We'll get 'em next year

If my body were a baseball team, this is the year we finished in the cellar. During spring training, only the most astute of sportswriters noticed the warning signs. The big guy down at the end of the bench, his cheek distended by a plug of tobacco, was a little surlier than usual, got up a little slower. The bats weren’t swinging as fast as they normally would that time of year. And the jokes, the horsing around in the locker room – well, it seemed a little forced, more out of habit than anything else.

Still, on paper we looked like we could have a shot – some decent numbers, a little power, a hot-corner hot-shot we picked up for some deadwood and a player to be named later, a guy with a curve that would leave his opponents spinning around so hard they’d be looking at the backs of their own heads. And there was our legacy. That legacy, those pretty pennants hanging from the rafters, luffing delicately in the spring breeze, those shining plaques mounted on the center field wall, lovingly polished once a week. Hell. We always had that to fall back on. And didn’t we turn it on hardest, didn’t it all come together when we were two, three games out, only a few weeks to go?

But only a couple months into regulation play we started going downhill. Our hardest-throwing starter went DL for the season with a torn rotator cuff. The hot-corner hot-dog, who’d posed for a Sports Illustrated cover with his ice-skater cutie, turned out to be a weenie at the plate. And the steroid scandal hit us hard. By June, the big guy just didn’t look as big as he used to.

After the All-Star break the real talk started – are these guys too old? Just a drain on a payroll that might do better with a bunch of young farm kids? And what about the manager? Yeah, maybe he’d won six, seven championships, but what had he done for us lately? The static on WFAN went crazy. Buy out the manager’s contract. Dump the batting coach. Dump the whole bunch of them and let the AA team finish out the season.

Oh, it was ugly. And ugly didn’t begin to describe the antics off the field. The hot-shot punched the batting coach in the locker room. The entire outfield was arrested following a drunken brawl. Details of the second-baseman’s affair and subsequent divorce from his uber-model wife was the page 1 story on the local tabloid every day for a week. The team was below .500 in September for the first time in fifteen years. For a while, the entire starting lineup was listed as day-by-day.

“I wish it were like Little League,” said one of the relief pitchers, one of the few who would even talk to the press anymore. “Then we could call the mercy rule and all go home.”

But mercy did come, as inevitably, inexorably, the last regulation game of what was to become known as the Season From Hell came to a close, with, ironically, a win in the fourteenth inning thanks to a walk-off homerun from the big guy who used to be bigger.

The limp was noticeable from the bleachers.

The guys had barely cleaned out their lockers when the rumors began. Which free-agents would sign with who, and who would merely be put out to pasture. Who they could get and what it would cost.

When the dust settled, one of the few guys still wearing the uniform was the manager. It had been like the blue-light special at K-Mart. But now, he had numbers. He had power. He had base speed. He had starters, relievers, and a guy out of the Dominican Republic it was said could pitch Mariano Rivera’s lights out.

During the press conference that followed, sportswriters and broadcasters from all over the country fired their questions. The manager sweated visibly under the hot lights.

“So do you think this is the team that’s going to get you the World Series in 2006?” a cub from one of the sports channels asked.

He gulped at his water. “Let’s not go crazy just yet. Let’s just call this a rebuilding year and leave it at that.”