Class A Read Free

line drive that hisses back at him and catches the knuckles on his right hand, tearing the skin with its seams. He gives a yelp and watches the ball ricochet off him into the outfield. For a moment, even looking out of my own mouth, I can see worry in his narrowed eyes. Everything can end so quickly. Danny Carroll, the LumberKings’ center fielder, broke a bone in his hand a year ago, and it’s not lost on Erasmo that he sits now as much as he plays. That the manager looks irritated or, worse, bored when Danny takes batting practice. A piece of him is flawed. His swing isn’t the same.
    “Any little thing can go wrong,” Erasmo told me once, then gave a falsely cavalier shrug.
    A good mascot is supposed to direct eyes away from bad things. Right now, I should jump on top of the dugout and be remarkable, whip fervor from nothing, but I lurk in the stadium walkway, peering out at the LumberKings’ best pitcher, as worried as everyone else. BJ, the trainer, presses a towel around Erasmo’s middle and index fingers, and he tries not to flinch. Later, BJ will congratulate him on not being a huge
chocha
, just a little one. He will say that the most irritating part of his job is the big
chochas
, the pussies who complain. He will hold his fingers in a narrow diamond by his crotch to emphasize his point.
    Erasmo has never complained about anything physical in his career as a baseball player, one that began professionally at seventeen. People seem to like him for that.
    “We don’t quit in Clinton, Iowa,” yells Matt, the mailman, a peripheral but boisterous member of the Baseball Family. He has an extensive list of dos and don’ts for baseball in this town. We certainly don’t quit.We get dirty. We run hard. We play the game right. Each mandate is trumpeted from his seat in the front row, an arm’s length away from the players as they trot into the dugout.
    “Attaboy, Ramírez,” he continues now. And then, as though he is quoting something famous, “Excellent. Excellent. This world rewards tough men.”
    Erasmo hears him, but he doesn’t respond. He knocks his heels against the sterilized white of the rubber, and he goes back to work. Today it’s the hard labor of trying to win when it’s apparent that whatever odd bit of magic gives a pitcher his best stuff isn’t there. He surrenders another single and walks a circle around the mound as though alone. He breathes deep, and he throws the fastball that he wants to throw, boring in on the handle of the bat, eliciting a hollow crack and a weak ground ball to Noriega, the second baseman, but it kicks off his foot and into right field. A run scores, two men stand on base, and Erasmo Ramírez, for the next few minutes, looks petulant and confused and twenty years old. Four runs later, the inning is over, and he walks back to the dugout.
    He glances up to the stands. Worn white faces look back at him. When he got called to Class A ball in a place he’d never heard of, Erasmo didn’t realize that it would be the same people here each night in this small stadium, that it would be so easy to pick out individuals as they call his name. Sometimes his BlackBerry rings, and it’s reporters from the biggest newspapers in Nicaragua. They want to know everything because he’s important now. On his laptop screen is an article from just a week ago, telling the nation that Erasmo Ramírez is the best pitcher in a place called Clinton, Iowa, that even in America he has his control. When the readers in his home city of Rivas imagine him, thousands of miles away, basking in all of his accolades and wishes fulfilled, they don’t think of this: semicircular bleachers with a few rows of dark green seats, above which it’s just metal benches, long and low, with the usual bodies dotted along them at various points like a bored student’s pencil marks on a clean page. Green poles rise up between the fans and hold a tin roof that hums when wind blows hard off the river.
    If you took a