The Only Rule Is It Has to Work Read online

  You can’t have cancers, either. Fehlandt tells us this over and over—and this often means you can’t have rookies. Rookies, he tells us, don’t act the right way. They have “no feel”—another fatal insult, the inability to read a room and act right. The infielder who started to throw his glove in frustration after an error. The kid who was showing nude photos of his girlfriend on the first day of camp. The one who asked whether a team dinner was mandatory. No feel.

  Veterans have feel, which is why Fehlandt has brought in the two guys he has played with, second baseman Sergio Miranda and shortstop Gered Mochizuki. Both have affiliated experience, Miranda’s extensive and recent and Moch’s just a blink five years ago. Fehlandt is so adamant that these two friends have roster spots that he actually pays Mochizuki an extra couple hundred bucks a month, out of his own salary and under the table, to entice him to Sonoma for the summer. And it’s obvious in spring training that these two do know how to carry themselves on the field. They lead the infield drills, and they give younger guys batting tips. They’re well coached, and they turn double plays quicker than anybody. They’re also friends with the manager, though, and we realize too late that, in the Bezrukova model of assessing a team, they’re creating a demographic cluster that can form fault lines.

  But at this point we’re so impressed by the complexity of chemistry that we don’t put enough faith in Bezrukova’s research. We feel like we’ve discovered a colony of ants that seem to be moving in totally random ways, only to reveal an elaborate and brilliant pattern. Like in the very first moments of spring training, the first five minutes of the first day, when there’s nearly a fistfight. One of the new players, Isaac Wenrich, with an angry beard and a hard stare, is needling one of our returnees, Eric Schwieger. Isaac’s poking his back, telling Eric there’s some shit on it. There’s no shit on it, and Eric is ignoring him with his head down in intense nonamusement. Finally, our veteran cleanup hitter, Joel Carranza, turns around and tells Isaac to shut it down. Isaac stares in disbelief, torn between saving face and cutting his losses. “Serious,” Joel tells him, assuring Isaac that he is very definitely in the wrong here. “He doesn’t like it. He doesn’t want you to do that. So stop.”

  The bleachers, having been alive with chatter, are silent. We all stare at Isaac. There’s no way out of this situation except escalation, and I expect an overturned table, a shouting match, and a punch or two. But Isaac takes a breath, like a preschooler remembering his mantra: “When you feel so mad that you wanna roar, take a deep breath and count to four.” He absorbs the moment of shame. Eventually the chatter comes back.

  Our team’s chemistry is already a disaster, from five minutes in. Except that I’ve misread the situation entirely. I saw an extremely petty situation that turned into something tense and serious, where a new player stepped on the toes of the incumbents, who stood up for each other but not for the outsider. I missed the real story: A leader emerged, in Joel; an extremely petty situation was nipped before it could become more; our new catcher chose not to elevate and showed that it was okay to wear a little bit of shame after an overstep. Within an hour, it’s clear that Isaac and Eric are also leaders on this team, and as Isaac catches Eric that day there’s no lingering tension. Chemistry is complicated, which makes it all the more intimidating to think about how we are going to be part of it.

  * * *

  “Listen up,” Fehlandt says, and they do.

  “Little bit about myself. Born in San Rafael, moved to Sonoma. I grew up like three blocks away from Albert [where San Rafael plays its home games], lived on a frickin’ hill overlooking it. I played there, moved here, went to high school here, graduated in ’95, I’m old. I welcome “old” jokes. Moved to Vallejo and happened to live right around the corner from Wilson Park [where Vallejo plays its home games], walked my dogs there every day.”

  He flips a thumb down and makes a fart noise.

  “Played three years in affiliated, and then indy ball came. To be honest, I didn’t have much fun in affiliated. It sucks. I felt like my baseball fire was like coals, like little ashes, and then I came to indy ball and…”

  He pauses, exhales, pauses.

  “… and I had fun again.”

  He starts again, then stops, and turns around. We see his back as he clenches his fist and tries to slow his emotions.

  “This happens every time I talk about baseball. Damn.”

  “We’ve got a guy here who you can tell loves the game,” Theo says, moving into the speaker’s spot. “We all love the game. None of us is here for any reason other than this is baseball. There’s way easier jobs, way better pay. Every person is here because we love this stuff.”

  “Fuck!” Feh says, turning back around. “I love playing ball. I want to have fun, and I definitely want to win.

  “Let’s talk about this little town we got here. This place is so small. You’re not gonna do anything that’s not gonna get found out, especially something stupid. I’ve had to check myself, too. If you’re driving and you road rage on somebody, there’s a good chance they’re gonna know who you are.” He’s referring, which they don’t know, to an incident he had the previous day with the owner’s wife. “I already got in trouble for Facebook, guys. I put some political posts on there, and friends in town…” Now he’s referring, which some know, to a few incendiary Facebook posts he made recently alleging that 9/11 was an inside job, posts that nearly got him fired and shook our faith in his ability to listen to reason. “It’s that small. Everyone knows everyone, so you gotta be smart. At the same time, if you do things right, that’ll make it a lot of fun, because you’ll have a place where you can walk around and get recognized. You don’t always get there, definitely not in independent ball or in minor league ball. I mean, shit, makes you feel like you’re big league. That’s why we do this. So if you do things right and play the game right, I don’t know why it’s not going to be an awesome summer. But there will be no, pfft, I mean, depending on the fuck-up—I don’t have too much tolerance for being an idiot.”

  “If there’s a fuck-up, you’re gone,” Theo says. “Your job is a commodity; there are hundreds of guys emailing us looking for your job. We will make the hard decisions when we have to. We’ve made them before in this organization.”

  Erik Gonsalves picks approximately this moment to show up late. Everyone watches him walk across the field. They clap as he gets close. Half-smiling, he says “Fuck” and sits down.

  “Everybody involved in this organization lives in this community,” continues Sean Boisson, the assistant general manager. He’s the one who wrangles host families and sells sponsorships based as much on civic support as anything else; he’s the one who tells me repeatedly that he doesn’t care if the Stompers win if we don’t have a team of good guys he can sell to the city. “This town has nine thousand people, and we’re going to be playing in front of two thousand on Opening Night. That’s fucking cool.”

  * * *

  For three days, Ben and I stare, hard and serious, left arms bent and resting on the back bars of the turtle-shell-shaped batting cage, trying to get the foul-tip flinches out of our system. “Don’t worry, it’s spring training for flinchers, too,” Tim Livingston reassures us. Our right hands grip stopwatches as we clock catchers’ throws to second, second basemen turning the double play, and the flight of each pop-up. We murmur and nod. We’re ever present at these spring training workouts. Sean stayed for an hour on the first day, and Theo stayed for a full day, but we’re here every day at the same time the players are, with sunscreen and thermoses and afternoon snacks—a plastic bag of mushrooms for Ben, who is increasingly revealed to have unusual tastes. We don’t show up late and we don’t leave early; we don’t take long lunches or long phone calls, even though there’s little happening yet. At one point in a preseason meeting with Fehlandt, when the conversation turned to the shittiness of umpires, our manager said something that stuck with me: “I try to explain, dude, this is my résumé. Put yourself in our per
spective and understand how important this is. I need to see you work as hard as me.” Before we ask the players to trust us, we need them to see how hard we’re trying. That’s especially true this week, when we’ll be forced to make roster cuts based on impossibly short looks at these players. A pitcher might throw two or three times before his dream is litigated; how can we tell him we’re making a decision if we haven’t shown full effort?

  There are immediate happy spots. The spreadsheet third baseman Kristian Gayday turns out to be huge, the one true physical specimen that our method found, and he leads off first-day batting practice with the best show on the club. Better, he’s the smoothest third baseman in the group, charging balls well, zipping accurate throws to both bases, and barehanding a hard chopper that takes a terrible hop at his face. Just after we had signed Kristian, Fehlandt had signaled that he was going to make it hard for our guy to win a job, sending me a long text out of nowhere to complain about the glut of infielders crowding out his guy. His guy, Marcus Kimura, had batted .270/.339/.330 as a senior, at a Division III school, while playing designated hitter; our guy, Kristian, had batted .358/.472/.653 as a senior, at a Division I school, while playing third base. It was not quite 9/11-Facebook-posts troubling, but at least almost-drove-into-the-owner’s-wife troubling, that Fehlandt had even invited Marcus to camp, let alone entertained him as a credible candidate over Kristian. “To be honest from what I saw with my own eyes, and from what I’ve heard, I think Kimura could easily be the guy,” he told me. “I am definitely open to one of the young guys forcing me to let them play, but from my experience, knowing what I expect, I feel like other people would have seen it and picked these guys up before we had a shot.”

  But it’s quickly clear that Kristian is good and Marcus, a 5-foot-8 Hawaiian who has muscled up but throws like he’s lofting paper airplanes, is not. Fehlandt, perhaps not subtly enough, calls across the field on the first day to tell me with a smile that he’s expecting an “I told you so” from me. I tell him I’ll never say those words, that we’re all just on a search to find the right answer together—but before I finish this fluff, he’s turning around and talking to Isaac Wenrich in the cage. Fine. It’s our first win, and it’s encouraging to see how quickly Fehlandt does respond to a change in the data. He didn’t take it personally, and he didn’t fight for his first position just to avoid an “I told you so.” This is all we want out of a manager.

  Sean Conroy throws and looks, at least against rusty, low-effort competition, unhittable, with a low arm slot that has right-handers stepping in the bucket; every so often he comes straight over the top and absolutely blows the hitter’s mind. Pink shirt not going to be a problem. And Paul Hvozdovic impresses in his first chance throwing to batters, locating three pitches well with a little pause in his delivery that seems deceptive to the hitter; it reminds us a little bit of Clayton Kershaw’s hitch. When we talk later that day, he asks me what we’re looking for when we stand behind that cage.

  I don’t know, man.

  But I’ve got to say something, so I tell him we’re looking for anything that’ll make him better than his velocity; we know that anybody who can hit 90 from the left side would be getting drafted by a big league club, so we need pitchers who can do things that will approximate that sort of stuff. Pitchers who get good tumble on a deceptive changeup, or who can work inside with the fastball against righties, or who have long pitching strides or who hide the ball well.

  “Yeah,” he says, and we’re quiet for a long time, staring at a field with nobody but a couple of workers building camera hitches on the light poles.

  “Were you ever scouted?” I ask him.

  “When I was in college, nobody ever really came out and saw us because we were a small school playing against terrible teams. But I had these numbers in my senior year, and I knew I was pitching well. My agent finally asked me if I’d be interested in having him get some scouts out to see me, and I said of course.

  “So I show up for my next start and there’s ten scouts, all sitting there in a group behind home plate. There is nobody else on either team worth scouting. They’re there for me and everybody knows it, my coach knows it, I know it. They follow me around while I’m warming up, standing there writing things down. The game starts, and in the first inning I give up two runs. The second inning I let two guys get on base. And I see them all stand up, almost all at once, and walk out of there.

  “That was the worst feeling of my life, seeing these guys who everybody knows are there just to see me, walk out of there. I was great after that, too. I went seven innings, I didn’t give up another run, and I struck out seven, but they were all in the last five innings. The Royals scout was the only one who stuck around to see it. He told me I touched 89 and they’d keep looking at me. But when all the scouts were out there, I was at 83. That was that.”

  * * *

  On day 3, we scrimmage against San Rafael. As we walk past the Pacifics’ manager, Matt Kavanaugh, two months after we saw him at the tryout, we pick up a few words that he’s saying to one of his pitchers: “… in the corduroy.”

  The game is ugly. The Pacifics have already had a couple of exhibitions against other teams, so we’re not surprised that they’re better prepared, but the difference between the teams is obvious before a pitch is thrown: they’re big. Their starting pitcher is 6-5; he’s relieved by a 6-3, and then a 6-4. They look like grown-ups. Their scrimmage jerseys are sponsored. Their postgame spread has lettuce. We’re completely outclassed.

  We lose, and Fehlandt tells me he just talked to Theo. “I’m pretty much decided on who the roster’s gonna be,” he says. “I told Theo and he was on board with everybody.” And, as quickly as I got comfortable with Fehlandt because of his open-mindedness regarding Marcus, I get extremely nervous that decisions are being made without our input. Territory is being claimed while Ben and I are still philosophizing about the nature of maps.

  Theo rolls his eyes when I tell him what I heard; he says Fehlandt told him he’d made some decisions, but that he, Theo, had told him we should all talk about it. So we call a meeting, the whole brain trust assembling in the Stompers office to assess what we’ve got. It’s Monday, and we’ve seen our players for three days, including one terribly played scrimmage. Somehow, I’m unreasonably optimistic.

  “The more I see, the more I love this team,” I say. “We’re going 60-18. At least 60-18.”

  “Oh, we’re gonna dominate,” Fehlandt says. “The goal is 78-0. Until we lose one, then the goal’s 77-1. We’ll just go from there.”

  The problem is that each of us is thinking about our sliver of the team, and we’re all bullish on the players we’ve each brought in, the ones who fit our heuristic for what makes a good ballplayer and a good ball club. I have total faith in our spreadsheet; Fehlandt has total faith in his buddies; Theo has total faith in the returnees. But none of us has total faith in the others’ guys—and we’ll soon have to cut a quarter of the players in camp.

  I speak first. “I was thinking that instead of talking about roster spots right now, we just go down the roster and say what we think of each player. We’ve seen them for three days. There are guys I have no thoughts on, and guys I have a lot of thoughts on. We can figure out where we agree. So let’s start: What do we think of Fehlandt Lentini?”

  “Garbage,” Fehlandt says.

  “He’s fucking terrible,” Theo says.

  “Overran a ball,” Ben says.

  “No, you look good out there,” I tell Fehlandt.

  “Yeah, I’m pretty good,” he says. “I want to hear Sam’s opinions about everybody.”

  “I like all these guys,” I say. “I’m a sucker. I want to hug them all. I want all their dreams to come true. They all have problems and they’re all great.”

  “Some of the things that you don’t see, because you’re not a baseball guy,” Fehlandt says, trying to educate me, “are that some of the guys are doing things, are acting a certain way on the field, that other pla
yers are seeing, and those are the guys that are cancers.”

  “Good, that’s what we should share,” I say.

  We move next to Will Price. Will is an outfielder, a tall and slim kid with thick forearms and a thicker southern accent. He arrived with a backstory: Coming out of high school he was a real prospect, but he and two college teammates were charged in connection with a home burglary, accused of taking $115,000 in jewelry and electronics. He was kicked off his college team, and three years later his mug shot remained the first result on a Google search of his name. Price pled guilty to lesser charges. Ray Serrano told us he was a good kid and that a major league team was interested in signing him but wanted to see him make an indy-ball team first—proof of concept that he could hang in polite society. We hadn’t had any problems with him—his host family, who lived in a mansion, loved him, and he was going on three days as the happiest-looking kid in camp. But he had also committed the cardinal sin of ballplayers: He wouldn’t shut the fuck up.

  “I think he could be a diamond in the rough,” Theo says.

  I agree: He’s got the best natural arm strength in the outfield, and might have the most raw power in batting practice. “There’s flaws,” I say, “but he’s got some tools that are rare in the Pacific Association.”