moved the single-A team elsewhere and Cincinnati moved in. He wondered what it meant that Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, hadn’t told him they’d stopped negotiating with Collier: did he already know Edward Everett was out, a sixty-year-old fossil who still preferred keeping penciled index cards on his players? He would have to get on the phone, go back to the baseball winter meetings and patrol the lobby of the hotel, taking his resume to player development directors alongside men half his age who understood all of the arcane formulae that people like Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, loved so well.
As he reached the front door, Ginger was walking in, laden with shopping bags, the eleven-year-old boy carrying a bag from the Apple Store, the girl carrying a suit bag from Macy’s over her shoulder—maybe more in retail sales, Edward Everett calculated, than he earned in a week, the benefit of Collier being born into a family that had the foresight to start a meat company eighty-something years earlier, when Edward Everett’s grandfathers were going down into a mine, the benefit of the Collier family realizing generations ago that it was better to be the sort of people for whom other people worked instead of, like Edward Everett’s family, people who worked for other people, people like Collier.
“Oh, good,” Ginger said when she registered Edward Everett’s presence. “There’s two bags from Williams-Sonoma in the trunk I couldn’t manage. Would you be a dear?”
Chapter Twenty-one
At the game that evening, as Edward Everett brought out his lineup card to present to the umpires and exchange with the manager from Lincoln, the stadium announcer invited everyone present to serenade him with “Happy Birthday.” Phantom Frank struggled through a plodding version of the song, beginning by hitting keys that were off by what Edward Everett imagined was a handsbreadth. Although on most nights he wouldn’t have paid attention to the size of the crowd, after his meeting with Collier, he couldn’t help but notice there were maybe five hundred fans there; perhaps only a third bothered to sing, starting out and then falling silent as they tried to match what Phantom Frank played. After a moment, as if someone had picked up his hands and put them on the right keys, Phantom Frank played something that sounded close to “Happy Birthday” and a few more joined in, but without spirit. As he arrived at the final note, Phantom Frank added an awkward trill and a handful of fans applauded.
“I’ll give you one call today as a gift,” the plate umpire said, winking. He was in his mid-twenties, his head shaved since, Edward Everett knew, he was going off for his once-a-month Army Reserve training after the series was over. They were all young, Edward Everett realized: the field umpire might be thirty, tops, and the manager from Lincoln couldn’t be any older than thirty-five. Two years ago, he had a pinch-hit double that drove in the tying run in the ninth inning of the seventh game of the World Series and then scored when the opposing pitcher tried to pick him off second base but threw the ball into center field. A picture of him sliding across the plate, the ball hanging just above his head as he smashed against the catcher’s outstretched left leg, had been on the cover of Sports Illustrated. They were all on their way up, he realized. In five or so years, the Lincoln manager would be managing at triple-A, mentioned in rumors whenever a major league manager’s job appeared in jeopardy; the umpires, too, would move up the chain, double-A, triple-A, fill-in when major league umpires took vacation.
Meanwhile, what would become of him after this season ended? Twenty-something years ago when he stopped playing and took a job as a hitting coach in the minor leagues, he had seen himself on the same track, fully expecting that one day he’d be in the dugout in the major leagues again—if not as a manager, then as a coach. He’d gotten stuck in the station, though, never offered a job above double-A. Once, he’d taken a job as a bench coach at Valdosta, Georgia, sitting next to a manager who, a year earlier, had retired after fourteen years as a second baseman in the major leagues, a legitimate star, someone whose face showed up in ads for a car battery, symbolizing the product’s reliability. As a manager, he was like a lot of former players who had enormous talent. He had little