The Bullpen Gospels - Dirk Hayhurst [76]
Leg back, hands up, rock, pivot, step, just like back at Mazz’s place. Alright asshole, you wanna peek, it’s gonna cost ya. I drove down the mound and snapped my best into flight. The batter squared up, full swing, locked in for the down-and-away fastball. What he got was a hands-high four seamer, inside from the start. A high fastball is too juicy to lay off, but the ones on your hands are like the poison apple. It continued riding in, even as the batter realized it was too late to stop his stroke. White leather bored into the handle of the bat, detonating it on impact. The bat blew up in the hitter’s hands, spraying kindling all over the infield while the ball spun to second, flipped to short, and fired to first—double play.
As the peeker jogged back to the dugout, Sanchy handed him what was left of his bat and said, “No more fucking pee-king!”
You tell ’em Sanchy. You tell ’em.
Chapter Twenty-three
We lost, showered, and packed up. Before we boarded the bus for Modesto, our clubbie served us our final meal in High Desert. It’s called a getaway meal, named because it’s the meal we skip town while eating. In A-ball, players typically don’t eat after the games like Double- and Triple-A players do. And we wouldn’t have been fed were it not for the six-hour trip ahead of us.
Tonight’s meal was barbecue. Pulled pork or chicken sandwiches with baked beans—we got to choose. I opted for the pulled pork—mistake. My sandwich looked like someone fed a grenade to a pig. What did I expect?—the food was just leftovers served from the stadium’s concessions. Minor league stadium food isn’t exactly five-star cuisine. Hell, I’ve had better barbecue from vending machines.
Bad sandwiches were only a short-term issue. Baked beans was the real problem. A bus trip meal simply cannot contain a time bomb like baked beans. It’s only a matter of hours before stomachs start to explode, and the bus takes on the scent of a barnyard. Inevitably, someone will drop trow in the bus’s poorly ventilated bathroom. That brown torpedo will remain for the next four days of our trip, marinating while we drive, baking when we play. The trip home will be eight hours in a portable septic tank, with the aroma continuously recycled through the bus’s air system.
What can I do? Try explaining the ramifications of poor bus meals to a group of hungry minor leaguers who rarely get a postgame feed. This was a feast! Cold pig flesh and a scoop of turd pills—the team mauled it like lions on a zebra carcass, snapping and clawing when another player got too close.
We left around 11 P.M. The team, fed and sedated, reclined in their seats while the clubbie inserted a movie into the bus’s on-board DVD player.
Nowadays, buses equipped with DVD players and at least six televisions to watch the media on make team trips smoother. The sets are staggered throughout the bus, hanging down from the ceiling above the seat backs. Most players take proximity to a screen into consideration when choosing their seats.
The movies played on team trips can be a welcome distraction or an unceasing annoyance depending on how many times you’ve seen the flick. Usually, during the first trips of the season, the same popular bus-trip movie staples are watched. I can bet, with almost one hundred percent accuracy, the movies most teams watch during this time frame in baseball are Dumb and Dumber, Old School, Wedding Crashers (the unrated edition so more boobies can be seen), The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Gladiator, and 300. Sometimes they watch them more than once in the same season, and sometimes more than once on the same trip.
Dumb and Dumber ate up an hour or so of tonight’s trip, distracting us as the bus made its way north. The next movie was Gladiator, a good action flick to change things up. The third movie was one I had never seen before, Midnight Express.
It was early in the morning when Midnight Express came on. Most of the team was out of it, trying to sleep in the uncomfortable coach bus seats as we went. The movie was older, produced in the later 1970s, with substandard