catching up, 9, epilogue
2022
The night before, they closed the Hall to the public and let the inductees and their families in by themselves. One last chance to commune with the greats of yesteryear before taking their place among them, or something like that, Pudge figured. The last time he had been to Cooperstown, he’d been barely out of rookiehood; he and Rogers had road-tripped out one winter, just to see what all the hype was about.
//They’ve got a movie thing upstairs, Dad, it’s starting in ten. You wanna come up?//
//You go ahead,// Pudge said. Dereck paused, indecisive, and Pudge waved him off. //Go on, take Ivanna before she gets bored down here. I don’t need you two babysitting me all week, you know.//
//Alright, alright.// Dereck clapped him on the shoulder and went up to Ivanna, indelicately extracting her from a conversation with a ridiculously attractive young woman. Ivanna said something angrily to Dereck-- Pudge could read her mood even as they walked away from him and up the stairs-- and the girl looked after her in a wistful kind of way that made him grin. Then her father walked over, drawing her away to look at one of the exhibits. Pudge winced. It didn’t matter how pretty Natasha Rodriguez had grown up to be; he was going to have to have words with Ivanna about flirting with A-Rod’s little girl.
He wandered into the Hall itself, that great vaulted room of pale wood walls lined with plaques in varying stages of tarnishing bronze. Everyone else was clustering around the newer plaques, exclaiming over the likenesses of guys they knew, so he strolled down to the far end, where they had the very first class set apart from the rest.
Nineteen thirty-six. His parents hadn’t even been born yet. He read the few lines embossed on each plaque, although he knew the names by heart: Christy Mathewson, Walter Johnson, Honus Wagner, Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb.
He knew the first catcher to be inducted into the Hall of Fame: Buck Ewing, in 1939. There followed thirty-four years before the first Latino player was inducted, the name that every Latino ballplayer who came after knew as well as he knew his own: Roberto Clemente. He had died on the very last day of 1972 and was inducted by special election early in 1973. Pudge had not even been two years old. But as soon as he had understood that baseball might exist outside of his backyard, he had known about Clemente. There was no such thing as a Puerto Rican who didn’t.
The other inductees and their families started to filter into the older areas of the Hall. He moved into the newer section, nodding silently at the others as he passed, not really interested in conversation. He was starting to see the names of men his father had followed, then the names he had grown up watching, and finally the names of men who had stared at him from across the field: Wade Boggs and Kirby Puckett, George Brett and Dave Winfield.
He stopped in front of the Class of ’99. Twenty-three years ago, and he could remember it as clearly as yesterday, that induction year and what it had meant.
Ryan’s plague was not a great likeness-- the eyes far too empty, the sculpting of his cheeks not nearly as arresting as they had been in the original. He was listed by his full name, Lynn Nolan Ryan Jr, although so far as Pudge knew nobody in the world had ever called him ‘Lynn’ or ‘Junior’.
A fierce competitor and one of baseball’s most intimidating figures on the pitching mound for four decades, his overpowering fastball and unparalleled longevity produced 324 victories and a host of Major League records. Lifetime benchmarks include 5,714 strikeouts, seven no-hitters and 12 one-hitters in 27 seasons pitched. Led league in strikeouts 11 times and fanned 300 batters in a season on six occasions, including a record 383 in 1973. Strikeout victims totaled 1,176 different players. A Texas legend whose widespread popularity extended far beyond his native state.
Visitors were probably not supposed to touch the plaques, but he very much doubted that anyone was going to yell at him. And-- just this once-- he did not care what any of the other guys looking at him might think. Let them draw whatever conclusions they wanted to draw.
He reached out his right hand, the one he had used to signal pitches, and trailed it gently over the bas-relief brass features of Ryan’s face, forever frozen, with whatever level of relative accuracy, in the time just before Pudge had first known him. The metal was cold under his fingertips. Well, he hadn’t really been expecting anything else.
He pressed the pad of his thumb briefly into the block T on Ryan’s hat before walking away, taking the white negative impression of it away with him, just for a little while, before it faded.
**
The outdoor stage they had set up for the induction ceremony had only a few steps on the side, but they had included a railing anyways. Pudge ascended slowly, gripping the rail hard. He didn’t normally have to be quite so careful, but he’d be damned if he was going to let his knees take him down in front of everyone, on this of all days.
When he reached the podium he set down the single page on which he had scrawled his speech notes and carefully gripped its sides, the wooden edges rounded from the grasps of a hundred old ballplayers who had stood there before. He was trying to not hyperventilate. Being the focus of large crowds was nothing new, of course, but nothing he had done had prepared him for this. It was less stressful than a World Series game, there was much less at stake, far fewer ways in which he personally could screw things up, he got that, he really did, but at least on a ballfield he knew what he was doing. In some ways this was far more harrowing.
The two World Series rings on his right hand glittered ferociously when the sun hit them, throwing shards of diamond-white light into the faces of the people in the first row. When he tensed his fingers around the edge of the podium, he could feel the metal bite into his fingers a little. This was real; this was really happening.
He knew what he would see when he looked out into the crowd. Former inductees, the ones who were still alive and still mobile enough to make the trip, some of their heads still dark, most gray or white. Other old ballplayers too, friends of his and friends of his fellow inductees, guys who’d been good but not quite good enough for this. Rogers, long since retired, would be there. Dereck and Ivanna would be there, 30 and 22 years old, taking time off from work and school; an imaginary hole where Amanda and Maribel should have been. There would be reporters, holding up their little iCapture recording sticks; photographers kneeling in the front and along the sides, jockeying for position, popping flashes despite the sun. The Commissioner would be there, and a number of the majority team owners, and representatives from the umpires’ union.
If he looked far enough back, he might even see the crowd of fans, baseball pilgrims who came from all over the country to this sleepy little town, traveling by plane and train and eventually by car, because that last was the only way to get out to Cooperstown, in the end. It was a quiet kind of place, where nothing of note happened that didn’t have to do with baseball, and all those people came, just to stand and watch another year of history being written.
There was a banner, he knew, affixed to the brick front of the building behind him. Welcome to the National Baseball Hall of Fame Class of 2022.
He caught his breath, and looked up.
--end--
previous
back to the start