S. L. Price - Heart of the Game: Life, Death, and Mercy in Minor League America

Heart of the Game

Life, Death, and Mercy in Minor League America

S. L. Price

For all the lifers, here and gone

And as the smart ship grew

In stature, grace, and hue,

In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

Alien they seem to be:

No mortal eye could see

The intimate welding of their later history.

THOMAS HARDY,

FROM THE CONVERGENCE OF THE TWAIN

And there arrives a lull in the hot race

Wherein he doth for ever chase

That flying and elusive shadow, rest.

An air of coolness plays upon his face,

And an unwonted calm pervades his breast.

And then he thinks he knows

The hills where his life rose,

And the sea where it goes.

MATTHEW ARNOLD, FROM THE BURIED LIFE

He was baseball.

HOUSTON ASTROS COACH JACKIE MOORE,

ON MIKE COOLBAUGH

JULY 22, 2007

THE BALLPARK NESTLES IN A SPACE WHERE BRIDGE AND RIVER MEET, and none of them is monumentalnot the park nor the bridge nor the river nor the cities that the river runs between. In their size lies a certain charm, though to the ambitious and young such smallness can feel like a cage: The bridge serves only its function, with no cables soaring so that you cant help but take in the sky; the ballpark, with its field and stands carved well below street level, sends a message less of civic pride than of unnecessary humility, like a tall woman slouching in the hope of blending in. And after its mighty beginnings in a steep and narrow drop out of the Rocky Mountains 1,500 miles west, after its widening flood across the Great Plains, the river is weakening here as it readies to meet the mother Mississippi, decorative, a mild buffer between the two cities. The one on the other side announced its size from the start, named as it was by paddling trappers for La Petite Roche jutting out from the south bank. This one, smaller still, merited no other label but a dismissive North Little Rock, until residents from across the river began coming here to dump their unwanted canines. Then everyone started calling it Dogtown.

There are two men down on the baseball field. They are small, too, by all measures of a material world, both raised in obscure towns along rivers with names like Susquehanna and Rio Yauco, both gifted but never enough to make it in the urban sprawls where one becomes famous and theres real money to be made. Theyd had their chances, but long before this Sunday night the last had come and gone. The men are what the game calls lifers, which, in its evocation of prisoners doing time, may be cartoonish but is hardly wrong. Beholden to talents theyd honed since youth, thrilled even now by moments of physical grace not replicable in any other profession, unsure how to begin the next career, they found themselves lodged in the games minor leagues. There was no escape plan. They counted the years. Seventeen for the coach lying still on the grass. Eleven for the player on his knees, bent double, head buried in his hands.

Silence has fallen over the crowd, some 1,700 people struck as still as a forest after sudden snow. Maybe 20 seconds have passed since Tulsa Drillers utilityman Tino Sanchez swung his bat and followed the balls flight as it curved in a line describing a scimitar blade into the rear of Mike Coolbaughs neck. Maybe 15 seconds have passed since Tino ran up the first base line, stood alone over his first base coach, and peered into the face below. Maybe 5 seconds have passed since Tino, in one motion, stood and pivoted 180 degrees while raising his left arm to signal teammates and manager and trainer that things were bad, worse than anyone could believe, and only stopped rotating when facing the field again, as if trying to draw strength from the geometric patterns that were as familiar now as the layout of a boyhood home: the diamond-shaped basepaths, the rectangular dugout, the meticulously set lines fanning down to fences stenciled with the precise number of feet from home plate, the comforting squares and columns and numbers alight on the scoreboardall of it interlocking into one snug and perfect whole. Still, his knees gave.

The ball lies near the first base line. It is 8:53 p.m., or maybe 8:54 or: 55 now; its impossible to say, exactly, because the timelessness of shock, the holiness attending the ultimate fear, has taken hold of every person in the ballpark. In the stands people have begun to talk again, but softly because no one knows if the coach is alive, if the game will go on, if they should stay or go. Theres a paralysis of even instinct because what can your gut, slowed by cold beer and stale popcorn and a lazy nights hope for a midsummers Double-A ballgame, tell you when seeing a man so alive suddenly not move? Phone numbers are dialed. An ambulance is called. Strangers surround Mike Coolbaugh. No, no, no, Tino is saying to himself. No, please.

Theres but one blessing. Somehow, the moment itself has slipped past the clutch of modern experience. No television cameras captured the ball hitting the coach; no team cameras focused on Coolbaugh as he was struck or falling. Despite the prevalence of cell phone photography and portable recorders and the Internets appetite for every recordable event, no Zapruder will surface with footage of the blow. Its as if, in that sudden erasure of noise just after, a kind hand conspired to wipe away any cheapening visuals, any reductive evidence of so public an accident, extending even to the games official record. History is baseballs lifeblood and statistics its spine. Yet after Sanchez hit the foul ball in the top of the ninth inning, the umpires gathered and called the game over, and when it was later decided that the result was official and the game would not resume, another marker disappeared. Because the at-bat never ended, was not complete, it became a statistical non-event. Tino Sanchezs record would show a total of 2,267 career trips to the plate, but the one that matters most isnt included; its a phantom play, forever frozen at a 32 count, hazy proof that there are some baseball events that numbers cant contain.

Still: There are two men down on the field. One is unconscious. The other had looked down into that face struggling in the grass, and dropped to his knees in the universal expression of helplessness, of begging. It is a warm Sunday night and summer, but the player hears nothing now, not from the game nor the river nor the people surrounding. Silence presses down, relentless, and Tinos gasping for air and learning too fast what it means to be alone.

FULL FURNACE

MAYBE, MIKE COOLBAUGH WONDERED IN THE FREE MONTHS before he joined his last team, its that he talked too much. Analyzing every little twist in the minor league life. Picking apart all the suspect statistical cliches, all the excuses and explanations thrown down from on high. Studying professional baseball as if it were an entity that, when subjected to relentless inspection, could actually reveal itself as making some kind of sense. He knew there were logical explanations for how a man could spend 17 years in the minor leagues and make AAA All-Star teams and win awards and prove himself time and again, yet never get a clean shot at the major leagues. He knew all about injuries, bad timing, the reality that someone might be just that much better. Still, in total it was hard not to be puzzled.

A curse on the Coolbaugh family, his father would say later about the game, and if Mike didnt go that far, on his worst days he might talk about bad luck. Really, though, mystical conspiracy wasnt his thing. His playing career ended as less a mystery than a problem, and every problem had a solution, right? So in retrospect that was it, perhaps: His attitude, his knack for worrying every angle, got on peoples nerves. Maybe his failure never concerned what he did or didnt do. Maybe it was all about who he was.