The Bawl Game

By Frank Diekmann

As he watches his team lose yet another game, Cincinnati Soapsuds owner Geoffrey W. Furst is fed up. Fed up with being a professional baseball franchise in a small market and being unable to compete with the richer kids in New York and Los Angeles, and fed up with multi-millionaire athletes who are compensated regardless of how they perform on the field. But Furst, falsely claiming to the media that he had been inspired by a perspiring hot dog vendor, has a plan to change all that. And not just change the game of baseball but change the very nature of professional sports. It’s a plan that comes down to three revolutionary words: “Pay-for-play.”

Furst’s plan is to sign a team made up of players who are paid for how they play, with contracts that compensate according to on-base percentage, fielding percentage, ERA, WHIP, and other modern-day metrics the owner doesn’t really understand. Instead, he gives an ultimatum to his reluctant General Manager to make pay-for-play a reality, and the GM succeeds in assembling a 25-man roster, 24 of whom have pay-for-play contracts even after their agents strongly recommended against signing any such deal. It’s a roster of egomaniacs who can’t imagine anything less than an All Star season, and guys who can’t imagine not taking the deal, as their only other option was a recreational softball league.

The pay-for-play season begins gloriously—and then the 25 players on the roster suddenly realize only 9 can play at any one time. All it takes is a few losses to turn cracks into chasms and in no time there is backstabbing, an attack using the Jugs pitching machine, all-bunt games, pitchers who refuse to come out of games, fake injuries, real injuries from attempting to be hit by pitches, on-field chaos, and one dead nun.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Frank Diekmann
• Release date: May 30, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311870421

Frank Diekmann

Frank J. Diekmann is a 25-year veteran of newspaper reporting and editing, having covered sports, travel and financial services. Along the way this included, sadly, many, many nights in hotels, where a TV was usually on in the background, and many years in vehicles and airplanes listening to classici rock and pop music. Diekmann has reported from more than 500 industry conferences and has leaned on a strong sense of humor to get through them all, building a significant following for both is fiction and non-fiction.

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The Bawl Game

Frank J. Diekmann

Copyright © 2014 by Frank J. Diekmann

Smashwords Edition

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CONTENTS

The First Inning

The Second Inning

The Third Inning

The Fourth Inning

The Fifth Inning

The Sixth Inning

The Seventh Inning

The Eighth Inning

The Ninth Inning

The Tenth Inning

The Extra Inning

The First Inning

So this is what $20 million gets you? This?! Sure. Go ahead. Lollygag. Hey, it’s just 20 mill. Take your sweet time. Dog it! Dog it all you want. Your sweet little paradise is about to change. Moneyball? I’ll show you Moneyball! Just wait ’til you see what’s coming!

To those around him, the sycophants, the deep-pocketed sponsors, the hangers-on, the two city councilmen whom he was entertaining purely out of economic need and not desire, Geoffrey Furst’s thin face was agreeable, almost pleasant. He wore the expression of a man thrilled to be there and, more importantly, happy to have ya here, the practiced greeting he paired with an even more practiced smile.

But those few in the suite who knew the team owner well could read that same face and see beneath the monthly facials and the anti-aging moisturizer the small, subtle signs of a man growing agitated, almost bitter. Like a stove burner set on low, his cheeks would grow crimson. He would cross his arms like a petulant child who wants to make it clear he will not be accepting any hugs from mommy and daddy. But most telling, Furst had the occasional, unconscious habit when unhappy of moving his lips just ever so slightly and mouthing the words stewing in his brain. In this case, the stew was all sarcasm and disgust.

This is what I get for $19.4 million. Nineteen….point…four…. million dollars. $6.466666…million…per…season.

Furst had done the math almost to punish himself for having ever agreed to the deal in the first place. Not that his team ever finished in first place. He would replay the words to himself, slow and drawn out, an exercise in monetary masochism, and his lips would move along with the dialogue in his head. Six…point…four…six…six…six. Mark of the beast, alright. Mark of the beast! Thirty-nine-thousand, nine-hundred and seventeen dollars per game. And sixty nine cents. Don’t forget the 69 cents! The daggone agent never would. Plus the per-diem when traveling. Lord, don’t forget the sacred per-diem. God forbid a multimillionaire ever have to buy his own meal. And for what? For this?"

It was at least the third time Geoffrey Furst had muttered, cursed and spat the words to himself over the course of just the last seven innings alone. His daddy, who cursed as rarely as a starched New England parson, had always called it lollyloungin, slamming together the words lollygagging and lounging as if to stylistically forge his animus toward both character flaws with his fondness for verbal efficiency. For his son, Geoffrey, lollyloungin’ just didn’t cut it. This was plain and simple, excuse the language, a $19-million waste of GD money. Why, in the same situation daddy himself would most certainly have been more than tempted to at least mumble such salty language.

But none of that mattered now. None of it. Or at least it wouldn’t soon. Furst had a plan. A wonderful, incredible, world-changing plan! A plan that would make everything right in professional baseball. A plan that would make his daddy proud. A plan for bringing fiscal sanity back to the game. A plan that would slay the giants, not to mention the Yankees and the Angels. A plan that he knew would make him a hero and finally right some injustices long overdue for correction.

Geoffrey Wilhelm Furst was bitter once again as he watched his team play, but the bitterness was being softened in the confident knowledge that soon, very soon, he wouldn’t just be showing professional baseball, he would be showing all of America. For the moment his lips stopped moving, and for the first time since his guests had arrived to sit in his box and eat his food and drink his drinks, he smiled a nearly authentic smile.

It is darn near impossible to lose money as a Major League Baseball team owner, and yet each and every one of the game’s owners detests its economics. At the front of that line could be found one Geoffrey W. Furst. The playing field isn’t level, Furst and his fellow owners moaned in refrain, and they were right: it was tilted almost completely in their direction. But far more than the owners of the teams in the big markets, Furst was repulsed by the fixed nature of player contracts in baseball. Once a contract was signed it was futile to attempt to void the deal; the Players Union had that locked down. A player could be signed for four-million per, then put up numbers Mario Mendoza would mock and the owner could only wallow in his helpless victimhood. Bench the guy. Send him down to the minors, even further down to the minors, release him, and still the four-million per had to be paid. Geoffrey Furst had spent years quietly dreaming of changing the model. He wouldn’t be quiet much longer.

Player contracts were carved in granite, sealed in industrial strength plastic, and stored for safekeeping behind a hydra at the bottom of a salt mine. Sports agents had joined with the union to make sure of it.

A deal’s a deal and you can’t change it, Furst had heard every agent but 007 tell him.

Of course, if the agent’s guy signed a multi-year deal and then went out and had 162 of Mickey Mantle’s best days, that same agent would be on the phone before the All Star break pointing out that a contract is only made of paper and should be torn up so that his guy could get what he rightfully has earned.

It’s become the era of big contracts and guaranteed play, a wag with the Cincinnati Inquirer had penned in a Sunday column. Were Wally Pipp playing in this day and age and some kid named Gehrig was backing him up, the youngster would have been sent down to AAA when Pipp was ready to return from injury.

But then perhaps such madness should be expected in such an odd game as baseball, where the mark of accomplishment is succeeding 30% of the time. Were air-traffic controllers measured by the same metric they would send seven out of 10 airplanes into mountainsides and there would be high-fives all around at the end of the shift.

Furst’s General Manager, John Arbeiter, who was sitting just to the right and slightly behind Furst in the comfortable, air-conditioned Owner’s Suite, saw the lips moving and heard the muttered curse and knew the cause of his boss’ angst. Again. Arbeiter own mind preferred the words underperforming asset rather than $19-million waste of talent. But he knew whose terminology was going to ultimately win the day, and the GM fidgeted in his leather chair.

It had been Arbeiter, after all, who had signed centerfielder Johnny Starr to the $20-million deal, a deal he continued to defend vigorously in the press and in meetings inside the ballclub’s plain offices. It wasn’t his mistake; in fact, it wasn’t a mistake at all, he had argued during the most recent off-season when Furst had begun demanding to know why the team just shouldn’t trade Starr.

The $19 million was and is a below-market expenditure that, based on our own analysis and the numbers crunched by the quants, was and is a good decision, Arbeiter had consistently countered.

But now the GM was running out of ways to spin it, and the $20-million player wasn’t helping. From their box Arbeiter and Furst both looked to Johnny Starr, who was at the moment demonstrating less enthusiasm in getting to his position in centerfield than a long-married husband trapped in a Linens & Things with his wife.

The general manager looked away from the field and in his peripheral vision back toward Furst, his boss and the owner and principal partner in the Cincinnati Soapsuds, wondering to himself if all the stress wasn’t forcing him into at least adjunct membership in the Self-Babbling Club. For a moment Arbeiter found himself lost in thought wondering if he wasn’t moving his lips to the words he heard in his head about moving his lips.

Now I’ve got to get my balls busted by the owner on top of everybody else?, Arbeiter brooded. As if I like the product we’re putting out there on the field? Do these idiots have any idea how damn hard it has been to get all these contracts to expire simultaneously? I’m freakin’ sick of being the bullshit fall guy. Arbeiter paused as yet another irony suddenly occurred to him; talk about taking one for the team.

The Soapsuds’ general manager had heard all blistering criticism from all the ill-informed critics—what he saw as an anti-team press; the sun-starved math gurus illuminated by nothing more than a computer monitor in their parents’ basements where they published their anonymous blogs; the fans whose shouts at him were muted by the glass cocoon of the Owners Suite—and had dismissed every one of the nitwits who now felt fully qualified to do Arbeiter’s job because they were in first place in their fantasy league, where there was a $25 gift certificate to Applebee’s on the line. On many nights he wanted to scream at every one of them, Not one of you damn fools knows what’s really going on.

Shout yourself hoarse, Arbeiter would continue to think to himself anytime he spied someone in the stands below the Owner’s Box as they frothily mouthed some blasphemy in his direction; it will make you thirsty. And a thirsty fan would seek relief at the concession stand, where the team’s chief financial officer had gleefully pointed out margins on a bottle of $5 water, $7 soda pop or $9 beer were, at a minimum, 450%. And every dime of it went to the ballclub, thanks to city bureaucrats with the negotiating skills of a waterboarded Cub Scout.

With some relief, the general manager had heard no shouting in his direction during tonight’s game. Like a hushed whisper echoing about within the stone walls of an old English cathedral, near-empty baseball stadiums have unique soundtracks of their own, too. A vendor’s lonely call for beer or cotton candy, or Cincinnati-favorite beer-flavored cotton candy. The distinct popping percussion made by bored teenagers stomping on upside-down paper cups. Snippets of music from the Wurlitzer organ that was really just a digitized recording. Silence.

In the Owner’s Suite, with its outdated décor of native Ohio red oak paneling and dark green carpet imprinted with the Soapsuds’ silver logo, the scrambled thoughts in Arbeiter’s mind had nearly grown into a full conversation. He was nervous, he was excited, he was uncertain, he was afraid. Like Furst, he had his own nervous ticks, frequently checking his wristwatch even when the time was irrelevant, and rolling up the white sleeves of his dress shirt only to roll them down again. He had become apprehensive and on-edge about what the team was planning to do, even though the owner had put him in charge of making it a reality. In one inning he was convinced the Cincinnati Soapsuds were about to embark on the most foolish quest in professional sports since Disco Demolition Night. In the next inning he was confident the plan was more brilliant than squeeze bottle ketchup.

Either way, it was get onboard or get thrown overboard, and he remained chagrined that Johnny Starr’s under-performance—the player he was most responsible for signing—had become the biggest driver in the top-secret plan the team’s owner expected to knock the knockwurst right out of fans’ hands.

Where there was absolutely no doubt was that Geoffrey Furst shared none of the apprehension.

It’s not just going to change baseball, predicted Furst earlier in the day as he and Arbeiter each polished off plates of spaghetti pasta smothered in Cincinnati-style chili and grated cheese. It’s going to change (slurp) all of professional sports. And not (sluuurp) just in the United States, all over the world! This is (sluuuuurp) long overdue!

As the general manager of a professional baseball team who had to assemble a roster and get it on the field, Arbeiter nodded, in the process becoming distracted and then irritated that he had opted against a plastic bib and now had a brown chili stain on his shirt. He had noticed over lunch how the owner had begun wearing a confident look on his face that was bordering on smug, never considering that his GM wasn’t every bit as onboard as he was. Arbeiter had been slow to buy in.

You’re kidding, he had blurted out involuntarily when Furst initially declared I’ve got an idea for athlete compensation. From the expression on Furst’s face, it was immediately obvious his boss was not, in fact, kidding. From that day forward and on a near daily basis Furst had been giving his own Sermon on the Mounting Costs of Payroll, and Arbeiter had had little choice but to listen.

Furst’s zeal for completely reinventing how baseball players were paid was rooted in his devotion to the book Moneyball, the account of how another small market team, the Oakland A’s, had eschewed all the traditional, time-honored intangibles used to measure the value of players in favor of cold quantitative analysis and statistics. Out were the scouts’ gut feelings. In was data. Out was batting average. In was on-base percentage, or OBP. Out was a pitcher’s wins and losses. In was Defense Independent Pitching Statistics, or DIPS. It was Revenge of the Nerds, professional baseball style. Ex-athletes who for so long had taken a job upstairs following retirement had been pushed aside; the chest protectors had been defeated by the pocket protectors. Thanks to computers, the game of baseball was now drowning in data, and seemingly for every blade of grass or Field Turf there was a number, a metric, a stat. But what to do with it all?

Teams had begun to dispense with a manager’s hunches and instead begun adjusting players’ defensive positions according to what the data projected for a batter against not just the pitcher, but the pitch count, whether it was a grass or turf field, and even whether it was a day or night game. On the field the Soapsuds had experimenting with many of the same strategies, even as the older coaches in the dugout spat out sunflower seeds in dismay. For Geoffrey W. Furst, how all that information was being used on the field didn’t amount to a wagon of wienerschnitzel; he had become obsessed with using the numbers where the numbers really mattered; off the field.

The appeal of Moneyball to the Cincinnati Soapsuds was obvious, as the team had little money with which to play ball. The ‘Suds were a small market team with a corresponding small budget, and had like Milwaukee and Pittsburgh and Kansas City become essentially a developer of talent for the big market clubs in New York and Los Angeles, almost as if they were farm teams themselves. The fact was a last place finish in the City of Angels was more profitable than a first-place finish in city once known as Porkopolis, a scenario that chewed away at Geoffrey Furst, who was among the last of a disappearing breed in the game, an old-school individual owner, a throwback to when families owned teams, not corporations. A legacy member of the demographic known as the angry affluent, he still rose each morning upset at being caught between a marshmallow and a soft place.

For the last several seasons John Arbeiter had begun tapping all those gigabytes of data trying to put together a club that produced runs without producing payroll, but the success of the book by the Oakland A’s General Manager, Billy Beane, meant every other club was now deploying the exact same strategy. Even the big market teams had hired so-called sabermaticians and quantitative analysts, known as quants, even though each of them could just buy their way out the kind of wrong quantitative decision that could saddle a small market team for years.

For the Soapsuds, the Moneyball approach had meant putting a defensive-oriented club on the field that sought to eke out wins with small ball that was dull and unexciting to watch. Not that the team needed to worry about fans being bored; they weren’t watching. The already chili-pasta thin crowds at Soapsuds’ home games had turned angel hair-like. From the suite Arbeiter watched as those few fans who had persevered all the way through the seventh inning began to gather their belongs and turn their backs to the field, making an experienced calculation they could start driving back up the hillsides to their homes in Cincinnati’s suburbs with little risk their Soapsuds would be making a bottom-of-the-ninth comeback.

As the team derided by critics as Chincy-nati due to its low payroll struggled to get fans in the stands even when it was above .500, John Arbeiter began to increasingly fret about his job. Every GM does; it comes with the territory and awareness there are 30 other assistant general managers all convinced they could do better. Paranoia was in the job description, but to Arbeiter it was about more than having to get a resume together; it was where to apply.

I’m one pink slip away from becoming general manager—and clubhouse attendant and ticket-taker—for some Independent League team somewhere in the Dakotas that is sponsored by a truck stop, Arbeiter had once remarked to his wife over their breakfast coffee.

His wife had put her coffee cup down and looked to her husband, noticing again how worn and tired he had begun to appear. I will miss you, she had told him, offering a smile.

The exhaustion had begun its slow build once Geoffrey Furst had decided he wanted to out-Moneyball Moneyball. Over time, and with self-preservation and fear of becoming a clubhouse attendant/ticket taker as a primary motivation, John Arbeiter had slowly dropped his opposition and had gone, if not all in, mostly in on the owner’s plan. He was no fool and the whole plan reeked of fool’s errand. And yet… And yet it was also so easy to be romanced and dazzled by the plan’s incredible potential. Arbeiter knew that if players were really paid for what they did on the field it would be the kind of plan that would make him and Furst heroes to the working man. Heroes! Get a hit. Get paid. Drive in a run. Get paid. Whiff? Hey, waitresses and valets and contractors have bad days, too.

It was the Manhattan Project of a plan that Arbeiter had with him in the Owner’s Suite, tucked carefully away behind a generic cover sheet inside his brown leather briefcase embossed with the team logo. No one but the team’s attorneys and its own quants, along with Furst, had been permitted to see it or even hear of it. Not quite yet, anyway. The plan had become the Soapsuds’ equivalent to he who must not be named.

Too many cooks in the kitchen and nothing gets made, Furst had told his general manager, sharing an old idiom his mother often quoted. And indeed, how many times had Furst himself watched in frustration as his own household staff lost focus and fell behind in serving dinner parties on time at his country estate? Too many to count.

Across the country more than a dozen of baseball’s general managers were spending their every day calculating what their teams needed to do to make the playoffs this season. Not John Arbeiter. He leaned back in his green, slightly worn but comfortably overstuffed chair in the Owner’s Suite and pondered not whether the Cincinnati Soapsuds might somehow back themselves into a wildcard slot; he quietly calculated instead how long it might be before the team was mathematically eliminated from the division race. How upside down had Arbeiter’s world become? A winning streak would have been a disaster. Elimination was critical. Those playing-out-the-string days would be the time to get serious about putting the plan into motion.

The snap-like crack of Stu Uhlmann’s 34-ounce piece of maple was loud enough to be heard behind even the double-plated glass that shielded Furst and Arbeiter from the schleps sweating in the thick humidity below them. For the fans in attendance the sound was nothing less than hearing a femur snap, and it silenced conversations and turned heads. From the team radio play-by-play man it elicited an awed Oh my! For center fielder Johnny Starr, it was an Oh, shit and a freaking distraction.

I’ll see you back here in a minute, Uhlmann had told the Cincinnati Soapsuds’ catcher as he flamboyantly flipped the bat aside and commenced his home run trot.

Only the hitter knows what a home run feels like; and what it feels like when a ball is struck precisely on the sweet spot, well, it feels like nothing at all. For everyone else in the ballpark, they can only react to the crack from the contact, and Uhlmann’s drive had the thunderclap of a moon ball in the making, maybe a second deck home run. But while Uhlmann’s timing had been so absolute and square, he had driven the pitch toward the deepest part of the green turf sea between himself and the outfield wall, and if there was one place inside Cincinnati’s aging Coronado Financial Services Stadium where there was a chance a play could be made on the warning track, this was it. The only difference-maker in the next four seconds would be whether Johnny Starr could get to it. And for the first two seconds, it was looking to be a challenge.

In the moments before Uhlmann’s mighty swing and even for a wink or two afterward, Johnny Starr’s complete concentration had been focused not on the batter—there were at least 27 of those distractions to deal with in every game—but on what looked from his vantage point as a mother-and-daughter team of hotties in the first row of seats above the outfield wall and just over his left shoulder. The scouting report on the right-handed Uhlmann was that he pulled the ball 63.8% of the time, and the coaches in the dugout had been waving Starr to make a defensive adjustment and take two or three steps to his right. Starr had taken a full three steps—but to his left.

Whole lot better view of the mama and the mommette, he thought to himself.

The mother and daughter were wearing matching white Soapsuds t-shirts that were pulled tightly over their matching sets of big tits. Starr didn’t know if it was the same DNA or the same surgeon, and didn’t much care. A MILF and a DILF, Johnny Starr was fantasizing. A MILF and a DILF. Starr’s hotel rooms had during his career borne witness to the kinds of debauchery that had led to pleas from his agent and the team’s general counsel about the importance of making the right decision; specifically, not allowing cameraphones ever to be used in his hotel room. But his room had never witnessed a mother and daughter MILF and DILF.

Now that’s the kinda double I’d like to tag and…

Crack! Starr wasn’t startled so much as a bit pissed. Mom and daughter were looking all too fine under the lights with those snug t-shirts and what? Were they wearing those