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, clad only in underwear and shower slippers, gulping down Coors and lamenting, “Baseball hates me! This is the end of the line. God, they must hate me to send me here . . .”

With the body of an aging linebacker and the twisted mind of a comic revolutionary, Rosie kept it loose for two tightly strung rookies. Once in a AAA spring-training game, he came out to brush off home plate with a huge industrial broom. Another time, as base umpire, he set up behind the pitcher’s mound in an office chair, his hat on backward. On pickoff plays he simply swiveled toward first, made the call, and swiveled back, suggestive of a corporate VP giving dictation.

With my game over, I watched this exhibition from the stands. It was a hot day for a change and my shirt was soaked with sweat, so I took it off. When Rosie’s game finished, he approached me, his hat still on backward, and said, with no trace of irony, “Don’t take your shirt off, Steve. You never know who might be around. Think of your career.”

Most evenings Rosie headed south across the border to Mexicali, where he caroused into the quiet hours of the morning. Except he didn’t believe in quiet. He’d stumble back to the motel like Stanley Kowalski, punctuating the darkness with his cries: “I’m three-quarters to the wind and I don’t care who knows it!” Everybody knew it.

Charlie joins me at the pool, contributes a Rosie story. “Dude got arrested—on the field! In Phoenix, bottom of the first, and out come these plainclothes cops. ‘Are you Bill Rosenberry? . . . You’re under arrest.’ Then they take his mask and lead him away.”

“What for?”

“Failure to make child-care payments.”

When we stop laughing, Charlie grabs another bottle of beer from the Styrofoam cooler between us. Twenty minutes later, we have downed a six-pack, and Charlie gets uncharacteristically chatty. He speaks of growing up in the Compton ghetto.

“When you grow up with seven sisters, you learn early on how to handle yourself,” he says. “Every fool in the neighborhood wanted to mess with my sisters. I was always defending one of those silly bitches’ honor. Always kicking ass, or getting kicked.”

How different my upbringing, I thought, in the cushy Montclair region of Oakland. My last fight was in the second grade—a record I intended to preserve.

“Seven sisters! Charlie, your father must have lit a candle when you arrived.”

“Old Patent Leather? He was as happy as a punk in a peter factory. Had to have at least one man around the pad. Women was driving him crazy.”

“How are your own kids?” Charlie was divorced.

“Okay, my son’s with Lana in L.A. My daughter’s still with her mother. That musty old ex-wife of mine! Sorry bitch! She still don’t know I’m in baseball. Good thing too. If she found out, she’d find some way to fuck it up.”

“She hates you that much?”

“Yeah, she do. And the feeling’s mutual.”

“Amazing, isn’t it? How two people who once loved each other can wind up—“

“While I was working at Colgate-Palmolive, graveyard shift, bringing home twenty grand a year, that raggedy bitch was balling every brother in the neighborhood.”

Charlie and I, it occurs to me, are together right here, right now, but what different paths we’ve taken to get here.

March 15

Another humbling moment on the field today. Carlos Lopez is batting when a fast ball tails in on his hands,  and suddenly he drops to the ground, writhing in pain. Having heard ball-on-wood sound, I raise both arms, like one of those airport guys directing planes on the ground, and yell, “Foul!”

Good aggressive arm action . . . a voice a yodeler could be proud of . . . terrible call.

While the trainer attends to Lopez, who is clutching his fingers like a frostbite victim, the on-deck batter sidles over to me and says, “You’re not going to give him first?”

“Nope. I heard wood. It’s a foul ball.”

“I would if I were you,” he said, walking away.

So would I—now. Turns out, Lopez broke two fingers on that hand, and I learned something. Lopez made no attempt to swing at that pitch—he was bailing all the way. Under those circumstances, if the pitch hits bat and body at the same time—give the batter first.

Next morning in Autry’s Corral, I went up to Lopez, his fingers in a splint, and said, “Sorry, man, if I had it to do over, I’d give you first base.”

“Dat’s okay, mon,” he said, “you can keep it.”

March 16

Today I’m working the plate behind catcher Danny Goodwin, number-one draft pick, super-phenom, allthatcrap. Most important for me, he’s a good guy, easy to work with. Catchers and plate umpires are bonded like Siamese twins.

In the third inning, batter Thad Bosley tops a ball that hits at our feet, sending pebbles spewing into our faces.

“Guess it’s an occupational hazard,” I say, trying to be friendly.

“I try and swallow the small ones and spit out the big ones,” Goodwin says.