Chapter 19

With Shiggie three-fourths of the way out of the closet, life in the locker room became difficult.

Pitchers are, at best, something of a breed apart in the professional baseball clubhouse. The everyday players tend to hold them a little at arm's length, as if they're not really fully included in the concept of "team".

Shiggie, with his language barrier to carry around, had always been something of an outsider anyway. There were many Latin ballplayers on the club, and language was sometimes a barrier for them as well. But they were numerous, and no matter how little English they'd acquired, they always had each other to talk to.

Now, Shiggie was an Outsider to the third degree: A pitcher; a foreigner; and -- worst of all by far -- a homosexual.

To their credit, several players and coaches went out of their way to treat him decently after the public exposure. In some cases, players were more friendly to Shiggie than they'd been before, when they had mostly just ignored him.

But there were a small number who were reacting very negatively -- way out of proportion to the gravity of Shiggie's actual "offense."

Worst of all was our starting catcher, Bjorn Eriksen. I think Eriksen's problem arose from the well-known slang terminology sometimes used by gay male sex partners. The aggressive partner is often referred to as the "pitcher," whereas the one being anally penetrated is the "catcher."

Eriksen, being Shiggie's regular catcher, took some low-grade teasing from other players, several of them employing crude variations on this "pitcher-catcher" theme -- with Eriksen as the "butt" of their jokes.

He didn't like it. But rather than strike out at the players harassing him, Eriksen directed his rage at Shiggie. The catcher went to Paul Warren and told him he refused to catch games in which Shiggie was the starter.

"That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard!" Warren told him.

It didn't matter. Eriksen was adamant. Let the backup guy catch Shiggie, if he wanted to. Not him.

That was just the beginning. Although maybe 70% of the players either supported Shiggie or at least kept their mouths shut, a noisy minority was doing its best to make his life miserable.

And we started losing ball games.

It wasn't anything obvious. To the outside observer -- maybe even to the manager -- everything looked normal, out on the field. Same starting lineup, same guys in the bullpen.

Only, Eriksen got traded to the Colorado Rockies on Tuesday -- the day before Shiggie's next scheduled start. He was traded for "future considerations."

The Ottawa guy, Phil Burkowitz, the catcher who'd been called up earlier when Holtz had been injured, was called up again -- this time as our number two catcher.

No matter how bad things get, somebody, somewhere, always benefits.

Shiggie, probably distracted by the chaos all around him, pitched poorly in his next start and had to be yanked after four innings, trailing 5-1. We went on to lose it. It was our first time that season that we'd dropped four in a row.

The Goddamned Yankees took over first place for the first time in almost two months. The revivified Red Sox were threatening to overtake us for second.

It was all going to Hell, and for no good reason.

I couldn't see any way out of the doldrums we were in as a club. It wasn't like there was anything tangible that Paul Warren, or the Oriole higher-ups, could deal with. They'd been reasonably supportive of Shiggie in his troubles. They'd been quick to throw Eriksen out on his ear, and I thought they deserved a lot of credit for that. But there wasn't anything else, with reference to Shiggie, that was being said or done in the clubhouse that was overt enough to call for action.

Some of the Latino players -- macho guys, mostly -- seemed especially scandalized by the idea that there was a gay player in their midst. None of them, though, was being very vocal about it. If they were grumbling about Shiggie, it was only to each other -- in Spanish.

As Shiggie's longtime housemate and his only real friend on the club, I caught a little flak myself. I was getting a certain amount of insulation from the fact that the other players were aware of my relationship with Amy. Amy had long-since been recognized as being a prime specimen of womankind.

But my friendship with Shiggie, and my continuing positive attitude toward him, didn't go entirely unnoticed.

I showed up, without Shiggie, in the workout room one late July afternoon, and Rich Scranton, our reserve outfielder, saw me come in. "Hey, Sam -- where's your asshole buddy?" Scranton wanted to know.