Some time ago, before the invention of BABIP and OPS, even
before saves were considered a statistic important enough to cover, there was
an easy way to tell which child was the biggest nerd, the most likely to quickly
abandon baseball dreams in favor of a career as an accountant or a lawyer or a
bookmaker. Going to a baseball game and finding a child or a teenager with a
scorecard said that this was the kind of child who, despite his intense love of
the sport, wouldn’t make it, and would instead be confined to the grandstand,
carefully observing, maybe eventually being good enough to work for Meyer
Lansky or Bugsy Siegel or Kennesaw Mountain Landis. Though scorekeeping has
dropped dramatically in popularity, the child who keeps score is almost
certainly not a good player, he is the watcher on the walls. He wears no
crowns, and wins no glory. He can’t even get a free hamburger from the Little
League’s snack bar.
I know about the reputation and the hamburger because,
despite living in the digital age, with any number of gadgets potentially at my
disposal, I took up scorekeeping as a kid. It was an extremely easy way to
avoid talking to anyone but the Umpire during the game. This helped me to avoid
reopening the deep, traumatic scars inflicted on me by North Venice Little League.
One day, I’ll talk to someone about these scars, which remain painful anytime I
think of them. Maybe if I’m ever a guest on The View the ladies and I will cry
about them together. My impression is that that’s basically how The View works.
But out of nearly every trauma springs an opportunity, no
matter how small or how silly. I learned how to keep score so that I could
pretend to be happy while at the games. It worked, and pretending to be happy
has become my permanent strategy for avoiding real conversation.
But suddenly I was at the Diablos Rojos game, and Rica was
asking whether anyone wanted to keep score, and people were looking down,
trying to avoid being saddled with the deep and abiding responsibility of being
a nerd, and I was done with the deportes section of the newspaper, and I was
about to watch a baseball game with nothing to do but watch, and so I raised my
hand a little and said “Hey Rica. I’ll keep score if you want.”
“You sure, man?” Rica is fluent in English, the only
non-native speaker on the team to have that advantage. It comes in handy in his business deals,
apparently.
“Ya, it’s no big deal. I got it. Then y’all can focus on
playing.”
“Cool, man. Here. Go get the lineup from the other team.”
And so I took the scorebook over to the other team, and
found an extremely old Oaxacan lady holding the book for the other team. She
was sitting next to an enormous cooler full of tamales, apparently prepared for
the team. I felt a deep twinge of regret that my brother didn’t play for this
team. The Diablos Rojos had no tamales. I looked at her and she saw I had the
book, and she looked around, and I politely introduced myself in Spanish and
then it turned out that she didn’t speak Spanish (or English) but her friend
next to her told me that she would read me the lineup after I read her
ours.
“Segunda Base: Pony” I said.
“Solo quiero sus nombres, señor” She said. “I only want
their names.”
I read the rest of the roster, and she read out theirs. I
was set for the game.
Our stands were on the first base side, under a short,
stout, leafy tree that seems to be the standard-issue shade device for the Los
Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks, whether it’s a tony Westside park or
a tiny pocket of green among barely-earthquake-code apartments in South
Central. As soon as I sat down a couple of rows above the team, none of whom
were in the unshaded dugout, one of the players (not a starter) offered me a
Bud Light. Taken by surprise, I politely declined. Drinking is, of course,
technically against the law in city parks.
My brother sat down next to me (The Diablos Rojos were the
visiting team, and they were still milling about waiting for the opponent to
finish infield practice) and I asked him if he was ok with his teammates
getting drunk. He told me that one or two or six “azulitos” (referring to the
little blue cans of Bud Light) were fairly common for some of the little-used
substitutes and the family members of the players who would spend the day in
the stands. We talked briefly about his position for the day (First Base, his
favorite) and he mentioned something which truly astounded me.
The man taking infield for the other team, over at first
base, was a substantially older man, in his late forties at least. He was
rotund, in that sort of way that aging relief pitchers are barrels, containing
multitudes that would love to escape through the buttoned seam of the front of
the baseball jersey. He had a massive moustache, in the style of Pancho Villa
or Vicente Fox. His name, according to Preston, was Melchor. While naming
children after famous historical figures is not unprecedented, going back to a
man who was president of Mexico for a couple of months back in 1832 is
certainly interesting. It is not, however, astounding.
What was astounding is that Melchor had been, until the week
prior, the manager of the Diablos Rojos. He had then traded himself to the
Maquileros (“Factory Workers”) the same week they were set to play the Diablos
Rojos. Bizarre doesn’t begin to cover that kind of move. I watched Melchor for a couple of minutes and
decided the Diablos Rojos were probably better off with Preston at first
anyway.
I was gazing out across the expansive, unfenced outfield
which was basically the rest of the park, the short right field formed by the
roller hockey rink still at least 250 feet from home plate at the foul line,
and considering the vastness of America that must be enclosed by foul lines,
and how much of the country must be in the fair territory of some or another
baseball field, with older men running around when I was snapped out of my
reverie. “¿Ey, compa, quien va a batear este inning?” (Hey, man, who’s gonna
bat this inning?)
I realized that the man was talking to me, and I read out
the list. “Dony, Victor, y Rica, y despues, Tristan.”
Everyone looked at me funny. They asked for me to read it
again. I did. One of the guys grabbed it from me. “Pony, Victor, y Rica, y
despues, Tristan,” he said. I had misread “Pony” (pronounced like a small
horse) as “Donny.” Sheepishly, I corrected the sheet and got ready for my work.
As Pony strode up to the plate, the umpire, a hulking
middle-aged Mexican man, came waddling down the first base line towards Rica.
He exchanged words briefly, and then pointed at me. “Ey, come down here!”
I walked down the steps, expecting even greater embarrassment.
I wasn’t making eye contact with the umpire, but he just asked to see the sheet.
I showed it to him, he said it was ok, and I went back to the stands. That
bullet had been dodged.
Apparently even in the most Mexican of American baseball
leagues, it is customary for the umpire, upon crouching behind the catcher for
the first pitch of the game, to shout “Play Ball!”
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