Chapter 10: A Biblical Rain

April 20: On the Road to San Antonio
While Charlie sleeps on the fold-out bed in the back of the van, I drive into the night. Immediately after the last night game of a series, we like to start for the next city, drive until we get tired.  On this night I am alert and stay [...]

Chapter Nine: Why I’m in Texas

April 11
I am reminded why I’m umpiring baseball games in Amarillo instead of basking on the Russian River with Donna. I work my first plate game tonight—and I’m brilliant. The energy flows unimpeded, my timing is precise. I can umpire!
The game is a rout—13-0, El Paso. No matter, for I could have handled the frigging [...]

Chapter Eight: Opening Day

April 10
Potter County Memorial Stadium, home of the Amarillo Gold Sox, is a huge iron-beamed dinosaur of a park. Set in an industrial neighborhood of factories and vacant lots, this relic can hold 6,500 fans, but never does.
Lugging equipment bags and hangered uniforms, Charlie and I trudge through the turnstile and into the bowels of [...]

Chapter Seven: Separation

Donna and I stare into each other’s eyes, then hug, a lingering embrace with more than a touch of urgency. We have spent an intense two days together, camping out on sun-drenched southern California beaches, making love each time as though it were the last time.
Now, at the Los Angeles Airport, we are saying good-bye. [...]

Chapter Six: The Pursuit of Excellence

March 24
This week’s piece of work, Fred Frazier. The second baseman for the AAA Salt Lake team is of the Billy Martin mold. Small in stature, volcanic in temperament, he exacts the utmost in patience from an umpire. 
Today I am on the bases, and rookie Chuck Neisler is calling his first triple-A game behind the [...]

Chapter Five: John McSherry

March 21
John McSherry visits us in camp today. Big John is a National League umpire, and few can imagine him doing anything else. In the off-season, he serves as chief field instructor for the umpire schools. He was Charlie’s and my instructor, and now he’s come to see us. Mostly he’s come to see Charlie. [...]

Chapter Four: Fraternizing

March 17
Charlie has a facility for banter with black ballplayers that I lack with most white players. It’s as though they’re members of a secret club, with a secret language. Actually, Charlie speaks two languages. When he meets my white, middle-class parents, he sounds like Eddie Haskell greeting Beaver’s parents. “Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Boga. [...]

Chapter Three: Rosie

March 14
Lounging around the motel pool this evening, I thought of spring training two years earlier, this very motel. Charlie and I were rookies, Bill Rosenberry the crew chief. “Rosie” was one of the many unforgettable personalities that litter the baseball scene—in his favorite expression, “a piece of work.”
I see him sitting outside  room 13, [...]

Chapter Two: Gene Autry’s Corral

March 11
The minor-league Angels training camp in Holtville is an arrow-straight ten-mile drive under a huge sky, past serried lettuce rows and concrete irrigation ditches. At the Holtville complex, four baseball diamonds splay out like blades of a giant fan. The hub is a thirty-foot-high rotunda upon which farm directors control workouts and make evaluations [...]

Chapter One: Two for Texas

El Centro, California, March 1977
Spring is a dicey season in the Imperial Valley. As I drive south toward the Mexican border, desert winds torture the powdery landscape. A fast-flowing river of sand obscures the highway; a gritty gray haze hangs in the air, and I periodically dab my nose with a wet handkerchief. My VW [...]