some ways it’s still the team’s body. Even the smallest step backwards could be the start of that dreaded slippery slope. Tom would be going into this exact same fight regardless of what the league average salary was. It’s the principle… no, it’s the owners screwing over the players, putting the bottom line first, company over team. It’s about fighting back for baseball itself, the game against the corporation.
Of course Tom likes money, but he believes in baseball.
Which is a big part of why Fehr named him the NL representative. He’s spent some time, in the past few days, wondering what made Cone the man for the AL position.
“We’ll do it. If they don’t compromise, we’ll do it.”
“I keep hoping I’ll hear something different.” Cone sighs, just a little. “But it sure doesn’t look like they’re gonna back down, huh? Not so easy.”
“Not so easy. No.”
“I picked a bad year to have a good year,” Cone says, and finally Tom has to smile to himself. A little reluctantly, because he’s not so sure he even likes Cone as a person much, but they are going to be working together, and Cone is audibly making an effort. Meeting him halfway is the least Tom can do.
“It’ll probably only be a few days. Maybe a couple weeks. Once they see we’re serious, it should straighten out pretty fast.” He means to say it to reassure Cone, who really is having kind of an amazing season, but as soon as the words are out of his mouth he wonders who he’s actually trying to convince. He believes it, he does; he doesn’t see how it could be otherwise. It’s the only outcome that makes any sense. They’ll lose a few weeks from the season at most.
He looks back out into the living room, where Fehr is still fending off questions from reporters, the word strike on his lips seemingly every time he opens his mouth, almost obscene, and it wouldn’t make sense for the cold feeling stealing over his body to be fear, but maybe it wouldn’t make sense for it to be anything else.
----
It’s not as though they announce the strike and suddenly they’re striking; they announce the strike in advance. Well, they have to. The delay between the announcement and the actual beginning of the strike is supposed to give them time to negotiate and, if all goes well, avoid the strike entirely. The date of the strike is really just a deadline for talks with the owners. Fehr is still talking about the rest of the season like he’s fairly certain it’s going to happen, and regardless of whether or not the strike actually goes off, they still have a number of games to play before the announced date.
Tom’s thankful that he doesn’t have to pitch the first game after the strike announcement, because he’s up the whole night before, fielding calls from reporters, then family and friends. He doesn’t tell them anything that Fehr hasn’t already said, but they keep calling, looking for something. Reassurance, he assumes, so that’s what he gives them. The same stuff he told Cone; the same stuff he’s telling himself.
When he gets to the clubhouse before the game, it’s more of the same. Guys crowd around his locker and want to know what the hell is going on. As a player rep it’s Tom’s job to relay as much information to his team as he can, something he takes very seriously (these guys trusted him enough to nominate him, after all, they have faith in his abilities, and he knows it’s an honor), but they want details, specifics, and he doesn’t really have much to give them.
Most of the younger players wander off after Tom repeats the same story two or three times, but the older players are not so easily moved. Fred McGriff especially won’t give up, leaving to get his glove and coming right back, pulling a stool over right in front of Tom’s, untying and retying all his glove laces.
“You guys know this ain’t gonna go on long, right?” he says, his voice twitching up at the end with a kind of hopefulness. “I mean, you cats got some information, right, the owners ain’t as stubborn as they’re makin’ it out to be, right?”
Tom shrugs one shoulder, wishing he could reach into his locker and dig his glove out for maintenance, just something to do, but he’s not getting into the game today.
McGriff leans forward, speaking in a low, urgent voice. “It really ain’t gonna be more’n a few days, right? Once they see we’re actually gonna strike an’ it ain’t just words, right?”
“Yeah. That’s the thinking.”
“Well, it can’t be more’n that, right?”
“Sure,” Tom says. “I mean, technically. Of course it can be, it can be as long as we make it, but I can’t imagine…” he trails off, thinking of the pale determined clench of Fehr’s jaw when he gets his mind set on something. He can’t imagine, really, or maybe he just doesn’t want to try.
McGriff sits back, probably realizing that that’s as good an answer as he’s going to get from Tom today. He tugs down the last of his glove’s laces and punches the pocket a few times, making the leather pop.
“Dunno what I’d do,” he says. He doesn’t have to say anything else, because it’s the same for Tom, the same for all of them. What I’d do without baseball, that’s the rest of it, but nobody has to tell anyone else that some things are better left unsaid.
Tom falls asleep in the dugout in the 6th inning, but it’s fine. Nobody even wakes him up until the top of the 9th, and then it’s just Cox telling him that he may as well get into the clubhouse now if he’s gonna bum around on the bench. Avery’s on a roll, and they don’t even have to go to the bullpen to finish the game.
----
He tries to catch up on sleep the next night, he really does, but the phone calls don’t stop. Most of the reporters have found out that he’s taking his new union role seriously, willing to answer the phone, and they’re all looking for quotes. He doesn’t want to give anyone a reason to write something bad about him, so he tries very hard to give a quote to every reporter who calls.
The owners are trying to take us back to the days when ballplayers were hardly better than cattle, and we won’t go back to that,
and
Of course this isn’t sudden, not at all, not to us. We knew it might come to this. We hoped it wouldn’t, but we knew it might,
and
Everyone in the union voted, so it’s not like this was something decided at the top without anyone having their fair say. This is what we all decided together was the best possible course of action,
and
Nobody wants a strike, none of us do, but we’d rather strike than let baseball go where the owners are trying to take it,
and on and on.
By 4 am he’s shaking from exhaustion, hunched over a glass of bourbon. It’s just something to keep him calm, and he’s at his most alert when the warm burn down the back of his throat wakes him up a little. Carri's been in bed for hours. She tried to stay up with him, then tried begging him to come to bed, to ignore the phone, but he can’t. He’s the league rep. His eyes are closing of their own accord, but when the phone rings again, he picks it up and says hello.
“Thought so,” says a rough voice. “Take your fucking phone off the hook and go to bed.”
He blinks into the bourbon, his own reflection squiggled back at him. Everything sounds kind of fuzzy, cotton in his ears, but. “Cone?”
“I kept seeing stories. On the AP wire, there’s new stuff coming out, new quotes, and I thought, that fucker better not still be up, and sure enough I call and you are.”
“I. What are you doing up watching the presswire?”
Cone laughs, a short bark. “Same thing you are, fucker. Difference is, I’m not pitching tomorrow.”
“Right.” Tom puts his head down on the table, keeping the headset pressed to his ear with one hand. The tablecloth smells faintly of lemons and pine, whatever Carri uses to clean it, and the plasticky weave is cool under his cheek.
“Go to bed.”
Tom starts to protest, he can’t, he just can’t, but Cone talks right over him. “There’s two of us for a reason, if someone wants a soundbite they can call me as well’s they can call you, and it’s 3 in the fuckin’ morning.”
“Four.”
“Really?” There’s a pause while Cone presumably checks the time, then a low whistle that somehow sounds as tired as Tom feels. “Shit, it is. When did that happen? Never mind, that’s not the point.”
Tom smiles in spite of himself, eyes closed. “Was there a point?”
Another short chuckle, raspy with lack of sleep, and then Cone lowers his voice, talking quiet and close to the receiver, right in Tom’s ear. “You don’t help anyone by being too tired to pitch. OK? Go to bed, ace.”
Tom can’t remember the last time anyone sincerely called him ‘ace’, not on this staff with Maddux and Smoltz, but it doesn’t sound insincere from Cone. He probably can’t even lie at this level of exhaustion; Tom’s pretty sure he couldn’t. It’s all he can do to make his mouth fit properly around the truth, and the truth is just what is, it’s nothing he has to invent on his own.
He doesn’t remember what he mumbles to Cone, but it probably amounted to something like ‘thanks’, or maybe just ‘good night’.
It’s only later that he stops to wonder why Cone, indisputable ace but a hundred percent AL now, even knew he was pitching the next day.
----
It’s 95, 100 degrees in the ballpark, what they call real Atlanta heat. It should be an advantage because they’re used to it and the Phillies aren’t, or at least that’s what the radio guys say and what the team tries to believe.
The brim of his cap soaks up sweat for the first couple of innings, but then it gets saturated. It sits heavy on his forehead and sweat drips down into his eyes no matter how many times he steps off the mound to try and wipe it away. The hair at the back of his neck curls crazily in the heat, sticking close to his skin. Every pitch he throws makes the collar of his jersey drag in the sweat, driving him crazy in tiny pieces.
He comes out of the 4th shaky. Every time one of the Phillies gets on the basepaths Tom has to throw from the stretch, his rhythm all fucked up and everything blurry at the edges. Cox takes one look at him when he gets to the dugout and immediately turns to the trainer, who nods and trip-runs down the steps to the clubhouse much faster in his sneakers than any of the guys can in their spikes.
Javy sits down next to him, unbuckling his shin guards. It must be a bad day to be a catcher, this heat. Tom sticks his pitching arm in the sleeve of a jacket when he’s not on the field even in July, but today the very thought of it makes him breathe fast, fighting nausea.
“OK?” Javy asks, in that quiet directed voice he uses with his pitchers, his for-your-ears-only voice.
“Yeah, OK,” Tom says. He sounds thready and unreliable even to himself. Fehr’s announcement was only a couple of days ago, surely he shouldn’t be this wrecked already, but Tom has never had much tolerance for sleep deprivation. In the minors he was almost always the guy first back at the motel, needing his 7 hours at least.
The trainer comes back with an old Gatorade bottle half full of water, the rest blocked up with ice. Tom takes it and presses it against his forehead, letting his eyes fall shut. The ice is so cold that he almost can’t feel it, fresh from the freezer and not melted yet, although that won’t take long.
He opens his eyes when Javy knocks his knee against Tom’s. “Hand,” Javy mutters, looking vaguely out at the field. Tom gives Javy his hand without thinking about it, and Javy slips something into his palm so fast he can’t see it, registering the slick slide of another palm against his own only after it’s already gone.
Pretending to yawn, bringing his palm to his mouth, it’s the oldest trick in the book, except for maybe the spitball. It would be so easy for a catcher to kill his pitcher this way, he thinks, chasing the pills down with the water without looking at them, because what pitcher would stop to check out something his catcher had given him? No pitcher on a winning team, that’s sure enough.
Of course Javy isn’t trying to murder him, and neither is the trainer, who slipped the pills to Javy in the first place, probably when he brought Tom the water. The greenies will take a little while to kick in, but his team’s got his back, fighting Schilling for every pitch of every at-bat, giving him extra time. Schilling has almost as much hair as Tom does, curling everywhere under his hat, but his is bright blonde instead of water-logged black. He knows he should watch, but the sun behind Schilling’s head today is more than Tom can take.
He’s just beginning to feel the effects of the greenies when he takes the mound for the 5th inning. He strikes out two Phillies, 1-2-3, 1-2-3. The greenies are really hitting his bloodstream now, and the heat feels like it’s jittering at the back of his neck. Things look less blurry, which is definitely an improvement. He can actually see the signs Javy is putting down. He doesn’t feel precisely like an ace, but at least he feels a lot more like himself.
There are 12 days left until the proposed strike date. He can do this.
----
The reporter from the New York Times wants to know if he’s personally talked to the owners’ representation. The reporter from the Wall Street Journal wants to know if he’s considered the impact of a potential strike on the paychecks of the youngest, lowest-salaried ballplayers. The reporter from the Washington Post wants to know what percentage of ballplayers were in favor of the strike. The reporter from the Atlanta Journal Constitution wants to know if his pitching is being affected by union business.
Of course it is! Tom wants to scream. It’s midnight and you’re calling me asking this, what do you think?!
“It’s not a problem at all,” he says. “On the field is on the field, off the field is off the field. I never even think about it when I’m on the mound. I’m sure any other ballplayer would tell you the same.”
----
The night of Cone’s first start since they announced the strike is right in the middle of Tom’s off-time-another Merck start. They lose fast and nasty to the Mets, so fast that when Tom gets back to the hotel and turns on the TV, he finds the Royals game still going and Cone still pitching.
It’s something else, watching Cone pitch. Tom has been around baseball long enough, he can usually tell what a pitcher is about to throw, but with Cone he sometimes has no idea. Tom himself has a lot of pitches: his bread-and-butter pitches, the four-seamer and the change; a curve when he needs it; a slider if he feels good about it; a two-seamer that trails off like a pretty little afterthought. Cone, though, he’s no bread-and-butter kind of guy. He throws everything: two-seam, four-seam, splitter, curve. He throws change-ups and sliders and pitches that people call screwballs with a what-can-you-do shrug, because they aren’t really screwballs, but who knows what they really are.
He’s small on the hotel TV, a little fuzzy in RGB resolution, but Tom can still see the ball dancing in on the batters, sailing up, diving down at the last possible second. He keeps looking for a knuckleball, but it must be the only thing that Cone doesn’t throw.
It seems impossible that the A’s have gotten four runs off of him, but that’s what the network graphics say. Mark McGwire steps up to the plate, hulking and huge about the shoulders in a way most hitters in the NL just aren’t, and upon reflection Tom decides that maybe it’s not so crazy after all.
After the game he waits a decent amount of time before calling. The Royals are at home, so it’s perfectly possible that Cone has plans of some sort-a bar out with the guys, a night in with a groupie or two, whatever it is that he usually does after pitching 8 innings and getting a win. And it’s not like Tom has anything in particular to talk about-they probably discussed everything that it was possible to discuss about the latest strike-related developments during Fehr’s last union-wide conference call.
So when Cone picks up right away and says hi, Tom is temporarily at a loss. He expected… he’s not quite sure what he expected. For Cone to not pick up, apparently.
Cone waits for a moment, then inhales sharply. “Hey, is everything OK? The owners didn’t…”
“No! God, no, nothing happened.” Tom winces, glad that he’s alone in his hotel room. “I just… wait, how did you even know it was me?”
“Caller ID, ace. Who else is gonna be calling me from the ballplayer hotel in New York?”
“Right.” Of course. Perhaps he could just sputter pointlessly down the line for a few minutes.
There’s another pause, Cone probably politely waiting to see if he actually has anything to say. When it evidently becomes clear that he doesn’t, Cone just starts talking about the A’s. About what it’s like to face McGwire, and did you ever? (Tom hasn’t, of course, and shudders a little to think of it.) About Steinbach, the catcher, a union guy and member of the negotiating committee, what a wry sense of humor he has. Cone tells him about hunkering down on a single bed in a Kansas City hotel room with Steinbach and the other A’s rep, Mike Bordick, all three of them trying to stay close to the speakerphone so that they can be in on the union conference call, way too much ballplayer on one bed, Cone at one point shifting too quickly and falling right off the side, straight down to the floor, thankfully landing on his left shoulder.
Tom ends up telling him about the Atlanta hotel where the Phillies were staying, going up to meet Schilling so they could help cut down the number of phones involved in the conference call, Schilling’s unbelievable excitement at getting to sit in on the executive league rep meeting, even though Tom told him at least three times that it wasn’t really any different from the regular meetings. Of course Cone was there-in Kansas City, but there in telephonic spirit-but nobody else gets excited about a thing like that the same way Schilling does.
“How much’ve you talked to that kid?” Cone asks. “I swear to God it’s his life’s goal to put as many people as he possibly can in a position where they have to sit and listen to him flap his jaw. Can you imagine him as Commish?” He pauses while Tom laughs in a horrified kind of way. “Executive rep meeting, to you and me and sane people, it’s just a boring thing to get our shit straight before we talk to the rest of the union. To a crazy fucker like Schilling, it’s probably like getting admitted to a top secret government society.”
Tom laughs helplessly, almost bent double over the phone. He’s still not sure why he called Cone in the first place-he certainly wasn’t expecting this, or anything at all-but it’s OK now that Cone’s got them going. It’s good. He feels better, more grounded, somehow, without even having realized that he was feeling adrift.
----
Cincinnati is a lot cooler than Atlanta, but Tom’s head still fuzzes on the field with lack of sleep, too much to think about, too much information or not maybe not enough, something. Javy comes trotting out to the mound after Tom shakes him off for the fourth time in a single at-bat.
“What’s up, ‘migo?” Javy asks, curving an arm around Tom’s waist.
“Nothing. I.” Tom closes his eyes and takes a deep breath, concentrating on Javy’s arm, trying to block out everything except for the warm weight across the small of his back, the gentle press of Javy’s catcher’s mitt against his side. It helps, a little.
When he opens his eyes again he finds Javy peering closely at him. “You need…?”
He thinks about it. A couple of greenies would sharpen him up, for sure, and he should be sharp out here. That’s what they pay him for; it’s his responsibility to the team, just like it’s his responsibility to his fellow players to be as sharp and alert as he can during union negotiations. The problem is that he already took a couple of greenies, two hours before the game started, and he never takes more than two at a time.
He opens his mouth to tell Javy that he already took some, that he’ll make do as best he can out here, and finds himself saying, “Yeah, maybe I should.”
Javy clenches his hand inside his glove momentarily, loosely closing around Tom’s hip in a reassuring squeeze before letting go. “OK. We strike this pendejo out, get back to dugout, we get you some before next inning, vale?”
Tom nods. Javy gives him a bracing smack on the ass with his glove and lopes back towards the plate, where Bret Boone is tapping his bat against his cleats impatiently. Terry Pendleton comes over from third and picks up the rosin bag, squishing it to make the white dust curl up between his fingers.
Tom waits for him to throw the bag down and go back to third, but instead Pendleton edges up the side of the mound. He cocks his head at Tom and closes one eye, which, Tom knows from several years’ experience, is what he always does when he’s carefully examining something.
“Look like shit, man,” Pendleton says, still squeezing the rosin bag.
“Thanks, Terry. That’s very helpful.”
Pendleton shrugs. “Just sayin’.” He lets the bag roll off his fingers, and it lands with a dead thump on the backside of the mound.
Tom strikes Boone out, although he has to concentrate so hard on Javy to get it done that the base of his skull is throbbing, afterimages of the pocket of Javy's mitt burned into the backs of his retinas. He stumbles over the place where the infield grass gives way to dirt on his way back to the dugout and it's only Pendleton's quick infielder hands, grabbing him by the back of the belt, that keep him from falling. Pendleton doesn't let go of him until he's safely deposited on the bench.
Javy comes over with his hand cupped in a careful loose fist. Tom is so, so happy to see him, to see the two or three of him that waver into and out of each other as they approach. "You sure he should be takin' that shit?" Pendleton asks. "He really don't look so good."
"He say he want to." Javy looks down at Tom dubiously. Tom looks back up at him as steadily as he can. He's fine, he's really fine, he's just a little tired. He just needs a little boost to keep him in the game.
Pendleton shrugs again and wanders off to the other end of the dugout, where the rest of the infielders are. Under better circumstances Tom would appreciate his concern, probably, but right now he just needs to get through this game. He just needs to do his job.
Javy sits on the bench next to him. "Hand," he mutters, looking in the opposite direction, and Tom offers up his palm.
----
Cone loses his last start, five days before the strike date. Tom loses his last start, two days before the strike date.
"No big deal," Cone says. It's the night before the strike, August 11. Cone is in Kansas City, and Tom is in the team hotel in Denver, just a little bit drunk off their last win, 13 to 0, Maddux going the full nine innings, the way that the post-game alcohol (all of it on the bullpen's dollar, which is what a complete game from the starter will get them) hits him harder than usual this high above sea-level. Tomorrow they'll both be in New York City, along with Fehr and most of the other player reps. "No big deal. We'll be back before we know it."
"What if we aren't?"
Cone snorts. "Oh, c'mon. Nobody's gonna let it get too bad. It's all just a bunch of beatin' our chests like gorillas at each other 'til we all understand that everyone's serious."
"What if that was the last game of baseball you ever got to play?" Tom is, maybe, more drunk than he should be. "What if this, this strike, it killed the league. I know it won't, I know, but what if. Just, what if."
There's silence on the other end of the phone for a long while, so long that Tom starts to wonder if Cone has hung up, but of course not, there's no dial tone, and if he listens really carefully he can hear breathing that isn't his. Eventually Cone sighs. "I don't know. Woulda liked to win my last one, I guess. I'd have to... we'd all have to just. Do something else."
"I used to think I could, I don't know. My dad does construction, I could have done that. I'd be at home every night for Carri and the kids. Work for my dad, bring the kids up Red Sox fans. I've traded everything," Tom says. "It's like. Sometimes I think. Everything that I love, for this one thing."
"Yeah," Cone says, quietly. "Yeah, but it's a pretty big thing."
"The biggest," Tom agrees.
There isn't really much else to say, after that. They sit for another minute in silence, the hotel room lurching around Tom in fits and starts, everything slowed down with the air too thin. He'd really like a greenie, just to counteract the depressive edge of the alcohol, but the trainer has them all. He has to remind himself to get some before he goes to New York.
"I'll see you tomorrow, right?" Cone eventually asks.
"Yeah. ‘Course. Wouldn't miss it, wouldn't miss it for the world."
"The big day." He can't see Cone's sardonic grin over the phone, but he can picture it. "The start of the early end. Fehr's gonna be shitting himself all night."
"If the season ended today, you'd probably win the Cy Young," Tom says, fast and almost all in one breath. He has no idea where that came from-- it's not what he was planning to say, not at all-- but it's true. He's been checking the AL numbers in the paper, and there's nobody like Cone in that league, not this season.
"Yeah, well. The season ain't ending today, ace, so don't go slackin'. We'll be back on the field before you can say, 'sucks to be an Expo.'" There's a shuffling sound on Cone's end. "Look, I gotta go pack. I'll see you. Tomorrow, OK? I'll come find you when I check in."
"Sounds good," Tom says. And it does. It's all finally happening, the strike and the season stopping and it's only August, and he'll be in New York with guys who aren't his teammates, eating dinner at night with people who aren't his wife. Maybe it won't be quite so bad if there's someone looking to find him when he gets there.
----
They send Mike Mussina, the youngest player rep, out to meet him at the airport. He seems a little grumpy, which is odd, because the last few times Tom had met with him he'd seemed pleasant enough, if a bit distracted. Mussina shoulders Tom's bags in the luggage claim without even giving Tom a chance to pick them up. When he asks Mussina how many union guys he's picked up since he got here, Mussina mumbles, "Twelve," and looks even more surly.
Tom follows him out of the airport, smiling just a bit. It's somehow comforting to know that rookie hazing goes on even without the ballgames.
----
He wakes up the next morning to a knocking at his door that turns out, when he drags himself out of bed and squints blearily through the peephole, to be Cone. He opens the door and runs a hand backwards through his hair, knowing that this makes it stick up even more crazily, but he's somewhere far beyond caring right now. Cone is wearing a bright blue button-down shortsleeve shirt with his hair already post-shower damp and neatly combed.
“Please tell me,” Tom says, “that this isn’t official union business.”
Cone laughs. “This early? With the place full of lazy-ass ballplayers? Not likely. No, the hotel restaurant stops serving breakfast at 10, and it’s already 9:15. Just thought I’d come drag you down.”
“Coffee. Yes.”
“Thought so.” Cone makes a shooing motion with his hands. “Go stick your head under the shower for a minute or something, I ain’t carrying you if you fall asleep in the elevator.”
Tom cleans up fast and Cone leads the way to the elevator and then through the lobby. He snags a local newspaper and waves Tom up to the buffet while he sits and pages through it.
When Tom sits back down, Cone casually flips a fat section over to him. Tom manages to grab it half a second before it would have ended up in his cereal. It’s the New York Daily News, just the sports section.
The headline is, simply, the word WHINERS? in huge block letters over an equally huge photo of Orel Hershiser looking vaguely perplexed.
“Oh my god,” Tom mutters. He stares at the page in horror for a minute before he can bring himself to open the section and read the article.
Cone reaches across the table and steals a banana slice from his cereal bowl. “Yeah,” he says, “welcome to New York.”
----
They fall into a routine quickly enough. Cone comes by and knocks on Tom’s door every morning, which wakes him up. In a normal season he would wake up early on his own, without even an alarm, but he’s all screwed up, the weather still hot and no previous night’s-worth of baseball wearing him out.
“Would you even bother getting up if I didn’t come by?” Cone asks. “Or would you just sleep straight through ‘til, like, 2 pm?”
Tom shrugs.
They eat breakfast together every day. Cone complains about the coffee but always drinks it anyways. Often Hershiser joins them. Sometimes Jay Bell does, or Joe Girardi. Sometimes Cecil Fielder shows up, carrying over as many plates as he can at one time. Once they all stop treating him like a September call-up, sometimes Mussina sits with them, stealing the crossword out of the paper and filling it out in pen.
After a few weeks Tom is the only one who reads the sports sections of the New York newspapers every morning. There is always, always something there about the strike, usually on the front page, usually (if it’s the Post or the Daily News) with some sort of awful, inflammatory headline.
FEHR CALLS OWNERS CHEATERS
and
OWNERS CALL FEHR CHEATER
and
PLAYERS FOR PLAYERS: WHO’S FOR THE FANS?
It always gives him a kind of hot, sick, swooping feeling in the pit of his stomach when he opens the paper, and he knows he shouldn’t bother, no one else does, but he can’t help it. He has a duty to know what the people are saying. He has to know.
He goes back to his room to shower properly after breakfast, because he doesn’t like to keep Cone waiting beforehand. Then he checks in with Fehr to see what he needs to do that day. Sometimes they have meetings set up with owner representatives, or meetings within the union, various groups of player reps getting together to discuss the latest offers and news. Sometimes they have press conferences set up, and if it’s one of those days he knows he’ll be seeing Cone again soon, because he and Cone are still the faces Fehr wants in front of the cameras and microphones and tape recorders.
If it’s one of those days, Tom will sometimes dissolve a greenie in his morning cup of coffee. Just one, just to give him a little bit of a boost, just to keep him on the right side of alert. He’s fairly discreet about it; one thing he learned from Javy was how to properly palm a pill. Sometimes he thinks Hershiser notices and frowns at him, but Tom has seen Hershiser put Tabasco sauce in his own coffee and actually enjoy it, so he can’t really talk.
If Cone has noticed, he certainly hasn’t said anything. Sometimes, in the back rooms and hallways they all haunt right before press conferences, Tom is pretty sure he sees Cone drinking something out of a flask he keeps in his coat pocket. It’s none of his business, and it’s not like Cone is staggering around, seriously drunk in public, so he doesn’t see any reason to mention it.
Nights are the worst. They don’t usually have anything planned for them at night, so the younger guys will go out and do whatever it is that young ballplayers do at night in New York City. Most of the older guys go out too, probably, but Tom wouldn’t know. Tom usually sits in his room and looks over papers, contracts, legal documents five inches thick. He watches TV and misses the hell out of Carri, who’s certainly not going to leave Atlanta while the kids are in the midst of their summer camp rotation.
Sometimes he goes down to the hotel bar and has a few drinks. Sometimes he’s by himself. Sometimes Hershiser is there, and sometimes Cone is there too. Sometimes Schilling is there, and on those nights he leaves the bar as soon as he finishes his first drink, claiming exhaustion, because there aren’t enough drinks in the world to make talking to Schilling for an entire night survivable.
He can never sleep properly at night. It’s too loud in the city, no matter how well-sealed the hotel windows are, and it’s always been tough for him to sleep without Carri in his bed, home series always preferable to playing on the road. Most of the problem, though, is that he just doesn’t get tired out right during the day. He works out in the hotel gym as often as he can, but it’s not the same as pitching 7, 8, 9 innings, it’s not the same as sweating for 3 or 4 hours in a dugout with his team all around him. It’s not the same at all.
So he wakes up tired in the mornings, and coffee doesn’t quite cut it. He’s still got a good-sized supply of greenies, though. He won’t have to try to find more for quite a while yet.
----
Maybe it was naïve of him, but Tom thought they would be closer to a resolution by now. September’s just beginning, and they have a meeting with some of the owner reps and their lawyers. It’s a formal meeting, so Tom and Cone and Hershiser and Fielder are all in suits, even if their suits aren’t as severe as the ones worn by the owner reps. Fehr’s also dressed up for the occasion, although he manages to make even a basic suit look rumpled.
The owner rep lawyers start the meeting off with a long litany of legal jargon. Tom tried to pay close attention to this, in the first week, but he’s long since given up (That’s what we got Fehr for, ace, Cone had said) and these days just tries to not look too glassy-eyed. Hershiser and Fielder make similar efforts, but Cone doesn’t even bother to pretend, blatantly staring out the nearest window.
They work around to the pith of the meeting eventually. The lawyers produce a bunch of precisely stapled packets and pass them out. Tom flips past the cover page and bends over his copy, the room silent except for the shuffling of papers and the small sounds Hershiser makes as he wipes the lenses of his glasses carefully with a tissue.
The new proposed agreement takes a softer stance on arbitration and has a much more reasonably-worded policy on players who’ve been with a team for five years. But the salary cap is still there, the wording exactly the same as it was the time before this, and the time before that.
Tom sits back in his seat. He doesn’t have to read the rest of the document to know that they’ll reject it. One his left, Fehr is making angry hmmming noises, his eyes darting side to side over the pages. On his right, Cone is ripping off the cover page of his document. As Tom watches he cleans up an edge by tearing it against the table and starts folding, while the owner rep opposite him looks on in something like disdainful horror. Hershiser makes a quiet disapproving throat-clearing noise, but whether this is directed at Cone or at the owners, Tom can’t tell.
“Look, you guys know we aren’t going to accept this,” Fehr says, pushing at his hair with his fingers, trying to get it flop somewhere other than in his eyes.
Cone bends the nose of his paper airplane, carefully curving it up. He throws it in the air, straight across towards the nearest owner rep, but it soars up on a big arc and inscribes a vertical circle over the conference table, ending up right back in Cone’s hand. Fielder snorts, loudly and unconvincingly suppressing a laugh. Hershiser looks over at Tom in mute appeal, but Tom looks up at the ceiling. This is a serious meeting, a serious matter, and it shouldn’t be funny, but he’s having an awfully hard time keeping the smile off his face.
The head lawyer for the owners waits for this little drama to be over, then shuffles the papers in front of him loudly. “I think,” he says, “that we should really talk about this. The commissioner is talking about…”
“We’re already on strike,” Hershiser says. He lays a hand on the front cover of his packet. “Do you really think we care about what the commissioner is saying when we’re already on strike?”
The lawyer stiffens up in his suit, like he’s being starched from the inside out. “You should think about what you’re saying. This is your livelihood you’re talking about here. This is the livelihood of all professional ballplayers that you’re talking about here.”
“You think we don’t know that, huh?” Cone asks, idly twisting the nose of the airplane back and forth between his fingers. Tom glances at him and has to drag his eyes away; the sight of Cone’s fingers playing across paper as they do across stitches on a baseball is disturbingly compelling.
The lawyers and owner reps all glare across the table. Tom opens the packet again. It’s going to be a long meeting.
----
They’re in Cone’s hotel room, everyone just a little bit tired and a little bit drunk. It’s two in the morning, or maybe three, something in that vicinity. Tom’s watch is back in his own hotel room, and Cone has for some reason turned the bedside clock so that its face is down on the tabletop. Late, anyways.
Cone is there, of course, sprawled proprietarily across the bed. Tom, having come up from the bar with Cone, has possession of the big armchair next to the bed. Hershiser is sitting in the desk chair, turned around so that he can rest his forearms across the top of the chairback. Girardi is perched on the edge of the desk, tapping his heel against one of the table legs. Mussina is sitting on the floor, back to the wall and pretending to ignore everyone with his nose buried in a travel book of crosswords, although everyone knows perfectly well that he’s excited to get to hang out with the older players.
“You think they’re really gonna do it?” Girardi asks. Nobody has to ask what he means.
Cone scoots up the bed to lean against the headboard, shoving pillows out of the way. “Not like we’re giving them much of a choice.”
“They’re not giving us much of a choice,” Tom corrects. They’re not responsible for this, not really; it’s the owners who have forced them into it with their greed and their hubris and their collusion.
“You know how many years it’s been since I last spent a September not pitching?” Hershiser asks. Everyone looks around at him, Mussina even peeking over the edge of his book. Hershiser shrugs. “I don’t even know. Years and years.”
“You broke into the majors in ’83,” Tom says, then immediately turns bright red with embarrassment.
Hershiser smiles at him, but it’s more kind than mocking. Cone is making gagging noises from the bed, but Tom is getting much better at ignoring him through sheer force of habit.
“So ’83. But I was drafted in,“-- an infinitesimal pause-“ ’79. And before that, I was pitching for Bowling Green, little bit. And before that, in high school…”
“Back before the dawn of time, when dinosaurs roamed the earth,” Cone intones, doing a very passable imitation of a TV science show narrator. Mussina snickers and immediately drops his eyes back to his crossword.
“So at least since the mid-70s,” Hershiser finishes, also ignoring Cone with practiced ease. “Figure 19, 20 years.”
Everyone is silent for a moment, digesting that. Mussina is staring down at his book, but his eyes are bugging a little. Tom can’t really blame him: Hershiser has been pitching in a serious way for almost as long as Mussina has been alive. “And here we are,” Tom says quietly.
“Here we are,” Hershiser agrees.
Cone thumps a hand against the headboard. “Dammit, I didn’t play ball with Abner fucking Doubleday like four-eyes over here, but it’s been a a long fucking time for me too. I mean, when was the last time we even just tossed a ball around? In September, not playing ball, that’s fucked up.”
“We could,” Tom says. Everyone looks at him, Mussina again peeking from behind the crossword pages. “Well. We’re all here. We’ve got… I have my glove packed, anyways, I’m sure between the five of us we can find a couple of baseballs…” He trails off, but as soon as he’s said it it seems perfect. They can’t get a proper game going, not with four pitchers and one catcher, but they can certainly throw a ball around.
Everyone, as it turns out, has brought their glove and at least two balls with them, hopefully stashed at the bottoms of suitcases, balls wrapped in socks, gloves wiped in neatsfoot oil and stuffed in plastic bags so they don’t make everything else all greasy. Tom supposes he should have figured on that: everyone knew they weren’t going to be playing ball, not that kind of road trip, but what kind of ballplayer travels anywhere without his glove?
He briefly wonders if any of the position players brought along their bats, considers tracking down Molitor or Fielder or Jay Bell to ask, but it’s fine like this, just them. They’ve got everyone and everything they need. It’s good.
----
There are a bunch of empty conference rooms on the second floor, so they reconvene down there. Mussina moves the chairs and tables away to the sides of the room without being asked, which is good, because they were probably going the make him do it anyways.
“So, catcher, you gonna catch?” Cone asks, lazily flapping his glove at Girardi. Tom has never seen Cone wearing a glove off the field in person, and it’s weirdly captivating. Cone’s usual lazy grace looks almost dangerous with a glove, like that attitude has a new and deadly sense of purpose.
Girardi makes a face. “Uh uh. Don’t think so. Four pitchers, one catcher? That’s practically a baseball gangbang.”
Mussina has a violent and embarrassed coughing fit at this. “Oh for god’s sake…” Hershiser mutters, going over to pound him on the back.
“The room’s big enough,” Tom says. “Five-man around-the-horn? Unless someone has a better idea.”
Nobody has any better ideas, so five-man around-the-horn it is. They arrange themselves in a loose pentagon about the room and snap the ball around to each other like they’re between innings in a game they’re all starting.
Tom fumbles the ball a few times early on, a deeply mortifying thing, but a couple cycles later Girardi drops it, and a few throws after that Cone throws the ball low, forcing Hershiser to field it like a shortstop. It’s been too long for Tom. It’s been too long for all of them.
There’s some chatter, especially from Mussina and Hershiser, who both manage to field the ball perfectly every time it comes around to them, but as they keep throwing and everyone gets into the rhythm of it, they quiet down. Soon enough the only sounds in the room are the solid thock of a baseball into the pocket of a well-cared-for glove, the shifting of sneakers over hotel carpeting, easy breathing, the tiny but distinct noise a baseball makes when its leather hide is pushed off of callused fingertips.
As they warm up to it, the mistakes get fewer and farther between. They start snapping the ball harder, more quickly, grinning at each other like idiots. Tom’s arm loosens up so beautifully that he can’t believe he hadn’t really noticed it was tight before.
The carpeting has a truly hideous swirly pattern in brick red and dirty yellow on it. The wallpaper is one of those subtle stripes that was probably designed to be soothing but actually isn’t. The chairs and long tables are pushed up against the walls in a messy jumble. It’s maybe the least baseball-like environment imaginable, but Hershiser’s mixing in pitches that slide now, Mussina is beaming nonstop, Girardi is firing the ball around like it’s the bottom of the 9th, Cone keeps trying to fake them out with screwballs, and for just a little while, the hole in Tom’s heart where baseball goes is perfectly filled.
----
They get a couple more weeks of negotiation, September wearing inexorably on. When they fail to reach an agreement with the owners, Bud Selig, acting commissioner of Major League Baseball, regretfully informs the public that the World Series is cancelled.
“Regretfully!” Cone snorts. “Shit, I’m glad he’s not doing it gleefully.”
Tom nudges him sharply in the ribs. They’re at the press conference; sitting in the back, true, but still, people can probably hear them.
Cone snorts again, not much more quietly. Tom catches a whiff of something sharp and boozey on Cone’s breath. It’s not even lunchtime yet, and normally Cone wouldn’t… but this is it, this is the official cancellation of the season. Normally doesn’t mean a whole hell of a lot, right now.
“So much for back on the field in a couple of weeks,” Tom mutters, trying to direct his voice out the corner of his mouth.
“Yeah. God.” Cone slouches down in his seat a little. Everyone’s looking at the podium, at Selig, but all they’d have to do is turn around to see Cone, one of the faces of the players union, for God’s sake, squinting angrily up through the rows of heads bent over notebooks, listing a tiny bit in his seat. He doesn’t look drunk, but he also doesn’t look particularly sober. Tom wants to cover him with a jacket, hide him from the reporters and the world.
“Nineteen-oh-four,” Mussina says, very softly, sitting on Tom’s other side. Tom puts a hand on Cone’s arm to keep him from leaning any further and glances over at Mussina. Mussina shrugs one shoulder, eyes on the podium. “That’s the last time they had to cancel a World Series. Not since 1904.”
“Christ,” Cone mutters thickly. “Go Team Us.”
No World Series. No rest of the season. Not now, maybe not ever. Tom tries to imagine it, to wrap his mind around the idea of it, but he can’t. Every time he tries to really think, that was it, the last season of Major League Baseball, his brain skitters away, circles around, refuses to look at it head-on. It’s monstrous; it’s impossible.
It’s our fault, and no, no, he can’t even begin to go there, not now, probably not ever.
He sneaks his hand around Cone’s arm until he’s got a solid grip, right around his bicep. He tugs lightly. “C’mon, we better get you back to the hotel before the presser ends and you have to talk to the media.”
“Oh, but I want to talk to the media. Right now, right now I really want to talk to the media.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Tom says, tugging harder and rolling his eyes for Mussina’s benefit. “We’ll see you back there.”
Mussina nods. He doesn’t shift his eyes away from the podium. It’s probably just the harsh TV lights, patchy this far back and partly blocked by the crowd, that make his face look older than Tom’s ever seen it look before.
Outside, Cone doesn’t stumble, but he weaves around the sidewalk enough to make Tom grab for his arm again. He’s never seen someone wander around like that while walking like he’s sober, but then again he’s never seen Cone this drunk before.
“Never seen you this drunk before,” he mutters, because he can’t think of anything to do, aside from stating the obvious.
“Special occasion, ace,” Cone says, slipping his arm out of Tom’s grip and walking, perfectly upright, into the side door of a parked car.
On to Part 2.