He turned a bat for me as long as I played the game. He never asked me to come back to the lathe room after that first time. He didn’t have to.
The body had the rookie year on file by the time the season ended.
132 games. 168 hits. .298, 35 home runs, 139 RBIs. Twenty-six errors at third I couldn’t unfile. Numbers that meant the kid had landed harder than anyone expected and somehow gotten more help than he deserved. Numbers nineteen other rookies that year would have killed for. Numbers that didn’t tell the whole story.
The bats had a file too.
Three dozen bats over the season — the standard pro-issue Adirondacks Rawlings shipped to every player on contract, identical specs, mass-produced from the same billets, the same finish, the same handle, the same knob. They worked. Sort of.
The body had adjusted to them the way the body adjusted to most things: file the deviations, work around them, move on. But the mind had been logging every bat’s quirks since April.
This one too dry at the handle. That one a quarter-ounce off. The third one with grain that ran six degrees off true and would explode at the handle on an inside fastball before May was out.
Three exploded by August.
Two more checked at the cup by September.
By the last week of the season, the file on bats had gotten long enough that I sat down in the visiting clubhouse in Anaheim with my notebook and wrote the whole thing out. Five pages. Pen-and-ink, in the leather notebook I’d been carrying since Modesto — the same notebook the moon had once gone into a drawer in.
I gave the pages to my agent.
He read them.
He looked at me.
He didn’t say anything for a minute, which for Phil Roston was unusual.
Then he picked up his phone and called Rawlings.
Two weeks later I was in the air.
Albany. November. The rookie year was over. I had a flight, a car Phil had booked out of Albany — a car and a driver, because Phil handled the things I didn’t do and never once asked why I didn’t do them — a directive from Phil that said don’t dress fancy, this isn’t fancy, and the five pages folded into the inside pocket of the canvas jacket I’d been wearing since high school. Phil had faxed the pages ahead. The man in Dolgeville had read them, said something to Phil over the phone that Phil hadn’t repeated, and Phil had called me back and said get on the plane. Earl wants to meet the kid.
ALB to Dolgeville is two hours by car if the weather cooperates.
The weather did not cooperate.