Winter is hanging over much of the nation like a soaked down comforter – wet snow piling on shingles from New Mexico to Maine, but you’d never know it, you never knew it, not on this 1.92 acres of clay, flapping pine-colored windscreen, crisp fresh blades of grass and a brand-new home plate, sanitary white bordered with night sky black precisely 17 inches across.
I am fumbling with the largest rake I’d ever held, aimlessly scrolling racetrack patterns on the red-brown infield dirt, when I hear the voice.
“Gotta get ready,” a deep baritone mutters. “Gotta get ready for Spring.”
I look up – no one on the at the plate, nor anyone on the mound. Empty grandstands, glistening silver with the snow-capped San Jacinto Mountains towering in the background – no one there either. Behind the locked gates of the first base dugout – emptiness. Third base? The same. But then, in the disappointing way that some apparitions creep into your conscience instead of announcing themselves with flashes of light and heavenly chimes, I see him.
More Fat Albert than Muhammad Ali, the rotund, jelly-like man labors as he removes his blue jacket adorned with an “A” on the chest. The familiar red-and-blue cuffs and trim remind me of the baseball dynasty with the fickle fans – Hank Aaron, Turner Field and all those pitchers.
“This is the year,” echoes the voice.
He lowers himself onto the aluminum bench adjacent to the left-field bullpen mound, deep breaths marking his concerted effort to reach down to the metal-studded cleats. The spikes are blue, sky blue, holdovers from another decade of baseball. They fail to contain his monstruous feet. His squat, fat feet ooze through the seams.
“Gonna make it. I’m goin’ north with the big club.”
“Hey!” my voice shatters the morning calm. “Can I help you?”
He wears a ragged red-brimmed cap bursting with an afro like I haven’t seen since the 70’s. It is pulled down low over his eyes and he keeps his chins close to his chest, so the answers come muffled.
“It’s a beautiful day,” he pronounces. “A beautiful day for baseball.”
Going through his determined motions, the voice answers, but he scarcely flinches another muscle to respond to me.
“Don’t mess up my mound!” I yell.
I get the sense he isn’t going to pay me much heed.
“That took me an hour!”
I drop the rake to my feet. The sun is high and warm on this February morning and my sweat-dripped long-sleeve tshirt clings to me. I’m heading to the ‘pen.
“Four Hunnerd strikeouts,” he answers, as if I’d asked a question. “That’s what they’ll remember me for… just like Satchel Paige, hardest thrower alive.”
He’s talking to himself?
“Twelve on Openin’ Day. Four days rest, then eleven more… Front page, Palm Springs Desert Sun. Sixteen in one game before May… Sports Illustrated! I can hear it now… James Wilson Aloysius Thomas Jefferson Cy Grover Cleveland Reagan Brigham Halliburton is MVP this year. And they’ll get it right. They’ll get it right. Ask me three times the order and I’ll always repeat it… James Weston Henderson Abraham Lincoln Tyrus Cobb Reagan Birkenbeiner. Yeah, that will be some story.”
“Excuse me?” I have to interject.
“Coach, thank yooou for the off-season regiment, liftin’ and runnin’, throwin’ rice and grabbin’ the rubber bands. I feel like One-point-six-nine-two-four-eight million dollars… and worth every penny. Did you see me at the gym?”
“Who is Coach? What?”
“Ever since I struck out Willie Mays Strawberry in my first game, I knew this was gonna be the year. So let’s get to work.”
Laces tied in a jumble, two-striped white socks pulled up high but eclipsed below the knees by Champion sweats – drawstrings askew, belly protruding - he rises to his feet. He towers over me and surrounds me in the narrow confines of the clay between the white-chalk foul line, the bench and the chainlink fence.
This is James. James K. Prospect – a man whose reputation has already entered my conscience despite my shallow days-old knowledge of this new town.
“You must be James,” I extend a hand.
“Yesssss, I am. James K. Harmonious Filibuster Travis Wilson Breadmaker, number one prospect in the California Angels of Gene Autry of the American League of Professional Baseball. And THIS is my year.”
Doobie, the city’s head groundskeeper, as well as Hawk, the team’s GM, have told me about James. They couldn’t be more right.
“Ever’ day I come down to this temple of baseball and wrap my hands around this little white ball and throw … well, I fire. Great balls of fire, heat-intensifyin’ missiles of strikeout material. I throw a seventy-seven mile curveball that falls like a donut from the coffee shop table and then I set them up for high an’ mighty heat that comes from the soul and when they go back to the dugout them announcers say, ‘strike three – James Montgomery Davis Winfield Bestenwilder has done it again’ and I just climb back up on the mound and get ready to fire and retire the next one.”
If windmills turn concise circles, James is more like tumbleweed when he stretches out his arms and starts to stretch and rotate. He climbs on to the pitching mound, balancing precariously ten-and-one-half precisely compacted inches above the playing field. He puts his left foot on the rubber, then his right and leans forward – a shantytown lean-to startled by a sudden gust of wind.
“Thirty-three years I’ve given to the game and when the Hall of Fame comes callin’, they probably want to make a bust of me and put it next to Satchel n’ Babe and I just scowl because intimidation is part of my game.”
He stares towards the south. He eyes home plate of the bullpen. Silent now, his left foot slides perpendicularly backwards by about six inches and in a jagged but non-stop motion, he steps forward lurching his body like a dented cab around a corner. The left foot clears the rubber by inches as he turns his back to me, sends his left arm flailing skyward, cocks his right hand behind his ear and creakily brings the entire motion forward with a demonstrative, “umph.”
The ball releases and in the split second that any observer of the game can assess whether someone is a prospect, I cringe. Home plate is always 60 feet, 6 inches away – no more, no less, no argument. But this first throw of Spring lands either 30 feet from the mound or 30 feet shy of the plate, give or take a few inches. I wonder if it slipped from his hand. But before I can utter a word, suggest that I’ll chase down the ball or process what this man is thinking, he cries out.
“Steeee-rike Three… Looks like I still got it.”
He steps down from the mound, reorients his cap, takes three heavy steps behind the mound, leans over and pulls out another baseball from his tattered bag “-N-G-E-L-S” inscribed on the side.
“Second inning… Up one run already. Boy, these folks are enjoying the game. Gotta stay focused. This is the year. Scout’s gonna sign me. One-point-three-point-two-four-six-eight-million dollars. Highest paid black man in the game.”
The contortion begins again. He steps up to the pitching rubber and like Lincoln Logs tumbling from a preschooler’s hand, James’ elbows flay, his waistline sags, a foot rises skyward and his right arm cocks and lunges forward. Horsehide flies again. The 216 red stitches float through the air, and before they fall to earth, the baritone erupts again, “Steeee-rike Three… James got a perfect game today.”
The workout lasts 13 pitches. Perspiring profusely, he takes three steps to the bench and reaches for the Coleman water jug he had set down when he arrived.
“Lemon-limeade Gatorade, is it in you?” his laugh is a bellow.
It looks like water to me.
“Hoss, my name is James. James Stapleton Heaverlo Adams Industry Beltaker, Cy Young award winner. Best Negro ever to put on this uniform – at least that’s what Mr. Bavasi says to me.”
He doesn’t let me respond.
“And you must be Mr. Rickey. Branch Rickey. It’s my pleasure, Mr. Rickey. I know you signed my bro, Jackie Robinson. And you’re gonna sign me, too. Where’s the contract? One-point-nine-three-point-six-zero-zero-zero-zero dollars, richest man in America.”
He pauses and looks deep, wishfully into my eyes. Standing before me is a man who leaves his bed in a shelter or transient hotel or cousin’s living room every day and comes to this sacred green-and-clay space, to forget about the demons, the doctors, the drugs and the TV cartoons. He grabs a tattered bag filled with all the treasures a man could want – a glove, some balls and a pair of spikes – and walks and walks because his legs are on auto-pilot to the ballpark. He’s done this ever since he woke up in this strange desert sanctuary, not that he remembers any place else. He trudges and he mutters, he winds up and he chatters and he zeroes in on a catcher’s mitt and he sweats and then he waits.
And I think of the dreams of 10-year-olds on Little League fields in a wealthy suburb of Any City, USA. I think of my upbringing, the college education, the graduate school, the ivy-walled academia and our self-aggrandizing “community service initiatives”. I think about every dream I’ve ever had – and the harsh reality when you tell a young boy in the projects who mother is a drug addict that maybe college isn’t in the cards for them. I think about my move, 3,000 miles in a Ford Escort with nothing but clothes, music cassette tapes, Mom’s credit card and four boxes of books. In the instant where a kid who doesn’t know better stands before a man who couldn’t look happier, I hear myself answer,
“Tomorrow James. Come back, tomorrow. Casey Stengel will be with me and he wants to take you North with the big club.”
“All right, sir,” he answers. “I better get some rest.”
“James?”
“Yes, sir?”
“He’s bringing you a contract.”
When I first arrived here in Salt Lake City, I was inclined to disparage the sports sections of the Deseret News and the Salt Lake Tribune. After all, there's BARELY any sports here, so what could they possibly write about - and how would any GOOD writers actually want to write here? But over time, both papers have had some impressive moments, so due credit is deserved.
