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Doug Hoekstra THE HANGING CURVE
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It’s fun to stay at the Y-M-C-A. The crowd was on their feet, forming letters with their bodies, bumping, grinding, and shaking their baseball loving booties back and forth. It was faith night at Greer Stadium and Moses was the bobblehead giveaway of the night. Many revelers in the crowd held Moses high, his majestic head shaking back and forth to the Village People’s anthem celebrating the lives of gay men everywhere. Ah, the wonder of America. But, then again, the scoreboard was a guitar and the infield was a diamond and the realities of most everyone on and off the field lay somewhere in-between. Hit a rock and you’ll hit a songwriter, that’s what they say about Nashville. The Sounds were having a good year. More than half the season was over and they were in first place by seven games. Our man, Rick Horton, a former major leaguer, had done a fine job shutting the visiting Omaha Royals for six innings. But, their man, Jack Thurston, had matched us inning for inning, and so it was scoreless heading into the bottom of the sixth. Roughly a million people live in the Metropolitan Nashville area, which makes it one of the country’s biggest small towns. You can’t go anywhere without running into people you know, and this sense of community is one of the city’s great strengths -- most of the time. I’d gone to the game that night with a songwriter friend of mine, a buddy named Tommy who works as a part-time advertising salesman, part-time writer of Petty meets the Stones pop songs, which of course, means the Music City isn’t sure what to make of him. As each inning went on, we talked a little bit about people we knew and places we were headed. Some of those very people stopped by to say hello; one even sang the National Anthem before the game. She did a good job, too, didn’t cheat on any of the tough parts. The bottom half of the sixth inning began uneventfully, as the first Nashville hitter grounded weakly to short, easy throw to first, one down. A friend of ours, Jumbo Jim, saw us and sat down in one of the empty seats next to the aisle. Jumbo Jim has long legs, hence his nickname, and so needed the space to sprawl. He is a baseball fan and songwriter, used to have some minor hits and album cuts back in the day with people like Crystal Gayle and Vern Gosdin, performers from the sixties and seventies. I’m not sure what he does for money these days; he isn’t married to a hard-working spouse or living off a trust fund. He’s at too many games for the former, and he’s probably too old for the latter. Maybe Crystal is getting tons of airplay in Sweden, and Vern has a loyal following in New Zealand, and the result is some sizeable BMI or ASCAP checks. Whatever the case, there are lots of folks like Jumbo Jim in Nashville, trading on past glories in hope of one more shot at the big time. Unlike baseball, songwriters aren’t cast into coaching when they hit 40, although sometimes I think it wouldn’t be a bad idea. Come back to me tomorrow and ask me again. Jumbo Jim is an affable sort, albeit a self-proclaimed an expert on everything. As we watched the action on the field, he sipped beer from his plastic souvenir cup and dissected the keyboard abilities of the hometown organist and the late breaking slider of the opposing pitcher. He didn’t like either, but he was right about the latter, because Tony Gwynn’s kid raked a flat one into the gap for a double and the crowd got noisy. The catcher hopped up and went to the mound to calm the pitcher. Jumbo Jim gave us about a minute on Steinbeck’s best works and another minute on a show he was going to be doing at Douglas Corner, while the Omaha hurler, visibly agitated, walked the next man. We had men on first and second, one out. Jumbo Jim’s friend Old Paul spotted him from the aisle behind our section and came to sit down, as well. Handshakes all around, we all knew each other peripherally, from music and baseball. I knew Old Paul’s kids, too, which made me feel old, even though they were closer to my age than his. Old Paul asked my buddy Tommy how things were going and what he was up to and before any semblance of an answer came forth, Old Paul nodded as if he was processing information the hadn’t heard yet and started launching into details about the record he was making -- and we’re talking details. It was as if he was doing a documentary on himself. He talked about getting the right drum sounds, what microphones they used to capture his vocal prowess, and even the fact that he got into a superstitious habit of ordering Pad Thai for the band every time they got a take he liked. Man, that’s a lot of Pad Thai, if you’re doing your job. They must have been spending more time eating than playing. Even Jumbo Jim was stymied by the flow of self-congratulatory conversation, but maybe that was because he really respected Old Paul. See, Old Paul actually had a number one, back in the day, for the Oak Ridge Boys, in addition to a series of lesser singles for people like Tanya Tucker and Porter Wagoner. This was the first time he’d ever cut a record on his own and quite cleverly, he was titling the work “Old Paul’s Greatest Hits.” But, the catch was they were all his versions of the songs he’d written, not the original tracks by the original artists. Get it? Kind of like when Chip Taylor, who is Jon Voight’s brother and Angelina Jolie’s uncle, did a record of his hits, which in his case, meant songs like “Wild Thing” and “Angel of the Morning.” But, clearly, Old Paul was no Chip Taylor. Finally, Thurston, the Omaha pitcher, after working the count to 2-2 , hit our batter in the ankle with an errant fastball and the bases were loaded. Old Paul got up to go to the bathroom, strange timing for such a die-hard fan. I wondered if he had an enlarged prostate, or perhaps he’d simply spotted another old friend he could discuss his project with . Two sections to our left, there was a fellow dressed all in red, screaming at the umpire with every pitcher. He looked kind of like Vern Gosdin, and stranger things have happened at Greer Stadium. “Hey, Tommy,” I said. “Is
Vern Gosdin still alive?” Vern was always overlooked, I thought. Anyway, Tommy and I, we could give a hang about the Oak Ridge Boys or Crystal Gayle, we just wrote songs and made records and got anyone we could to put ‘em out, because we came to Nashville because of things like Blonde on Blonde and Kristofferson and Hank and Johnny Cash and because there are some of the best musicians anywhere here and because we were sick of traffic in our northern towns and shoveling snow and paying for parking at the movies and because we liked the fact that we could go to a ballgame at the last minute, pay five bucks and sit anywhere. Besides, running into folks is cool, because it makes you feel a little more connected to the heartbeat of the town, which of course, is driven by music, the best and the worst. It’s nice to be part of a giant pool of quality music lovers, writers, and players - even if sometimes it meant a dude like Old Paul would talk your ear off. “Bless his heart,” as they say down here in the South. The crowd was getting noisier by the second. The score was still 0-0, but we had the bases loaded and clearly, this was the pivotal moment in the game. Baseball aficionados like to talk about the pivotal moment in the game, that’s where all the best managerial strategy lies. It’s not necessarily in the ninth inning, it could be the second or fourth or in this case, the sixth. This is when a manager needs to make the correct decision about whether to lift the pitcher, pinch-hit for a batter, put the hit and run on – whatever. If he’s successful, victory ensues; if not, the slippery slope to defeat begins, which is a lot like life, when you think about it. The pivotal moment of your life doesn’t usually come in the ninth inning, or at the end of your life. It’s somewhere in the middle or earlier, in your teens or your twenties. Maybe you blow it and the rest of your life is spent treading water, trying to make up for that mistake. Or, maybe you get lucky and hit a home run and the next thing you know you’re on top of the world. The toughest part is knowing when that moment comes, and whether it’s passed you. Jumbo Jim and Old Paul, well, it was clearly in the past. As for me and Tommy, we liked to think our pivotal moments were just around the bend. Maybe we weren’t any different than Jim and Paul. Maybe we were just younger. That said, our home-team Sounds were sitting pretty on this particular pivotal moment, because we had our clean-up hitter due to bat, Alfredo Gonzalez. He’d been hitting the crap out of the ball all season long. I looked at my scorecard and saw the numbers; .316, 15 homers and 50 RBIs, in only 210 at-bats. That was impressive. In short, we had our biggest power threat coming up with the bases loaded. Omaha called a conference on the mound, the manager came out, and in the end, the pitcher stayed in. Sometimes in the minor leagues, they leave guys in certain sitiuations to build their confidence. Still, it puzzled me. I checked the stats on Thurston, the Omaha pitcher. Not good – 3-3 with a 5.50 ERA. He was only 22, though, and started the previous season at single A. The tension grew as Thurston went into his wind-up. He got the first pitch over for a strike, which was, as any baseball aficionado will tell you, huge. Two more pitches and our man Gonzalez was heading slowly back to the dugout with a big strikeout on his head. “Holy Moses,” exclaimed Tommy, gripping his bobblehead tightly. That season it had been John the Baptist, Moses, and Samson. Earlier, Jumbo Jim vehemently argued that Moses was the coolest Biblical figure of the bunch, and Tommy had made a strong case for John the Baptist. We all agreed that Samson was a minor character and that the John bobbler should come with a detachable head. After Gonzalez struck out, the Omaha manager was back on the mound again, apparently to discuss how to pitch to our next man. We had a whole different situation on our hands now, the bases were loaded with two outs and all Thurston had to do was get one guy, forget about the baserunners. We had a lefty coming up and so I figured Omaha was going to leave Thurston in, as he was a lefty, too. But instead, he pulled him and brought in another left-handed reliever, a veteran presence by the name of Pablo Morrison. This was where real faith began to show its face. Pablo was born and bred in Las Vegas and rolled his dice on a baseball career. He was a solid left-handed pitcher for the first half-dozen years of his career, posting an ERA around 4.00 and winning 50 games for the Cardinals. Then, he had arm problems and started a series of mainly unsuccessful comebacks, with the Mets, Cubs, and others. I checked my program and saw that he started all over again the previous year, with independent league Long Island, before catching on with AAA Albuquerque. He did great at Long Island and got rocked at Albuquerque. And, now he was with Omaha, trying to crack the bigs once again. Maybe he needed a little time to complete his pension. Maybe he felt he still had something to give. Maybe he felt pitching anywhere beat the alternative. Sometimes I feel that way, that no whether or not my pivotal moment has come or gone, it’s better to be in the game, working on new material, than to stop. As Young Pablo Morrison warmed up, I saw, even from where I sat well behind the first-base dugout, that there was nothing whatsoever on his fastball. His surgically repaired left shoulder just couldn’t bring it anymore and of course, baseball aficionados know that every pitcher needs to set up his other pitchers with his fastball. Clearly, our Young Pablo was no Sandy Koufax. And, my program told me that he really wasn’t that young anymore, particularly for a guy in AAA. He had just turned 36. So, I began to feel a little queasy, like I was about to witness something terrible, a feeling made worse by his first pitch, a curve ball with not much break that lobbed over the outside part of the plate for a ball. Suddenly, I remember I’d been in Nashville for ten years, longer than Tommy, less than Jumbo Jim. I checked the guitar-shaped scoreboard to refresh the count in my mind. To my left, two sections over, the man in red was finally silent, intent on the action. Old Paul stood next to him. To the front of us, the Soundettes, decked out in red short shorts and ready to slingshot Goo Goo Clusters into the stands after the inning, had their heavily mascared eyes glued to the field. Close by, Jumbo Jim held his beer cup tightly, and Tommy’s arms were crossed in nervous denial. None of us were speaking. The bases were loaded with two outs. It was another pivotal moment. The next pitch from Pablo landed in the dirt, but the catcher blocked it neatly. He put his glove up as if to say, “It’s okay, I got your back, just settle down, we only need one out” In my memory, I heard a baseball announcer somewhere talking about what a gutsy pitcher Pablo was, describing him as a “gamer” with a lot of heart. The catcher threw the ball back and stood up to kick some dirt off one of his cleats, buying time. A little cloud of dust popped up around his foot and I was back at the first gig I ever did in a band, in the suburbs of Detroit, another place, another time. I was new member in a four-piece rock band that favored really fast numbers, stuff by The Buzzcocks and The Undertones. They had already booked an afternoon gig at a farm house outside of town, halfway to Ann Arbor. Every time I tapped my foot on the dirt floor, a little cloud of dust would pop up. There was no stage, just a band set up in the barn, kids lined up in front of us and little clouds of dust rising and falling like bubbles, bursting, falling, and then rising again. The next pitch had nothing on it, either. The minute it left Pablo’s hand, you knew it wouldn’t make it past the batter. Jumbo Jim groaned and buried his face in his hands. Tommy looked down at the beer-stained concrete. I checked on the man in red. It was like being at a horror movie and trying to predict the violent climax, so as to be prepared not to look. We dreaded the inevitable and the inevitable came, as the ball made its slow, straight path to the plate. Whereby, the hometown Sound cocked his bat back, timed the hanger perfectly and followed through with power and grace. The crack of the bat was heard first, and then the ball was spotted, lifting into the night sky, heading out towards right field faster than it had come in. We looked. The outfielder didn’t even move. He didn’t have to. It wasn’t a cheap homer, it was a majestic Grand Slam. The Sounds were ahead 4-0 and the crowd went wild. Everyone jumped to their feet, gave each other high fives, and waved their Moses dolls. Everyone was cheering, except us and the Omaha nine. And, Pablo, whose earned run average took off faster than the Space Shuttle, from 9.00 to 27.00. His chance of returning to the bigs sat somewhere outside the Taco Bell sign, misshapen and defiled. Normally, I stay at a baseball game until the last out. But, after our next man flew out to right, I’d decided I had enough. Tommy couldn’t join me fast enough, and we headed silently towards our cars as the man at the gate handed us coupons for free Frostys at Wendy’s. Frosty indeed, that’s how I felt. Later that night, I pulled up the box score on the net and saw that the Sounds had won 6-2. I should’ve been happy, but I wasn’t. I wasn’t really from Nashville, no matter how long I’d lived there. Horton got the win, as he should have. Morrison inherited his baserunners, so he escaped the loss, as he should have.You can’t blame a man for trying.
Doug Hoekstra is the award-winning author of Bothering the Coffee Drinkers, available through Canopic Publishing. When he's not touring the British Isles, he's usually strumming at some local music venue or oiling his typewriter for a novel or two. For even more info, check out the Doug Hoekstra website.
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