Fatted Calf

It was still morning when we pulled onto the vast, empty lot that spanned the vacant outskirts of Kansas City. Reaching up from the asphalt toward the dull clouded sky stood the two behemoths: Kauffman before us, Arrowhead behind. With no sun to glare off the stacked faces of cement or cast shadows deep into the sheltered concourses they framed, the stadiums seemed unusually placid.

In this world of grey, spring began anew.

Opening day was our family holiday. Every year, my dad would call me in sick to school, and we would drive into the city to see the Royals christen the new season. All winter the date would be marked on our calendar, circled in red ink.

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This year had been different. April had come, and still no date had been circled. The strike that had wiped out the World Series continued on into spring training. The season waivered in limbo. No one knew when, or even if, it would begin.

…

News crept slowly to Mayview, Mo. The traffic that constantly hummed along Highway 70 just a few miles south carried with it the bustle and happenings of the cities, but its flow was just as dammed off by its narrow banks as the great river to the north. No amount of flooding could span the miles of cattle and crops far enough over the river valley to reach us.

The few cars that came trickling in did so caked in dirt from one of the two roads that led into town. Whatever luster may have shone vibrant on the interstate was stripped away by the gravel guarding our smattering of houses and churches until the intruding vehicle was just as humble as the rest of ours. They would come bounding up Highway E, kicking up clouds of dust easily visible from our hilltop residence, the sound of tires spinning against the loose rock audible across the town.

The highway veered sharply to the right at the railroad tracks. It continued on like that for a few hundred yards before colliding with Main Street and straightening back up toward the north and out of town. Sometimes the cars would circle back south onto Main Street or keep heading east on Long Road (which, at roughly three miles from where it started west of town to where it reverted back to Highway MM, was bafflingly long in a town maybe a few thousand feet across).

It was like this that the news filtered in. Every Thursday afternoon, a blue Chevy K-series rolled up and circled down around Main Street with the weekly Odessan from the next town over. Most of the farmers from the church where my father preached read the Odessan. The Baptist church around the corner where I went to Bible school in the summers read the Concordian, which came on Wednesdays. These were the two papers that came to our town.

There was one exception. Upon arriving in Mayview fresh out of his St. Louis seminary, my father quickly learned that he couldn’t sustain himself on the goings-on of the Board of Aldermen, local interest pieces, and high school football updates alone, no matter how comprehensive that coverage may be. After going six months without an Associated Press story, he finally made a deal with one of his church members who drove in from Odessa.

Every Sunday, Elaine Hudson would bring with her a stack of Kansas City Stars from the past few days. Every Wednesday, her son would drive in after school with another stack. My father would then go through them one day at a time, never peeking ahead and never seeming to care that he was always a few days behind. My mom bothered him about it once when he first started getting them. He told her he would give up his morning paper if she would give up her morning coffee. She never mentioned it again.

It was his one indulgence to remind him of his old life in the city. Whenever we took our trips into Kauffman, he would climb to the top row of the upper deck and look out at the distant skyline. He hated that the stadium was so far from everything. He would always compare it to Busch, to how he could grab a slice of pizza or Polish sausage off a street vendor and walk around in the shadow of the Old Courthouse or the Arch until the gate opened for batting practice.

Still, as we played catch waiting for the lot to fill with cars, he would slowly forget all of that. Everything he missed about the city, about St. Louis and Busch Stadium, slowly gave way to his love of baseball. By the time the first pitch left Kevin Appier’s hand just after 1:30, he could have been on the sandlot behind our elementary school and it wouldn’t have mattered. Baseball had finally returned.

…

I would turn nine that summer. It was the first summer I was old enough to play organized ball with the local Little League team.

Baseball had always been simple. It was a game of triumph and of failure. Batter against pitcher, team against team. The small losses and victories added up into big ones, growing and piling on top of each other until finally one team was left holding the pennant.

No matter how far you broke those victories down into smaller and smaller pieces, it was still nothing but simple wins and losses. The catcher against the base stealer. The right fielder against the runner trying for third. A hard slide into second against the shortstop trying to turn two. One wins, one loses.

Every bit of it, from the great pennant all the way down to the lowly at-bat, was chronicled in the stack of Sporting News magazines my dad kept in the bottom drawer of his rolltop desk. Each decision was there in the hundreds of box scores sprawled across the newsprint pages on the floor of our study. I used to pore through them at night after my parents had gone to sleep. I’d add up Lankford’s 3-for-5s, forgive Ozzie ’s 0-for-4s, marvel at Tudor’s and Tewksbury’s best games. From these pages, I worked forwards, trying to puzzle out what the Blue Jays or Twins or Reds or A’s or Dodgers had that the Cardinals and Royals didn’t.

And then, suddenly, there were no winners or losers. The box scores didn’t add up to anything. There was just Tony Gwynn with his .394 average, Matt Williams with his 43 home runs, Greg Maddux with his 1.56 ERA.

That year, the one where I first stood in the batter’s box against kids four years my senior, I learned that baseball is hard.

…

Aside from the newspapers, most of the town had a radio. Some had a TV. One of our neighbors had a huge satellite dish set up in their yard.

That spring, my dad and I were glued to our channels of information for updates on the strike. I would bring the sports page from my dad’s slightly outdated Kansas City Star to school to hide in my desk and sneak peeks at throughout the day. My dad had a cheap transistor radio he kept in his office he had bought to listen to ball games in the summer. Every day when school let out, I would stop by the church first to check if any news had come in before returning to our house next door.

At dinner, we would discuss whatever bits we could piece together. The owners wouldn’t agree to anything without a salary cap. Selig was complaining that small-market teams like his Brewers would be helpless without it and needed revenue sharing to boot. Salary arbitration could be eliminated. Teams might use minor league replacement players if the strike didn’t end in time for the new season. Slowly, information seeped into our town, and we stretched it out as far as we could to keep our winter discussions alive.

Jim Bunning was championing some bill in the Senate that could end the strike. Peter Angelos, a longtime union lawyer himself, was refusing to field a team of replacements in place of his beloved Orioles. Cal Ripken, with the Iron Horse so nearly in his grasp, wouldn’t cross picket lines to keep his streak alive, either.

Spring training came. The replacements reported. The strike continued.

Then, one Friday as I came into my dad’s office after school, I saw him staring at the radio on his desk. It took me a minute to work out what it was saying. It wasn’t until I looked up at him that it hit me—that smile on his face, the same one he would later show as Kevin Appier struck out Brady Anderson looking. The strike was over.

That Sunday, my dad stood before his congregation of farmers with his worn cotton Bob Gibson jersey in place of his usual robe and stole. Elaine’s husband Mel wore his Frank White jersey under his typical suit coat. The two had spent the morning before the service arguing over whether George Brett could still hit in the majors.

That day, for the first time, my father caved and jumped ahead in his stack of newspapers. We spent the day reading everything we could on the strike. A federal judge in New York had issued an injunction blocking MLB’s attempt to bypass the union and institute its own collective bargaining agreement. Pending further negotiations, the conditions of the previous agreement had been restored. A new 144-game schedule had been drawn up to replace the normal 162-game one.

The threat of a lockout lingered, but the players were ready to report. The real players. Ripken and the rest of Angelos’ Orioles and all of MLB with them headed down to Arizona and Florida to prepare for the season. After months of waiting, that was enough for us. Soon, we would have a date to circle on the calendar.

…

The stadium was beginning to stir nervously. Appier had gotten Rafael Palmeiro to pop up to start the seventh, and now Ripken stood at the plate. The first pitch was over for a strike. Ripken fouled off the next pitch then took one wide for a ball. Appier dipped into his wind-up, his back shoulder tilted low as his glove swung wildly in front of him. Ripken missed. Kauffman erupted. My dad sat silently, his eyes fixed on the top step of the dugout.

Slowly, the cheers turned into boos. Appier turned and looked into the crowd, into the fountains over the outfield, into the giant crown-shaped scoreboard. Anywhere but at Bob Boone, who, in his first ever game managing in the majors, had to pull his starting pitcher from a no-hitter.

On the drive home, my dad and I couldn’t get over the decision. We understood, or at least he did, on a rational level—it had been nearly nine months since Appier had pitched a competitive game, and spring training had been shortened due to the strike. But for those few innings from when we first realized what was going on until Appier was pulled, baseball felt magical again.

Baseball was never magical, though. Baseball was hard. It had always been hard. Seeing my dad so animated over a game, talking to him again like this, the same way he had talked with Mel about George Brett three-and-a-half weeks earlier, it didn’t matter. Baseball didn’t need to be magical. It just needed to be.