By eleven-thirty, when Edward Everett took a break to make himself a sandwich from the cold cuts he kept in the small refrigerator in his office, he had uploaded his stats and was ready for that night’s game: his lineup card, his notes about the order in which he would use his bullpen staff when Sandford faltered. The big club wanted him to begin stretching Sandford out, having him get into the seventh inning, although he hadn’t been much more than a five-inning pitcher. Off the mound, Sandford seemed a comic exaggeration of a human being: six-foot-six and not much more than bone thin, with a gaunt face and ears that protruded so much that opposing teams taunted him with “Dumbo.” When Edward Everett talked to him, he blinked so slowly that Edward Everett wondered if his mind was able to process anything he was told. Despite all that, until he hit the inevitable barrier after five innings, he had such control that he seemed capable of threading a needle with a baseball. Beyond that, his speed was deceptive. His arm motion was fluid, seemingly effortless, but his fastball came in at more than 95 miles an hour, according to the radar gun Biggie Vincent aimed at him from a seat behind the plate in the stands. Several times a game, the gun registered triple digits. A month earlier, after one of Sandford’s starts, Edward Everett and Vincent had gone for a beer and Vincent slipped the pitching chart across the table to him, the notations of the pitches that had hit 100 or more circled in red. Vincent had had four or five beers by then and as he passed the card across the table, he was teary-eyed. “Don’t get the idea I’m turning faggot, but I love this boy.” Sandford’s curve, which he threw with the same motion as his fastball, hit 83 and his change had come in as slow as 71. Routinely, even going but five innings, he tallied seven or eight strikeouts, often with only a single walk. Then, when he reached his Achilles’ heel sixth inning, he pitched as if he had never held a baseball in his life to that point.
Edward Everett wasn’t sure what would help him become the pitcher that Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, wanted, but he needed to figure it out. The grace period Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, had promised everyone had expired months before. While he hadn’t yet, eventually he would begin firing people and there wasn’t much room in baseball for minor league managers who were approaching sixty.
Chapter Sixteen
An hour and a half before game time, there was a crisis. Brett Webber, his shortstop, was missing. Webber was a moody kid from a small town in Ohio near where Edward Everett was raised; Edward Everett had sometimes gone to high school dances there after he and his friends decided that it would be easier to get girls who didn’t know them than the ones who did. Three years earlier, when Webber was a high school senior, Baltimore took him in the first round of the draft but then let him go in a trade after his second year, even though the team had given him a two-million-dollar bonus just to sign his contract and Webber had led the Florida State League in hitting. With his talent, he should be at least in double-A ball by now but it was clear that unless he matured, he would never get beyond single-A. He had been undependable all season: he was a week late for training camp and then had missed two games when he went to Chicago for a concert. When Edward Everett benched him as punishment, Webber had said, “It was The National, dude. So worth it.” Edward Everett told the big club it should just cut him loose, but Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, talked about his superlative zone rating, his similarity scores—arcane statistics that Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, derived when he massaged the spreadsheets that Edward Everett sent him—and wrote, “Talent carries a price. Have confidence you can smooth out rough edges in BW.”
Today, irrespective of his dislike of Webber, Edward Everett needed him to show up because they were short yet another player: Jim Rausch, his remaining backup middle infielder, had gone back to Alabama three days earlier to bury his father and to figure out what to do with his fifteen-year-old brother. Their mother had died four years earlier and they