Grounding Out

The day was an early one or an early one for me at least. I met a friend of mine outside a building I used to live in and he drove us to a friend of his where we were going to work. It was 11:30 and it was hot, probably just below 90 when we got there. Our task was to move and reassemble 13 filing cabinets from a garage to an office building. It was soupy humid and the sun promised more heat in the afternoon. I was sweating before we loaded a single cabinet. I wouldn’t be dry until I rubbed my tennis ball green towel over my body at 7 that night.

The work itself wasn’t too bad. Manual labor isn’t too bad in general, I think. The only time I’ve felt God was in manual labor. I didn’t see God on this day. It was the hottest day of the summer. When my friend dropped me off in front of the building I now live in I had 100 dollars in my previously lonesome wallet, a soaked through t-shirt, tired arms and back, and that sense of accomplishment that you can only get after working on days like this. I also had a ticket to see the Cardinals that night. I had planned on going back to Ohio instead of the baseball game.

I wanted to be home for father’s day and to be with my mom. She had just gotten back from a trip to see her dying father. My grandfather, the man I’m named after. I needed to be home. But not tonight. I wouldn’t get back there until 2 or 3 in the morning and I was utterly worn out. Baseball would be my treat. Baseball would be my cure. Dying grandfathers, grieving mothers, father’s day obligations, joblessness, homelessness, and an unshakable feeling of being out of place- they would all wait for tomorrow. Baseball tonight.

We got there late. The Tigers hung 4 on the birds in the first inning that we missed. We were delayed at the bar before hand waiting on the fourth person of our party to turn up. Eventually she showed up and she, my roommate, his cousin, I went downtown to the ballpark. She was a cute student from a neighboring state school. We each had a beer that cut through the heat of what was becoming the hottest night of the year, laid a foundation of small talk, and then I turned it on.

It didn’t really matter that there wasn’t any real future for us past the end of the game. I wasn’t interested in hooking up with her, or dating her, or even seeing her the next time she came out. She was a pretty face sitting next to me at a baseball game and that was all I really needed her to be.

I would tell a story and she would smile. I would make a joke and she would laugh. I would pull on my beer and grin as it coolly snaked through my body. The Cards cut into the Detroit lead. The sun set, I ate a bratwurst and watched how her cheeks pulled up her lips to put her teeth on display.

Two home runs in the Detroit half of the eighth and the ball park thermometer reading in the high eighties prompted my roommate and his cousin to pitch the idea of leaving. It wasn’t so much that I thought the Cardinals were going to come back, or that I wanted more time to seal the deal with her, or any other specific reason, I just didn’t want to go. I convinced them to stay.

Two scoreless half innings later I turned to her in the bottom of the ninth, “If this guy reaches base, we’re winning this game.” I grinned and raised my eyebrows at her after ball four. She smiled and shrugged her shoulders. The aura of the bottom of the ninth stirred deep inside of me and for the first time in a long, long time I was happy. More than being happy, I was excited. Something was happening, there were signs of life here in the bottom of the ninth and in her pretty face and in me.

It was 6-3 with a runner on first base when Albert Pujols, the best baseball player on the planet, a man who I had earlier described to her twinkling eyes as “better at his job than I ever will be at any job I ever do,” flied out to left field. But whatever air left the stadium when the left fielder squeezed Pujols’ fly ball not only came back but multiplied after a wild pitch and two walks loaded the bases for Rick Ankiel.

I’ve been a Rick Ankiel fan for as long as he’s been in the majors. He came up as a pitcher with a ton of promise. When he got called up to the show I already had four or five of his rookie cards and had been personally hyping his arrival for a year. Then Rick Ankiel had one of the biggest meltdowns of anyone I’ve ever heard of. He couldn’t find the plate with both hands, a map, and a compass and would routinely fire balls at the backstop. He lost all sense of command. It got so bad that he couldn’t play catch. Throwing the ball to a target was now the hardest thing in the world to someone who was on the verge of making millions for doing just that. Somewhere between his ears pitching stopped making sense and he was sent down. A few years ago he resurfaced with the Cardinals, not as a pitcher but an outfielder with a canon for an arm and a bat that had decent pop in it. My favorite player came back and hit a homerun in his debut.

And so my hero dug in with the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth. I was on my feet encouraging him, occasionally throwing my head over my shoulder to smile at her and let her chide me for being so into the moment. At least half of the 41,000 and change that were on hand for the beginning of the game had left but the rest of us were standing. Ankiel took strike one and then looked at a ball. On the third pitch he put his bat on the ball. He took a change-up and hit it to Detroit’s shortstop who stepped on second and then threw out Ankiel at first.

After we dropped her off at her car I told her it was lovely to meet her. I tried to rally support for night swimming until I was informed that there was no was to access any of the three pools around us. I was dropped off at my building, my back and arms more sore now than they were hours ago. It was still hot outside. It was going to be hot in my apartment. I wouldn’t need a blanket to cover me when I went to sleep on the same couch I had been on for the last month. The next morning I was to drive for six hours to see my family. To celebrate father’s day. To be there for my mom. To explain my troubles in landing work. To keep being oddly unhappy and strangely stuck. To lie awake in my bed at night and think about Rick Ankiel grounding into a double play.