Chapter 12

Unlike professional football players, most off-season training for ballplayers is individually managed on an informal, non-team structured basis. We had a strength and conditioning coach, but we weren’t ever required to physically conduct our workouts with him present ... as long as there were no injury issues and we coordinated with him in general terms what we were doing, and when and where. As the big slugger John Kruk famously once said, ‘I’m not an athlete, I’m a baseball player.’ Most players tended to just rest their bodies for the remainder of the year until after New Years and then hit the gym hard just before Spring Training, but I preferred to keep to a slow and steady routine.

Now that I had alien nanite technology, or something similar, flowing through my veins I didn’t want to suddenly hit the weights like a maniac and instantly start looking like Barry Bonds (the giant head version). A good pitcher (not a thrower) generates much of his power from his legs, so lots of stationary bike time was a must for the leg muscles with a bit of extra attention to the other body groups, working on different muscle groups each day. In January I’d quit the weight work and strictly work on flexibility and stretch work. Some serious yoga, I decided, might not be a bad idea for this. Leah was into that ... at least she showed me all of the Kama Sutra related positions anyway, and she’d be a good teacher. Assuming of course that we could ever reconnect together again, some day.

So, another baseball season was done, the last pitch thrown, the last dirty uniform and jock tossed into the laundry, and my off-season training plan turned in for near certain approval, I had naught left to do but pack up my locker and sign off with the gals in the front office that I had received my travel voucher, travel expense check, confirmed latest contact information, etc ... when Arnie the clubhouse manager came looking for me.

“Spacey, have you been upstairs to the front office yet? I had a message to make sure and not let you leave before you picked up a box they’re holding for you.”

A box? “Ok, sure ... I’m heading up there next, ten minutes max, in case they call down again to pester you about it.” He nodded and scuttled off. The sooner the last player was finished and gone, the sooner he could start his final end of year clubhouse inventory and then go on vacation too, to a long hiking trip into deepest darkest Alaska for a month. There were a lot of jock straps and batting practice baseballs that would need counting and inspecting before next springtime!

I already had my travel voucher for my flights home, and my pay was automatically handled via accountants to my bank direct deposit account so I couldn’t imagine what the office had been holding onto for me, and it came as rather a complete surprise. It was a box with about four dozen assorted pieces of fan mail!

When I’d checked in with the team upon my call-up, a lot of paperwork was shoved at me to sign and approve of in a disturbingly short amount of time, and once my official MLB contract had my John Hancock on it, my eyes and brain started to quickly glaze over. Half the time I wasn’t quite sure what I was signing or for purpose. I did (now) vaguely remember a document being hurried signed that stated my preference for how the club should handle mail addressed to me that came c/o the club. There were lots of choices, actually ... and you’d be surprised at how many players (especially stars) that chose the club option to toss away all fan mail, unopened and unread. Most players took, the usual default that I had also apparently chosen after less than one second of thoughtful reflection, the option for the club to hold all mail for me until the end of the season. Star players might get tens of thousands of bits of mail, or even more, but my name was mercifully unknown except to the most rabid local fans.

“Spacey’s alright, I suppose,” I heard one fan casually mentioning my name during a sports discussion at a local bar, “pitches slow, slower, and slowest ... but at least he never hardly walks anyone, so when he serves up a dinger, it’s usually only a solo homer. Eats up innings though, so that might be good for your Rotisserie league team if your using a minimum innings pitched rule, or he’s just a dirt cheap pickup to draft for your fantasy team next spring, if nothing else ... assuming you can’t find anyone else who can give you more K’s.”

So ... I was worth about a dollar or two, in most fantasy leagues. That certainly meant that I wasn’t ‘exceptional’ in any way, shape, fashion, or manner, to anyone. I suppose that should have made the ‘new me’ feel contented, at doing a good job of keeping my light & bushels all well-hidden, but in truth it made my teeth grind just a bit. I wanted to aim a bit higher, into the territory of at least ‘he pretty good’, rather than being just alright ... an adequate temporary replacement until someone better came along (and with a 95 mph heater too).

Well ... at least I had some fan mail now, so that was a start. Having all of my mail (almost three months’ worth) saved up together actually made a great deal of sense. Most players were just too busy during the season to even filter through their mail to do simple triage on it until the end of the season anyway, and most guys liked to review all of their mail (and even answer some of it) during the off-season. I’ve even heard that some popular players are years (and even decades) behind in answering their fan mail, unless they’re super rich enough to be able to afford a secretary to forge their name to all of the baseball cards that kids mail in for his signature. One semi-star player later told me that he’d never once signed any of his own autograph requests – he sent them all to a kid brother to sign for him, in return for regular game tickets.

About fifty fan letters, more or less, didn’t look too formidable for me to handle this winter, and I wanted to give a personal reply back to everyone. The art of actual letter writing is nearly lost in these days of internet email, and I thought their extra effort ought to be rewarded ... but I of course didn’t have time to deal with that now, while still in New England. I crunched the mail into one of my suitcases, which offended the Fates ... so that very piece of luggage became lost for the next three weeks. I didn’t much miss all of the western wear freebie samples in it, but I was really put out that my brand new collection of bobble-head figures (with my face and name on them) that had been given out as a fan promotion on my last pitching start, seemed to now be misdirected to some airport in Spain.

You’re not even ‘just one of the guys’ in the clubhouse yet until you have your own bobble-head toy doll!

Most ancient cultures assigned a god specifically to cover every aspect of humanity and nature. In the case of lost luggage, the classical Greeks apparently determined that his name is Cleptomethious ... and somehow, I’d annoyed him. Being a God doesn’t excuse you in the least from being someone’s unwanted idiot relative (Hade’s wife’s nephew, I think) that has to be given some nominal job with the firm to keep the domestic peace ... but not any position of either authority or even simple competence. Being a total git, his divine job description seems to consist of nicking anything not nailed down, like my suitcase.

Sure, I had my suitcase back, about three weeks later, but this pushed everything three weeks further back than was strictly needful and I was very, very resentful at this lost time for quite a while.

Sorting it all, finally, on the kitchen dining table back home on the ranch, I found that the vast majority of the fan mail was the usual beg stuff; a fan (usually a kid), asking for an autograph for their collection, which I was happy to do, hand-signing a computer drafted form reply letter thanking them for their letter. That wasn’t too hard to do, and I replied back to almost everyone the first day I sat down to handle the correspondence.

If the kid hand-wrote the request, and obviously wasn’t sending me a form letter of his own, I’d include a 3x4” official photo that the club had taken of me in uniform right after my call-up. The club had given me a small box of them, at least a thousand, and this seemed like a good use for them. The official club group picture for that season didn’t include me, as it had been taken earlier in the spring, but next year I’d likely get a small box with a bunch of that picture too.

Some of the kids (or adults trying to fake me), wanted me to mail them (no SASE’s supplied) my rookie card, signed of course. There was just one little problem with that ... I didn’t have a rookie card! Topps had put out a limited Rookies series at the end of the season that covered most of the big prospect promotions to their Big Clubs, but they hadn’t included me. I guess I wasn’t a prospect in their book. I didn’t even make an appearance in AAA Miskatonic’s minor league card set, as the player photos had been taken earlier in the spring, before I arrived there. So those fans would have to settle for one of my pics in uniform too!

Unknown, unwanted and unloved ... I thought to myself as I was going through the remainder of the mail. Most of the rest of the dregs were from various opportunists, wanting me to either invest in some rather dodgy investment, or become a spokesperson for other (even less salubrious) enterprises. Nope! I just chucked all of these various blandishments into a file folder labeled ‘Weasels to Avoid’. Easily now done. The rest were sad requests for funds from (allegedly) various small time charities or folks hoping to touch me for some of my new hard-earned cash. Most of these smelled ‘scam’, especially when the alleged charity name didn’t appear when doing an internet web search. Two were actually legitimate, and after a brief vetting process I did send them some small token checks and asked them nicely to not sell my name on their donor list to other charities ... and they all did this anyway. All three of the private individuals claiming destitution could be located (pretty easily) on various known scammer lists, so their letters join the Weasel file too, without regrets.

The NFL, as part of its week-long rookie training class program every year, runs a day-long financial awareness seminar that tries to teach these poor kids, drafted from off of the streets in some cases, about how to handle being suddenly rather rich, maybe even a millionaire now. One of the most important parts of that class was learning how to say ‘No’, to fringe family members, ‘old friends’, and needy causes that will all want a piece of your good fortune. I sort of wish that MLB had a similar program, but fortunately I hadn’t needed it, as I’d always been good about handling money. Mostly because I’d never had very much of it! Sooner or later, my name would be on every ‘sucker list’, for both the legitimate and illegitimate groups, and my name would circulate endlessly thereafter as a target. Fortunately, I’d never had much trouble learning to say ‘No’.

The final bit of mail was a postcard, and as it was unsigned and had no written message on it, I almost immediately threw it away as being of no consequence. Fortunately, later that night I had a sudden impulse to look at the postcard again, much closer, and this time I noticed a few subtle clues.

First of all, the postcard was an old one, 1950’s or 60’s, the front photo featuring a vintage drive-in motel near Flagstaff, Arizona, The Sagebrush Motor Inn. The old retro neon sign featured in the picture looked pretty neat, showing a cowboy trying to lasso a cactus. I doubted that the sign was even still working nowadays, over fifty years later after this photo had been shot, but the old neon had definitely been something to see back in its day. That thought got my brain thinking just a little ... hadn’t Leah told me that Roberta went to Flagstaff (or near it) regularly every month and that the girls might try and meet there, when they could? I was pretty sure of it ... but was this the place?

Secondly, the postmark on the rear of the card was pretty recent and dated roughly a week after my call-up, making this likely the very first piece of mail sent to me via the official mailing address of the ball club ... an address I had included in my longer hand-written letter to Leah I had written on the plane. Heck, I didn’t even have a permanent ‘home’ in Boston yet, as the team had me put up in an extended stay hotel near the stadium. If/when I made the club again in the spring, I’d then have to make some better arrangements, like an apartment, at least.

As there was no visible message in the correspondence section of the card, I went all paranoid counter-spy on it, trying to find some message written in invisible ink that couldn’t see or read. All of the usual tricks like holding it up to the light and using lemon juice on it didn’t work, so I decided that ‘no message’ equaled some other secret message that I didn’t understand. Next, I looked for a micro-dot, or something similar and couldn’t find one ... or figure out how I could have read a micro-dot, if there was one to find. Stuff like that will drive you crazy, if you let it.

The address written on the card was done with a modern pen, I decided ... and with a distinctly feminine hand. It was not level and uniform however, and the slant of the mailing address inclined slightly towards the upper right, pointing towards the stamp in a vaguely suggestive manner. As a kid, I’d steamed off old stamps from envelopes and this stamp didn’t seem especially tightly stuck to the paper back anyway, so it didn’t take me too long to steam the adhesive off over a boiling tea kettle. The results were worth the effort though!

‘L&R’ was plainly there to be read, underneath where the stamp had been, along with a little heart symbol underneath. Subtle ... but I’d found the clue at the end – or was this some long postponed vengeance by the MiB who planned to now lure me in? Fuck if I now knew!

I had zero debate though, about getting in my almost brand new extended cab pickup truck and driving non-stop straight to Flagstaff, except to get gas, to find out! It was an impulsive decision and I admit I hadn’t thought through my clever plan much, if at all. I hadn’t bothered to throw anything into the truck along with me other than my dad’s old 20 gauge shotgun, along with a box of 00-buck shells. If there was trouble, I figured, this should take care of it. If I needed food, extra water, or enough guns and ammunition to start a war in Central America, I could buy it there in Flagstaff, if needed.

I’d been without a car or truck, since leaving Randy’s in Arizona when I’d left the Bird to Leah’s care. Mostly in the minors, you don’t really need one. I’d gotten along fine in AA/AAA without one as I had found rental places to stay at near both ballparks. Once I had been called up to New England, a fairly reputable (or at least not notoriously disreputable) local used car chain offered me some dough if I’d do a TV commercial for them. It was a fairly funny and cheesy ad full of my ‘Aw Shucks’ media persona and after I cashed the check they approached me about doing more, with the offer of a free vehicle. Ok, I agreed ... if they could work out a cash or trade agreement with a dealer in or near Van Horn, Texas, by my ranch home, or else arrange to have the truck transported down there. It took some finagling, but in the end I picked out a nice last-year’s model truck here in Beantown, and an auto carrier ported it all the way to West Texas for me and delivered it right to my driveway, waiting for me when I arrived home.