catching up, 8
The first game was in Detroit. Verlander was starting. Of course.
He couldn’t do it. Bluffing could only take him so far, and the World Series itself was apparently the limit. He was in the World Series and his kids weren’t there to watch him. He had gotten a fucking phone call from Dereck, who had sounded sad and scared and confused, not really understanding why he wasn’t allowed to fly out, just barely aware that Papa had done something bad to make Mama cry so much, and Pudge had never felt worse than he had in that moment.
He asked Dereck to put Amanda on the line too, but she wouldn’t come. //She says she doesn’t wanna talk to you,// Dereck admitted, low and guilty like it was somehow his fault. Pudge managed to make it through the rest of the phone call, but when Dereck hung up he went into the bathroom and stared at himself in the mirror and thought very, very seriously about why he was even bothering to stay alive.
At the ballpark, Verlander paced tight circles in front of his locker, wringing his hands together, reciting the Cardinals lineup over and over. Pudge needed to settle him down. He needed to go put his hands on Verlander’s shoulders, sit him down somewhere, tell him to breathe. He should assure Verlander that he knew what he was doing and he would be able to guide them both through it and everything would be just fine.
But he couldn’t. He sat in front of his own locker, staring at the carpet between his cleats. Leyland walked by and hissed something angry, imperative, but there was absolutely nothing Leyland could say that would be worse than what he was already saying to himself.
Verlander was jumpy and wild on the mound. He gave up one run in the second, three in the third. In the sixth he threw a ball away that let Albert Pujols advance two bases. He looked shell-shocked when Leyland came out to pull him from the game.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Leyland just shook his head and shot Pudge a nasty glare. Verlander walked slowly back to the dugout, rubbing at one cheek, staring at nothing in particular: the very picture of a pitcher cut adrift.
Pudge looked away.
Rogers pitched the second game and managed to hold onto it by the skin of his teeth. He was more of a veteran than Pudge, though; he had been to the World Series before; he was not so dependent on a catcher.
They lost the third game. They lost the fourth game. The fifth game was in St. Louis. Verlander’s spot in the rotation had come up again.
He threw two wild pitches in the first inning. Pudge thought of all the things a good veteran catcher should do. He knew how it was all done. But every encouraging word he tried to say came out wooden and insincere; every steadying touch came out limp. Every pitch he called was exactly the wrong pitch, and Verlander didn’t-- wouldn’t, couldn’t-- override him.
They lost the game, and the Series. The Cardinals sprayed each other with champagne and beer and the St. Louis fans rose up in a joyous sea of red, pleased as punch to have it all won on their home turf. Verlander disappeared into the clubhouse with his hands shaking and his eyes hollow. Zumaya ducked in after him.
Pudge sat on the dugout bench and watched the celebration engulf the field. Every smile on a Cardinal’s face was like a spike to some tender spot on his heart, but he was going to sit there and take each and every one of them. It couldn’t hurt this much forever. Layer enough pain on there, and eventually he would have to go numb.
**
“So you’re getting divorced.” Boras said it like a salesman: so you’ve decided to buy a new car! Pudge nodded dully, looking at the perfect, obsessively vacuumed beige carpet of Boras’ office.
Boras pushed a printout across the desk at him. “Here’s your lawyer. Best in the business. Tons of experience with separations involving your, ah, level of assets.” He folded his hands neatly in front of him, a pen tangled up in his fingers. “Now, you were married how long?”
“Fifteen years.”
“And you’re breaking it off now why?”
Pudge swallowed hard, dug the fingers of his right hand into his thigh. He did not want to talk about it. He most especially did not want to talk about it with Boras. But Boras was his agent. “Cheating.”
Boras made a little note on the legal pad next to him. “You or her?” Pudge shot him a single disgusted look. Boras nodded, unruffled. “Had to ask. You’d be surprised. Now. She given you any trouble over the preliminaries yet?”
“My daughter,” Pudge said, knowing damn well it wasn’t what Boras was asking, still unable to stop himself. “My oldest daughter, she will not talk to me.”
Boras bent his head over the pad, raised just his eyes to look at Pudge. “How old.”
“Eleven.”
“They often side with the wives,” Boras said, dropping his eyes back to the pad and shrugging. “These daughters, you know. Women.” He scribbled a few more lines, black ink blooming in spikes and loops over the yellow page. “When do you plan to get remarried?”
“I. Excuse me?”
“Remarried. Married again.” Boras stopped writing and looked up. His expression was flat, all business. “Maybe to the cheat-ee?”
“That is. That. No. It’s not legal,” Pudge said, looking at his hand curled on his leg, at the carpet, at his shoes, anywhere but at Boras. He could almost see Boras running through the possibilities in his mind, the reasons why Pudge could not legally marry someone. An already-married woman? Some little underage chick? He would get to the truth of it eventually.
In some ways it would be easier to just tell Boras everything. He spun things for a living; this was his area of expertise. Pudge could just lay it all out there, every last little sordid detail, the whole tangled disaster area that was his life, and let Boras deal with it. Let him apply logic and reason to it, rationalize and sanitize.
It would be easy to tell him about Urbina; there was no harm in that, not now that Urbina had been neutralized out of sight, and thus out of baseball’s mind. But he could not tell Boras about Beckett, or Verlander-- it wasn’t his to tell. And of course the mere thought of bringing up Ryan was nearly enough to send him screaming out of the office.
“You’ll have to take up with someone else, then,” Boras said, very carefully. “Before, when you were doing… whatever. You had the wife and the kids you could point back to. Instant cover story. Now, I don’t say this to make you feel bad or anything. That’s how it is for most guys in the league, one way or another. And you think you guys are crazy, you should see the NFL guys, or the European soccer guys. Whatever you’ve been up to, it hasn’t made the papers, so already you’re ahead here.
But you don’t have that, the cushion. The excuse, the cover for… whatever. Not anymore. You need to get it back.”
“I still have… I still, the kids…”
Boras shook his head gently. “Doesn’t work like that. And hey. Hey. I’m not saying you have to fall madly in love here. I’m not gonna ask you to do something crazy-hard. I’m talking about an image thing, that’s all. Just find some willing girl, make sure she’s cute enough you don’t mind fucking her if you have to, set her up in an apartment somewhere. Do the ceremony, give her a shopping allowance, you get the squeaky clean image back, she gets a free ride, nobody gets any controversy, you sign nice big fat contracts, the agent gets paid, everyone’s happy.”
“I don’. I don’t think I can do that.” Which was an understatement. The very thought of it was making his throat itch, acid rising up at the back.
“Look. You’re not the first big leaguer I’ve represented who had something going on the side, not by far. You’re not the first big leaguer I got through a divorce, OK. I know how it’ll all go down. I’m talking image, here, Pudge, I’m talking your career. Trust me on this.”
He closed his eyes against the dizzy sick feeling in his stomach. He couldn’t do this. It would be like a perversion of everything he and Maribel had been, everything they had promised to each other, everything they had lived through and loved through for all those years.
But-- he’d already ruined it. Perverted whatever his marriage had been supposed to stand for. Hadn’t he.
“I can call around the local high-end escort services, see if there’s anything that catches your eye,” Boras was saying. “Just to get you started, no need to pick from that pool, but it’s best to get the ball rolling on this as soon as possible. Takes a while to plan a wedding, you know.”
“I know,” Pudge managed, throat scraped raw on the inside like he’d been screaming, even though it had been the exact opposite, all the words he wanted and needed to say dying back behind his tongue long before they could taste air. Boras flashed him a quick grin, so slickly fast that it was gone almost before it had registered, and reached for his phone.
2009
It was strange to be working on one-year contracts again. Strange to feel that annual uncertainty, a real throwback to his earliest years in the league. Boras kept telling him that it was to be expected for a thirty-seven year old player, especially a catcher. Normal. Every next year was the one where he could finally break down, from the perspective of a team (not from Boras’ perspective, Boras believed in him totally, of course). He did not feel like he was any closer to breaking down than he had been the past couple of years, but he had to try to see it the way a team would. It was not that they were showing him a lack of respect; it was just that they had a different way of looking at things.
Still, he’d held out for a while, hoping for at least one team to come through with a multi-year offer. He even would have taken two years with a buy-out option. But nothing came, and in the end he just had to pick the least objectionable of the singleshots available to him, which had turned out to be the Astros.
He was honestly trying to make the best of it. If nothing else, he was bemusedly enjoying the experience of Texas baseball in the wrong league. They had a dome, of all things; it could be air-conditioned when the weather called for it. Compared to Arlington, which had been a long, drawn-out exercise in heat and sun suffering, it was surreally luxurious.
His usual number seven had been retired the previous season in Houston. Craig Biggio had worn it for twenty years with the Astros; they were not about to un-retire it for Pudge. He tried wearing 12 for a while, but it felt weird on his back, somehow, the fabric of the numbers pulling oddly at his jersey-- maybe just in his mind, but it felt real. He switched over to 77, which was not perfect either, but was at least an improvement.
In June, interleague play brought them up against the Rangers. They drove right into classic Arlington: mid-90s at night, that familiar old searing dry heat that left the Astros grumbling. Pudge was so keyed up he barely felt it. Nolan Ryan had been hired as the president of the Rangers in ’08. He had already earned a reputation for being a hands-on kind of president, much more involved in team management than most, and he would certainly be in the ballpark somewhere, watching.
The second game of the series, June 17, was his 2,227th game caught. That put him ahead of Carlton Fisk-- the original Pudge-- a Hall of Famer who had retired when Ryan did. It was Pudge’s nineteenth season and he was still only 37 years old, and he had caught more games than any other single player in the entire 140 year record of Major League Baseball. He had seen the numbers countless times in the newspapers and magazines in the week leading up to this day, and they still did not quite feel real to him. He had been there for each and every one of those games, obviously, but that many, Dios, surely that had to be mistake, surely that couldn’t be right.
That wasn’t a career, that was history.
His first time up to bat, he tapped his cleats in tidy compact motion, the familiarity of batting in Arlington embracing him like an old friend as he stared in at the pitcher. He hefted his bat, waited for the pitch, but the pitch didn’t come. He did not understand the delay until the Rangers’ catcher, some impossibly young kid with an impossibly long name, stood up behind the plate and touched him hesitantly on the shoulder. Pudge turned to stare at him.
“They’re standing for you. Um, sir.” The kid fumbled to take off his mask and helmet, then tipped both at Pudge, a little nervous grin on his face.
Pudge spun on his heel, bat dropping down to his side. Every single person in the stands was on his or her feet. They were clapping, chanting something that gradually resolved itself into his name, Pudge on a rising swell of collaborative noise. The people in the luxury boxes were standing too, tiny and remote from home plate. Somewhere up there, he knew, was Ryan.
There was really only one thing to do. He grasped the brim of his batting helmet and in one smooth motion raised it from his head, waving it to the crowd behind home. He turned slowly, saluting the fans behind third, the fans in the outfield bleachers, the crowd behind first base. There was a video running on the scoreboard, some compilation of baseball scenes from his past, but he kept his eyes on the fans. The noise had swollen to something incredible; it must have been shaking the stadium down to its concrete foundational bones.
When he had made a full revolution he put his helmet back on, tamping it down with a few taps to the top, and swung his bat up to his shoulder again. The kid catcher fumbled to put his own helmet and mask back on too.
“Congrats,” he said, as he settled back behind the plate. “This is, wow. S’really something.”
Pudge grinned down at him. The kid nearly swooned out of his crouch. “Sure, guess it is.”
The game itself was unremarkable. They ended up losing by one run in extra innings. Maybe he should have taken himself out of the game in the later frames, let his backup catch the rest of it, but he hated to voluntarily sit even under normal circumstances, and he was not about to do so in this game. It was kind of fitting, anyways, to catch an extra number of innings on the day he caught a historic number of games.
In the clubhouse afterwards the Astros presented him with an insanely expensive bottle of champagne, something they’d all pitched in to buy. They all had cheaper bottles of champagne for themselves, and they all wanted him to sign these, taking cell phone photos with their arms slung casual around his shoulders. They shook his hand one by one, congratulated him with bright sincere voices, all these National Leaguers, these kids who hadn’t even played a full season with him, and he was so overwhelmingly touched that he had to excuse himself and go sit in the bathroom for a while, alone, just breathing.
So it was not the American League. Maybe it wasn’t ideal. Maybe in the minds of a bunch of moron owners out there, he was too old to go on. But he still had a clubhouse that welcomed him, a team to lead, baseball to play.
**
In August, Ed Wade, who had always been polite to him if nothing else, called. “It’s about the Rangers,” he said.
“Um,” Pudge said, certain that he had misheard. Wade was the general manager of the Astros. He didn’t have anything to do with the Rangers.
“They’re asking for you in a trade. Well, Mr. Ryan is. Mr. Ryan was very insistent,” Wade said, and Pudge gaped at his apartment wall in confusion for several seconds until he remembered that Ryan, as president of the Texas Rangers, apparently had the ability to pull off a trade if he wanted.
“I… OK…”
“I’m s’pposed to give you a message,” Wade added, sounding amused. He recited an address, date, and time, obviously reading off of something. “He wants t’meet you there before the trade’s finalized. I’ll tell you straight, this is not how we usually do business, but I’m not one to go up against Mr. Ryan.”
“Um. No, I… of course. Thanks.” He hung up, stunned. Ryan wanted him back on the Rangers. Ryan wanted him on the Rangers?
Of course he would show up to this meeting, whatever it was. He couldn’t very well turn down an invitation from someone that high up in any front office, but even if Ryan had not been a Major League Baseball team president, he would go. It was Ryan.
**
He did not recognize Ryan when he walked into the bar, which was embarrassing. On some stupid level he supposed he had expected Ryan to look exactly the same as always, and so he stood in the doorway, looking from side to side, waiting for his eyes to fall on a familiar face. Stupid, stupid. He had a computer, he could have looked up more recent photos, but he hadn’t thought to do that, and now he was going to just stand here until one of the probable real-life cowboys at the bar decided he was looking at him the wrong way and got up to do something about it.
“Pudge. Hey, Pudge.”
He spun around, relief flooding him, turning into shock when he saw who had called his name. Ryan was-- well, he had a belly, he’d ballooned, all the weight he had fended off over the course of his career apparently slamming into him hard now in his semi-retirement. His forehead was high and domed, weak bar light glinting off of it, the short hair clinging tenaciously to the back and sides of his head bleached out to a gray so pale that it was almost white. There were bags under his eyes; his ears, weirdly, seemed longer. He had jowls.
“You look good,” Ryan said. “Little different, but almost just the same.” Pudge shook his head and snorted. “No, you do,” Ryan insisted. “It’s actually almost kinda creepy, but y’look more like you did back in the old days.”
“Lost some weight. I guess that helped.” He did not mention Ryan’s appearance. It was almost shocking how old Ryan looked, although it should not have been; Ryan had already been an old man in baseball terms when Pudge had last seen him in person. Now he was an old man by anyone’s standards.
They made excruciatingly small small-talk, both looking at the table in front of them, taking in its worn wood surface, the dark rings of past drinks set down without a coaster, the initials gouged into the edges, black with unmovable grime. A standard bar table in a standard Texas bar, too run-down to be touristy, although some of the limp, cheesy wall decorations indicated that it had hopes in that direction. Pudge had never set foot inside it before; Ryan knew the owner, or something.
“I heard ‘bout Beckett, y’know,” Ryan said, deliberately casual, like he was bringing up the score of yesterday’s game instead of bypassing any semblance of polite circumvention to go straight into a heavily land-mined warzone. “You think you’re bein’ careful, but that stuff gets ‘round, in baseball. Always. The league ain’t nothin’ but a buncha gossips stacked in together like a can’o sardines when you get on down to it. And that’s why… I wanted to tell you. I have to tell you that that’s why I couldn’t never…”
Pudge pressed his lips together and looked out towards the bar. The bartender was busy doing something complicated with lots of different bottles, flipping and twirling, arcs of translucent liquid spinning artfully from their spouts into a tall thin glass set before her. The moment where he could have brought up Urbina, and Verlander, came and went in silence. It didn’t really matter anyways.
Ryan followed the line of Pudge’s gaze to the bartender and watched her for a moment too. “I almost. I almost hoped you’d come out for the induction ceremony.” A bit of a non sequitur, but Pudge cottoned on easily enough. Ryan’s Hall of Fame induction.
“Ten years ago,” Pudge said. Ryan jogged his head to the side, dismissing the time easily. Pudge thought back, dredging up the year. “That season. Man, I was busy that season. All Star game, Gold Glove, I hit over .300. That was the year I win the MVP,” he added, pleased even now at the memory, although the warm, proud feeling faded slightly as he gazed across the table at Ryan’s face. He could not really read Ryan’s expressions properly anymore through the obscuring haze of wrinkles and fat. “I guess you’ll hafta come to the ceremony when they induct me.”
Ryan laughed. “You better hurry up’n retire, then. You don’t come up for votin’ ‘til five years after you call it quits, and who knows if I’ll be around that long.”
“Ah, you are not that old.”
“In m’sixties, though, ain’t I? All it takes is one little heart attack and bam! That’s all she wrote.”
“You jus’, what, sit around thinkin’ about that shit?”
“Mmm. I never smoked, I got that goin’ for me, and I never did none of them harder drugs, but I sure drank plenty, and then there were the greenies, and I didn’t always eat too healthy. Ain’t like I got a stat sheet tellin’ me the odds, but I reckon I’m a good sight worse off’n one of those joggin’ tofu eatin’ hippie types. They already hadda go in and fix the old ticker once, it could go off again, any second. You get t’be my age, you start thinkin’ ‘bout it, just wait’n see.” Ryan did not sound depressed, though-- if anything he seemed to have developed a grim sort of relish for the challenge of going toe-to-toe with cardiac arrest.
Pudge shook his head. “Always wit’ the big overreaction. Always the drama. It wasn’t never enough to throw a good game, it was always goin’ for the no hitter wit’ you, huh?” He smiled, not precisely at Ryan, more at Ryan’s beer. Ryan smirked down at the table.
Silence came down between them again, but it was a more comfortable kind of silence now. Ryan seemed to be thinking about something, and Pudge was content to watch him. The longer they sat, the more obvious it was becoming that the Nolan Ryan he had known was still in there somewhere, under the face that retirement and age had bricked up around him. Pudge could still see him, sometimes, little flashes of light through chinks in a wall.
“For a while I thought I hated you,” Ryan said. He nodded firmly to himself, very matter of fact. “Blamed you for, oh, all kindsa things. I’d lie up at night tellin’ myself how much I hated you. Listed out reasons in my head and everythin’.” He looked up, then, catching Pudge unawares, locking his gaze squarely onto Pudge’s eyes. “But that was just somethin’ I was tellin’ myself. I never really did.”
“Oh,” Pudge said. “I know,” he added, even though he hadn’t known at all.
“I was an idiot, that’s all. Veteran, you’d think I woulda known better by then, right? But I didn’t know shit ‘bout some things. Took me a while to think it through, and by the time I did… well.” Ryan shrugged. “Way too late now.” Pudge opened his mouth, a thousand protests on the tip of his tongue, but Ryan glared at him, a flash of the old pitcher in those eyes, and Pudge shut up fast. “Been sixteen years, Pudge, it’s too late for lots of things. In lots of ways.” He shook his head, mostly to himself, Pudge thought. Ryan slapped a hand gently on the tabletop. “But hey. I’m runnin’ these Rangers, now, and I want you back with the ol’ team.”
The old team. Of course it wouldn’t be the old team; never could be again. But the Rangers-- “Why?” It was all he could think to ask.
“We need a catcher. I need a catcher on my team. You’re my catcher,” Ryan said, like he hadn’t just said all that other stuff. Like it was that simple.
But maybe-- just maybe-- it was. Pudge had been many things to many people, over the course of his career. He’d been a friend and a lover, a husband, a father, a teacher and a student. He’d been a leader and occasionally an instigator. He’d been an All Star and a Gold Glover and an MVP. A promising rookie and a well-versed veteran. He’d been an impossible ideal and a grave disappointment.
But through it all, he’d been a catcher. He’d been a catcher since he was a child in Puerto Rico, too short to reach the kitchen table without standing on a chair, since he’d played his first game of catch behind the old house, his father holding up a brand new baseball, shiny and white with the red stitches all pristine, and it had been the most perfect thing Pudge had ever seen. He had wanted nothing more than to catch that ball. And he’d never stopped.
“We’ve got your old number set aside for you and everythin’,” Ryan said. “I even got-- don’t even start wit’ me, OK, but I thought-- I got one of our hats here…” He reached down and took something out of a bag by his seat, putting it on the scarred-up table. It was a Rangers hat, the classic bright blue, the block white T with its two little diamond extrusions, outlined in red. It was brand new, the brim still flat as the day it had been manufactured. Ryan pushed it across the table with just the tips of his fingers, looking away, very slightly embarrassed. “Come on home.”
Pudge stared at the hat, resting there between them like some kind of royal blue metaphor that he could not decipher. After a moment he reached out, over the hat, to where Ryan’s hand still lay on the table.
Ryan drew back ever so slightly. He didn’t remove his hand from the table, and he didn’t say anything; it was a tiny, minute movement, but Pudge was, after all, a catcher, and he knew perfectly well how to read the tiniest motions of his pitchers.
He sat back, picked up the hat and turned it around until he had the brim firm between his palms. He crushed it inwards, snapping the paperboard, then curved his hands to mold it, starting the long process that would eventually form the brim into exactly the right parabolic shape. He’d had plenty of new hats over the course of his career, but it didn’t matter; give him enough time with them, and they all broke in the same.
“I’ll come back to Texas. To the Rangers,” he said. “But you need to understand. I’m playing ball. I’m already home.”
previous --- epilogue