inning, went to a full count, and walked on a close pitch. Where was that, ump? thought Bobby, or perhaps he’d said it aloud: Boyle’s eyes shifted his way for a moment. Lanz struck out and Zamora flied to right. The aisles clogged with fans trying to beat the traffic. Then Primo doubled off the wall in right center. They held the kid at third.
“Bobby?”
Bobby looked up. Burrows was standing in front of him.
“Could use a little bingle,” Burrows said.
“You’re putting me in?”
“Why not?”
Bobby went to the bat rack, looked for the one he’d used in BP before remembering, and picked out a new one. He walked slowly onto the field. Lots of noise. He shut it out, slipped the donut onto the bat, swung easy until he felt loose, knocked the donut off, moved to the plate. The catcher went out to talk to the pitcher. Bobby took a few more swings.
“My feet are killin’ me,” the ump called out to the mound. The catcher returned, crouched behind the plate. Bobby stepped in, took his stance. He thought about the pitcher: good fastball, better slider, pissy little change-and looked for the slider on the first pitch. He didn’t put himself through picturing anything, or feeling anything, or any other bullshit. He just got ready to do what he’d been doing all his life: hitting a baseball.
And there it was, slider, not a good one, up and over the plate; the kind of pitch he’d punished so many times. Bobby leaned into it and got it all, or almost all. Or maybe just a piece. Just a goddamned piece. The ball soared into the sky, seemed to hang motionless, then looped and began the long drop back down, down into the second-baseman’s glove. Bobby’s first thought was of Bullwinkle.
Bobby hadn’t taken a step. He was still in the batter’s box when Primo trotted down the third-base line, on his way to the dugout, eyes on the ground, but with a little smile turning up the corners of his mouth. He slowed down, allowing Simkins, loping across the infield, to catch up, and whacked him on the butt as they went by.
Bobby stood in the batter’s box, not wanting to move. Where was there to go? Then he felt eyes gazing at him from all directions. That broke the spell. He hurried into the dugout. Everyone else was already in the clubhouse. Bobby stopped by the water cooler and smashed it to bits. The act had lost its cleansing power. This time it didn’t make him feel better at all, not even for a minute. In the clubhouse, he tore off his shirt with the hideous forty-one on the back and ripped it apart. Stook saw him do it, didn’t say a word.
Bobby stayed in the shower until the media was gone. He dressed, gulped down a beer, and went out. Wald was waiting.
“Did you forget?” he said.
“Forget what?”
“That interview for the Times Magazine. ”
“Did I say yes?”
“Don’t you remember?”
Bobby didn’t remember. “Cancel it,” he said.
“How can I do that?”
“With a phone call, the way you do everything.”
“But she’ll be at the house by now, Bobby.”
“At my house?”
“That was the arrangement. She wants to see it.”
“Why?”
“It’s a profile piece, Bobby. Just the thing to get you in front of a wider world.”
“What wider world?”
“The one beyond baseball, Bobby, like I told you before. The world that’s still going to be out there after all this is over.”
Bobby looked down at Wald. “I want to be traded,” he said.
“That’s a joke, right?”
Bobby grabbed a handful of Wald’s silk shirt. “Get me traded,” he said.
“Let go.”
Bobby didn’t let go. “Trade me,” he said, backing Wald against the clubhouse door.
“Have you gone nuts? I’m the agent, not the owner.”
“Anywhere will do,” Bobby said. “As long as…”
“As what?”
“You know what.” Bobby released him.
Wald nodded. He knew. Eleven.
19
Bent over a legal pad in the windowless office she shared with Bernie and Norm, Jewel Stern worked on the list of questions she would put to Bobby Rayburn. She parceled them out in subgroups: “$,” “Lifestyle and Family,” “The Game,” “Misc.” “The Game” was further subdivided into “Mind” and “Body.” Thirty-seven questions, so far. Jewel reviewed them at random:
Who do you respect most in the game?
What’s given you the most satisfaction in your career?
If you could change anything, what would it be?
How does being on the road so much affect your family life?
Who’s your wife’s favorite player?
Do you miss California?
Do you feel under any special pressure because of the big contract?
Jewel hated every one. She had the feeling they were all the same question anyway, except perhaps the last, and she’d already asked him that in spring training, to no effect. Still, dumb questions didn’t always lead to dumb answers. Maybe Bobby would open up on his own, bubbling forth eye-popping quotes, exploding with inside stuff. Maybe, for example, when she asked him about his family life, he’d blurt something about all the girls he screwed on the road. Maybe she’d get lucky.
Jewel swept that hope aside. Hoping to get lucky was a step toward mediocrity, and mediocrity wasn’t what Jewel wanted. If she was fated to sit one day in some nursing home for husbandless, childless biddies, she wanted at least to be able to dazzle them with what she’d had instead. The Rayburn profile was her chance to rise to another level. Jewel squeezed the pencil tightly in her hand, as though physical intensity might somehow give birth to a good idea.
“The answer’s yes,” the editor at the New York Times Magazine had said of her proposal, and Jewel had been so thrilled she hadn’t paid much attention to what had come next: “But we still feel it needs a stronger hook.”
“Don’t worry,” she’d said. “I know it’ll come out of the material.”
But now she was a week from deadline, and worried. In her proposal the hook had been the question of money and pressure, weak in their eyes and now proven impotent. She knew that the Times Magazine liked to do profiles of sports figures, in the desperate hunt for the possibly extinct male reader, but why green-light hers if they didn’t like the hook? Jewel couldn’t help but wonder what would have happened to her proposal if she’d been a man. Were they favoring her to make some kind of statement, or was she still, after a generation of court cases and locker-room scenes, a novelty? Or was it just possible they realized she knew the game?
None of those questions arose at the station. They knew she knew the game; she also had the voice. They paid her well. She slept in nice hotels, ate in nice restaurants, lived in the buzz of a hectic schedule. The question that arose at the station was in her own mind, and attacked from another direction: Had she gone to journalism school, now more than twenty years ago, to spend the rest of her life covering a boys’ game? If asked what Janie was up to-Jewel was her nom de guerre, suggested by her first agent, the one who had discovered her, as he liked to put it, at that dinky three-thousand-watt station in Hartford-her mother would say, “She’s in the media,” and if
