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By Root 1308 0

made perfect sense. I’d wondered all year how the power of baseball should be wielded. And now I knew. Baseball doesn’t have any intrinsic power. It only has what people give to it. For some, the man who plays is a superhero, and he can do great things. For some, the man who plays is an obstacle who must get out of the way. Is baseball as important as food, knowledge, care, or a dry pair of boots? Is it as important as some of the things that pass us by in everyday life? I don’t think so. Can it inspire, motivate, and call us to do something greater than ourselves? Absolutely. The burden of the player isn’t to achieve greatness, but to give the feeling of it to everyone he encounters. It was wrong of me even to try to separate life and the game. They were intertwined, meant to be, one affecting the other, one teaching the other, even when the mixture occasionally blows up. It takes a real person, one who understands himself, to use the tool of baseball for something good. For that person, as long as he has a jersey on his back, he has a chance.

Chapter Forty-five

The Missions took three out of four from the Rough Riders. We had proven to ourselves we could handle one of the best teams in the league, mix fun with talent, and still brew up victory. By the last month of the season, we had a clear-cut sense of ourselves, an undeniable purpose, and a taste for winning. We went after the league with a vengeance.

If ever there was a time for montage music to be played, it was during this time of my baseball career—something sweet, rocking, and all together satisfying. The boys from San Antonio found ways to win, manufacturing them out of raw will and determination. We took early leads, made astronomical comebacks, and occasionally just did some good, old-fashioned ass-kicking. Come the last week of the season, we mathematically clinched a spot in the playoffs, an accomplishment you’d swear impossible had you seen us play only a month or so earlier.

When we locked our spot in for postseason ball, we were rewarded with Tott’s champagne and watery domestic beers, not for drinking, but for soaking. The bottles and cans sat packed in ice-filled coolers like clubhouse centerpieces. As we filtered in from the victory, we all grabbed hold of bottles and popped the corks of our Tott’s champagne rifles, but did not dare spill a drop of the liquid in celebration until Randy had a chance to address us, pronouncing us victors.

He came in, pleased, but under control and focused, with a bottle of champagne in his own hands. We stood, elated and giddy, some with jerseys untucked, others with hats spun backward, others in just socks. “Hey, couple things, guys,” Randy said, gesturing with one free hand, armed with a thumb-capped bottle in the other. “We are, as of today, the second-half winners. On behalf of the staff and myself, I’d like to say congratulations. You earned it. You kept fucking grinding it out, and you earned it.” Then, he smiled at everyone, spread his feet and started shaking his bottle. “But”—we armed ourselves as he spoke—“you still got work to do!” He let it rip, hosing us down. We followed suit, turning the center of the room into a fountain of cheap champagne. Our clubbie watched the floor accumulate hours of future cleaning as we danced around like natives, wrecking the place.

The work Randy referenced was a little thing called winning the Texas League—no easy feat. We did, however, do our best to make it look that way as we swept Frisco in three games to clinch our berth in the championship series. Before ten days had passed from our last champagne spraying, we were in the locker room again, standing in front of Randy with another round of bottles, awaiting his words.

Randy came in for the second time, a thumb pressed over the top of his bottle. “Alright, we got everybody?” He looked around at us, all of us ready to imitate firefighters. “Look at you guys—you’re already on this shit, aren’t you?” What could we say. We had a taste for winning, and much to the chagrin of our clubhouse manager, we got to trash