Two weeks after trading rotation mainstay Pedro Martinez, the Moline Greens dealt the last piece of their dynasty days, center fielder Andruw Jones, picked in the 5th round of the 1995 draft, traded today to Chicago along with recently acquired third base prospect Edwin Encarnacion for enigmatic outfielder Vernon Wells, who will take over AJ's center field duties. Wells shares with Jones a storied minor-league career that has never quite translated into superstardom in the majors unlike the comparably celebrated Alex Rodriguez, Chipper Jones, and James Allman. Wells is only a year and a half younger than Jones, but his salary and service time are much less. Wells is signed through 2009, at which point some one of the many minor-league outfielders in the organization may be ready to replace him.
This morning at the John Deere Headquarters on John Deere Road in Moline, the organization's hooded spokesman was muted. Monosyllables prevailed. Mostly, gestures sufficed. Shoulders rose and fell. A head moved this way and that away. Hands spun slow and low then hid behind the back. The spokesman took no questions. After laconic announcement, he trudged off without farewell, his green hood tattered where it meets the gown, his ensemble faded, threadbare, and caked with dried mud, the creases and cracks in his scuffed black brogans visible below the torn hem of his sage robe, sighs wafting from his slumped form.
Two and a half years ago the Greens won their fourth shoe and set a league record with 111 wins. Under the hot sun by the dry banks of the Rock River, that time seems long past. Since November, 2002, the organization has turned over the entire lineup of that championship squad with the exception of left fielder Pat Burrell. Those traded include future HOFers Scott Rolen, Derek Jeter, and Vladimir Guerrero. Their respective replacements, Sean Burroughs, Rafael Furcal, and Jody Gerut, have, charitably, not reached such high levels of performance, as the team's current 35-40 mark makes amply clear. The upside is a considerably lower payroll, which gives the team room for the expanded salary demands of young players at every position except second base. It helps that the team's farm system still ranks as the best in the league, led by 2004 first rounder Delmon Young and the resurgent Chris Snelling and supplemented by some fast movers from the March draft, right hander Thomas Diamond and shortstop Asdrubal Cabrera.
"The Shoe is not ours by right," said general manager Rolf Samuels. "Player development is hit or miss, especially with pitchers. We may win again. But we've got a stretch of losing before that happens. And hot as it's been this summer, maybe it's just as well that we're closer to the basement."
It was a fitting sendoff to contention and a farewell wave at winning before full-scale, all-out, no-holds-barred rebuilding in Moline. A 5-1 week ended with a loss to New Orleans, a loss that snapped a nine-game winning streak for the Greens, their best winning streak of the year by buckets, yards, and miles. In his last appearance in the green and yellow, late ace Pedro Martinez held New Orleans to three hits over eight strong innings as the Greens bested Greg Maddux and the Hurlers, 6-1. Pedro lowered his ERA to 2.91 with the win and his seven strikeouts increased his league-leading total to 118. The offensive highlight of the week was a 17-3 mauling of Caracas that featured a 4 for 5 night with three doubles from first baseman Nick Johnson. In the laugher, the Greens coaxed a dozen walks from the errant arms of the New Orleans staff.
That offensive explosion helped pushed the Greens team slugging percentage over .400 for the first time all year. It also nudged the team one game above the basement, now occupied by Dutchess County. How long the Greens can stay one step above the bottom is an open question. They left bedding, hats, and gloves down there and they had begun to cultivate extensive illuminated gardens with heritage crops they had assigned poignant names like Rosebud, Flashpoint, Jessica, and Sweet Mother of God, Get Me Out of Here.
The success of the last two weeks softens slightly the loss of Pedro and the fear of new lineups and rotation created by IT director Nick Pulak using his Acme Program for Baseball Analysis. As the smoky deliberations for a new manager continue to stall at the John Deere Headquarters and as Jody Gerut resumes his playing after an injury delay of two months, the APBA software promises to substitute statistical analysis for on-field decision making. "If the worst that happens is that we return to the basement," said general manager Rolf Samuels, "then at least we'll have learned something about these young players who were supposed to develop into ballplayers at some point. Plus there are those plants that we miss so. Jessica."
Saturday morning, at the John Deere Headquarters, with shortness of breath and cracked voice, a hooded spokesman for the Moline Greens announced the trade of Martinez and catcher Toby Hall to the Raleigh Renegades. In return for that battery, Raleigh relinquished RHP Denny Bautista, RHP Matt Cain, 3B Edwin Encarnacion, and the Renegades' first-round pick in 2007. In the transaction, Raleigh also received the Greens' 5th round pick in next year's supplemental draft. Four extra picks in the first two rounds of the 2006 draft make the loss of a fifth-round pick less dear, although the contributions of Martinez in 2005 make the Renegades' first-round pick less promising now than it appeared in November, 2003, when the Greens traded a 2004 first-round pick for a like pick from Raleigh in 2006.
As for Martinez, "there's little to say about Pedro that has not already been said," croaked the spokesman. "Without him, Moline would be as shoeless as Joe Jackson, that illiterate rogue." The spokesman gasped for breath, sobbed, and paused before continuing. Trading Pedro, he said, meant that the Greens had "fully embraced their rebuilding." (Their entrenched position in the lower reaches of the Northern Division suggests that such an embrace need not have awaited the trade of the greatest pitcher in franchise history). The spokesman expressed "deep gratitude" for the contributions that Martinez had made in Moline, including generous holiday bonuses of peppery dark chocolate and absinthe to all the members of the front office staff. "Vaya con dios, Pedro," said the spokesman, crossing himself and hopping twice on his left foot.
Losing Hall held less significance. The spokesman said that the arrival of J.D. Closser, disappointing as it had been, meant the Greens had little need for Hall, a starter who chose a rebuilding year to begin hitting at age 29. With Closser and Ramon Castro playing regularly and Guillermo Quiroz, Josh Willingham, and Brayan Pena on the horizon, Hall's days were numbered. That number now stands at 0.
To make room for the additions to the Moline roster, the Greens released RHP Colby Lewis, acquired in the 2003 trade of Mike Sweeney. The promise and subsequent failure of Lewis (and Ed Yarnall and Dennys Reyes et al.) belie whatever hope the organization has in the future success of Bautista and Cain. Pitchers break, water leaks, stains endure.
It is not the chill, really, that makes the basement dismal in May. A basement cannot be a happy place at the best of times, true. At best, the cellar shields its users from harm above: the bombs of Bhagdad, the twisters of the Plains. The basement hardens in winter, hardens and dries. Above ground, today, out where there are seasons and days, it is not winter. The curling Vinton Hybrid seed calendar says so. The dirt surrounding the concrete foundation stays a comfortable 55 degrees year round, so with a Goodwill sweater, a hooded sweatshirt, or a homburg, the chill is not so bad. We cannot see the earth. We think it there.
The great discomfort of the basement is the damp. There's more of that come springtime. The walls seep. Assiduous plugging of new fissures cannot stop the moisture from creeping through the walls. Hair falls flat across the forehead. Crackers lose their snap fast. The gathered greens from doted interior gardens droop wet in the salad bowls. Fungi sweat. Shoe leathers slicken. Coughs linger. Counter measures are fire and machinery. But there's no fireplace down here. No visible vent to the outside. The potted ferns absorb carbon dioxide from the tired lungs of weary miners. The fluorescent banks overhead fool the ferns, who have been down here so long they know no better. Once the ferns' photosensitive cells knew natural light, knew a place apart from this and lights other than these. No, those were other cells, cells now part of the fern's family tree, cells replaced by these subterraneans for whom the basement is home, the only environment they've known. These are the same ferns only in name and location, not in memory. The sun? What is a sun? The ferns do not know. So the miners tack up posters of Kansas goldenrod prairies suffused in sunlight. They post shimmering prints of white-lit stone Greek homes, advertisements from the Hellenic Tourism Organization for travels aboveground. The miners put up bright charts illustrating the solar system so the ferns won't stay Ptolemaic. The posters stand for absent space. And when black dots merge with time into smudge on the posters' white backing and mildew claims its own, a miner pulls down the diseased paper, and sends out a call above: another copy, please, from where the world is bright and dry.
The lights overhead humbuzz humbuzz humbuzz. That throb is more bearable than the crackle when the ballast charge ignites the argon gas within. That crackle happens seldom here; here the lights stay on. When one lamp dies, it takes so much with it. It hangs on, you feel it, trying to find a glow, like a drained car battery in a North Dakota winter. Although the lamps lack sentience, it is as if they know. When one bulb begins to falter, it goes quickly, an act of mercy to the prisoners of the deep. That is a small comfort of this dim place: that the bookend ballasts need not cyclically prod a lamp that has no life left to offer. The steady drone does not allow for clear reception of radio, static in the subterranean white light. One Spanish-speaking station flickers in sometimes. It comes from south Texas, someone says, though he says he does not know Spanish. Past that, there is a faint signal from a pentacostal station that seems to be run out of a local college. When the voices flit into audible, they seem to be chanting doctrine from mystical prophesy of the 19th Century. The sound oscillates. The message cannot move our heathen souls.
We whisper here more than talk. We murmur more than whisper. Mostly, we sit, hushed, eyes averted. We shift on haunches that ache with the waiting. Bones press flesh. Our cushions are vinyl, slick, the air inside is cold and indifferent. Skin sticks and squeaks and slides on plastic pads. Thin cotton throws fast grow damp and clammy. Towels won't dry. Above our heads, the rhythmic hum of the lights endures, soothes us in its inevitability. When the Ebac CD100 Industrial Dehumidifier runs, occasionally, its pitch rises above the chirr of the lights. Together, they drown out the sighs of the discontented. There are many discontented in Moline in 2005, many. But it costs so much to run that dehumidifier. And the organization's sunk costs are already so high. So much has already been sacrificed to the putative rebuilding efforts of a once-proud franchise. We have the books to record that legacy, but their pages stick and the effort seems too much. History changes, but it changes nothing. These are the Greens underground.
Even here, there are stories of smoke and fire from above. Decisions will be made up there, change will reach us below. Grey skies are gonna clear up. The sun'll come out tomorrow. Bet your bottom dollar, the dollar at the bottom of the pile. Even here, here below a decaying pile of moist heat, there are tales of development and player targets, five-year plans, reorganization. Some of us mumble about indefatigable arms and power bats, while we sleep mostly, to ourselves mostly, half-articulated prayers. Lethargic lips mouth dared hopes: a natural on the farm, talent on the horizon, international free agents, pop overthrows, dry heat. Such rumors arise when anchored wall clocks tell us that we must sleep, even though the lights stay on. The lights stay on. The clocks mark time in ten time zones and six languages. The Cold War is dead; long live the cold war. Of the outside stories, who can say? Who can confirm? Who can deny? We are all down here together, serviced by the outside through tunnels guarded by chimeras, rogues from the island of Dr. Moreau. What can we know? Where, then, do the myths come from? From the souls of impoverished men, from collective unconscious, vestigial hope, and atavistic memory. It is not March. It is dismay. We have no right to hope. We have not earned it. We have earned nothing; check the standings. But the memory of late hope holds us. I knew a hope once. She looked something like you, if I can recall. But now I am so tired, so very tired. Hope keeps us eating, makes us willing to rise each clocked day. We rise and we stay here. We do not dig beds wide and deep, deep, wide troughs, sloughs of despond, bins for swill for such refuse as we. That far we have not fallen. We have not fallen that far yet.
Two weeks into the 2005 season, a 67-51 runs allowed to runs scored differential should have the Moline Greens settled in the damp basement of the Northern Division, gnawing hard biscuits, fussing with the shortwave radio, comforting themselves with sad old songs, and watching the rats scurrying across the floor. Instead, two one-run victories this week pushed the Greens' record in one-run games to 4-0. Given the mediocrity of Juan Cruz and the thinness of the bullpen, that luck won't last long. This is a team with an offensive future and a question mark in place of its pitching staff.
The Greens divided their week down the middle. They began by dropping three straight to the visiting Baltimore Hons, who battered Cruz for five runs in the top of the ninth of game 1 before taking the next two games more handily, 8-4 and 4-1. It was pretty galling to see ex-Green Aaron Rowand go 5-8 with two doubles and a triple in the first two games, while his center field counterpart, weren't-you-supposed-to-be-a-superstar-by-now Andruw Jones, went 1-10 in the series. Against London, Moline reversed brooms and took all three games, thanks to two one-run wins. The most dramatic of those wins was an extra-inning affair in game two, ended by a Jose Reyes double in the bottom of the 13th. Reyes has been playing second while the team awaits the return of starter Adam Kennedy, who should begin a minor-league rehab next week.
The search for a successor to Joe Morgan continues, even as disabled Jody Gerut works magic from the dugout with IT guru Nick Pulak supplying the necessary software. Brown smoke from the John Deere Headquarters this afternoon again signaled that no new skipper had been selected despite clandestine discussions that have now lasted for ten days. Since the start of the conclave, baseball birders have parked along John Deere Road late each afternoon and trained their binoculars on the treetops above One John Deere Place in Moline. Awaiting the traditional green smoke that marks the selection of a new leader, the birders have so far had to content themselves with brown smoke, blue jays, blackbirds, and one mangy bald eagle.
A shroud of secrecy surrounding the proceedings means that observers have resorted to speculation. An unnamed source implied that the duration of the conclave marked factionalism within. KJOC sports disc jockey Aaron "Big Dog" Johnson said it was likely that the length of deliberations signaled concern about the direction of the team in what has all the signs of being a rebuilding year. The Quad Cities chapter of the National Organization of Women organized a protest of 50 or so ladies, who carried signs protesting the representation of women in recent Greens' events. They hired a small propeller plane, which circled the 1,400 acres of the headquarters, displaying a banner which declared "Women Are Not the Enemy." Team ethicist Suzann Moertl was excluded from the negotiations, as were all the members of the Greens organization, including surprised general manager Rolf Samuels. Still, Moertl wondered if she might help the secret members of the Deere inner circle, who were, she speculated, stuck in a spiritual funk. "These are not decisions that should be made without the guidance of Jehovah and good coffee." Moertl offered to pray on their behalf and treat them all to a round of lattés from Zeek's, but no reply to her offer came from the curtained windows of the 400-seat auditorium, where inner sanctum Deere officials remain gathered.
Her name, she said, was Betty Willes. She was twenty, a putative junior student nurse at St. Ambrose University in Davenport, past the taxing coursework of anatomy and physiology but not yet free of school, working clinical rotations at the Trinity Medical Center in Moline. She was more thin than chunky, possessed of a thin upper lip and thick lower. She was attractive but not beautiful, clear skinned, a perky native of Milan. She favored patriotic sweatshirts over demure cardigans. She said she was the second of two daughters of a divorced clerk in the Soy Fuels division of the Illinois Department of Commerce, Industry, Sobriety, and Community. She was a dishwater blonde, the kind of color that only darkens on the road to thirty.
He was black, graying, sometimes mustached, usually self important, 61, retired from a Hall of Fame playing career, a manager entering his second decade in Moline, beginning in his prolixity to become an organizational embarrassment despite the team's success under his charge. He was also married, though it was easy to forget that living in the Quad Cities. Joe, little Joe, flapping Joe Morgan, long-time manager of the Greens, took Betty back to his Sherrard, Illinois, home to help with his recuperation from a hard fall in the parking lot of Moline Park, a February fall that broke multiple bones in his left arm.
Her assigned role was restorative--nurse, cook, helper, distraction. Betty sorted the mail and recycled what she could, incinerating the rest. She fed his tiger goldfish; some survived. She waxed her legs in the downstairs bathroom. With plastic chopsticks she scratched the itch beneath his cast. She drove his Lexus RX330 to Southpark Mall for herbal supplements (his) and Tim McGraw compact discs (hers). She planted tulip bulbs on the south side of the house. She thawed and ate frozen chicken wings from the upright freezer in the basement. In the company of other men, she visited the Figge Art Museum in Davenport. At the Moline Public Library, she charged a laptop that may not have been hers. The library's late-shift custodian was suspicious, but he couldn't be sure. She talked with a hooded man in a GMC truck in the parking lot of the John Deere Headquarters down the road from Moline Park. In his Sherrard home, Joe pawed her post-adolescent bosom with an appetite sharpened by years of sagging flesh, his own, his wife's. He reached for her unslumped bum as though baseball no longer mattered. She mixed his morning gruel with sedatives and rifled through his papers in his slumber. She used his ATM card to drain his savings account. She drove his Lexus to St. Louis on Friday and flew to Belize with $18,000, his. She wrecked his amplifier. He woke from a long sleep yesterday without his World Series rings, his car, his savings account, a 512MB USB flash drive, and much of his pride. There is no Soy Fuels division of the Illinois Department of Commerce, Industry, Sobriety, and Community. What was her name?
Joe's wife has lived in the Bay area for years. She and Joe settled there at the end of Joe's playing days. Joe grew up in Oakland. Joe left the area and has been AWOL from that relationship for a decade now, since he took the wheel of the Big Green Combine. That wheel is no longer his. Sometimes they come back. Ashamed, belittled, bereaved, aimless, carless, Joe called his wife. She took him back. She did not ask where he had been. She took him back. He deserved less. For his arrogance, neglect, and infidelity, for his hubris, he deserved nothing. Still, she forgave him. He flew back to San Francisco Easter morning. He left Ruhl & Ruhl Realtors to sell his Sherrard home after Mayflower packed and moved its contents west across the country, obliterating traces of his time in the Midwest.
Now Joe is gone from Moline, gone before the season begins, gone before the 2005 Greens push the machine into gear and take the field, gone before he had to suffer watching the Greens drop below the surface, bob below .500, and wait in rebuilding waters for the lift from the farm system that will offset the leakage of years, steady the ship, stay the course, and steer her towards the land of success that is her heritage.
In Homestead, Florida, the Moline Greens' spring-training home, days before their return to Moline and the start of another baseball year, the team scrambles. Morgan's self-aggrandizing ways had grown tiresome, all knew that. No Joe story about the Greens was free from the mighty Reds of thirty years ago, especially in the last couple years as the team fell from its own earned glory. If he had not fled, he might have been pink slipped anyway. He had long expressed distaste for guiding any team through the rebuilding process. But what man in that organization, what soldier on that field does not feel some sympathy for Joe's missteps? What husband who polls fans from the team hotel to break out of a slump does not think "there but for fortune"? And to a man, in the wake of Joe's departure, who does not wonder about the immediate direction of the team? With Joe Morgan gone, arrogance and all, who would, who will steer the ship? Is the pool of spring training NRI candidates that deep? Who will general manager Rolf Samuels designate to pilot the vessel through the uncertain waters of another rebuilding year?
St. Patrick's Day in Moline usually finds the most ludic members of the Greens' front office staff gathered to celebrate Irish heritage at some local tavern, an establishment devoted to distraction from the demands of debt reduction and asset accumulation. The organization's retirement and benefits package may rank above the industry standard, but only the Greens' most abstemious (or lucratively wed) employees can dream of early retirement or part-time status. And the abstemious drive straight home to their families Friday nights and holidays. They don't clink and drink at Patsy's in Milan, the Lucky Eight in Coal Valley, or the Blue Cat Brew Pub in Rock Island. They shun Lollies Irish Pub in Rock Island and the Green Briar Restaurant and Lounge in Moline. Who knows in what quiet ways the abstemious celebrate St. Patty's Day? Yahtzee and green sugar cookies? Group readings of Finnegans Wake? A good hard spring-cleaning of the house baseboards?
The Green folks who shun the abstemious route have known habits and haunts. For breakfast, it's Chris and Pat's Pancake Palace out by Southpark Mall or a quick in-and-out at Zeek's in Davenport (try the oat currant scones). For long sodden lunches when the boss is away, it's Donna's Pub & Grille on Coal Town Road, close enough to leave the car and wander back to offices at Moline Park if the head is too wobbly to drive. By tradition, the Grotto on U.S. 150 has always belonged to the players. At the end of the workweek, Greens general manager Rolf Samuels likes to gather his advisors in the oak-paneled boardroom of Moline Park, where they discuss the week's news in the league and on the farm and the implications for the direction of the team. In March, though, players, coaches, and management (save for hobbled skipper Joe Morgan) are all down in Homestead, Florida, pushing mind and body into readiness for the seasonal marathon to come. But someone has to mind the store. For the Moline front office staff, the usual Friday night watering hole is the Granary in East Moline. But each St. Patrick's Day finds the crew out and about the QC region, depending on where the brew is greenest, cleanest, and cheapest. This year they started at Montie's on Kennedy Drive in Moline, stopped briefly at the Lucky Eight, but spent most of their time and greenbacks at the Hanger on 78th Avenue in Milan, near Deere & Company Aviation, just south of the Quad City Airport. Nick Pulak played designated driver, chauffeuring the crew about in his Escalante (purchased on the cheap from a fellow owing him money).
Cozier than its name, the Hanger features model airplanes strung from wires in the rafters, posters from travel agencies from decades past, framed newspaper clippings of aviation milestones, and a propeller from a 1930s-era crop duster mounted above the bar. More to the point on this St. Patrick's Day, the Hanger featured pitchers of green Grain Belt for two bucks and mini-pretzels gratis. And there was karaoke. Human Resources director Kelly Green pitched her warbling rendition of "Old Devil Moon" to the whelmed assembly before rendering unto Caesar in the lady's room [sic] what had been dinner and some lunchtime chicken salad. Dennis A. Front's hokey version of "Green Acres" made the crowd chuckle. But it was Greens' cultural liaison Dineen Grow who topped them all, bringing the assembled multitude to tears with her measured and mournful "Danny Boy."
That melancholic Irish chestnut softened the atmosphere, and, even as a group from the La Quinta Inn had mounted the stage and started in on Brooks and Dunn, the talk at the Greens' table turned more contemplative. What was going on with Josh Logan? The boy genius John Dark (already nineteen? Gosh, how the years go by) had substituted for him in the supplemental draft earlier this month, subbed for him for the second time in a row. What did that mean? Was someone grooming Dark to replace Logan? Was Logan even around? Who had seen him since the return from France? And what were those in-draft resignations about? Bird-In-Hand and Kansas City gone from the league, just like that? Things change. Too fast sometimes. But try to get promoted around here. How fair were the organization's promotional policies? Was theirs a true meritocracy? Where did that word "meritocracy" come from anyway? It couldn't be Anglo Saxon, not with an affix like that. (The Random House Dictionary, Unabridged behind the bar confirmed as much.) Who was the man in the iron mask, and wouldn't that make your skin break out? Why call it a Belgian hare if it is neither Belgian nor a hare? Does Dugdale's study of the Jukes prove the existence of a criminality gene? Would some malevolent group start breeding bad guys if it did? And, hey, Dineen, what about Paris? Grow tried to explain the subterranean mysteries of Paris in January. She even had in her wallet the ticket stub from the Alizáe concert to document attending the show, but what about the wanderings afterwards? Dineen swore that it had happened just as she described, that the accounts the Greens group gave were not a collective fiction, but what kind of proof was there? Only the potatoes that had been in their pockets when they'd awoken. And what kind of proof was that now, now that the potatoes were rotting in a roadside ditch en route to Roissy Airport?
By that turn in the conversation, they were all on to Bailey's and hot toddies, and the topic of potatoes got Dineen to reminiscing about the previous off-season, when she'd led a Greens excursion to Ireland. It had been, remembered Dineen, an exhausting but rewarding trip. They had steered clear of the prosperity of the New Ireland and had opted for time in the ancient corners of the land. It had been so much about service, really, that trip. She and her entourage had toiled for a week in the Bushmill hop fields in Northern Ireland with a heartiness and vigor that earned the respect of the people of Ballycastle and even a note of thanks from His Holiness Himself (though, come to think of it, the signature did look machine scrawled on close inspection). At night in the remains of Bonamargy Abbey, the Greens gathered, bundled, with bold locals and listened to ghost stories of the MacDonnell, O'Cahan, O'Dogherty, and MacSweeney clans around a fire of discarded barrel staves and Irish peat (Rhacomitrium lanuginosum). The Greens toured divided neighborhoods of Northern Ireland, distributing team banners, pennants, and signed bats, the last of which were sucked up by local hooligans like mouse dung by Hoovers. Throughout the land, the Greens' contingent adorned fairy trees with yellow ribbons, to offer encouragement to all who passed by and to remind all drivers of the sacrifices that trees had made throughout Irish history. At a crossroads near Lifford, over protests by her comrades, driver Kelly Green sacrificed a stray tabby in the name of peace between Catholics and Protestants. In the county of Donegal, the visiting Greens helped with the construction of a bridge to Inishbofin Island, a marvel of engineering constructed completely from abandoned Curraghs, a bridge that will one day cross the sound and unite Tory Island with Ireland, just as the Greens brought together in peace and harmony all those they met over there in the auld sod.
Paris? Paris was an aberration. "Liaison" comes from the Latin ligare, meaning to bind. And that is how Dineen Grow sees her mission, to bind together the Moline Greens with the multiple peoples of the earth.
Sometime in winter, someone has to take a fall. In January, 2000, a stroke took the life of Fate Norris, architect of the first Big Green Combine, c. 1997-2002. This February, winter brought down skipper Joe Morgan, in town to take care of some club business before returning to Homestead, Florida, where pitchers and catchers began trickling in late last week.
Southern Florida features no snow, but the Quad Cities in February are not so lucky. Neither was Morgan. In the Moline Park lot, while returning to his Flint Mica Lexus RX330 (IL license "LIL JOE"), Morgan slipped on a patch of white ice that knocked the black manager of the Greens flat on his ass by way of his flapping left elbow. The treacherous snow-dusted asphalt lot tore the sleeve of his Raiders parka, broke his left arm in four places, and left Morgan with a mild concussion. The sixty-two year old manager moaned and writhed in the snow for a half hour, singing bawdy baseball songs to keep his spirits up. Morgan was finally discovered by Dennis A. Front, head of stadium security, making his customary dinner-time rounds of the perimeter. After some checking, measuring, and casting at the Trinity Medical Center in Moline, Morgan was chauffeured home by Front and a student nurse whom Morgan befriended at the clinic and hired as a helper for what is expected to be a short recuperation.
"The ice clipped my wings, you might say," joked Morgan, sipping rum and coke from the brown leather couch of his Sherrard, Illinois, home. "I'll be okay. I got someone here to take care of me." He paused to fondle the passing tush of his blonde nurse. "But if there's a bone in the butt, I bet I broke it. That's a nice ass there." Morgan said that he would return to Florida and his team in a couple days. His convalescence would not affect preparations for next month's annual draft. "That's something I don't worry about. That's for Josh and John to put together. This is just a little accident, that's all. It's nothing. I been in worse spots. One time in 1976, this was an April series, I think, and--" But here the screen darkened, and the telephone line clicked and fell silent.
After a lackluster 2004, full of injuries and desultory performances, and loss leaders--a third baseman who didn't slug .400, an aging ace, a traded superstar; after a year of war after war was declared over, a war of mass deception and escalating casualties; after a November of political retrenchment in the hubris capital of the world behind a newly affirmed commander in chief, a thumper more interested in preserving an agenda than confronting the facts on the ground; after such a season of despair in the midst of a winter of discontent, the Moline Greens are away. They are a month and a half away from the rebuilding effects of Homestead, Florida, their spring training home, far from the now-icy shores of the Rock River. The Greens are also away from their putative homeland, away from the exurban and rural voters who cast the country's lot with a lug from the East masquerading as a good old boy from Texas. It's time to move on.
The Greens are touring France, washing away the bitter taste of a sour season by hitting the jugs of Burgany, Normandy, and Piggly Wiggly; exploring the chateaus of the Loire Valley, the chattes de Sologne, and the umbrellas of Cherbourg; and sampling the flashing flesh of the Moulin Rouge in Paris. On-field failures matter less with a glass of wine, a crust of bread, and some brie. Player development concerns fade when the lights come up and a fleet of dancing feet kick high into song. Show us your tits. It's a good time to leave the United States of Arrogance. And what better place than France, the soft, anti-war state of Gaul, where doughty men spend years studying the detritus of Jacques Lacan, the napkins of Michel Foucault, and the degraded mixture of Luce Irigaray; where R. Crumb hides from his ravaged past, trying for the nonce to forget Charlie, Charlie, Charles; where l'enfants affam's drink Chateau Clos du Cadeos from sippy cups; where ever-young Jerry Lewis nuts his way across the voracious screens of Parisan bargain cinemas.
There are many reasons to visit France in January. But none of these reasons brings the Greens to Paris for their annual off-season excursion. Non, c'est Alizée qui alleche les Vertes a Paris. C'était l'année d'Alizée dans les Villes Quatres or at least in the Moline clubhouse and office. Ils sont fixáe par Alizée. While the Greens struggled to their worst mark since 1996, staying above .500 for the ninth straight season by only one game, the attention of many of the players and personnel at Moline Park drifted to a certain brunet chanteuse from Corsica, one Alizée, the Britney Spears of France, the cheerful lolita herself, whose declaration "J'Ai Pas Vingt Ans" was rendered null and void when she left her teenage years behind August 21.
The enthralled team sent a lavish floral display for the pumping youngster's 20th birthday. The flowers received no acknowledgment but were presumably received; online tracking confirmed that much. The Greens were by then well out of the pennant race, playing out their meaningless string, auditioning young talent, wondering where their power had gone (295 home runs in 2002, just 150 in 2004), wondering what to play for, what to live for, really. But then entrée Alizée, whose effervescence brightened the dimmed corners of the Moline clubhouse. Alizáe, whose smile inspurted the Greens just when the dog days of August hit, just when their seasonal plight left them searching for sustenance and craving art. First came "Moi Lolita." Then came the clip for "J'Ai Pas Vingt Ans." But nothing kicked ass like the shaking, velvety jet cul of Alizée in "J'En Ai Marre." Oh, my, that flying fish. O, that I were scale upon that fish.
No one remembers exactly who downloaded the first Alizée clip or just how the clubhouse soundtrack moved from Usher and Alicia Keys to the Corsican Colt. But by the time the season ended, Greens cultural liaison Dineen Grow knew there was just one place she'd be taking the team during the off-season.
Of course, there were dissenters, men who refused to board the Alizée bandwagon; no wise assertion neglects qualification. The Latin players, particularly, Pedro Martinez, Andruw Jones, Sid Ponson, et als, never quite warmed up to the pipes of Alizée. "Nice ass," quipped Ponson. "But that's it." Jones professed a preference for female singers who were a little "nastier." Shortstop Rafael Furcal articulated a fondness for potty-mouthed Lil' Kim. "The booty queen," declared Furcal. "And she got the mouth, you know, the way I like it." Another foreigner, sometime-closer Byung-Hyun Kim (no relation), took to watching Alizée music videos with the sound down while playing Edith Piaf on his boombox. "The sparrow sing good but not so good bottom as Alizée," said Kim.
Naturally, none of these men joined Grow on the January jaunt to France. (The disapproval of team ethicist Suzann Moertl was presumed and confirmed throughout August; "mere leering," she called the Alizée fixation.) Neither Moertl or her clubhouse allies were there, then, when the Grow and four Greens secured a visit backstage after an affirming Alizée concert at the George Pompidou Center ("great lights," said Grow). It was a meeting much anticipated by farm director Josh Logan, whose fondness for young talent is feared through half the heptarchy.
The meeting did not go so well. Alizée's handlers had not been informed of the visit and two burly thugs from the Marais pressed their case against the perceived intrusion. Stanford-educated Jody Gerut quickly intervened, produced documentation, and in fluent French explained the intent of his Moline entourage. After a delay of an hour and a frenzied skip to the loo, Grow, Gerut, Logan, and pitchers David Riske and Justin Wayne were admitted to a cramped room adjacent to les chambres d'Alizée. There they waited another twenty minutes before being shuffled to a third, smaller room two flights below. It was now well past 1:00 local time, and the five Greens felt the effects. Another guide, a stairwell three flights below led them to a windowless fourth chamber with no chairs, only a potted plastic palm in one corner. Ils etait tirés. And still there was no sign of Alizée.
By 2:30, the Green crew had decided that enough was enough. They fled their grotto for the comforts of the Hilton Paris. That was their intent, at least. But the dim halls of the Pompidou had something else in mind. "It's not like the States," explained Wayne. "There were so many winding passages and no clear signs of how to get out of there." Hours passed. The five found an escalator, but it went only down. Occasional bubblers kept the Americans hydrated and a crusty baguette left in Grow's coat gave them all something to nibble on as they trudged the subterranean depths of the postmodern structure. Sometimes they would find vestibules with facilities for satisfying one's physical necessities. Down one dead-end hallway they found a forlorn vending machine but it sold only prophelactics and anti-papist tracts, and it asked for a currency none of the Moliners could decipher. Another hallway led to a furnace, where an ancient Negro stoked a thundering metal machine of heat. The index finger of his left hand was missing down to the second knuckle. His right hand was bundled in a mitten. The stoker could understand their predicament, but could only gesture mutely when prompted for directions. So onward the Green gang wandered. They lost track of time.
They came upon a Smarte Cart marked with a olive Post-It note that read "Veuve." The cart held two azure Samsonite suitcases, both locked. Riske used his Leatherman to break the lock of both cases. One held a photocopied page, third generation at least, of pages 256 and 257 from Codice Da Vinci. The other suitcase contained a weathered carton of Filboid Studge ("Best by 8 January 1935") and duct taped to the inside lid of the suitcase a silver Moline cross with a linen cord. "It was clearly a sign of some sort," said Logan. "But we didn't know of what."
They pressed on. Gerut was brave enough to try to Filboid Studge, but gagged with the first bite. "Nasty stuff," he croaked in most cracked voice I ever heard. He cast the opened box into a darkened corner. White jumbo rats flitted from the shadows, converged, and dragged the box off, squealing. Grow wore the cross for hours, until the linen began to chaff her delicate skin. It just got to be too much. What was the point after all? "I'm no communist, but I am an atheist, thanks to Liane. What we needed was a compass, not a cross." She left the cross draped over the head of a mechanical children's horse ride half buried in packing peanuts. The horse bucked once when Grow inserted a New York Subway token. It then ground to a halt. Logan pushed the cart for miles. They took turns pushing one another and kept their spirits up by singing Christmas carols. The cart's wheel started to stick. Wayne fell off and landed in a slick of orange oil that smelled somehow of Indiana. The wobbly cart was abandoned in a darkened alcove. A single women's high heeled shoe, polished, black, the size of an African elephant, tusked, blocked one hallway completely. The halls looked less and less like those of the Pompidou and began to look more and more like subterranean passages from The Phantom of the Opera.
Hours went by. Their pocket flash drives gave no light. Their chronometers stopped working. Knees, ankles, and feet ached. Palms perspired. It began to rain, a mist at first then long and hard but warm. Grow slipped and scraped her right elbow. A shot rang out. Voices, and yowls, and echoes. Suddenly, a hallway to the left with rumble strips every thirty paces. Yellow light ahead, not any mystic phosphoresence but a steady golden glow drawing them in. A domed structure with translucent walls. An ancient oak door, unlocked. Inside 500 square feet of comfort, cedar floors, oak-paneled walls, ebony eyes. A sourceless fire, ambient heat, the displaced smell of baking bread with cinamon highlights, five overstuffed Lazyboys, and piled high in a porcelain Blue Willow tray a mountain of red pistachios, not one of them a dud. Alys Robi singing "Rhum et Coca-Cola" in the indeterminate background. Scones with clotted cream. Five waiting John Deere mugs and a steaming French press full of Burundi (no sugar or creamer). Two floor-to-celing walnut bookcases of dusty tomes damaged by fire and water. And a black call box with a red rotary dial phone. Zero. Allo, allo. De qui parlez vous? Non, attends.
They slept. When they awoke it was full daylight, with normal sounds in the house below. They were in their respective rooms of Hotel Hilton, sans explication, fully dressed in clean, unrent garments, Peruvian Blue potatoes in their pockets. Two days had passed. Downstairs, the front desk handed Grow a hefty bill (covered by the travel account) and the concierge handed her a sage-scented note from Alizée, who regretted that illness and political malfeasance had kept her from their rendezvous. Some "autre jour," she implored, when she was "better bien."
The five weary travelers stretched and packed. They ate croissants and downed cafe au lait at the hotel bistro. They tossed shiny pebbles at tourists who flashed cameras from boats on the Seine. At the Virgin Megastore on the Champs-Elysées the Midwesterners picked up five copies of the Alizée concert DVD (released in October). They locked arms in front of the store's Alizée display and asked a passerby to capture them on camera. Exultant smiles, well earned. A shared taxi van to Roissy Airport. Airport souvenirs for the folks back home. Anticipation.
Ca suffit. The Seine flows muddy, slow, and timeless. La femme Alizée is twenty. Today Elvis would have been seventy. They say the love bug will get you at the age of forty three. The hour has come for the Green covey to fly away home and wait out the last blasts of winter alongside a different river. Oh, to be in Moline now that January is here.