Play Ball!
By Drew Gallagher
THE INTERN TO BE NAMED LATER
Anyone who grows up playing and loving baseball believes that, given half a chance, they could lead a team, or at least a front office, to the World Series. That dream is why baseball’s annual winter meetings are packed with thousands of baseball enthusiasts in their 20s hoping to be given that opportunity for greatness and to make a life and living in the game they love. The reality is less romantic. The jobs in baseball are coveted and finite. Except for those born into baseball with a name like MacPhail, the odds of getting an MLB job are minuscule. Dreams, however, are seldom deterred by reality, and college graduates keep streaming to those winter meetings with visions of championships and champagne—not, as is the case, Miller Lite running down a hair-clogged shower drain in a dingy minor league locker room that smells of Ben Gay and Barbasol.
When I landed one of those positions in 1993—not in the majors, but as an unpaid intern with the team then known as the Class-A Prince William Cannons, now the Fredericksburg Nationals—my initial job duties were ill-defined, since they didn’t even know I was coming. The woman who had hired me back in the spring—over the phone—had left for a position with the Wilmington Blue Rocks, who were about to begin their inaugural season in the Carolina League, and she hadn’t bothered to tell anybody that there was another intern coming before she took off.
The Cannons’ all-male senior staff—as profane and misogynistic as any in baseball—didn’t seem to appreciate that she had gone to work for the Blue Rocks. For one thing, her new team had a brand-new stadium and brand-new offices, in sharp contrast to the Cannons’ old and uncomfortable Pfitzner Stadium (“The Pfitz”), made mostly of steel with offices that were clearly an architectural afterthought, stuck on the side like Lego pieces from a couple of mismatched sets.
After I explained who had hired me, I was treated to a barrage of epithets that included whose rocks the woman could blow and how no one would have blue rocks in Wilmington after she got there. Profane and misogynistic, as I said—and not terribly creative.
It was a dubious start, but I was told repeatedly by anyone to whom I complained that the fact that I had the job, even one with no pay and 15-hour workdays, was consolation enough. “You’re working in baseball” was a constant refrain whenever I openly doubted the life choices that had led me to that summer.
A guy named Kevin, whose first love was broadcasting and who was the radio voice of the Cannons, was the director of media relations and my boss. Since I had recently graduated from college with an English degree, he gave me press releases to write and other duties befitting my background. It meant he didn’t have to do them. My first byline was a a preview of the Carolina League’s top prospects entering the season, a piece that was quickly picked up and plagiarized by another outlet. No one seemed to care. When Lorena Bobbitt sliced off her husband’s penis and threw it into a roadside field in nearby Manassas that June, I wrote a press release that was faxed to all Yankee affiliates, including the major-league club, letting them know that we were all safe, and that no amount of penis slicing was going to cancel that night’s baseball game. Play ball, even if that’s all your wife has left you.
MY BACK PAGES
My life in baseball up to 1993 might be classified as unremarkable by some, but I felt that my time as a fantasy baseball general manager had prepared me well for a front office career in the majors nonetheless. And ever since I was 7 I knew I had a mind for the intricacies of the game. I first realized it when I was playing shortstop for a team called the Angels in a coed kiddie softball league in my hometown of Reading, Pennsylvania. Early in the game, the other team put runners on first and second with no one out. The next batter hit a line drive up the middle, but I took a couple of quick steps to my left and snagged the ball in an oversized mitt that my father had once worn. Both runners were moving on contact because they anticipated that it was going to be a single to centerfield (or they simply didn’t know how to run the bases).
After I caught the line drive, I stepped on second base, doubling up the runner from second, and then ran toward first, where I tagged the runner from first for an unassisted triple play. I then rolled the ball to the pitcher’s mound and walked off the field to our dugout-less bench to wait for my turn to bat. Our coach, Mrs. Heifitz, came over to find out what had just happened.
“We didn’t have any outs before that play, right?” she asked.
I told her she was correct, but I had gotten three outs on the play and so now our team was up to bat. In that moment, I knew I could take over as coach of a co-ed kiddie softball team, which would inevitably lead to managing my beloved Boston Red Sox.
I’d fallen in love with the Red Sox on a Saturday in that same summer of 1977. In the 1970s, there was no ESPN, and the only baseball games that were televised in Eastern Pennsylvania were the Philadelphia Phillies. My father was a Phillies fan. My brother was a Phillies fan. All my relatives and friends were Phillies fans (except my mother, who was a Mets fan because she had been a Brooklyn Dodgers fan growing up listening to them on the radio with her grandfather, so when they put a team that wasn’t the Yankees back in New York she maintained her loyalty to the team and her grandfather). But every Saturday ABC would televise a game of the week, and on this particular day, the Red Sox happened to be playing. I don’t remember the opponent, nor do I remember the result of the game, but there was a moment where a batter on the other team hit a foul ball behind home plate. The Red Sox catcher, Carlton Fisk, jumped up from his crouch and tossed his mask away as he stared down that foul pop like it owed him money. He reached up over his head, caught the ball, and then turned to throw it back to the pitcher with a look of utter disdain. Fisk had a wad of tobacco the size of a golf ball stuck in his cheek, and the message he was sending out to the world was do not hit a lame pop up behind home plate or I’m going to catch it and look like the coolest motherfucker to ever step on a baseball field while doing it.
I was hooked. I asked my parents for a Red Sox hat that very day, and the hat soon arrived along with decades of unwanted heartache.
When I was offered a job with the Prince William Cannons, a farm team of the hated New York Yankees, I justified my disloyalty to Boston by convincing myself that the best way to beat an enemy was to infiltrate them and find out how they worked. Then I could take that knowledge and share it with Boston. One thing I learned that summer was you should always draft players named Derek Jeter, Andy Pettitte and Jorge Posada. I’m not sure that insight was particularly helpful to the Red Sox front office.
Not that baseball had always treated me well. I was a substitute batboy for the Reading Phillies in 1983 and 1984, working for $5 a game when one of the full-time batboys was unavailable, which was not very often. Once a season the big Phillies came to town. They used two batboys for the major-league team, which was how I found myself in the dugout one day with some of my boyhood idols, including Pete Rose. I thought I might shit myself. During the national anthem, I was standing, statue still, outside of the dugout. Pete Rose was leading off for the Phillies, so he was in the on-deck circle behind me. Apparently, my anxiety was oozing out of every pore, prompting Rose to poke me in the butt with it and say, “Kid, loosen up.” I yelped. Everybody heard and saw.
But that wasn’t why I got booed. For that, I blame the longtime owner of the Reading Phillies, Joe Buzas, who was tighter than bark on a tree. Any foul ball that stayed inside the fenced in area of the field was to be retrieved by the batboys and put back into play. When Reading played the big Phillies, the stadium was sold out. It was loud. Easily the biggest crowd in Reading each season. At some point in the game, a line drive was hit down the left field line but curved foul, which meant I had to go retrieve the ball. I jogged down the line and arrived at the ball just as some enterprising father was lifting his child over the fence to grab it, too. The father looked at me and said, “Come on, let the kid have the ball.” But I had my orders from Mr. Buzas and refused. When the fans realized what was going on, though, they erupted into a deafening chorus of boos, finally shaming me into letting go. As I jogged back to the dugout, a cop stationed by the fence asked me if I gotten the ball and I said: “No.” He shook his head as if I had failed, and in that moment. I realized that, god help me, I had aligned myself with greedy baseball owners and coldhearted cops instead of kids who loved baseball and only wanted to go home with a souvenir.
MASCOTTING
Amid all the faux romance of crafting press releases and articles for the game-day program, there were other responsibilities thrust upon me as the lowest of all the interns for the Prince William Cannons. Saturdays before the season started, days the six summer interns were assured we would be off, I found myself putting up billboards in the outfield with forklifts and nail guns. Other days we power-washed the entire prefab stadium, and painted surfaces for no real reason except that we happened to have some paint. One Saturday we catered the owner’s wedding, which he staged at the ballpark. The GM could have called in the hourly summer employees to serve the guests steak and lobster, but why pay when there was free labor?
One of my other jobs starting in late spring was dressing up in a giant walking cannonball costume as Boomer, the team mascot. A fellow intern had put together a geographic presentation showing where the assorted teams in the Carolina League were located, and he would go to elementary schools and engage the classes for 30 minutes to get kids to take a few pocket schedules home, or coupons for a free hot dog, with the hope that they would bring their families out to the ballpark. I had no experience in mascotting but did my best dancing around in a big fuzzy black outfit with insulated puffy shoes. The costume grew hotter and hotter the closer we got to summer and stank from the accumulated sweat of the intern stuck inside for hours at a time. Some days we would visit three or four schools. The mascot costume, which smelled worse and worse after each one, was only budgeted to be dry-cleaned right before the season started. That was when an actual paid mascot took over for game days and demanded working conditions that did not reek of the sweat of interns like me who were struggling with their poor life choices.
In hindsight, having a costume that smelled like a junior high gym locker might have helped ward off the uncomfortable situation I found myself in later that season, when I was ordered to dress as Boomer for the grand opening of a Food Lion near the Cannons stadium on a Saturday with a fellow intern, Dale, representing the team and handing out pocket schedules to unsuspecting shoppers.
I’d been castigated the first time I played Boomer at an elementary school when I jumped into a classroom, shouted “Hey, kids!” and then danced from one foot to the other for the next 20 minutes, making wisecracks in my best mascot voice to get the kids to laugh. My handler—the intern with the geography presentation—was clearly exasperated, though I didn’t know why until later. He took a deep breath when we got back to his car, sighed, and then in no uncertain terms informed me, “Boomer does not talk.”
I took this as gospel and never spoke as Boomer again, even at the Food Lion grand opening, when it would have been most helpful. The Cannons had two mascots, and Dale was dressed as the other, a character named Prince Willie who was the only one allowed to speak even though the big-headed Boomer had a mouth, eyes, and nose as well.
After a few minutes into our two-hour shift, Dale realized that if our sole purpose at the store was to give away all the game schedules then the task would go much faster if we split up. So split up we did. Nobody knew who or what we were supposed to be as we walked the aisles separately, but Dale at least had the ability, or I guess permission, to explain why we were there. I, on the other hand, couldn’t explain anything to anybody as I wandered silently though the aisles, approaching wary shoppers, mostly women with children, trying to hand out pocket schedules.
The walking embodiment of stranger danger.
The Boomer costume came in three parts: oversized feet that slipped easily over your shoes for comedic effect; a regular pair of the pinstriped pants just like the actual players wore; and most important—and by far the most prominent—a big black cannonball head. I guess there was a fourth component to the costume, come to think of it, which was the large Cannons baseball cap stuck on top of the cannonball head, and through which the mascot—me in the Food Lion that day—could see.
Boomer’s demeanor was meant to be pleasant. He had a great big painted-on smile, wide eyes to capture the world through a lens of wonderment, and a large, bulbous nose that protruded a few inches from the face, an all-too-inviting target for children, who liked nothing better than to grab and tug on the thing. During games, both Prince Willie and Boomer were followed by handlers whose job it was to stop children from pulling at the costumes and causing damage, which meant that they would then have to be sent out for repair or replacement since there were no backups.
At this point, it would be helpful to provide some anatomical context. I’m 6 feet,1 inch tall, while the game-day Boomer—the one who actually got paid for the gig back in ’93—was at least half a foot shorter. On him, the protruding proboscis sat safely at knee level, so the grabbing was not that big a deal. Plus there were mascot handlers at the games to run interference when little kids got too grabby.
On the frame of a much taller man, though—me that day at the Food Lion—the tuggable nose sat right at crotch level. Most likely this wasn’t at all evident to the children who squealed with delight when they saw this giant walking cannonball with giant shoes, a giant face, and a giant baseball cap, wandering the aisles. And soon they were crowded around me, one after another, and sometimes more than one, pulling on poor Boomer’s nose.
The parents, though, were another matter, and it didn’t take them long before they realized how tall the guy was in the mascot outfit, and what lined up with what, and snatched their oblivious children away.
Even though my view through the mesh veneer in the baseball cap wasn’t entirely clear, the parents’ looks of abject horror wasn’t easy to forget, and I couldn’t help but think, based on their quick exit from the bread aisle despite the howls of protest from their children, that they were never going anywhere near a Prince William Cannons game.
SECRET SERVICE
One person who did attend a Cannons game that summer was recently elected Vice President Al Gore. As a staff, we were contacted by the Secret Service the day before the game, and they came and scoped out the stadium and then had special meetings with the general manager on how best to ensure Gore’s safety. We were told to act natural during the game, but my direct boss asked me to send out a press release alerting the local media that we might have a VIP in attendance that night without naming the actual VIP. I think the Cannons were coming into the game on an extended losing streak, so I headed the press release: “After Gorey Weekend, Cannons Return Home.” It was either too subtle or dismissed as the work of an intern who could not spell. Either way, our press contingent that night was no bigger than usual.
Gore and his son sat near the third base dugout and were surrounded by men in pressed khakis and earpieces. When Gore was ready to leave, a few innings early, my radio crackled, and I was told to head to the exit on the left field line and help the Secret Service agents there form a human shield around the veep and his kid for protection as they left the park. There were no background checks conducted, or else I doubt they would have allowed the Assistant Director of Marijuana Sales to Players Before They Left on a Road Trip (an unofficial title but important to certain middle relievers) to be in the circle of trust.
When we were ready—half a dozen Secret Servicers and two minor-league summer interns—the agent in charge told us how to position ourselves and how to walk in step so our not-so-bulletproof wall didn’t dissolve on the way to the waiting SUVs. It was hard not tripping over so many Secret Service feet, not to mention the Gores’, junior and senior, but we somehow managed to get the vice president out of the ballpark still alive, thwarting any would-be assassin’s plot.
Once we got the Gores safely tucked inside their ride, and after the fleet of SUVs pulled away into the Woodbridge night, I returned the the field just in time to oversee the Dizzy Bat Race promotion that we held sometimes between innings, a job that required me to keep the participants from falling down the dugout steps. No vice presidents, but I did manage to keep half a dozen woozy fans safe that night, too.
RAPID ROBERT
Visitors to the stadium that summer were not just politicos. World-class celebrities like Morganna the Kissing Bandit and the San Diego Chicken also made appearances. And then there was the autograph session with Hall of Famer Bob Feller, who the team lured to Woodbridge for a weekend game. Feller, one of the greatest pitchers in the history of baseball and a World War II veteran, was very popular with the fans—too popular, as it happened, because after a couple of hours he ran out of photos. Typically, everybody in the front office also got a signed photo from guests, but since Feller had no more to sign, it didn’t appear as though that was going to happen. Until I remembered that both Feller and I would be in Cooperstown, New York, in a few weeks for the annual Baseball Hall of Fame induction ceremony—him as a Hall of Famer, of course, and me as your run-of-the-mill baseball fan. I asked Feller if it might be possible for me to meet him the Saturday before the to get autographed photos for my colleagues, and to my surprise he agreed.
My idea was not as selfless as it may have appeared, because I was thrilled that it meant I’d get to introduce my father to a living and breathing Hall of Famer. When he was a young boy my dad had seen Feller pitch at Shibe Park, so getting to introduce him to Feller in Cooperstown seemed like a small way of giving back to my father all the great baseball experiences Dad has shared with me over the years.
All the returning Hall of Famers stayed at the Otesaga Hotel for induction weekend, so my plan was to meet Feller in the lobby at 1 p.m. on that Saturday. As we strolled through downtown Cooperstown earlier that day, though, I saw that Feller was signing autographs downtown until 2 p.m. It didn’t make sense to go to this hotel at 1 p.m. when he wasn’t going to be there, so I figured we’d roll down there around 2:30 to give Feller a little time to get back to his hotel. No harm, no foul. Just a little adjustment in our starting time was all.
We showed up at Feller’s hotel at 2:30 and asked the front desk clerk to call up to Feller’s room, which she did. She spoke to him briefly, then told me that Mr. Feller would be right down. And right down he came, sprinting out of the elevator looking far younger than his 74 years and giving me a tongue lashing in front of my father that I have largely blocked out of my mind, except for the part where he kept demanding to know why the hell had I made his wife wait for two goddamned hours in their hotel room with the signed photos. I tried to explain that I thought I’d be meeting him, not his wife, but then found out he was busy until around now. I couldn’t get a word in edgewise, though, as he lived up to his nickname, Rapid Robert, and continued dressing me down in a painful verbal assault at a volume that seemed to freeze time in that spacious but crowded hotel lobby in front of my dad and God and everybody.
So that was how I got to introduce my dad to his idol, Bob Feller.
After the induction ceremony on Sunday, Dad drove back to Pennsylvania while I drove the eight hours back to Virginia so I could be ready to work on Monday. South of D.C. I encountered a hellacious thunderstorm that made visibility impossible. Since I had a key to the Prince William Cannons locker room, I pulled off early at the Dale City exit and drove to the stadium, where I parked and then hopped a fence to get inside and unlocked the locker room. It was 12:30 a.m. which meant I’d have seven hours to sleep on the trainer’s table before everybody showed up in the morning.
I slept more on that table than in my own bed that summer.
LET’S MAKE A DEAL
I never smoked a lot of pot in my young life because I had a history of asthma and spent a week in a bubble in Reading Hospital when I was 6, which left a lasting impression on me and my lungs. As assistant director of media relations, I had to help with media access to the players and was in and out of the locker room numerous times on game days. I was talking with one of the relief pitchers one day and he casually let it drop that some of the players liked to smoke when they were on the road to take the edge off, and he asked whether I had any connections. Remarkably, that summer, for the first and only time in my life, I did—a maintenance guy named Robert.
Robert was a man chiseled from granite, with a mullet that did not seem out of place on him in 1993. His chest was wide enough to show drive-in movies on, and he pulled and dropped car transmissions in his spare time. It was assumed that he did the pulling and dropping strictly by hand. He was blind in his right eye, and the shotgun pellet that had blinded him was still visible. I never bothered to ask why he was getting shot at, and I think he appreciated that. Most of the front office avoided Robert, and the general manager especially found Robert objectionable—unless of course he had to put down a drunk frat boy rebellion during a game. Then his first pleading radio transmission was for someone to go find Robert. Robert was not a person that anyone fucked with, but he seemed to like me, so when I asked him if he had access to some blue smoke he simply asked me how much I needed.
As much as I needed money that summer, I never made a profit off the weed. The players would tell me how much they wanted, Robert gave me a price, and then it was a simple matter of collecting the money from the players, meeting Robert under the stadium, and making the exchange. I then went back into the clubhouse, often while the players were relaxing before the games, and dropped brown paper bags into the tops of their lockers. This lacked subtlety but no one seemed to care, and I do believe that the relief pitchers pitched better on the road.
I had a bet with one reliever heading into a home series against Winston-Salem. The Reds minor league team, which won the league championship that year, featured one of the top prospects in the Carolina League in Chad Mottola. At that point in the season, Mottola was on fire and led the league in most offensive categories. The reliever told me that if he faced Mottola in the three-game series, he guaranteed me Mottola would not get a hit off him. I told him to name his price. He said a six-pack of my favorite beer, and I took the bet. It seemed like an easy win. Mottola was going to kill this guy.
The reliever was a lefty specialist, so he didn’t pitch very often, but he did get into one of the Winston-Salem games and did get to face Mottola. I happened to be walking through the stands when Mottola came to the plate and got to see what happened next. Mottola, a right-handed power hitter batting fourth, settled into the batter’s box, ready to crush something. The reliever reared back and threw a fastball—drilling Mottola right in the middle of his back. Mottola shrugged it off and trotted to first base while the catcher threw the ball back to the pitcher, who seemed completely unfazed that he had just put a runner on first. I had obviously lost the bet, and the next day I ran to Food Lion so when the relief pitcher showed up to his locker that afternoon there was a six-pack of Guinness waiting for him.
WAIT ’TIL NEXT YEAR….
The 1993 Prince William Cannons baseball season ended on a nondescript Sunday afternoon in September. The Cannons didn’t make the Carolina League playoffs, so as soon as the game ended the players and coaches packed up their equipment and remnants of a 67-73 season and scattered to different parts of the world. Two of the players from that team, catcher Jorge Posada and pitcher Andy Pettitte, became stars for the New York club and won multiple World Series. On the evening of our last game, there was no one in the locker room at 6 o’clock as I showered in the vast communal shower and drank beer from a 36-ounce novelty cup that was only ever used for sodas.
In a short time, I would be going to a party where I would lose my battle with a bottle of tequila and pass out in an unfurnished room of a townhouse rented by a fellow intern who I would never see again after that night. As the mist from the shower coated the mirrors, I reflected on the past seven months of my life in baseball. The girl I had started dating that summer had returned to Virginia Tech for the fall semester, and I doubted I’d ever see her again. I was a college grad who’d just spent the summer working 15-hour days for no money. I had no prospects. I’d probably have to go back home and live in my parents’ basement.
The baseball thing clearly hadn’t worked out the way I’d planned.
I stayed in the shower long as I could, smelling of bulk-rate soap and shampoo, until I realized my cup was empty and I needed a refill. Much as I wished I could live out my days as one of the boys of summer, it was time to hang up my cleats—metaphorically, anyway—and go get a real job.
***
Drew Gallagher is a freelance writer who lives in Fredericksburg, Virginia. He is the second most prolific book reviewer and first video book reviewer in the 137-year history of The Free Lance-Star newspaper, and a weekly humor columnist for the FXBG Advance.
