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The Sport

  Francis W. Porretto

  Copyright (C) 2010 by Francis W. Porretto

  Cover art by Francis W. Porretto

  ====

  You've gotta love 'em. They're the biggest bunch of crybabies, narcissists, and all-around scum you could find this side of a coke dealers' convention, but they think we're the worst vultures and fiends in creation. Miss one syllable of theirs, and they scream about being misquoted. Quote 'em accurately, and they yell about being taken out of context. If you catch one of 'em doing somebody a favor, you can be sure the favor's owed. If you catch him treating someone with what looks like respect, you can bet the debt is money. Big money.

  Money's the only thing that gets their undivided attention. Which is why, when I spotted one who didn't seem to care about money, he got mine.

  Truth be told, he would have gotten it anyway.

  They have to register their contracts; it's league and union policy. The union is protecting its CBA, and the league is enforcing its salary arbitration system. The rule couldn't be tougher if they had an actual cap. And there has to be a contract. The date on the contract is what determines eligibility to play.

  It's not unusual for a new guy to get the minimum. Hell, I wouldn't complain about it; the minimum is twelve times what I get for more or less honest work. A thirty-seven year old no-name should count himself lucky to get a shot at the majors, even with a going-nowhere expansion team like the Olympians. But when June starts to fade and the guy is 14-0 with twelve complete games, a no-hitter, and a 0.31 ERA, and he's still getting the minimum, you start thinking about alien invasions and sanity hearings.

  And feature articles. Not Page One above the fold, but top, front and center of the Sports section, with your byline in bold, and serious prospects for TV spots and panel shows.

  Not only was he getting the minimum salary permitted to a major leaguer under the CBA; he wasn't spending it. The money never hit his checking account at the team's bank.

  As far as I knew, I was the only hack who'd noticed. I had to conceal the discovery. I wanted an interview with Conrad Bearing -- who didn't -- and the money angle was my crowbar, but I had to let him know what I knew without spilling it to my competitors.

  We are a bunch of vultures. Vultures that will snatch up meat that's still breathing, if there's no carrion to be had.

  With reporters all over him before and after every game, I had to slip him the hook in a way the others wouldn't snag. It was going to be a challenge. But if I couldn't find a way, I wouldn't get the scoop.

  I wouldn't deserve it.

  ***

  He didn't finish his fifteenth, but he won it. It would have been a shutout, but the reliever gopher-balled the Twins' number-one RBI man with one out in the ninth. Still, 4-1 wins just as well as 4-0, and the reliever got the earned run. Bearing's ERA was down to 0.30, and his statistics were screaming Cy Young and MVP. It would be the first time ever in the history of the sport, but if he finished the season the way he'd started it, no one in America could deny it to him.

  The usual horde was besieging him. I was part of it. As he dressed, he answered the shouted questions, no matter how pointed or personal, the same way he always had: with silence and a shake of the head. He didn't look up but twice, both times with the same stony face he showed to opposing batters from the mound. His teammates, knowing they wouldn't get two seconds' worth of any of us while he was around, faded away without a word.

  I'm used to pro ballplayers. I know why they all look older than their ages. But I'd never gotten over how old he looked. You could have convinced me that he was fifty. His hair was solid gray, his face was deeply lined, and I'd swear he had liver spots on his hands. He was fit and trim at six feet and one-eighty, but there was a suggestion of a stoop to him, even when he sat, that suggested that just maybe, the years on his face weren't just from sun and wind.

  The other hacks were half-crazy. None of them had turned up the first thing about him. They knew his name, and his face, and his incredible pitching, but not one damned thing more. He saw no one but his teammates, and them only in the locker room, the dugout, and the clubhouse. He made no phone calls and received no mail. Nothing about him had turned up on the Web. Despite offers in six and seven figures for the beginning of a clue to who he was and how he'd risen from nothing to the top pitcher in the game -- in the history of the game -- no one had stepped forward with the smallest morsel of fact about him.

  A man who arrives at training camp as a free agent, has never played pro ball before, then wins fifteen consecutive starts in sixty games has no business being anonymous. Maybe he wasn't doing it to spite us, but that was the effect it was having. At first, they just wanted to know who he was. Now they wanted to get him.

  I had him. It was time to land him.

  I held my tongue until the rest of the pack had stopped baying. I wasn't going to shout. Not likely he would hear me clearly over the rest, even if I did shout. But if I waited until the din died down a touch, and caught him looking my way, I could mouth what I had to say. Eyes like his would catch it.

  They did.

  His eyes caught mine. He looked about as if he were still attending to the others, but never more than a few degrees off our personal line of contact. I stayed stock still, hung back as unobtrusively as I could until the locker room cleared. The five seconds before the door swung shut behind the last of my colleagues were the longest of my life.

  He turned to face me squarely, clapped his hands against his thighs, leaned forward and murmured, "What was that about my salary?"

  Even his voice sounded old. I looked him in the eye. "You've barely spent the first dollar of it."

  "And you know this...how?"

  I smiled and said nothing.

  He grimaced. "What are you angling for?"

  "A scoop, of course."

  He looked away. His hands clenched, relaxed, and clenched again.

  "All right," he said. "You get an interview. Twenty minutes, right here and now. But strictly about baseball. Nothing personal. And only on the condition that you stop looking into my private affairs, permanently."

  He sat back, plainly expecting me to start into a conventional sports interview. When I shook my head, his face fell.

  "Then what do you want?" he said.

  "The same thing everyone wants: to know who you are and where you came from. To know where you got that fastball, that curve and that control. To know where you're headed next, since a pitcher that good isn't going to stay with an expansion team for the minimum two years running." I pulled my cassette recorder out of my jacket and pushed the RECORD button. "Give me that if you want me to lay off your finances and your miser's ways."

  He glared at me as if I'd hit a grand slam off him the inning before. I just smiled. But my smile faded when he chuckled.

  "I don't know which of us is more ridiculous," he said. "You for overplaying such a weak hand, or me for taking you seriously. You lose. Take your best shot and we'll see what you can learn on your own hook. I won't try to stop you."

  He rose, hefted his duffel, and left me there gaping at his back.

  ***

  Yes, sports hacks socialize. Professionally, we'd cut each other's throats given half a chance, but we can be pals after curfew. After all, who wants to drink alone?

  The Tenth Inning was its usual noisy post-game self. No major-leaguers, but a few triple-As and the customary swarm of collectors and jock itches. Most of them were there in the hope that a utility infielder might wander in, susceptible to a plea for an autograph or the offer of a bed partner. The hacks were there...well, why were we ever there? It was the boozery nearest the stadium, and we all had expense accounts, so why go anywhere else?

  Besides, th
ere was always a chance he might wander in, even if he never had before.

  "What gets me," Mitch Rainier said, "is the endorsements."

  "What endorsements?" Cal Martinez said. "He won't even do a no-lines spot for a soft drink."

  "Right." Mitch flashed his one-sided grin. "Fifteen-and-oh with the All-Star break still three weeks away, he could probably pull down twenty million in spots this year alone, but none of the flacks have gotten within a county of him. The doormen at his hotels are all given instructions to pitch them into the street."

  He's not interested in money, I thought. But why else does anyone play this game?

  "He won't keep them at bay forever," Martinez said. "They'll hook him. They hook everybody sooner or later. Who was the last big guy said he wouldn't do a spot for anything?"

  "Guidry," I said.

  Martinez nodded. "And they got him, didn't they? They used a Cause. Once they found out he had a thing for dogs, he was meat on the table."

  "So," I said, "if they find out he has a soft spot for dogs, or old buildings, or alcohol-soaked hacks, they've got him, eh?"

  "Right. Of course," Martinez said, grinning, "that first step is a doozy." He hefted his glass and squinted down into it. "Who buys the next round?"

  I was about to own up when Floyd Whiggins slouched through the front door. He scanned the bar, saw us and headed for us, and I nodded in his direction.

  "He does."

  ***

  Bearing was Torre's immediate choice to start the All-Star Game. It's not like he had to think hard about it.

  The Olympians wouldn't have anyone else on the squad, but their star was enough for the whole league. Everyone in America wanted to see him pitch. Hell, there were hacks advocating rescinding the rule against more than three innings per pitcher just to see what he could do against the National League's finest.

  Thing is, he didn't want to play at all.

  Day after Torre announced his picks, Bearing made his first phone call that year. Hell, maybe the first of his life. He called Torre and asked to be removed from the squad, completely.

  I hear the call lasted for nearly an hour. Torre finally persuaded him to play. It was close, but that's why Joe's a great manager. The manager's job is to get your lazy ass onto the field and goose it into performing no matter how sick or tired or hungover you might happen to be, and Joe is the best manager in the game. Ask any of the primadonnas he's had to coddle.

  The game was special. First baseball game ever to out-draw a Super Bowl, and Conrad Bearing was the reason. Two days before, he'd won his twentieth straight game. Another complete game shutout.

  He sauntered out to the mound as if he had nothing much to do that day, just crank up the windmill, throw a few balls, then go back to Spokane, win, lose, or draw. But I'd caught a glint in his eye and a hard line along his jaw as he warmed up. He wasn't happy to be there, but as long as he was, he was going to show us his best.

  I didn't know that we hadn't yet seen his best.

  The National League owns all the slugging records these days. They grow 'em big over there. But they also grow 'em quick. Every man in their starting lineup had an average of .320 or better. Some of those guys could hit Nolan Ryan's best fastball all the way to Paris.

  Bearing peered in at Alec Altman -- .365, 22 homers, 76 RBI -- and whipped a fastball past him that practically fried the Jugg gun. It was right down the cock, a perfect hitter's pitch, but it clocked in at 115 miles per hour. Altman's mouth sagged open and he called for time. The ump, whose mouth sagged just as loosely, gave it to him. It didn't help.

  Bearing threw two more whizzers, same place, same scorching speed. Altman swung at the last one, God knows why. Up went the thumb.

  He threw three curves to Edgar Kretgen. Real yellow hammers. All three looked to be high and away. All three nicked the low-inside corner of the zone. Another thumb.

  Juan Gottfried came to the plate holding his bat like a truncheon. A lot of the pre-game chatter had been about whether he could handle Bearing. He'd blasted the best pitchers in the NL all year long: thirty-six homers in eighty-one games. It seemed they could only keep the ball in the park by plunking him, and a lot of them did. His glower said he knew he had something to prove. He practically dared Bearing to throw at him.

  Bearing didn't take the bait. He cocked and threw, and I gasped.

  The ball seemed to float through the air like a dirigible. It was the fattest-looking pitch I'd ever seen. I was certain Gottfried would put it into orbit.

  Just as it closed on the plate, the ball sank three feet. Gottfried missed it by two.

  Bearing threw two more, and Gottfried could come no closer.

  Nine pitches, three strikeouts.

  He did it again in the second inning, and once more in the third. When he stepped off the mound at the end of his stint, the thunder could have cracked the world.

  He looked up at the stands, and his face, for three innings a stone mask, melted into a sunny, boyish smile. He doffed his cap and waved, and the applause seemed to redouble.

  When the hacks went looking for him after the game, he was nowhere to be found. Torre told us he'd left the stadium as soon as he was off the mound, and caught an early flight back to Spokane.

  ***

  The Olympians weren't going anywhere. Expansion teams never do, Their team batting average never broke .220, and they didn't have a certified power hitter anywhere in their lineup. Their fielding was no better. Except for their star, their pitching frankly stank. Only Conrad Bearing could get them near to respectability, and he only played one game in four.

  But every game, they played before a capacity crowd. Only the size of their piddly-ass beer-baron's stadium limited their gate. They could have packed the Grand Canyon.

  It wasn't dreams of the postseason. It wasn't that there'd been an untapped market for baseball in the Pacific Northwest. It wasn't clever marketing or promotional days. It was Conrad Bearing. Whether he was slated to be on the mound or not, the people of Spokane wanted to be near him.

  The hacks and the flacks continued to pursue him. There wasn't a reporter in the game who wouldn't have sold his children into slavery for five minutes of his time. There wasn't a corporation in America that wouldn't have given him a controlling interest for five words of praise for their products...and a replay of that All-Star smile.

  He kept taking the mound every fourth day. He kept winning. He was even more unhittable after the All-Star break than before it. Game after game, he mowed down the American League's best as if they were toddler league scrubs. But the smile never returned.

  I could learn no more about him. None of us could. Not that any of my colleagues would have shared even the smallest tidbit. Hell, just learning whether he liked his socks to be wool or nylon would have been a million-dollar scoop. It didn't matter. He revealed nothing, and no one could unearth anything. All we knew of him was his name and his prowess on the mound.

  For the sportswriters, it was an agony of agonies. For the city of Spokane and baseball fans the world around, it was more than enough.

  ***

  The season is long. Players tire, even the ones who keep up their conditioning regimens and scrupulously avoid the bars and the Baseball Annies. It's simple physics. We all knew that Bearing had to lose a game eventually.

  Except that he didn't.

  He won his thirtieth straight game on August 8: his second no-hitter. He threw not a single gopher ball. His ERA sank to 0.28. From the All-Star Game onward, he was never taken off the mound before the end of the game.

  He just kept on, looking as strong or stronger each day than the previous one. And the crowds kept flocking to see him.

  Fans have always preferred free-hitting games. There's more color to them. More seems to be going on. Paradoxically, because they demand less attention, they hold your attention better. The history of the game seems to bear it out. Back in the late Sixties, when hitting was on the sk
ids and titans like McLain and Gibson ruled the field from the mound, attendance and viewership hit their postwar lows. So why did this unhittable pitcher command such adulation and love? Wasn't he doing exactly what the fans should have resented: taking the action out of the game?

  I couldn't fathom it, any more than I could fathom him.

  He kept accepting the minimum, and none of it ever reached his checking account.

  ***

  Bearing was scheduled to start against the Angels on the last day of the season. His record stood at 40-0. He hadn't allowed an earned run since late July. As usual, the stands of Olympus Field were packed.

  As he took the mound, Cal Martinez nudged me and murmured, "Think he'll go out undefeated?"

  "What else would you expect?" I said. "Has anyone laid a bat on him this whole year long?"

  "First time in the history of the sport," he said.

  "First time for everything, pal." I settled back and propped my steno pad on my knee as the ump yelled "Play ball!" and the first Angel batter stepped to the plate.

  Bearing didn't hew to the practice he'd followed the whole year long. He didn't concentrate immediately and wholly upon the batter. Instead he put his hands on his hips, scanned the stands from end to end and back again, and nodded as if he'd come to a decision. Catcher Roy Wriston started to rise from his squat, but Bearing waved him back down, peered in for the sign, wound up and threw.

  The ball smacked into Wriston's glove with a clap so sharp I'd have sworn it could be heard in Canarsie. The catcher reeled backwards as the digits on the Jugg display whirled, slowed, and finally settled on their verdict.

  128 miles per hour.

  Right down the cock, yet completely unhittable. The crowd shouted in amazement.

  Bearing nodded, wound up, and did it again.

  And again.

  And again.

  Is there really a first time for everything? How would I know? Or anyone else, for that matter? As the game progressed, it dawned on me that never in the history of the sport had a pitcher eliminated his opponents without ever allowing the ball to touch their bats. It was inconceivable, a degree of dominance no player had ever achieved in any sport. But as Conrad Bearing strode out to the mound at the beginning of each Angel half-inning, it became ever clearer that I was witnessing exactly that.