patience with the journeymen, couldn’t find the words to tell a shortstop how to react more quickly to a ground ball, became flustered when he tried to teach a batter how to change his stance to take the merest fraction of a second off the time it took him to swing through the zone.
But the All-Star was personable, funny and famous. Several times during the season, network TV crews came to Valdosta to cover his story; the angle was always that he was giving back to the game, teaching the new generation. He made jokes, repeated the same story, about a shortstop who had started the season making an error in each of the first dozen games and how he’d been patient with him and, within six weeks, he had been called up to triple-A. “That’s gratifying when you can help a kid do that.” He left out that the season had started the day after the shortstop, a twenty-year-old from Venezuela, had learned that his sister had been arrested in their home country, that no one knew where she was, and that two weeks into the season, the State Department, pressured by the owner of the big club, had negotiated her release and, after that happy resolution, his play improved; he left out the story of the day in the clubhouse when he had screamed at the kid in pidgin English because he himself couldn’t speak a word of Spanish, “Bad play-o, bad play-o,” while the kid sat on the bench, looking at the floor, curling and uncurling his toes; he left out the story of how Edward Everett had taught himself enough Spanish that he could remind the kid of the basic lessons, using a few words and gestures. “Stay down.” “Permanecer abajo.” “Don’t pull away from the ball.” “No torear.” Miming the correct way. It was nothing the kid didn’t already know but Edward Everett worked with him for an hour every day until he found himself again; his patience, Edward Everett knew, more important than the instruction.
At the end of the season, the All-Star moved up to manage at triple-A Knoxville. Edward Everett expected he’d be promoted with him but the All-Star had a friend from his days in the major leagues and the friend ended up sitting beside the All-Star at Knoxville and, five years later, they were with the big club, manager and coach, and Edward Everett was back at single-A—the world spinning in excess of 800 miles an hour, him still standing still. Or perhaps, now, falling off it altogether.
The game went badly almost from the start. Pete Sandford was on the mound for P. City and he was throwing strikes, his fastball well into the nineties, but it was flat. In games when he was effective, his pitches moved like a trout through water, slippery, seeming to change elevation and direction on their flight to the plate, as if the ball were avoiding some obstacle only it could perceive. Today, they sat there as if they were on a tray of hors d’oeuvres circulating at a party.
The top two hitters for Lincoln went down: the first on a one-bounce shot to Webber at short, who snared it with a sideways flip of his glove and then tossed it on to first; the second hitter sent Nelson back against the wall in left, where he caught it chest-high. However, with two outs, and Sandford standing on the back of the mound, facing away from the hitter, rubbing up the ball, Edward Everett felt a prickle of anxiety. He hoped it was only the day off causing Sandford trouble and that, as the game progressed and his arm warmed, his pitches would start moving again. But they didn’t.
Before the end of the first, Lincoln was up three–nothing, and when he saw Sandford’s shoulders sag, his posture saying “surrender,” he sent Biggie out to talk to him on the mound. There, Sandford nodded at whatever Vincent was saying but when Vincent got back to the dugout, he said to Edward Everett, “Better get someone up.” He called down to the bullpen, thankful that the day off because of the sewer backing up meant that his pitchers out there were rested. Five minutes later, Lincoln was leading five–nothing and Edward Everett was taking a walk to the mound to remove Sandford from the game, his shortest outing all season, two-thirds of an inning. A few of the fans sent out boos and catcalls, the attendance so