Chapter 7

It was only a few days more before it became evident to me that little Maria was looking at me in a new light. I was no longer merely the leader of her beloved Baby Birds, I was a possible candidate for Daddydom.

Did this scare me a little? Well, maybe. I'd had one unsuccessful marriage already, and that always gives the question a little dollop of extra uncertainty.

And I had no experience at all as a daddy.

But my ex-wife and I had been awfully young and green when we'd gotten married, and despite that, we'd held it together for quite a while before our mutual decision to let it go. Maybe my marriage had been a negative experience, but it wasn't a bitter one. The failure had been like my career batting average -- disappointing, but tolerable.

And now Orlie, in contrast, seemed like such a grown-up. When we'd first met, she'd been calm and a little reserved, giving me no particular reason to believe she might be interested. Had it not been for Maria's "nice butt" confidence-betrayal, I'd probably never have had the necessary nerve to start up a relationship.

Maybe a nice butt wasn't the seat of all courage, but it at least had been the initial impetus for us to get together. And now, we were together, and Orlie had given herself to me, without reservation, and with no strings attached.

Clearly, it was up to me to make the next move. My half-assed proposal that we move in together -- into her house, no less -- had been left unanswered. It was a question that was just hanging there. I'd been to The Promised Land with Orlie, but whether I'd be invited in as a roommate was still unresolved.

Maybe I had asked the wrong question.

Meanwhile, Orlie and I were getting along awfully well, and the Bluefield Baby Birds were still winning.

Life was Good.

In August, with the brief Appalachian League season winding down and only the Divisional Playoffs to look forward to, my young charges suddenly, inexplicably, took a nosedive and lost four consecutive games to the Johnson City Cardinals and the Danville Braves.

The one loss to the Cardinals was humiliating because Johnson City was the weakest club in the league. The three-game set we dropped in Danville was far worse. The Braves were our principal competition for the Division title and, whoosh! Our lead was gone and we found ourselves in second place.

My e-mails to the Orioles were not quite as chirpy as they'd been there, for awhile. The Baby Birds had busted a wing, and I was going down with them!

Sure enough, with only eight games left in the season, we managed to lose five and finished second in the Division -- out of the playoffs. The Bluefield fans were crushed, my kids were disappointed, and the Orioles brain trust back in Baltimore was just -- silent.

The season was suddenly, unexpectedly, already over. No Divisional Playoffs for the Bluefield Orioles.

Most of my players had no new instructions from the Big Club's front office. They would just go home -- to their hometowns all over America, Mexico and the Caribbean -- and wait for further word about where to report next year. I knew how they felt. And I knew that several of them would just get a letter saying that they had been released.

For some of these boys, Bluefield would be the beginning, and the end, of their careers as professional ball players.

All their War Stories about Life as a Pro would have to come from those few wispy summer memories of dusty ballparks in West Virginia or Tennessee.

Three of my guys were promoted elsewhere to play out the waning days of the current season -- two to Hagerstown in the Carolina League, and one happy youngster who was sent up all the way to Bowie, Maryland, in Double-A. For that kid, it had been a very successful season.

I said goodbye to each young man, individually -- some of them in my third-rate Spanish -- and twenty-four hours after that final game, the latest edition of the Bluefield Orioles was history.

I still had my grubby little apartment. It looked even grubbier as a full-time abode, but I didn't have any particular place to go.

Not unless Orlie wanted to take me in.

And what kind of baseball season ends on August 31st, anyway?

"What you need is a vacation," Orlie told me, after I'd expressed my frustration at the premature end of the season. "And cheer up! Playing a few more summer league playoff games wouldn't have given you all that much extra satisfaction."

"It would have given me -- closure," I said -- half-kidding in using that overworked term, but also meaning it, a little.