The Farm Team

A nineteen-year-old catcher. Seventy arm, sixty power, a pop time of one point eight seven seconds, barely a number a grown man has. Every row on his report is graded twenty to eighty, where fifty is a big-league regular. Every row but one. On the makeup line somebody typed a word instead, and the word is *watch*, and no one who wrote it will say what he meant.

Nobody will put it in a document. It is a nineteen-year-old's name on paper that follows him as long as he is in the game, and if you are wrong you have cost a kid a career with an adjective. The field is where it gets found out.

Coaching goes to everybody at once. So does the weight room, the video, the bus, the two meals. At-bats do not. A lineup holds who it holds, a night is one night, and every time one man hits, another man in that room did not.

In the last week of camp the organization puts a sentence in writing: the expectation is that one outfielder receives four hundred plate appearances at Marbury this year, health permitting. Buck Rendell is the man who spends it, in pencil, at four o'clock, out of everybody else. The boy is not going to be told. And a rehab window runs up to twenty days.

The eleventh of January, the back room of the town hall on Depot Street, five rows of folding chairs, and the ball club is the fourth item on an agenda of six. Delia Shoaf stands up and reads the front of a letter that came the week before Christmas. The ballpark has been re-scored for the coming license year: nineteen points against a limit of fifteen. The count is on the back. Home clubhouse four. Training room three. Lights three.

Nothing about the building changed. A phase-in ended, and somebody scored the whole of the standard instead of part of it. The town owns Ellery Field and the club leases it, the organization does not put capital into buildings it does not own, and nothing obliges anybody to sign again. Buck Rendell is asked to sit in the back row and say nothing, because the minute the manager opens his mouth it is the ball club asking, and it cannot be the ball club asking.

The twenty-ninth of March, and somebody has been in the building two days. The heat thrown before seven. All four banks of lights burning, including the one nobody uses, whose switch is out by the laundry door so that you have to want it. Twenty-six stools squared to twenty-six lockers.

Down at the far end a man is on one knee with a stool upside down between his hands and a screwdriver going. About a third of them come loose over a winter. There is no procedure for it and it is not anybody's job. Tuck Rasco is thirty and will be the oldest man dressing in that room this season by a good four years.

In the office mail on the first of April is the note the roster clerk sends every affiliate every spring. One paragraph. The Domestic Reserve List stands at one hundred and sixty-five, and the in-season figure governs from opening day. Buck Rendell reads it and puts it in the tray with the parking page, because there is nothing a manager does about the list in April.

The housing standard is four lines long and it has not moved since twenty twenty-two. Furnished. A commutable distance from the ballpark. No more than two to a bedroom. And every one of them his own bed.

How many men are coming is settled in an office in Arizona by people who have never laid eyes on Route Sixty-Two, and this year it comes out three short. The man who assembles beds comes on a schedule, and the schedule is the second week of April. The players come on the twenty-seventh of March. So Buck Rendell spends the twenty-first on the carpet of an empty end unit at Cardinal Court with a headboard panel across his knees, and Sonny Baird, who has put this club's laundry through a machine since nineteen eighty-four, is down on the floor beside him, because Delia asked him whether he minded and he said he did not mind.

That same week the man who owns Cardinal Court comes in through the side gate with his cap in his hand and says he is selling it all.

An earned run average is the runs that are a pitcher's fault over nine innings, and in a town this size it is the only number anybody reads.

Ray Tarwater is the pitching coordinator. He flies in four or five times a year, works a building for three days, and while he is standing in it every arm in it answers to him. He comes through the office door on an off day in April, keeps his jacket on, puts no paper on the desk, and says it in three sentences. Gwaltney throws the changeup in hitter's counts. All year. Every start.

The boy has a real one. The only way he is ever allowed to keep it is to throw it in the counts where a hitter is sitting on the fastball, and get hit for it, from April until the season runs out. Nobody softens it in September. Buck Rendell is told that in April, sitting down, so that he hears it in a month when he is not looking at the kid's face.