Class A Read Free Page B

It’s the same as when she’ll whip her head around toward the sound of fans who’ve come, it seems, only to feel the rush of insulting the home team. She admonishes them without a word.
    The nasty fans aren’t crazy. It’s intoxicating here—the proximity to the players and their proximity to failure. When I used to sit high up in Yankee Stadium with my father, a heckle could earn you, at best, an agreeing nod from the drunks around you, but the players I irrationally hated were bulletproof. They were so markedly better than me and everyone I knew that even when they failed, there was no power to be found in aiming cruelty in their direction. Here, you can hurt them if you want to. Every voice is distinguishable, and the players listen even as they pretend that they don’t.
    But the idea among the loyal fans, I’ve come to believe, is to provide something of the best of yourself. Treat them as though they will be great so that they might remember. And isn’t the idea of greatness enough? The closeness to the promise of something extraordinary? The possibility that here, right here where you’ve always been, you cared for them first, before anybody else decided to give a shit?
    The top of the sixth inning is Erasmo’s last, and he gets out of it with a series of ground balls. He leaves the mound with his eyes focused on the dirt. The game is tied at four, and if his teammates score in the bottom of the sixth, he’ll be in line for a win, pulling the club within a game of a wild-card play-off spot, but that doesn’t happen. He tries to be stoic because that is what he always tries to be, but his face hangs disappointed. A win would have helped his stat sheet, something for the Mariner higher-ups to notice. Instead, today has been a wasted day, almost as if it never happened except for the slow, accustomed ache running between his elbow and his shoulder. He trudges to the clubhouse to ice his arm. He passes Betty and Bill and Tim and Tammy and Joyce and Matt and Derek and Julie and Gary and Eileen and Cindy and Angie and Craig and they call to him.
    As he drapes a jacket over himself with my face emblazoned on it, Betty yells to him, a burst, almost as if she hadn’t intended to say it.
    “Do you like it here?” she asks him.
    He stops trudging for a moment and turns to her. He forces his face into a smile. He nods his head and looks earnest.
    “Oh,” he says. “Yeah. It’s nice.”
    He doesn’t wait to see the satisfaction on her face, and I don’t know if he hears her as she responds, “Well, it’s not too big and it’s not too small.”
    The game stays tied until the tenth inning, and I’m exhausted. Those fans who wander into ballparks just to drink and heckle are long gone. There are fewer than five hundred now. The weight of my skull is beginning to hurt, and the wood and hard plastic scrape at my collarbone. I let my head hang and then realize how absurdly melancholy that must look—not a normal person dejected, but a localized Disney character,eight feet tall, with his hands in his pockets and his ever-smiling face tilted toward the ground in despair.
    Erasmo is still icing his tired right arm at the elbow and at the shoulder, sulking and eating a granola bar.
    “Jiménez,” BJ calls to him, but he doesn’t respond, because that’s not his last name. “Jiménez. Jiménez. Oh, shit, I mean Ramírez.”
    Erasmo looks up and sees the trainer pointing at the clubhouse TV. A sportscaster is announcing that the best young pitcher in the world, Stephen Strasburg, who was guaranteed $7.5 million before he was even sent to the minors, could need elbow surgery. You never know with a pitcher’s arm, the sportscaster reminds the viewers. Things can just disintegrate. Erasmo, whose own signing bonus managed to clear $50,000—a number eaten into by taxes and his agent’s cut, which would have been 25 percent at a minimum, the remainder placed in a bank account shared with his entire family—leaves