Work Text:
Spring 2007
San Francisco’s built like a roller-coaster, with buildings the color of Necco wafers tumbling down the absurdly steep hills, and streets careening off in every direction but square. Market Street, not too far from the ballpark, is a circus of junkies and hustlers where even the runaways look like porn-movie extras. The yuppie lofts Tim’s been looking at in the Dogpatch are too expensive, and the railroad flats in Potrero Hill are dim with age and smell like old plumbing.
He’s looked at twelve places, and he’s sick of driving around the block four or five times waiting for a parking space to open up that's big enough for his F-150.
It’s taken awhile, but Tim’s finally learned which neighborhoods are sunny and which ones are always fogged in. He knows where to get a dime bag or an empanada; that it’s easier to take the N-Judah to the Park than to drive there; what “BDSM” means. He now knows not to call it “Frisco,” but “The City”; that the Presidio’s a good place for long-toss; that he’ll pretty much always need a jacket.
I need a car, not a truck, Tim thinks to himself, and a place to live. And I need a better sense, if I’m gonna stay here, of which way is Market.
//
In Fresno, the front office had put him up with three teammates in an aging tract house just east of 99. It was already so hot that the lawn was turning brown, and the stucco siding was splashed red with dirt from the empty flower beds. In the mornings the front seat of his truck would be almost too hot to touch, so he’d roll down the windows on the way to the ballpark, and take deep breaths, sucking in the smell of oleander and fast food cooking and diesel from the freeway.
The guys, Chase and Ricky and Jovan, had all been kicking around the minors for awhile, San Jose and Richmond and Augusta, and Ricky had played winter ball in the DR. All three were used to guys getting called up or sent down, and they’d all developed the don’t-really-care attitude that allows people to survive in a situation where most of them won’t make it.
One evening, when they were drinking beer out on the concrete-slab patio, Chase’d told Tim this was probably his last year if he didn’t get called up. His girlfriend’s father had a Chrysler dealership outside St. Louis, he said, and the job and the girl wouldn’t wait forever.
When Tim got the call from the Giants’ front office, the guys’d given him one-armed bro hugs, slapped him on the head, and cracked open a six-pack of Molson.
Pretty soon, though, they’d drifted back to their game of GTA.
//
The ball club's promoting the idea of “The Two Barrys.” Barry Zito, whom the Giants recently lured away from Oakland with the biggest contract in major-league history, dresses in the clubhouse next to Barry Bonds, who’s notorious for walling off his locker space with a personal leather recliner, a full-length three-way mirror, and a plasma TV.
Bonds is just what Tim expected, a showboating asshole to be appeased and avoided.
Zito comes across as standard-issue tall-dark-and-handsome - the kind of guy who’s never been turned down by a girl in his life. On the other hand, he’s quirky. There’s a guitar hanging next to his locker, and he burns incense before his starts. When Zito talks to people, Tim notices, he focuses on them intently, as though there’s no one else in the room.
Tim’s done the math on Zito: after taxes, a million bucks a month for seven years.
Tim’s not exactly impoverished himself. He got a hefty signing bonus, but his Dad made sure it went straight into things like mutual funds and annuities and paying off his college parking tickets. So since college, Tim’s been living pretty much the same, eating at In-N-Out, sleeping on his friends’ couches, driving a ten-year-old Ford with a muffler that’s held up by a wire coat-hanger.
As he watches the two Barrys horse around the clubhouse in their matching t-shirts that say “Don’t Ask Me, Ask Barry,” Tim wonders what it’s like to be a guy who’s made it.
//
The first thing Barry Zito notices about Tim is his hair. It’s coal-black and coarse, matted under his cap, the ends poking out unevenly. What does he cut it with - nail scissors? The kid, he really is just a big kid, looks like he’s naturally dark-skinned - Latino? Asian? - but he’s pale and sallow as if he’s spent his life playing video games in his mom’s basement. He reminds Zito of himself as a high-school freshman, awkward, before the rest of his body caught up with his bones.
- His college nickname was ‘Scum,’ says Sergio Romo, laughing. - You know, from his last name. No way! There’s no way I could make this shit up!
The nickname fits. There’s something a little sinister about how Lincecum carries himself - watchful, quiet. He always wears three or four layers and long sleeves - maybe the little fucker’s hiding tracks.
He probably doesn't realize, thinks Barry, that he looks more like a Castro hooker than the baseball player he supposedly is.
And supposedly he is. In college, Zito’s heard, Tim tore up the PAC-10. But for the first few years, major-league front offices kept drafting him low and late. The Mariners, Lincecum’s hometown club, passed on him repeatedly. The Giants’ legendary scout Dick Tidrow kept his interest under wraps. They took him tenth overall, but Lincecum was cheap, even with a signing bonus.
Baseball players are an odd bunch. Some guys have played under three or four different names and grew up in shacks with dirt floors. Some guys would probably be gang-bangers or meth cooks if they weren’t playing. There’s Japanese guys who’ve had to learn to stop bowing to the coaches, and Dutch guys who’ve taken up baseball as an exotic sport. Sometimes there’s an Orel Hersheiser or a Sandy Koufax, someone who came sideways into baseball from accounting or a job at the Hormel plant.
Lincecum, Zito reflects, is the first skateboard punk he’s seen get called up.
Right now Barry’s got more important things to think about; there’s a lot happening on Planet Zito. This weekend Esquire’s doing a photo shoot of him at his place in the Hollywood Hills, which he’s had redecorated to celebrate the decade of his birth with bowl chairs, shag carpets, and chrome lamps. He’s hung his new Giants jersey as artwork on the wall. But he’s also made sure it’s not too contrived. Out in the driveway, there’s a peeling Deadsy sticker on his Land Rover, which is still covered with dust and mud from the Palm Springs trip.
Some part of Barry is a little worried about how the interview will go - what they’ll ask him; what he’ll say. But he’s pretty confident that the retro hipness of his pad and a pitcher of lemongrass martinis will take the edge off any questions they might ask about how much, how long, and why.
And anyway, it’s not his job to teach Lincecum the ropes.