The Cactus League: A Timeful Game

Baseball is called a “timeless” sport, and in one sense, it’s precisely that—being one of the few professional team sports whose terminus is not dictated by a game clock, in contrast to such time-bound sports as hockey, basketball, soccer, and football. In baseball, a half inning could conceivably be over in as little as a minute (there have been at least eighty-four three-pitch half-innings in baseball history, according to Baseball Almanac)...or it could go on for an hour or more. Games are generally nine innings long, but if a game is tied at the end of nine innings, it could theoretically go on forever if the tie is never successfully broken. Thus far, the longest professional baseball game has been a mere 33 innings, lasting a svelte 8 hours and 25 minutes^[1]—a long time, indeed, but well short of infinitely long^[2]. So perhaps it would be more accurate to call baseball a timeful game?

We use time to measure change, according to Aristotle; and the concept of time and the inevitability of change are both featured prominently in The Cactus League, Emily Nemens’s ostensible celebration of America’s favorite pastime. Early in the novel, the unnamed first-person narrator, a veteran sportswriter whose monologues open each of the nine “innings'' (chapters) of the novel, avers: “Nothing is static: not the bluegrass-ryegrass blend growing out there; not the architecture; not the angle of the sun hitting the seats ... all is in flux” (p. 4). Though by no means a particularly profound observation, it serves to introduce a major theme—in fact, the main theme—of The Cactus League: the persistence and ubiquity of change at all levels. Nemens deftly weaves this theme into the fabric of her baseball tale—which, in truth, has very little to do with baseball.

Our sportswriter friend does not narrate the entire story; he shares that duty with a third-person omniscient voice that narrates the “innings” proper. Our friend gives us the prologue to each inning in a voice whose verbose grandiloquence reminds me a lot of a less profane version of Hank Azaria’s Jim Brockmire. The omniscient third-person narrator gives us the stories of the various characters—supplies, that is, most of the plot. Our Brockmire-like friend links those personal stories—told in human time (hours; days; years)—to geological and historical events unfolding on a far more expansive time scale, spanning epochs; and he is decidedly upfront about his intention: “Here’s the thing about baseball, and all else: everything changes. Whether it’s the slow creep of glaciers dripping toward the sea, or the steady piling up of cut stones, rock upon rock, until the wall reaches chest high, nothing is still. Sometimes change comes as quick and catastrophic as a line drive.” But sometimes, our friend knows, change takes eons, and happens so slowly that, not only do we not notice it, we would probably deny that it is even happening. What could be more immutable than the mountains of the Arizona desert? What more permanent than the desert itself? Well, our friend reminds us at various points in the story, those mountains, before they eroded over the ages, used to be measured in miles, not mere thousands of feet; that desert used to be a vast sea:

Remember how I said this was a long game? Let’s put it in perspective, consider the history of this place in geological time. Take a look at Salt River Fields’ cleat-pocked outfield and imagine this: the ground under [the outfielder’s] feet was once a sea, shallow and warm and dotted with coral reefs, clusters of orangey calcium deposits spread like neon inkblots across the seafloor. The water was that impossible, startling blue that makes even an Arizona sky look as though it’s been mixed with a tubful of gray, and sharks swam through the dugouts, finning to the mound and back.

...

Today, Arizona is littered with shark teeth, dentin and enamel fangs lost in the sand. Some are as small as the top joint of your pinkie, others the length of a tall man’s index. You don’t have to go scratching too far below the surface to find one. With a bit of spit and a thumb rub, it’ll still glow white as bone. What’s past is prologue, a murderer once said. It goes without saying, but there’s some drama in baseball, too. [p. 39-40]

He also gives us this gem of an opening couple of lines on p. 81:

Let me remind you of our timeline. We’re a few games into the season, a few billion years into Arizona’s geological history.

Jason Goodyear, whose last name consists, appropriately enough, of a value judgment melded with a period of time, is the main character of The Cactus League—if, indeed, it can be said to have one—and he is, in fact, not having a very good year. Though he is a millionaire superstar outfielder—a Triple Crown recipient and winner of multiple Gold Glove and MVP awards—he is deep in debt because of an out-of-control gambling habit. His wife has just divorced him because of it. In an act of senseless vandalism while spending the evening with a woman that the film Bull Durham taught us to call a “baseball Annie”^[3], he nearly burns down Taliesin West, the landmark Frank Lloyd Wright Scottsdale home, and is arrested. The arrest costs him a lucrative shoe deal with Nike. A loan shark is demanding he pay back a half-million-dollar loan or have his limbs broken. He has already liquidated all of his assets and is living in a utility shed on the premises of the Arizona stadium where his team, the LA Lions, play their spring training games. Jason’s having that kind of year...and it’s only spring.

But he’s not the only one having a bad year. The novel opens with the arrival of Audrey and Michael Taylor at their spring home in Scottsdale; to their dismay the house, in their absence, has been ransacked, trashed by squatters who have also stolen Michael’s beloved Cadillac. Michael is a former ballplayer of little note, mostly a bench-warmer during his playing career, and currently a coach for the Lions. He is now in his seventies and had been forlornly hoping to be named the team’s batting coach, which he now knows will not happen because one of the club’s owners dismissed Michael’s appeal without consulting the other owners, hoping to drive the old man to retirement. The reader is led to believe, at the beginning, that this will be Michael’s story. It is not.

Nemens quickly veers off to other characters without in any way “resolving” the Taylors’ story. She doesn’t resolve any of her many other characters’ stories either—though parts of them resonate throughout. The Cactus League is not about resolutions, and especially not tidy resolutions. Just as the story of the land we currently call Arizona is “about” a desert only if you arbitrarily consider its current state to be an endpoint beyond which it will never evolve (which our sportswriter friend constantly reminds us it is not), so it is with Nemens’s human characters: Nemens is thoroughly uninterested in telling us how her characters will “end up”; like the earth itself, they are in a constant state of flux, albeit on a smaller scale, both physically and temporally.

There is an “inning”—the sixth—devoted to the largely venal, utterly shallow baseball wives, who are led by Melissa Moyers, spouse of the Lions’ old pitching ace Hal, who has just been replaced by a younger ace hurler. Melissa is a phony, a judgmental snob, referring to the “baseball Annies” who have not yet managed to corral a ballplayer husband as “cleat chasers”, and gleefully gossiping with the other wives about what might have caused the split between Jason and Liana Goodyear. (Jason’s gambling problem is not common knowledge.) Melissa is annoyed that Liana shows up to Melissa’s lingerie party, thereby depriving Melissa and the other wives of the pleasure of gossiping about Liana and her former husband. Melissa believes that Liana, as an ex-wife, should realize she’s no longer part of the wives’ clique.

Melissa is difficult to sympathize with...until the very end of the inning when Nemens provides some context. In a scene of genuine pathos, Melissa stands alone outside her own house while the other baseball wives continue with the lingerie party inside:

Melissa drinks the rest of her glass in a gulp. Now she does not need her jacket; the whiskey warms her from the inside.

“Hal wants to get a divorce,” she says to the potted aloe. There, she’s finally said it. But nothing happens. ... “He’s going to leave me.”

She’s not a crier, but she feels her eyes getting hot and heavy with liquid. ...

Melissa decides in that moment: they [the other women at the party] can all stay. The beautiful baby and the cleat chaser and the randy politician, all those women she hated and those she thought were her friends. Instead, she will go. She will slink back through the yard and up the hillside and through the desert mountains. She will go into the night and no one, but no one, will notice she is gone. [p. 196]

Just as Hal himself has been easily replaced by a new ace pitcher, Melissa is on the verge of being replaced by a younger “cleat chaser”. Her relationships with her husband and the other baseball wives were always transactional and these transactions, Melissa acknowledges, have now come to an end—so abruptly that there is no one left for her to talk to about her impending irrelevance other than an aloe plant, whose soothing balm can offer “nothing” to salve the wounds to Melissa’s psyche. Everything changes.

The narrative thus regularly strays from “main character” Jason Goodyear, but he’s always on the periphery at least, and the plot circles back to him at various points in the story, including at the end. Jason leverages his star power to convince William Goslin, a rookie signed straight out of high school, to lend him $500,000 so Jason can pay off his debts. Goslin has just received a $2 million signing bonus and is flattered that a big star like Jason would so much as give him the time of day. Jason knows this; he’s been watching Goslin and knows he’ll be easy to manipulate, unable to refuse Jason’s request.

Jason’s deliberate grooming of the rookie shows his selfishness. But he is also capable of genuine heroism. Immediately after he uses Goslin’s loan to pay off his debt to the loan shark in the stadium’s parking lot (he is also forced to hand over the beloved Jeep he’s had since high school), he somehow spots a young boy lying unconscious, overcome by the heat, in a sweltering car in the stadium parking lot. This boy, we know from an earlier inning, is 6-year-old Alex, the son of the drug-addicted woman who’d been squatting in the Taylors’ house but has now moved on to other unoccupied homes. “Momma” works in concessions at the new stadium. On this day she’d had no choice but to take Alex with her, but she promptly abandons him to go off on a drug binge with her boyfriend.

Earlier, our quidnunc sportswriter friend had also encountered Alex and his high school-aged sister Michelle. Through him we get this background:

I wonder what [Alex]’d say if I told him his hero-among-heroes, Jason Goodyear, was in trouble. [Alex loves the Lions, especially Jason, his favorite player.] Would Alex believe the left fielder was as broke as his family? That the athlete was homeless and squatting, too? My guess is that the kid would just giggle at me, shake his head, and say, Rawr. [Alex has been told this is what Lions say.] That’s what he says to most strangers these days, the kids at his new school and his momma’s friends, the ones who come over for parties that start after he’s already meant to be in bed. The social worker at school said she’s worried, … but his momma waved it off. He’s just going through a phase.

Coping, his sister told me as we drove to school. I’d picked them up at the bus stop, Michelle knowing better than to get in a stranger’s car, but also knowing they’d missed the bus again, and she didn’t want to be late for her first-period exam. It’s what he does when he feels scared, she said. ...

Rawr, Alex said when he jumped out of the car. … I believe Alex is on to something. It’s not a half-bad idea, figuring out some phrase that could make us think fondly of ... our heroes and convince us, even briefly, that we’re big and bold and fierce. We've all been in situations where we could use a bit more courage. [p. 233-4]

Alex has been told to wait for momma in the car with the air conditioning on; but the air conditioning fails and Alex is afraid to leave the car because he’ll get in trouble. Alex is near death when Jason, ignoring the potential jeopardy to his own career, breaks the car’s glass using a rock and his bare fist and rescues the boy, who is wearing his beloved Jason Goodyear tee-shirt.

This is the point where the two narrative voices - and in a sense the two time schemes (human and historical-geological) merge, as our sportswriter friend—who has been pursuing his What’s-up-with-Jason-Goodyear? story but has so far remained on the sidelines, commenting on the action like a Greek chorus—enters the fray:

That’s when I come over [to help], having been trailing Jason at an inconspicuous distance all morning. ...

And what about Jason? What does he think? When he hears the wail [of the approaching ambulance] he leans over the limp boy and squeezes him tighter. “Hang on, little man,” he whispers into the boy’s tiny ear. He caresses the boy’s damp cheek, leaving streaks of blood. He’s cut up his hand pretty bad, smashing that window. That’ll be stitches, a week out of the lineup—if not more. ...

“Hang on,” he says again. Jason Goodyear means it as some sort of hope for that wilted, red-faced kid in his arms, but goddamn it if his words couldn’t have been meant for himself, if they couldn’t have been meant for us all. [p. 271-2]

The sportswriter’s final words represent a type of merging of the different timescales. The sportswriter had been the voice of the large-scale, long-term perspective on things, of the Historical Overview that dwarfs the merely personal, of the march of time and change that is indifferent to our puny, personal, vainly human perspective. But our sportswriter friend is now an active participant in the human drama.

In keeping with Nemens’s handling of the other plotlines in The Cactus League, we don’t know what ultimately happens to young Alex. Does he die? Does he live? Is he removed from his dangerous home situation? What is Jason’s future? Does Nemens offer no hope? Things, as we know, change...but can they change for the better?

Nemens does vouchsafe us a hint along these lines, subtly, apologetically, and, appropriately enough, non-chronologically dropped by our friend the sportswriter nearly 20 pages earlier, included among the items in his 9th inning litany of unlikely events:

And it’s improbable that Liana and Jason will ever get back together—though she does come to the hospital when he calls—but wait now. I’m getting ahead of myself. [p. 255]

This proffered tidbit (which is immediately withdrawn) almost certainly is a reference to the aftermath of the Alex rescue (“I'm getting ahead of myself”). Before the omniscient third-person narrator even recounts Alex’s ordeal in the overheated car, the sportswriter hints at the possibility of a reconciliation between Jason and his ex-wife at the hospital where Alex will be treated. That Liana shows up when Jason calls may be a good sign, it may say something about their prospects for reconciliation. But it’s just as possible an upset Jason calls her because the boy dies and she shows up merely out of kindness. We can’t know for sure. Everything changes, but it is equally true in Nemens’s novel that nothing is ever resolved.

And that is one of the novel’s greatest strengths.

Selected Works of Baseball Fiction Available at MCLS

Bang the Drum Slowly by Mark Harris. Henry "Author" Wiggen, a star pitcher, befriends a slow-talking catcher from Georgia named Bruce Pearson who is more ridiculed than respected by his teammates. When Pearson learns he is terminally ill with Hodgkin’s disease and is to be sent to the minor leagues, Wiggen rallies his teammates to keep the catcher among them and inspires Pearson to become a better player before his time runs out.

Calico Joe by John Grisham. In this novel, the careers of a golden boy rookie hitter for the Cubs and a hard-hitting Mets pitcher take very different paths. The baseball is thrilling, but it is what happens off the field that makes this story a classic.

You Know Me Alby Ring Lardner. Epistolary novel consisting of letters from a professional baseball player, Jack Keefe, to his friend Al Blanchard in their hometown of Bedford, Indiana.

Shoeless Joe by W. P. Kinsella. The source for the much-loved baseball movie Field of Dreams.

The Natural by Bernard Malamud. Roy Hobbs is a baseball prodigy whose career is sidetracked when he is shot by a woman whose motivation remains mysterious. Source of the Robert Redford movie of the same name.

Double Play by Robert B. Parker. It is 1947, the year Jackie Robinson breaks major-league baseball's color barrier. This is the story of that season, as told through the eyes of a difficult, brooding, and wounded man named Joseph Burke who is hired by Brooklyn Dodgers manager Branch Rickey to guard Robinson. The bodyguard faces some hard truths of his own, in a world where the wrong associations can prove fatal.

The Great American Novel by Philip Roth. A baseball farce in which Philip Roth casts an unlikely group of men as the country's baseball heroes.

^[1] I heartily recommend you click through and read the Wikipedia article on that 33-inning game between the Pawtucket Red Sox and the Rochester Red Wings—it is a genuine laff-riot. Take, for instance, these lines: “Several times, a team would come close to victory before circumstances changed. When Wade Boggs drove in the tying run in the bottom of the 21st inning after a Rochester run, even the Pawtucket players groaned.”

^[2] A new rule placing a “zombie runner” on second base at the start of each inning after the 9th has gone a long way toward ensuring extra inning games don’t go on for too long now. In all likelihood, the day of the 18-, 19-, 20-inning game is over.

^[3] The term pre-dates the movie, though. Bull Durham just brought it more into the mainstream.

- by Tom G., Hopewell Branch