“I think you know me better than that,” she said. “I prefer substance to style, except in films and literature. That’s the way I was brought up and that’s the way I am.”
After that she stopped coming to the games except for those times when she did. It used to be the exception when she wasn’t there. Now it was the exception when she was, although in terms of actual appearances at the ball park things remained about the same.
Before the game, the manager called Rocco into his office and asked him if he had any problems that were getting in the way of his ball playing. Pop, or Boss as the players called him, liked to talk to the men about their problems.
For a while Rocco couldn’t think of any problems he had, which was one of the problems he had when anyone asked him. The only thing, he said, which he didn’t want to make anything of since it wasn’t much of a thing, was that he was not getting enough playing time. His was the kind of game that thrived on hard work.
“I like a man who wants to play,” Pop said angrily. “The only place I can think of you getting more playing time, Rocco, to be frank, is at our farm club, Vestal, in the Postum League. You don’t hit for average and you don’t hit consistently for power. What else can I tell you? On no team that I managed has there ever been any problems with the way I do things.”
The next day, without prior warning, Rocco found himself in the starting lineup at left field. What did it mean? He tried to catch Pop’s eye during batting practice to say thanks or something else, but the doughty little manager seemed whenever Rocco looked at him to be looking on the ground for something he had dropped.
A telegram came for him as he was stepping into the batter’s cage to take his swings.
Last chance
It’s make or break
Hang loose
It was only the third telegram he’d ever had in his life. The fourth was delivered to him by the bat boy at his position in left field. Far out, he thought, after getting two telegrams the first thirty years of his life to get two more on the same day.
This one, it was clear, was from his wife (the signature blurred by tears), with whom he had had a falling out before coming to the ball park.
Have had offer to go off with another. Will make decision by nightfall.
Love etc.
He had had enough messages for one day. Worried about losing concentration, once lost it could take years to recover, he thought about a movie he had seen the other night at Venestra’s urging, rehearsed the plot line to himself. In the movie, which was in French, this man and woman were living together when this woman’s former boyfriend showed up. The guy she’s living with gets jealous and then it’s only a matter of time before she runs off with the old boyfriend. After she leaves the old boyfriend — or he leaves her — the two men move in together.
The game was being played miles away from the mind’s resting point as if he were on a hill looking down at the lights of a city in the distance.
The first pitch he looked at was called a strike, to which he had no valid objection, a fastball or slider on the inside corner of the plate. He had been anticipating a breaking ball on the outside, so he had been unable to take advantage of a pitch he usually liked to stroke. What was the pitch most likely to come next? If he were the pitcher, putting himself in the other’s place, he would throw himself a curve or slider on the outside of the plate or, the deception of the obvious, the same pitch in the same place.
He guessed the same pitch and was right, though the second was not quite as far inside as the first and was, at quick estimation, three inches higher. Rocco triggered the bat, his anticipation a fraction of a second ahead of an ideal meeting, exhilaration frightening him as the ball jumped from the bat. All was ruined, he let himself think, his best hopes shot to hell, but the ball danced along the foul line crashing the wall inches fair.
The applause sung to him as he stood on second base regretting his failure to do more. He wondered if there was anyone in the stands who really liked him for himself as opposed to the disguises of accomplishment.
In the fourth inning, moments after he had dropped an unimaginative fly ball hit directly at his glove, he got a Special Delivery letter from an anonymous fan, which read (in its entirety), “You have disappointed our best hopes.” There was nothing you could do to please them, he thought.
He struck out swinging in the fifth and got hit in the face by a tomato. That didn’t seem right.
In the eighth inning, after hitting a home run with two men on to put his team in the lead, he received in the mail several offers of marriage from grateful fans of both sexes.
After the game the television announcer asked him what was the pitch he had hit so prodigiously and he said he thought it was a fastball on the inside of the plate or a slider right down the middle, one or the other. When they watched the replay on the television the pitch looked like a low curve on the outside corner.
“How does it feel to be a hero?” the announcer asked him.
“I can take it or leave it,” he said. “Tomorrow if I do something wrong, they’ll be booing me again. I mean, you can’t live with people like that.”
“They’re the ones that pay our salaries,” said the announcer. “You know where they can stick their salaries,” said the player. Whatever his public reputation, he envisioned himself as a credit to the game.
“That’s no way to make friends,” his wife said to him when he came home. “That was a very destructive thing to do.”
“That’s the way I am.”
Pop called him on the phone that night. “I don’t know how to tell you this, Kidd, because I know how much it means to you, but you’re going to have to give back that home run you hit yesterday.”
“How come?”
“That thing you said on the television. The commissioner made a ruling on it last night after the mail went twenty to one against you. They’re giving the game-winning home run to Hatchmeyer whose place you took. It’s a real good break for the rookie who I understand is your best buddy on the club.”
Rocco was almost too disturbed to complain, the news fulfilling the worst of his life’s prophecies. “It doesn’t seem fair,” he said.
“You have the right to file a petition of appeal to the commissioner’s office, which is the league rule.”
“The commissioner was the one, you said, that took my home run away. What would be the good of appealing to him?”
“No good. No way. I’m just telling you what your rights are in case you want to make use of them. Okay, son?”
“Okay, Pop.”
The next day he wasn’t in the lineup, nor was he the day after. On the third day it rained.
“You have only yourself to blame,” his wife said, holding out her arms to him in comfort. “What did you do it for?”
Why did he do it? It did itself. He kissed his wife’s neck, lifted her off the floor, and carried her into the bedroom. “I prefer substance to style,” he said.
Stripped of his home run, his name not in the lineup for a whole week, Rocco fell into a severe depression, began to drink heavily, became the bloated substance of his former shadow, gave way to greater and greater distraction.
One day he was on the bench watching a game and he daydreamed that he was in the clubhouse watching a movie of a game played the day before. It might even have been an old game, the cinematic representation of former glories. When you weren’t playing, and even sometimes when you were, one game could seem very much like another.
He was trying to remember whether he had gotten into the game he was watching when Pop said to him, “Rocco, get up and swing a couple of bats, why don’t you?”