left, Edward Everett went to retrieve the map and directions from his printer tray. Although he realized he needed to get to the new park soon, he was nonetheless curious if Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, had finally responded to his report on Webber, and he opened his email program, simultaneously wanting and not wanting a response. When his email loaded, his cursor sat at the last one; it was from Marc Johansen, MS, MBA. “Organizational Changes,” the subject line said. Edward Everett sat down at the table, watching the cursor blink. As he hesitated before opening the email, he remembered someone he once knew, Mitch Weil, his team trainer when he managed at Lexington. Every week, Weil bought a lottery ticket and waited until long after the drawing to check the numbers. “I’ve had an unlucky life,” he once confided to Edward Everett, “but as long as I don’t check the ticket, it’s a winner and my luck has changed.” As long as he didn’t open the message, Edward Everett thought, he still had his job.
When he did click it, however, he found that it didn’t concern him, not directly, at any rate. “As you know, when I joined the organization, I said we wouldn’t make any changes until I was certain I was confident in our direction,” the email read. “My office has spent a long while evaluating our structure. Today, as the first move among others to come, I am announcing that, at the end of the season, Hale Claussen will be leaving his position as manager of our club at Gary and joining our scouting department’s Mountain States region as a special consultant. We appreciate his years of service and look forward to his contributions in this essential aspect of our operation. I will keep you apprised as we continue our review. Marc Johansen, MS, MBA.”
“Special consultant for the scouting department’s Mountain States region” was a euphemism, Edward Everett knew: as manager at triple-A Gary, Claussen had been a hairsbreadth from the big show; now he’d spend his days driving long distances between small towns in Montana, Wyoming and Idaho, looking for talent no one else had spotted, all without a salary, merely the promise that if he found someone no one else had, the team would pay him a bonus. If Claussen took the job, Edward Everett knew he was likely to earn little, since “undiscovered talent” was a myth nowadays, when everyone with modest ability, a cellphone camera and an Internet connection was posting videos on YouTube of themselves hitting home runs or striking people out. It was just a way for Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, to avoid saying We fired him; so long and good luck.
When he clicked “delete” to erase the message, Edward Everett realized that he had been holding his breath. He was safe, for now, but the first casualty had fallen. There would be others, Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, promised.
He collected the map and directions and went out to see what sort of field Collier had found, to learn how much farther he had fallen in the cosmology of the game.
Chapter Twenty-seven
Despite the MapQuest directions and Collier’s email that had said all Edward Everett needed to do was look for the county fairgrounds and take the first left past them, it took him an hour to find the field; he drove back and forth along the blacktop road near the fairgrounds three or four times until he finally saw the stone sign for the school, “St. Aloysius,” and a statue of the patron saint, all but concealed by a thick stand of goldenrod. When he got there, he saw that Vincent had been right about the place. Although Collier had promised “a sweet country spot,” it was the worst field he had seen in more than forty years of professional ball. It sat behind the abandoned high school, down a crumbling set of forty or so concrete steps from the school’s parking lot. When the school was in operation, the ballpark, no doubt, was a fine place for high school baseball. As Vincent had said, the builders had modeled it after Fenway Park; a miniature Green Monster rose ten or twelve feet high at the edge of left field. By now, however, much of the green paint had flaked away and some of the boards from the face of the wall were missing, revealing rotting cross braces. If there ever had been a fence in center field or right, none stood