Clubhouse Confessions: The Real World of Professional Baseball

By D.D. McDonald

Once a hard-throwing Major League pitching prospect, thirty-year-old Jim Miller, aka Buckethead, has overcome three devastating knee injuries to get one final shot in pro ball in the Class "AAA" North American League, and over the course of the 1995 season, a baseball old-timer shows him a way to keep his career viable by egregiously cheating which could get him banished from the sport permanently.

For the reader who wants to experience a wacky, yet absolutely authentic, look at pro ball from inside the clubhouse to out on the field to anywhere else ballplayers might go, the novel CLUBHOUSE CONFESSIONS delivers with an unadulterated season long narrative of the highs, the lows, and the wild and hysterical laughter emanating from the various ballparks, planes, buses, restaurants, bars, and hotels of the Tacoma Loggers, a club contending for the '95 Class "AAA" North American League title.

Over the course of the 144 games season, the Loggers schedule takes them from Tacoma to Tucson and Vegas to Vancouver, and along the way, Miller and Sam Stone, his catcher and roommate, perfect their relationship to brotherhood status while Miller frantically tries to stave off the immanent day of reckoning for his playing career his impending release and forced retirement by Tacoma's big league parent club. But on the night of the rained out home opener, Miller's chance meeting with a high school history teacher ultimately transforms him from a dour woman-hater to a man who comes to discover just how astonishing life can be, even without baseball.

CLUBHOUSE CONFESSIONS will put you in the dugout, the bullpen, on the mound, and in the clubhouse alongside twenty-three Logger players, and will finally allow the whole world to hear what actually goes on in those crazy arguments with the umpires and what takes place at the bottom of a stack of players during a bench-clearing brawl. And hey the ending might just surprise you, so don't you dare peek!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499029253

D.D. McDonald

D.D. McDonald was born and raised into a family of baseball lovers and began his career at the age of five. Though he loved the sport with a passion, he was a lousy hitter until reaching the ripe old age of thirteen. One of the fathers of one of the other kids, a former pro ballplayer himself, showed him how to keep his right side high through the swing, and things pretty much took off from there. He was an all-state catcher in high school and was drafted in the Major League players draft during his senior year in the early ’70s, but chose to play college baseball instead. Then before player free agency became a reality, a college degree was worth far more than the Major League minimum of $25,000 a year. He was drafted once more, this time in the 3rd round of his senior collegiate season, and was assigned to long season Class “A” in 1975 reaching “AAA” in 1976. A serious case of “bus trip burnout” ended his playing career at the end of the ’76 season, but in 1978 he realized how much he missed the game, and his renewed desire to return to baseball led him to begin umpiring kids’ games. While balancing a business career with calling balls and strikes, he moved up rapidly and began working high school, junior college, and eventually college ball in just his second year. Ultimately, after more than fifty years of squatting behind home plate, thirty of them wearing a “blue suit” and twenty more catching, his worn-out knees compelled his retirement in 2010. Mr. McDonald is currently retired and living with his wonderful wife and cat in a log cabin in the wilds of the Pacific Northwest.

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Copyright © 2014 by D.D. McDonald.

Library of Congress Control Number:     2014909979

ISBN:                  Hardcover                        978-1-4990-2926-0

                            Softcover                          978-1-4990-2928-4

                            eBook                               978-1-4990-2925-3

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 06/24/2014

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CONTENTS

Preface

Chapter 1.   The First of My Last?

Chapter 2.   Caesar’s Night on the Town

Chapter 3.   Who in the Hell Would Baptize a Preacher?

Chapter 4.   Dew Drops Aren’t Limited to Spring Mornings

Chapter 5.   Let’s Get This Show on the Road

Chapter 6.   Wang’s Sore Neck

Chapter 7.   A Civil Brawl

Chapter 8.   Hitting the Jackpot in Sin City

Chapter 9.   The Female Game Changer

Chapter 10.   The Hangman Bites the Dust

Chapter 11.   A Whopper with Cheese

Chapter 12.   Sam Loses His Milk Money

Chapter 13.   Suzi Tells All

Chapter 14.   A Seven-Page Ejection Report

Chapter 15.   How Can They Live In This Place?

Chapter 16.   My Most Memorable Night Was a Rainout

Chapter 17.   What They Really Say in Those Arguments

Chapter 18.   Time to Earn Our Money

Chapter 19.   A Pink Slip In A Yellow Envelope

About The Author

PREFACE

T hank you, honey, for putting up with me and resisting the urge to pull out that two-by-six hidden under the bed and beating me senseless now and again. I sure as hell deserve it more often than not!

I would be completely remiss in the publication process of this little fish wrapper without giving that jasper who happens to be just a couple of days older than me a huge thank you for the inspiration to complete this project and for the considerable assistance in the editing process. I never paid enough attention in English class to be able to construct a complete sentence without stubbing my toe (or for that matter, another highly important appendage) somewhere before getting to the capping punctuation.

I also should also show my appreciation to the multitude of bartenders across North America who have played a major role in the assimilation of materials. Without your assistance, I would never have been able to exercise my liver to its current razor-sharp physical condition, and after all, where else can a person go to hear disgustingly funny bar stories besides a watering hole?

I have dozens of ex-teammates strung around the country that also were lynchpins in the accumulation of a treasure trove of humorous stories, several of which appear herein. Thanks, fellas. I hope none of you took that Ultimate Hotfoot thing personally.

And, Mr. McM, I owe you the highest in praise because you, and only you, could hit three home runs in a game with a hangover so severe that you were incapable of tying your own shoes prior to batting practice. It’s like they say—if they hadn’t invented whiskey, the Irish would own the world!

My years of umpiring amateur ball also allowed me to amass all kinds of wonderful anecdotes and great friendships. Many thanks to CJM, HC, DS, LM, JH, ED, SSM, GK, TC, HP, GE, RB, LB, and the late DT, a man who I’m always going to miss. It was always a pleasure and privilege to work with and learn from all you guys. Sitting in my rocking chair now, it’s a little depressing to reflect back on those times because we never, ever, had a single iota of fun. Yeah right!

I should close this little diatribe by noting that the majority of college baseball coaches don’t know what plumbers know, but they think they do. But I must concede that those humps do know one thing exceedingly well—most of them can far outclass their contemporaries in the minor leagues in the art of being ornery. They piss and moan over every pitch. I believe deep down that each of my ejections at that level was every bit as satisfying to me as my colleagues in pro ball must feel when they dump a malcontent. As one of my boyhood heroes, none other than the legendary Foghorn Leghorn, used to put it:

Get your dumb ass outta here, Doo-dah, Doo-dah!

CHAPTER 1

The First of My Last?

B lue sky and emerald green grass. Oh shit! I’ve got to hurry to get to this one. A baseball cracked off the bat of one of my teammates about 350 feet away and arched gracefully in my direction. I cruised back a few steps and hauled it in, just short of the warning track.

Welcome to Spring Training 1995, my ninth as a professional. As is usual during batting practice, I’m in the outfield shagging baseballs. This year I’ve signed with one of the new expansion clubs, the Indianapolis Solons, and am assigned to their Class AAA affiliate, the Tacoma Loggers. It’s nice to finally be with a club in my home state since I was born and raised in the town of Ellensburg, a hamlet located a hundred miles due east of Seattle on I-90.

Allow me to introduce myself. James Russell Miller is the name, and baseball is the game. My resume includes the following personal information:

•   Height: 6'4"

•   Weight: 225

•   Vocation: Veteran minor league professional baseball player

•   Education: B.S. in Economics and M.S. in Business-Administration from the University of Washington

•   Marital Status: Did that once very unsuccessfully

•   Nickname: Since I wear a size-8 hat, my teammates in past years have branded me with Buckethead, aka BH

•   Previous Work Experience:

Tallahassee—Short season A 1985 and 1986

Columbia—Long season A 1987

Eau Claire—AA and Iowa City—Long A 1988

Hartford—AAA 1989

Panama City—Short season A and St. Cloud—AA 1990

Edmonton—Class AAA 1991

Winnipeg-Independent—1992

St. Cloud—AA 1993

Edmonton—AAA 1994

This brings up to the current moment, March 1995. We’re being brought to you live and direct from the thriving metropolis of Cave Creek, Arizona, a bedroom community located outside Phoenix. I’m standing in the outfield of Indy’s minor league complex on the field designated for their top farm club.

I’m joined in the outfield by a great friend and all around good egg, Sam Stone. Sam, like yours truly, is a veteran of the minor league wars although he’s had a couple of cups of coffee in the big show, the Major by God Leagues.

Doing my very best slack-jawed New York sportscaster, I ask, Sam, how do you see the Tacoma Loggers club looking this year?

My colleague slides to his left and responds into my microphone cleverly disguised as a Wilson A2000 fielder’s glove, This club is gonna’ be like a cobra and a two inch dick. Ain’t nobody, nobody in their right mind that’s gonna want to fuck with us!

Sam Gorilla Stone, catcher extraordinaire from Arkadelphia, Arkansas, jogs off in the general direction of home plate to get in his cuts in the batting cage. We’ve been in camp for eight days now, and everyone is getting antsy to get to the first portion of our exhibition schedule. Our first game will come later this week against Colorado Springs.

I’m here only by the grace of God. It was a cool and drizzly late April evening up in Calgary about a year ago when Mickey Carr, the Broncos little right hand hitting second baseman, dropped a bunt down the third base line. I hustled across to pick it up, and as I planted to throw, the right foot slid out from under me on the damp grass, dropping me unceremoniously to all fours. As soon as I hit the ground, that all-too-familiar burning sensation was alive yet again in my right leg. I knew immediately that the Patella Tendon had ruptured again, this time being the third in my undistinguished career.

My first thought was probably typical of what most ballplayers would think. Piss on this. I don’t need this anymore. I was absolutely certain that I was all through in the baseball business right then and there. But there was just one problem with that reckoning—I’d have to get a real job. My lifelong credo has always been that pro wrestling is real. It’s the rest of the world that’s fake. Now I was staring life right in the face in its most grotesque form, and it was laughing and telling me to eat shit and die.

You see, the idea of responsibility is the most vulgar and disgusting thing that I can imagine. I’ve lived most of my thirty years until now avoiding responsibility like a high-grade case of the Mexican clap. Nowadays, I could never consider marriage, kids, a job, or anything other than a couple of the essentials of life to have any real meaning whatsoever. One-night stands, a 6-4-3 double play, and cold beer are the only entities that mean squat any more.

That value set made me rehab my ass of over the past seven months to get here. Since Indy is building their minor league system pretty much from scratch, in January I was able to get the Solons’ farm director, Bert Hopkins, to give me one last shot.

But like it or not, this is going to be it for me unless I can find a reserve of strength in my right leg. When I was a kid at the University of Washington, I threw a fastball in the low nineties. Most of the scouts that saw me seemed to think that I would mature physically a little more, so California made me a third round choice in the ’85 draft. They gave me a generous bonus, which is mostly salted away, and I also got the rest of grad school paid for.

But later that first year, I blew up the knee initially while covering first base on a routine ground ball to the right side.

Have you ever had a doctor check your reflexes by popping you in the crazy bone area just south of the kneecap with that little rubber hammer? Well, that’s the patella tendon. Damaging that part of the knee is a painful injury because it aligns with many of the nerves in that area of the body. It also makes that knee extremely stiff most of the time after it’s repaired. It feels like putting on warm jeans right out of the dryer.

So with most professional athletes, a torn patella tendon is almost always the kiss of death. When she gives way, it’s time to get sewn back together and try to get some educational experience that will help land real work in corporate America.

But that winter I broke my ass in rehab, partly because of my desire to pitch again and partly because of my fear of real work. I was picked up by the Cleveland organization in ’86 and was able to advance as far as AAA with Norfolk in ’88. I was absolutely certain that my career was on the way back.

But as luck would have it, it tore again when we were in Rochester midway in that season. Same old shit—surgery, sit on your ass for twelve weeks, and then several more months of boring and gruesome rehab. To begin ’89, it was back to long season Class A ball again to start the long climb to success all over again.

As chronicled earlier, the son of a bitch did a curtain call again last year. But I fooled it that time. I went to a highly recommended orthopedic surgeon in Alaska who specializes in putting downhill skiers back together. This time he inserted a new tendon from a corpse, and the knee seems to have stabilized pretty well. The bad news, you ask? The kneecap was too badly damaged to save.

Unfortunately, I’ve lost a great deal of the strength in the right leg, the leg that pushes against the pitching rubber during the delivery. Being a power pitcher, much of the leverage and body torque that hard throwers need to hurry that little seed to home plate is now gone.

Most fans have heard the sentence, He’s lost a yard on his fastball. Well with mine, I’ve lost a whole freakin’ football field. Unless I find something pretty soon, C.J. Parker, the Loggers manager (not to be confused with the siliconed blonde tramp on Baywatch), had better keep the married guys out of the infield when I’m on the mound.

Most ballplayers are so macho that think that they are the toughest assholes on the face of the earth. Some of them will tell you that they jogged home from their own vasectomy. I’m no different. God blessed me with a .30-.30 for a right arm when I was a kid, so I’m dying to show the entire world that I can throw harder than any man that ever lived.

But the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. I was, unfortunately, given smallish hands for a man of my size, thus the obligatory pitches like the curve ball, changeup, and now popular split-finger are hard for me to throw. I either bounce the son of a bitch three feet in front of the plate or hang it right down the can. Therefore, I’m basically a one-pitch pitcher. I’ve been a short reliever throughout my career to date since hitters would only see me once a game.

Even in the low minors, hitters will ultimately be able to time any pitcher if they see his fastball often enough over the course of a ball game. A starter has to have something else to show them now and then to be successful later on. Since they’d only see me once, it was seldom that they would get on my fastball. And hells bells, I could run it up there in the midnineties in my heyday, sometimes even a little quicker.

Looking in toward the plate, Sam is now in the cage, and he rifles shot after shot over the chain-link fence in right-center and right fields. The Gorilla is strong enough to bench press a Kenworth, and his forearms are bigger than most women’s thighs.

But Sam has two major shortcomings in his game. He can’t run a lick, and he throws worse than he runs. But he swings a very solid bat, switch hits, calls an excellent game, and since Indy’s backup catching situation is somewhat fluid right now, he will vie with Wyatt Slime Champoux for the Loggers’ regular catching job. My money’s on Sam.

The Loggers’ pitching coach, Cletus Nelson, yells out my name from the bullpen located down the left field line. I jog over to where he stands in review of the proceedings.

Cletus has the goddamnedest body that I’ve ever seen. He’s 6'6" tall and weighs about 230 pounds, but the big bastard is built like an hourglass with no bottom. He looks like 200 of his 230 pounds are from the waist up. His legs are virtual toothpicks. I can’t imagine the hell that he must have taken from the ballplayers of the other clubs when he pitched for Philadelphia and St. Louis a number of years ago.

Cletus, in his serious Alabama drawl said, I’m goin’ to want ya to thow about ten minutes of BP tomorra’. Ya got any problem with that? True to his Southern heritage, Cletus always has a big chaw of Beechnut chewing tobacco in his right cheek, a holdover from his days of picking cotton when he was a kid. Because of his continuing drool, he now only wears brown shirts on the street. You should never, and I mean never, stand directly in front of him when he talked because of the fine brown mist that he continually emitted. If you did, you end up looking like you had a case of the chicken pox.

And I’m goin’ to want ya to go an inning ur two Friday, he said.

I responded, Okay, Cletus, you’re the boss.

This was not the best news that I could have gotten. Because of the recoup time from the knee, I’m very rusty and haven’t done much more than playing some long toss this spring. I expect there to be some friggin’ rockets hit off of me during my stint tomorrow.

And more bad news—all of the front office dillwads are down here right now, and they’re everywhere. They’re crawling all over us like a busload of transvestites at a Frederick’s of Hollywood lingerie sale. Ten bad minutes at the wrong time can assure you a lifetime of selling insurance.

After spending the rest of the morning shagging balls during BP, I did my running and headed to the clubhouse. Most of the ballplayers had already retired there, and the constant chatter drowned out the pulsing music playing on the stereo in the training room.

Since many of my colleagues will be back for more work in the afternoon, our clubhouse man will usually go over to Subway or KFC to pick up some food around noon. He’ll set it up in the corner of the training room on a good-sized card table.

But since I am done for the day, I quickly stripped down and hustled to the shower room located directly adjacent to the locker room area.

After my quick rinse, I glanced at the table where the noon time goodies were located. Directly over it stood Slime, quite possibly the most vile man in professional baseball. He was stark naked and eating a drumstick with one hand while scratching his nuts with the other. Champoux, you asshole! I shouted.

Startled, he spun around and, in the process, drug his root through the Styrofoam bowl of coleslaw on the front corner of the table. Jesus, if this big pile of monkey crap is going to be our regular catcher, it’s going to be a long goddamned year.

Maybe getting released won’t be as bad as I think. And since Prudential is likely to be calling anyway, I guess that I should start to advertise. Is anybody out there looking for a little piece of mind for the family?

Aw, what the hell. As long as I’m here…

CHAPTER 2

Caesar’s Night on the Town

T he next morning proved to be a cool and dreary one for more reasons than one. My confidence level was lower than a nightcrawler’s scrotum, and I was throwing today. Unlike virtually every other day in my professional life, I dreaded going to the ballpark on this one.

After breakfast with Sam, I went to the clubhouse, dressed quietly, and headed for the field so as not to have to talk with anyone. I don’t want to get too attached to anybody or anything around here, just in case.

This morning’s work was to be live batting practice where the pitchers air it out at about 80 percent of their good stuff against the hitters. This way, the pitching staff can ease into game type activity while giving the hitters a chance to sharpen up their timing in preparation for the start of our exhibition schedule.

I was scheduled to throw for ten to twelve minutes and would be the second man to the mound. Billy Reynolds was to be the first hurler out. Reynolds, 6'7" tall and about 235 pounds can run it up to home plate real quick. He’d played college basketball at Butler and was nicknamed Machine for his shooting prowess, but me thinks it’s because his fastball seems like it’s shot out of a high-power rifle.

Of course, the veteran hitters didn’t want to go into the cage against Machine because his lively fastball tended to sail around the strike zone, thus jamming hitters on occasion and breaking bats. A good fist shot from Reynolds on a cold and raw morning like this would feel like you just grabbed a handful of those friggin’ African killer bees.

So when Machine started throwing, I began to loosen up in the bullpen throwing to Slime. The first thing that I noticed was that my good fastball was slightly below average and was straighter than a horny dog’s dick. The second thing that came to me was that Slime couldn’t catch the clap in a Mexican whorehouse.

As luck would have it, they called me in before I could find anything of decent enough quality to get a blind man out, let alone somebody who hits baseballs for a living.

The first guy that I’m to face was Raul Spider Vasquez, an up-and-coming young shortstop from the Dominican Republic. Unlike most Latin middle infielders, Spider was a fairly good-sized guy at 6'2" and about 195 pounds, and carried a reputation of having some pop in his bat.

The first four pitches that I threw to Spider were ripped in various directions around the ballpark. This pissed me off to a major extent, so my fifth offering was aimed just in front of his hat bill. It sent him sprawling in the dirt to avoid the message that I was sending.

Well, that got Spider’s Latin blood boiling pretty good. In fact, he got more excited than a dozen blind lesbians on a tuna boat. He jumped up shouting, Puck you, you pucking deeksucker!

I hollered back to him that he should try to perform an unnatural sex act with himself and to get back up to home plate like a man who had a little hair on his ass. At this point, it was becoming more and more apparent that I need to get the little bastard off of my pitches. So I wound up and threw my very best changeup. But as my current streak of good fortune would have it, it floated in about belt high and was centered directly over home plate. As it neared the dish, a very perceptible grin came to Spider’s face, and he proceeded to drub the son of a bitch into another time zone.

I was told that it landed about 420 feet away high on the embankment beyond the left-centerfield fence. As soon as he touched it off, I muttered, Shit, under my breath, but I didn’t turn to watch the frequent-flyer miles it was piling up. Instead, while the ball was in flight, I decided that Plan 5D was in order. It’s either that or a trip to the unemployment office. But there’s only one problem with Plan 5D—I have absolutely no goddamned idea what 5D was.

So I turned my back to the plate, walking to the grass behind the hill in deep thought. I wondered how I could at least keep these guys in the ballpark and concluded that some sinking movement was necessary. I had always had a serviceable two-seam fastball, a pitch that runs down and in to right-handed hitters. Theoretically, that downward movement would allow me to at least keep the line drives in the yard.

I gripped a new ball with the smooth part of the skin along the seams, pinching it a little with my first finger. My first offering dropped in crisply toward the inside corner and Spider’s big cut rewarded him with a shattered Louisville Slugger and a pair of hands that felt like he’d just stuck both pinkies into a light socket.

After that, he couldn’t even get the ball airborne off of me. Throughout the rest of session, I threw nothing but the sinker and was rewarded with a high percentage of ground balls and a couple more serious jam jobs. Nobody else took me deep.

After my mound stint was over, I was encouraged, but am enough of a realist to know that I’ve got to come up with something more than a chicken shit little sinker to stick around, especially in the hitter friendly North American League.

You see, the thing to remember about the NALLY is that it’s about as unfriendly of an environment for pitchers as God could ever have possibly devised. You have a brutally hot and dry climate in the Southwest cities of Phoenix, Albuquerque, and Tucson, so air drag is reduced considerably. Breaking pitches don’t curve nearly as much as they do in cooler air, and solidly hit balls carry forever.

On the other hand, you have high-altitude ballparks in Calgary, Salt Lake City, and Colorado Springs. Since the reduced air density won’t allow breaking balls to bite the air as much and balls hit in the air seem to carry ceaselessly, you have a different combination ripe for scoring runs in bunches.

Anybody with an ERA of under 4.00 in this league is having a helluva season. In fact, an ERA of under 5.00 is quite acceptable.

In the clubhouse after the workout, I apologized to Spider. He let me know that he wasn’t mad, that it was just a competitive thing. Ballplayers are like that—they’ll break their ass to beat you on the field, but most are pretty good guys away from the ballpark.

I felt a lot better when I went in to shower that afternoon than I did when I’d walked into the clubhouse earlier in the day.

Coming out from my rinse and spin dry, I couldn’t believe my eyes. There stood Slime again, buck naked, and hovering over the food table. Whether or not he’d showered prior to that time or not didn’t make any freakin’ difference to me.

In the recorded annals of mankind, Slime was one of the dirtiest people to smudge the face of the earth. This asshole always smelled like the Louisiana swamps that he’d grown up in. His hair was shampooed the second Saturday every month, whether it needed to or not, and he always had pimples on his back and ass from not keeping his skin clean.

I would make a sizable bet that there wasn’t a woman in all of Arizona that would let him ball her without putting a bottle of that nasty orange-colored disinfectant on his root before mounting up.

And talk about dumb—this fuck thinks that Gaelic is a male Irish cocksucker.

So at the risk of pissing off my teammates by butchering their lunch, I hustled over to the clubhouse’s outer door and snatched the CO2 fire extinguisher from the wall. Then I snuck into the training room and hid behind a towel hamper. I took careful aim and fired. I coated the filthy son of a bitch with a layer of white powder akin to a two-coat industrial grade whitewashing.

As I emptied the entire canister onto his torso Champoux screamed, Miller, you motherfucker!

I barked back, Slime, you’re a goddamned pig. If you want lunch, I hear that they have a buffet today over at the sperm bank. Why don’t you go over there and get your fill. That’s about your fuckin’ speed.

I dressed quickly and left to a standing ovation from my teammates.

In my earlier intro, I neglected to mention that one of the things that Indy wanted from me is to keep the Tacoma clubhouse loose. Professional baseball is one helluva a grind, especially in the minor leagues. Travel and accommodations are generally about as pleasant as root canal surgery, and you get very few days off. In fact, the Loggers have only eight scheduled open dates over a 144-game schedule that starts the second week of April and ends Labor Day weekend in early September.

Odds are pretty good that most, if not all of those off-days, will be lost to make up rainouts from earlier in the year. Rumor has it that the Tacoma ownership group nearly named the club the Tacoma Wet Sox before finally settling on the name Loggers.

With many ballplayers, laughter and the World Grappling Association are the only true forms of sanity left in the world today. In that I have a unique capacity to make grown men laugh, guys like me are needed to keep the rest of the club from going crazy over the course of the year. Not to brag, but clever practical jokes are my forte.

Now I won’t be the guy who invented the ultimate hotfoot, but I won’t hesitate to proclaim that I took it to a new and improved art form.

On one of those endless nighttime bus rides in the Midwest League a few years back somewhere between Limp Dick and Cornhole, Iowa, Bobo Gleason’s snoring was more than any human should have to endure.

Scotty Parr, a young left-handed pitcher from Boise, was sitting in the seat directly behind me. He’d been having some minor arm soreness and was carrying a small bottle of rubbing alcohol with him. I whispered, Scotty, give me that stuff. I’m putting an end to this horseshit right now!

So I walked back several rows to the toilet and collected a wad of paper towels. I coated them thoroughly with the solvent and crawled forward to where Gleason reclined in his seat. I wiped down his Adidas sneakers real good and set them off with a half-smoked Winston. Well, folks, I’m here to tell you that the snoring son of a bitch jumped around like a Ubangi witch doctor with a thousand fire ants up his ass for at least five minutes. Needless to say, Bobo never slept on a bus for the rest of the year, and I’ll guarantee you that the rest of the club was saved a bunch of sleep because of it. The rest of the guys were, by my reckoning, eternally grateful for my consideration of their slumber habits.

Meanwhile, back at the Scottsdale Best Western, our spring training home away from home, I decided to go out with Sam for a few Miller Genuine Drafts and, with some luck, some entertainment for Caesar. You see, I named my best buddy, Caesar, after the Shakespearean line, We came here not to praise Caesar, but to bury him. Some of the local wolf cookie might find the line humorous. It had happened before. Besides, I’m not going to have to throw tomorrow, and a sound hangover won’t hurt my chances to win a spot on this club.

So we strolled into the hotel parking lot and crawled into Sam’s Firebird heading down the Yellow Brick Road to fame and fortune, or the county jail—whichever comes first.

We pulled into the parking lot at a place called Harpo’s in downtown Tempe at about five-thirty. Harpo’s was a place that the minor league ballplayers in the valley liked to hang around since the beer was cold, the food well above decent, and a fair amount of nooky could normally be found there. Besides, the prices at Harpo’s were affordable to the guys making minor league cash, and they had the two kinds of music that most of us enjoyed—country and western.

Big league players wouldn’t be caught dead there—it was too deplorable for people with money.

We grabbed a table in the back corner so that we could survey all of the comings and the goings in the joint. Then lo and behold, who comes over to serve our table? It was our old friend, Wanda. I shit you not, that’s her real name.

Wanda’s a redhead, somewhere between fifty and sixty-five years old, wears too much makeup, and is probably too friendly for her own good. But she’s been here for a very long time and is as nice as she can be. She’s a salty old broad who’d gotten accustomed to getting her ass pinched a hundred times a day. We became friendly when I broke up a fight before it could started in there, and she still remembered me from bygone years.

When she saw me, she howled, Jim Miller, you horny bastard. Are you still fuckin’ around playing a boy’s game for a living?

I smiled broadly and said, You bet, you gorgeous thing! How the hell are you? You’re still looking as good looking as ever.

I wasn’t lying. Wanda, for an older woman, has a fairly strong set of lungs and a very pleasant face to look at. She’d managed to keep her figure pretty well despite years of making a living on her feet for eight hours a day as well as quite a few hard ones at night. To tell you the truth, I’m pretty sure that Wanda could drink me under the table with one arm tied behind her back. Whoa! Stop right there! Who made up that saying anyway? What does having an arm tied behind a person have to do with the ability to swill whiskey? I hate that fuckin’ saying, and if I ever meet the guy who wrote it, I’m going to kick his ass! Anyhow, in a modest alcohol-induced stupor, I’d probably introduce Ol’ One Eye to Wanda myself.

But what I appreciate most about Wanda was the fact that she had the cajones to throw any lowborn butthole that didn’t mind his manners in her place of business right out the front door. Don’t get drunk and utter nasties to any of the sweet young patrons or the female employees at Harpo’s, or Wanda would have your ass down the road kicking rocks faster than you can say, Shit flows downhill.

As we hugged one another, I asked, Really, Wanda, how are you?

She gave me a kiss full on the lips and replied,