The Rake Magazine

Author: Brad Zellar

What I Have To Say Today

Whoever, so as to simplify problems, denies the existence of certain obligations has, in his heart, made a compact with crime.

—Simone Weil, The Need For Roots

How could I have expected that after a long life I would understand no more than to wake up at night and to repeat: strange, strange, strange, o how strange. O how funny and strange.

—Czeslaw Milosz, Unattainable Earth

The town I found myself in had a surprisingly nice public library where I could spend a couple hours checking my email, reading the newspaper, and browsing through books on local history.

At the back of this library there was a spacious and sunny enclosed porch that jutted out over what might have been either a lake or a swollen river. I could have probably found the answer to that question in one of the local history books, I suppose, but I wasn’t that curious.

Through the big glass windows of this porch I stood and watched as they dragged a body out of the lake or river almost directly beneath me.

I couldn’t tell you where I was if you pasted my mugshot on a wall map that had all of the place names printed in big, black letters. I saw them drag that body out of the water, though. It was hard to miss that. I saw them heave the body from the water and drag it through the tall grass along the bank. You couldn’t really tell what it was other than, unmistakably, a body. The guys who did the dragging were wearing plastic gloves, and there were a lot of guys wearing plastic gloves; it seemed like everybody that was standing around wanted to have a hand in pulling that body from the water.

I watched as they wheeled the shiny black bag away and tucked it inside an ambulance.

It was a small town, that much I know, and every cop, firefighter, and news reporter in town was down there, as well as the usual mob of kids on bikes and old folks out walking dogs.

Later, on the local TV station, I heard the body had been some eighty-eight-year-old woman. I was on the bed in a motel room when I learned this news. They said it appeared the woman had been in the water for quite a long time. They knew her name, and showed a photo of her on the screen, a shot that looked like it might have been from a church directory.

A little fucking town like that and nobody had even reported her missing.

Let me tell you something: if you fall off this planet you can fall for a long time, and much of that time you won’t even feel like you’re falling.

So this is the advice I can offer you today: Hold on.

Gravity is sometimes brutal, but it’s at the very least a sort of connection and binding, and as such is mostly a beautiful thing, and beautiful things are blessings.

That much, at least, I believe.

July 30, 2005
The Diving Bell, The Belly Of The Whale

For fifteen years I’d been waiting for the news that this poor, skinny fucker had turned up dead in a place just like this, but here he was, (barely) living proof that it didn’t require much in the way of cooperation and commitment to simply keep on breathing.

It had probably been at least seven years since I’d last seen him, and he’d lost even more weight, pounds you wouldn’t think he could afford to lose. He seemed to have a permanent case of pneumonia.

He claimed he was installing countertops, this wrecked moron who was probably the most brilliant person I’d ever known. Once upon a time he had been, anyway.

For several weeks I’d harbored the nagging idea that I wanted to see him. At the moment, I felt surprisingly fine –pretty good, really, if not quite like the old days– but looking at him nodding off on the floor of that motel room I knew that I had nonetheless been mistaken. It would be just my luck if the fucker finally kicked in a room registered under my name.

He was sitting maybe three feet from the television, propped up against the foot of one of the beds, making a sort of instinctive, animal effort to watch Sports Center through fluttering eyes. Earlier I’d tried to rouse him to get him to clean his blood off the bathroom sink.

Twenty years he’d been playing with needles and he still made a mess. He was so fucked up he’d either missed the vein or popped it.

I wasn’t nearly as fearless as I’d once been, and was flat on the bed when the first wave rolled over me. I threw up in a plastic garbage pail.

“I’ll bet you never thought you’d feel that way again,” he said.

“This isn’t going to be my life,” I said. “It never was.”

“Of course,” he said. “You were always just an adventurer.” I knew this was him trying to be nasty, the best effort he had in him.

“Who buys this shit and pays for your motel rooms when I’m not around?” I asked.

“There’s always money,” he said. “Or there’s always people with money. I have a place, you know. The motel was your idea.”

I knew he had a place. I also knew I didn’t want to see it.

He had a weird and mysterious knack; no matter where he was –and he had been lots of places– he always seemed to know how to find drugs. Even in a dinky, jerkwater town like this he had his connections.

“Do you remember if there were Tecatos around back when you walked away?” he asked.

“No idea,” I said. “What are they?”

“Mexican junkies,” he said. “I work with a couple of them. They’re always plugged into something, although a lot of what they come up with is actually Fentanyl, and I’m not sure they know the difference.”

This was a guy who’d changed the direction of my life, and there were a lot of good, enduring things that I’d learned from him, along, of course, with the things that weren’t so good. There was a time when he’d had a real gift for discovering interesting things, in a place where that wasn’t so easy to do, and I’d once admired him more than anyone I knew.

I don’t know what happened to him, beyond the obvious things that had happened to him. I’d long since lost interest in trying to figure it out.

I think the last thing he said to me before he nodded off was, “Remember what you said to me that one time?”

“I don’t suppose I do,” I said.

I slept, which had been what I was really after, and when I woke up he was gone. I honestly can’t recall the last time I felt such a huge sense of relief.

July 29, 2005
Hello [Insert Town Name Here]!

How strange.

Do you see how much that poor creature has in its hands?

And yet you’ve never known anyone with emptier arms.

Look Closely: This Picture Is A Metaphor

Is anybody alive out there? Would you care to show yourselves or produce some general murmur to announce your presence?

This darkness is oppressive, and surely more blinding than light. I can’t see you, and I have no true way of knowing that you exist. Thankfully, however, my presumption apparently knows no bounds. I’m willing to presume all manner of foolish and seriously misguided things. This trait, I suppose, is a sort of protective delusion. I’m not sure, frankly, that I could live without it, or at least without some equally pathetic variant of it.

There are, I’ll admit, occasionally spells in which I like to imagine you –and first, of course, I have to imagine you, which is no small feat– huddled out there in a great, or even a rather modest, sea of bodies, pressed together in the darkness or even just scattered sort of randomly about, and holding aloft cigarette lighters in mass –or minor, or whatever the opposite of mass would be– tribute to my non-existent gifts.

I shout things like, “Hello, Minneapolis!” Or, “How’s everybody doing out there tonight?” Typical things, really, but I’ll also sometimes find myself yelling more atypical things along the lines of, “What am I doing, and why am I doing it?” Or, even more ridiculously, “How am I doing? Does my hair look okay?” Or: “Is there really any reason at all that I should carry on with this nonsense?”

And I can tell you emphatically that as blinding as the darkness can be, the silence is positively deafening. It’s unnerving, to be completely honest with you (as if, of course, such a thing were even remotely possible), and some nights it just flat out makes me keen myself red-faced and hoarse.

I wish I could say that this was somehow cathartic.

July 27, 2005
Well…

That sort of felt like a punctuation mark, didn’t it? A big, loud, red, emphatic something right there in the middle of the schedule.

I don’t know. Maybe the Twins will bounce back and have one of those sustained hot streaks they had so often in the last several years but which have resolutely eluded them so far this season. I’m not holding my breath, though, not with this miserable offense.

Tonight was just pathetic. The Twins looked like a Little League team against that rangy geezer, and I realize, yes, that rangy geezer was Randy Johnson, but Johnson is not the pitcher he was even a year ago, let alone several years ago. He is a rangy geezer, plain and simple, and an unsightly geezer to boot, not to mention a New York Yankee. He’s virtually the same age as Terry Mulholland, and almost as old as Wayne Terwilliger. Johnson, in fact, looks like he’s been sharing a personal trainer with Terwilliger for the last thirty years.

I can only imagine how depressing this stuff must be for the pitching staff. Seriously, can you imagine? What do you suppose Brad Radke was thinking as he made his way to Yankee Stadium today?

I’ll bet you a signed Wayne Terwilliger fungo bat he was thinking, “I don’t have a prayer in the world. This club will be lucky if they manage to scratch out two hits against that unsightly geezer. I got no chance. None. The Yankees could suit up and send to the mound that fat Irish bastard who sings ‘God Bless America’ every night and I’d still show up in tomorrow’s boxscore as the losing pitcher. I hope like hell that moron Billy Crystal isn’t sitting there mugging from the box seats. God, I hate that poisonous troll….It sure would be swell if I had time to get a nice beefsteak somewhere after the game.”

I know, of course, and by this time you surely know as well, that this is all somehow my fault. I wish like hell I could find a way to put a stop to it, and please rest assured that even right this moment I’m wracking my wracked brain trying to figure out a way to stop the bleeding.

The kids, though, that’s who I really think about. All those kids out there who live and breath Twins baseball. The game, as I think I might have pointed out before, is really all about the kids, and it breaks my heart to think what must be going through the heads of those poor little nippers as they toss and turn in their beds tonight after folding their little hands and asking Jesus to please help the Minnesota Twins get all better.

But, no, I can’t do it. It’s just too painful to imagine.

I simply can’t afford to think about the kids. It would kill me right now. And I’m not quite sure why, but, dammit, I want to live.

July 27, 2005
Not A Creature Was Stirring

I began by telling him how dissatisfied I was with the idea that life must be a lesser thing than we were capable of imagining it to be. I had the feeling that the same thing happened to nearly everybody I knew and whom I did not know. No sooner was their youth, with the little force and impetus characteristic of youth, done, and they stopped growing. At the very moment that one felt that now was the time to gather oneself together, to use one’s whole strength, to take control, to be an adult, in fact, they seemed content to swap the darling wish of their hearts for innumerable little wishes.

—Katherine Mansfield, from her journal

Come and get these memories.

—Martha and the Vandellas

There was a culvert down there that would take you right back into the mountain. In the spring, or whenever it rained, the thing would rush with run-off water that would fill the little creek and turn it for a time into a roaring, dirty river. During dry spells, however, you could walk ankle-deep in clear water way back into the cool darkness of the culvert, right into the belly of the mountain. A normal-sized man wouldn’t even have to stoop.

When everything started to go to hell and the men came across the fields in their black helmets and set fire to farm houses and barns, the people who lived in the little villages that were spread out across the countryside packed up their most essential possessions and took up residence in the mountain culvert.

Eventually the villagers established an elaborate community in the culvert, and started excavating further into the mountain on all sides. They set up partitions and built elaborate housing warrens for individual families and tribes. At one end the essential flow of water into the culvert was walled off with stones and diverted away from what were now the crowded apartments of refugees.

After a time the culvert community, strained by overpopulation, began to expand further and further, until there were a handful of anonymous villages strung out deep within the mountain. These subterranean hamlets eventually developed their own languages and cultures, and became in time bitter rivals. Malnourishment and an assortment of related dementias led to escalating violence that was every bit the equal of the hostilities that had driven the culvert dwellers underground in the first place. There were constant eruptions of new conflicts, and eventually full-scale war, which was a savage, bloody, and hand-to-hand affair in such close quarters.

They said when they finally went in there with the bulldozers they found the bodies stacked like cordwood, and there wasn’t one soul left breathing.

The darkness is only light

That has not yet reached us….

—Charles Wright, “Tattoos”

I knew if I waited long enough light would eventually come through that hole, and so I waited.

I waited a long time.

July 26, 2005
It's The Same Old Song

Yes, it is. But what song is it?

That is your assignment for today, class. What is the theme song of the 2005 Minnesota Twins?

Possible suggestions, as of 5:30 this morning:

“Too Much of Not Enough”?

“Thin Line Between Love and Hate”?

“You Ain’t Goin’ No Where”?

“My Favorite Waste of Time”?

“Bases Were Loaded”?

“Stranded”?

“One Step Forward, Two Steps Back”?

“Pink Has Turned to Blue”?

“You’re Gonna Change (Or I’m Gonna Leave)”?

“From a Whisper to a Scream”?

“I Bought A Headache”?

“Hopeless Blues”?

“Living on a Thin Line”?

“Walking the Floor Over You”?

“Is That All There Is?”

Or, in the wishful thinking category: “The Night Chicago Died.”

And now –and I think we all could use a little diversion about now– here’s Patrick Donnelly’s latest dispatch from the road:

San Luis Obispo
July 20, 2005
San Luis Obispo Stadium

Leaving Fresno around noon, I stumbled onto a rare treat when I turned on the radio. The Giants were hosting the Braves in a weekday matinee, and the signal from KNBR was coming in loud and clear, allowing me to catch a few innings as I drove southwest to San Luis Obispo.

I’d almost forgotten what a pleasure it can be to listen to a major league radio crew calling a game. Driving through the dusty terrain as I made my way to the central coast, John Miller (sans Joe Morgan, another bonus) painted a brilliant picture of a sun-kissed Wednesday afternoon by the bay. “Here’s Omar Vizquel,” said Miller, and I could see the diminutive shortstop digging his cleats into the manicured dirt of SBC’s left-handed batter’s box. I could feel the intensity of Braves pitcher John Smoltz glaring in for the sign. I could once again smell the garlic and sea-salt winds, and hear the hecklers and vendors echoing throughout the seats.

What I didn’t hear was a litany of in-game spots for various broadcast sponsors. I didn’t hear every agonizing detail of a Double-A game played the night before, halfway across the country. I didn’t hear hokey anecdotes and catch-phrases and missed pitches and meaningless statistics read straight out of the game notes prepared by the team’s media relations staff.

I did hear an announcer describe the action as it was happening, instead of sputtering and fumbling for words, then providing a recap of the play after the dust settled. I did hear a brief, throwaway story about some doughnuts missing from the press box, and it didn’t drag on for two innings. And I did hear a very cool spot between innings from Giants pitcher Scott Eyre, who talked about his earliest baseball memory, going to a ballgame with his dad at Dodger Stadium when he was about nine or ten. Eyre said he was raised on Vin Scully and bled Dodger Blue, and that night he saw Fernando Valenzuela pitch a no-hitter.

Many years later, he recalled, Eyre mentioned his memories of that night to his father, who replied, “We listened to that game together on the radio.” Such is the power of baseball on the radio, in the hands of a skilled narrator like Scully — you’re not just listening to it, you are there. I weep for future generations of Twins fans, who will remember more about the New Britain Rock Cats and your local Kinetico dealer than Johan Santana or Torii Hunter.

On to San Luis Obispo, an oasis after the heat of Fresno. This little college town, located on the coast halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles, is as scenic and welcoming as you could ever hope, especially with a guided tour from my old friend Tim, who moved there with his wife Bonnie a year and a half ago and have quickly taken deep roots. It’d be hard not to, with “seventy-five and sunny” a year-round mantra for the local weather forecasters.

After a scrumptious meal of fish tacos at “the best Mexican restaurant on the Central Coast” (according to Tim, who would know), we made the brief trek to San Luis Obispo Stadium, parked for free, coughed up a mere seven bucks a head and settled into our lawn chairs behind the first-base line. The San Luis Obispo Blues are the spawn of a relatively recent development of wood-bat summer leagues for college players who might be pro prospects. These leagues used to be limited to Alaska and the Cape Cod League, but now they’re springing up everywhere, including the Upper Midwest, where you can watch a similar level of ball in St. Cloud, Rochester and elsewhere.

The Blues feature players from universities as far away as Georgetown and Tennessee, and as nearby as Sacramento State and the local Cal Poly SLO squad. And they put on a decent show against the Santa Maria Indians, with both sides pitching well and playing outstanding defense. Unfortunately for the home team, my streak of bringing good luck to the visitors continued as the Indians scratched out a run early and held on for a 1-0 victory.

The backstop at the stadium is ringed by five rows of bright orange seats from dugout to dugout, about 800 in all, but many of the fans brought their own chairs or spread out a blanket and watched the game from the grassy hill just behind the box seats. Kids chased each other while they weren’t chasing foul balls (each one earning them a Jamba Juice gift certificate, redeemable at the concession stand), friends greeted each other and the PA announcer called out the name of a fan who made a nice catch of a foul popup, and the atmosphere was as small-town friendly as any town-team amateur game in the hamlets and burgs that dot the Minnesota landscape.

Even the stadium had its small-town features, including trains (actual, working trains, not fake ones like in Houston) running behind the outfield fence, which itself was bedecked in advertisements for local merchants. My favorite was the sign for ABC Bail Bonds (apparently Chico’s has an exclusive deal with the Bad News Bears). We heard another ABC sponsorship late in the game — when a Santa Maria player was thrown out at second on a stolen base attempt, the PA announcer (after playing a snippet of “Been Caught Stealing” by Jane’s Addiction) piped in, “Been caught stealing? Call ABC Bail Bonds! Their slogan is, it’s better to know them and not need them than need them and not know them.”

The other highlight of the night for the crowd involved, as it often does, cheap beer. Each night the announcer designates a “patsy” from the other team, and each time the patsy strikes out, fans get fifty cents off a Blue Moon Ale at the Peach and Frog, a downtown SLO pub. Wednesday night’s patsy got the hood — three strikeouts — and the buck-fifty off Blue Moon after the game likely sent the owners of the Peach and Frog scrambling to bankruptcy court the next day.

The seventh-inning stretch appears to be a special ritual here, as a vendor they call “Rudy the Rocket” — who spent most of the game hawking raffle tickets to help cover the team’s expenses — grabbed the microphone and led the crowd in a rousing rendition of “Baseball’s National Anthem, Take Me Out To The Ballgame!” (See what years of listening to John Gordon will do to a guy?) The other musical entertainment came from a live, four-piece rock band, The Bootleggers, who were set up behind the third-base stands and filled the air with tight covers of classic rock staples from the likes of The Who, David Bowie, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. They didn’t have a singer, but they did have a bassist with great hands — he snagged a foul ball on the fly in the ninth inning as they were tuning up for their final set.

I didn’t have to hear it on the radio to know that I’ll remember San Luis Obispo for a long time.

Thursday: Bakersfield

July 25, 2005
Take Another Look

A bad night lies ahead

And a new day beyond that–

A simple sequence, but hard

To remember in the right order.

—Mark Jarman, “Psalm: The New Day”

Twice I woke up tonight and wandered to

the window. And the lights down on the street,

like pale omission points, tried to complete

the fragment of a sentence spoken through

sleep, but diminished into darkness, too.

—Joseph Brodsky, “On Love”

I must say. Don’t you love that expression? The suggestion of compulsion, of being forced, or helpless, to say, even when, as now, the million dollar question is, say what? Something, certainly.

What was I going to say? That’s another good one, and the story of my days of late, all day, every day and long into the night.

There always seems to be something lurking in the peripheries, moving in and out of the shadows, the ceaseless hide-and-seek of an exhausted consciousness. Earlier today I was certain that there were two lines, or two strands of thought –almost ideas– that at some point I felt should be recorded, or at the very least preserved somehow, committed for some purpose to memory.

But they’re gone now. I’ve been sitting here for an hour with a pen light clenched in my teeth and my brain in a soup bowl in my lap, poking through the weird coils of meat with a chopstick, trying to find those elusive fucking words. They do, however, seem to have vanished. They’ve slipped back into the brush and headed for the river. I suppose they’re drinking beer and huffing paint under the bridge even now, avoiding the moonlight that’s making a moving screen of the water. I can just barely hear the distant murmur of their voices carrying back up the river.

By tomorrow they’ll have forgotten themselves. They will have wholly disappeared. I can’t keep track of all the deserters any more. They go right from smiling, bright-eyed babies to fugitives to just plain gone.

we passed a long row

of elms. She looked at them

awhile out of

the ambulance window and said,

What are all those

fuzzy-looking things out there?

Trees? Well, I’m tired

of them and rolled her head away.

—Williams Carlos Williams, from “The Last Words Of My English Grandmother”

July 25, 2005
The Spell Is Broken

Thanks for nothing, fellas. Thanks for ruining another Friday night. I suppose I should thank you, though, for the fond and lingering –well, maybe not so lingering; maybe swiftly evaporating– memories of that glorious three-game winning streak.

FYI, for those who’ve inquired: I’ve had some pretty intense squabbles with Jumbo over the last week or so, and had told him that he wouldn’t be allowed back in the room until he wrote something that would qualify for a PG-13 rating. Ideally I’d like to see him shoot for a straight PG. He’s been working some seriously raw and apoplectic hard-R territory of late, and as we all well know, the game’s really about the kids. I’m not sure I could live with myself if I felt I was responsible for introducing a shitload of blue language into the vocabulary of some little shaver out there.

That said, I’m pretty damn close to letting Jumbo come back in here to take his whacks.

In the meantime, here’s Patrick Donnelly’s latest road dispatch from out West. Those paying proper attention will surely have noticed that the Twins are now officially an ugly 0-1 since I welcomed Donnelly aboard. Maybe that’s just a coincidence, but I guess we’re going to find out.

Grizzlies Stadium, Fresno
July 19, 2005
Fresno Grizzlies vs. Salt Lake Stingers, PCL (Triple-A)

The term “minor league” has become synonymous with substandard, low quality, entirely undesirable. Which brings me to Fresno.

Now, I don’t want to knock Fresno. It seems like a perfectly fine place to visit, maybe even to reside. Sparkling Grizzlies Stadium, home of the Fresno Grizzlies of the Pacific Coast League, is the centerpiece of plans for a downtown renewal that seem to be rolling along. The people are pleasant, the weather is nice (if you like 105 degrees and humid), and the children appear to be above average.

It’s just the baseball that’s minor league.

Now, of course I’ve been spoiled by living in a big-league city for the past 18 years, watching the Minnesota Twins, who even in their down years (also known as the 1990s) played a brand of baseball that could reasonably be called “Major League.” And after spending Monday night with the Atlanta Braves and San Francisco Giants at SBC Park, the next ballpark on my five-day tour would naturally pale by comparison, like watching a movie after seeing “The Godfather” or dating anybody after being married to Catherine Zeta-Jones.

Triple-A baseball, though, is truly the epitome of “minor league,” and the blame for that falls squarely at the feet of the men in cleats. These days, most hotshot prospects jump directly from Double-A to the big leagues, bypassing the traditional on-deck circle altogether. That leaves Triple-A ball littered with “organizational players,” guys who get stuck on the threshold of their dreams because two or three of their five tools are not quite good enough to get it done at the next level; and mostly washed-up ex-big leaguers who are on their way back down through the system, hoping against hope for one more taste of four-star room service.

The fans who showed up for Tuesday’s tilt between the Grizzlies and the Salt Lake Stingers (and that appeared to be me and about 400 of my closest friends) saw plenty of organizational guys hacking it up, a few legitimate prospects, and a handful of has-beens, including Salt Lake left fielder Curtis Pride (late of the Expos and Angels) and former Twins pitcher Matt Kinney, now toiling for Fresno, the top affiliate of the Giants. But we also were treated to the surprise appearance of two legitimate major leaguers — injured Giants Marquis Grissom and Edgardo Alfonzo, who were on injury rehab assignments in Fresno.

So it was with mixed expectations that I pulled into the local parking ramp, paid my five bucks (the same amount I pay in Minneapolis, though two blocks closer to the stadium), bought an $8 seat down the third-base line and entered the first Triple-A game of my baseball watching career. I decided to sit in the same general section as I occupied Monday night in San Francisco, but I didn’t look closely at my ticket until I’d grabbed a Newcastle (six bucks, on tap, very fresh) and found my section. Imagine my surprise when I realized — Bingo! — I must be in the front row! And I was. Not a bad value.

The game began as a pitchers’ duel, with Kinney and Stingers starter Chris Bootcheck belying their mediocre stats (6.15 and 5.32 ERAs, respectively) with strong showings early. Kinney retired the first seven batters before Ryan Budde homered in the third for a 1-0 lead, while Bootcheck was perfect through four innings.

And, more shocking, those four frames were completed in a brisk 35 minutes. The pace was unexpected for anybody familiar with Kinney’s tenure in Minnesota, where he wrote the book on bad body language, driving manager Tom Kelly crazy as he’d kick the dirt, circle the mound, and basically appear to be wishing he was anywhere in the world other than on the pitching rubber.

Grissom, who struck out in his first at-bat, broke up Bootcheck’s perfecto with a leadoff home run in the fifth, then circled the bases and called it a night, no doubt declaring himself ready to return to San Francisco. Alfonzo, who had three singles in his first rehab game on Monday, was not so fortunate — his bat looked slow as he slapped three dead-fish grounders before looping a duck snort to center for a weak single in his final at-bat.

For those who don’t like taut defensive struggles, the evening’s entertainment came from the liquid courage guys oozing out of a suite high above the third-base dugout. They decided to pick on Stingers catcher Jeff Mathis, breaking out the tired Darryl Strawberry-inspired chant of “MAAAA-THIS! MAAA-THIS. MAAA-THIS! YOU SUCK!” every time he came to the plate. Behind me, a young fan asked his parents why they were yelling so much. Mom replied, “Don’t worry — they’ll be gone by the sixth inning.” I didn’t have the heart to tell her that a few of them appeared to be gone already.

I will give the guys some credit, however. They did stick around past the sixth inning, and even showed some baseball smarts in their razzing, eventually chanting “Cucamonga!” at Mathis, referring to the Angels’ Class-A affiliate in Rancho Cucamonga.

As an organization, the Grizzlies trotted out a few other sideshows to keep the fans’ in their seats. For instance, between innings a bear-type mascot named “Wild Thing” climbed atop the dugouts and flung freebies into the crowd, including frisbees and hacky sacks (“Dude! Free hack!”). Of course, this only further cemented Fresno’s minor-league image — what, they couldn’t afford a T-shirt cannon?

Then there were the Diamond Dancers, five women who were, for lack of a better term, cheerleaders. At a baseball game. Decked out in green velvet, shaking gold pom-pons. At a baseball game. Yes, cheerleaders. At a baseball game. To each his own. At least the Diamond Dancers earned their keep — late in the game, they circulated through the crowd with garbage bags, collecting recyclable items from the remaining fans.

Ah, California!

The food was solid — a burrito served enchilada style for $6.50 and a three-dollar bottle of Diet Coke. And they let me keep the cap! How they knew I wouldn’t hurl it onto the field and trigger a riot, I’ll never know. I just appreciated the trust.

Back to the game, where Kinney cruised into the seventh, when his defense let him down. After Pride led off with a single, a bit of indecision up the middle led to a cheap infield hit for Luke Allen. When third baseman Brian Dallimore botched Mathis’ sacrifice bunt, the bases were loaded with nobody out. Brian Gordon’s sac fly put the Stingers ahead 2-1, and Adam Pavkovich drove in another with a single before Kinney got out of the jam.

The seventh-inning stretch featured the ballpark organ playing “Take Me Out To The Ballgame,” followed by John Denver’s stirring rendition of “Thank God I’m A Country Boy.” Again, no fake patriotism, no flag-waving, no Lee Greenwood, even in strongly right-wing Fresno. I’m just saying.

They even had the Kiss Cam, ripped off from the Metrodome, which undoubtedly ripped it off from someplace else. I hadn’t even noticed its absence Monday night in San Francisco, but I shouldn’t be surprised. The Giants don’t do the Kiss Cam for the same reason the Lynx don’t — some fans just aren’t prepared for what they might see.

With Kinney gone in the eighth, the bullpen faltered a bit, as Allen led off the ninth with a monster blast to straightaway center field, over a 30-foot batter’s eye. Too bad he didn’t pull it to right — instead of a $25,000 Subway Hot Spot, Grizzlies Stadium features a plank on the scoreboard that says, “Hit Sign, Win Fruit.”

The Grizz got one back in the bottom of the ninth on Mickey Lopez’s home run, but with the tying runs on base, Dallimore and Tony Torcato struck out to end it, 4-2 Salt Lake. The totals on the board were correct, and the game checked in at 2 hours, 27 minutes — meaning the last five innings took nearly two hours.

I crashed the box seats behind the plate for the final inning, and that’s where the differences between Triple-A and the majors were most obvious. The ball just sounded different coming off the bat. Many of these guys still have aluminum bat swings, wet-newspaper swats that too often produce sagging grounders that struggle to get through the bone-dry infield grass into the infielders’ waiting gloves. In Triple-A, the players generally get the job done — it just doesn’t always look pretty. Catchers staggering under foul popups before making bacon-saving catches; first basemen turning routine 3-1 groundouts into epic adventures; and all those soggy grounders.

That just won’t cut it in the bigs — that’s why they’re here. And by the way, if Minnesota doesn’t build a new Twins stadium, they’ll be there, too. And the Twin Cities can become a cold Fresno.

Although after 105 degrees, that doesn’t sound so bad right now.

Next Stop: San Luis Obispo

July 23, 2005
My Back Pages: No Man Should Ever

No man should ever find himself in the fish-belly gray light of dawn sitting hunched on the floor with a pen paralyzed in his fingers listening to Jimmy Scott.

No man should ever eat plain white rice and corn chips for breakfast.

No man should ever sit at four a.m., raking the soiled carpet with his fingers and building foul and bewildering ashtray fires out of lint and scruff and dog dander and pubic hair and brittle chips of indeterminate origin. No honest man should ever call what are clearly the clippings from fingernails and toes “brittle chips of indeterminate origin.”

No man should ever write such words as those that preceded the words “No man should ever write such words….”

No man should ever spend so many hours sitting in one dank room that the liquor of his own stench has become almost intoxicating and the crawling of the hours has reduced him to a savage who cannot remember his last truly conscious thought.

No man should ever sit puzzling over a diagram of the arteries of the brain as if it were a satellite photo of a country that no longer exists.

No man should ever look up from his hunched stupor at five a.m. and find himself gazing into the terrified face of an elderly paperboy framed in the window of his front door.

July 22, 2005
I've Done My Work

Let this be a lesson to all of you. A teachable moment, as they say in the corporate world, or at least as they used to say in the corporate world. Or in the sub-corporate world. An old boss once said it to me anyway, after I threatened to shove a Big Mike’s submarine sandwich down a customer’s throat.

At any rate, do you see how much good can be accomplished in this mean, mean world with one simple apology? One small gesture can make all the difference between a lifetime of festering resentment and inexplicably horrendous play on the baseball field, and, well…a three-game winning streak and what I guess I’ll go ahead and call a sort of pervasive atmosphere of good will. I won’t yet go so far as to call it a Love-Fest. Let’s give it another week before we get carried away.

I don’t ask for much from any of the miserable wretches who visit this site –there are, I think, something like thirty-seven or thirty-eight of you a day– but in this instance I’m going to have to demand a little bit of credit where credit is clearly due.

So, come on everybody, get in line. It’s Leo Buscaglia time. Zellar needs some hugs.

While I bask in the many much deserved bouquets of thanks, appreciation, and, I’ve no doubt, a few disturbingly obsessive missives that have hero worshiper and stalker written all over them, I’m going to run some dispatches from Patrick Donnelly, a damn fine fellow and writer who covers the Twins from time to time. Patrick’s out on the road at the moment, taking in some West Coast games, and he’s been –and hopefully will continue to be– kind enough to check in for however long his money and patience holds out. His first stop was in San Francisco, the city of broad shoulders, hog butcher to the world, the toddlin’ town, the city that never sleeps, the mistake by the lake, etc.

SBC Park, San Francisco
July 18, 2005

It’s been repeated so many times that it could be apocryphal, but if Mark Twain didn’t say that thing about how the coldest winter he ever spent was summer in San Francisco, he damn well should have.

I’m on the first leg of my five-games-in-five-days journey through California. For reasons I don’t care to get into, the trip started in Las Vegas. Three days, temps topping out in the range of 115 freakin’ degrees, and though it’s a dry heat, so is a kiln. The weekend in San Francisco was a welcome change — an almost autumnal chill, fog so thick we couldn’t see the Golden Gate Bridge as we walked across it, and a sourdough tang in the air.

I boarded the Muni at the Moscone Civic Center station and headed to SBC Park (a.k.a. The Park Formerly Known As Pac Bell, or The House That Barry Balco Built) for the Giants’ post-All-Star Break home opener against the Atlanta Braves. The hometown nine had just come within an eyelash of sweeping four from the hated Dodgers at Chavez Ravine and were looking to scratch their way into the NL West race, while the Braves were welcoming Chipper Jones back into the lineup after another extended stay on the disabled list.

You know how every park has its own unique aroma that triggers a flood of memories from every game you’ve seen there? The old Met always smelled of cigar smoke and stale beer (but in a good way) and took me back to my first big-league ballgame, where I saw my hero Rod Carew, and marveled at Oscar Gamble’s afro. The Metrodome’s bouquet of boiled meat products and plastic grass always reminds me of the glory days of the Dan Mastellar Era.

Well, in San Francisco, garlic is one of the four major food groups (along with bread, chowder and chocolate), and SBC Park is all about the garlic smell. Garlic fries. Garlic chicken sandwiches. Garlic beer (probably — if not, I’m sure they’re working on it). I can’t wait to find out what memories that smell will trigger the next time I see a game here.

The buzz that filled SBC was entirely foreign to me, having been raised on Domeball. The Giants are six years into their new home, twelve games under .500 and in the neighborhood of ten games behind the first-place Padres, yet some 42,000 fans ventured down to McCovey Cove on a damp, gloomy Monday night. Contrast that with the 20,308 the Twins drew for a game with wild-card implications against the Baltimore Orioles on the same night. Still think a new park wouldn’t be a draw in Minneapolis?

The fans stayed engaged throughout the game, despite seeing the Braves pull ahead 3-0 in the first inning on back-to-back homers by Andruw Jones and Chipper Jones. The Giants didn’t scratch out a run until the sixth inning and lost 6-1, and decided to make me feel right at home, stranding eight runners in the first four innings and grounding into a double play with the bases loaded.

But that was just about the only similarity to baseball, Metrodome style, that I saw on Monday. Obviously a new park will have nicer amenities, but the perks at SBC are flat-out ridiculous. I knew I wasn’t in Kansas City anymore as I grabbed a Guinness (Guinness!) on tap (on tap!) and settled into my seat down the third-base line.

Talk about disorienting. I was twenty rows up, even with the bullpen mound, and my seat actually faced the center of the diamond. Instead of staring out toward center field or cranking my back to see home plate, I stared right at the pitcher. What a concept.

Andruw Jones hit his second two-run shot of the night in the third inning, doinking it off the foul pole just to my left, to put the Braves ahead 5-0, but nothing seemed to dampen the spirits of the Giants fans. I strolled over to the left-field corner, near the massive Coke bottle and oversized mitt sculpture, where the packed bleachers hummed with energy.

Every ballpark has its share of wacky fans, including the screaming twenty-something guy lubed up with liquid courage making a spectacle of himself. (Ah, memories.) But instead of trying to start the wave, the wacky SBC guy was pointing out Braves fans and trying to get the crowd to turn on them. When the kid wasn’t getting the desired result, he finally screamed out, “Hey! That guy, over there! He’s a Republican!”

He then turned to his buddy and said, “Here in California, that’s all they’ll respond to.”

I wandered past Orlando’s BBQ, named for former Giants star Orlando Cepeda, where the Baby Bull Tri-Tip Sandwich and Cha-Cha Bowl have become legend, but I knew I had to dine at the Stinking Rose concession stand, where you can get authentic, garlic-laced cuisine from the legendary North Beach restaurant. I inhaled a meatball sandwich that would make Steve Lombardozzi weep like Batgirl meeting Torii Hunter [editor’s note: for the record, it has been documented that Batgirl held up admirably in the presence of Torii Hunter. No tears were witnessed, none, we feel certain, were shed, at least by anyone other than bench coach Steve Liddle, who wept copiously in the presence of BG]. I knew I wouldn’t get a better meal in The City for the seven bucks I’d just spent.

The beverage selection at SBC is pretty phenomenal. You’ve got your standard macrobrews, your boutique beers, your Anchor Steam (the real San Francisco treat), your Guinness and Harp (did I mention they’re on tap?), and amazingly enough, there’s even a PBR kiosk, where you can fight through a crowd of aging hipsters in trucker caps to pay eight bucks for a Midwestern classic. Of course, there’s an array of wine selections for the effete liberals, and don’t get me started on Tully’s Coffee, where the lattes flowed like water. Fancy an Irish Coffee from the Buena Vista, where the drink was invented? They’ve got a stand at SBC too.

And –get this– they serve popcorn that’s actually popped before your very eyes, not hauled up from the bowels of the stadium in a body bag, fresh as Chris Berman’s home run derby schtick. What a revelation.

The fans roared at the cable car races on the scoreboard between innings, then sang along with “Take Me Out To The Ballgame,” played on an actual ballpark organ, and not followed by some faux patriotic right-wing anthem –go figure.

The views were breathtaking from everywhere in the park, especially the right-field pavilion overlooking McCovey Cove, where the winds whipped up in the late innings and dropped the temps easily into the low fifties. I capped the night with a trip to the souvenir stand, where sixteen bucks got me the fastest-selling item of the evening –a Giants stocking cap.

Somewhere, Mark Twain is smiling.

Next up: Fresno

July 22, 2005