The Lower Parking Lot

Bats distributed to date: zero. Equipment managers contacted: zero. Miles driven: thirteen hundred and change. The tour has commenced.

Gary Keach, Senior Marketing Manager of Wallop Lumber Co.—and the only reason I am involved in any of this—handed me the keys in the lower parking lot on Thursday. Not early. We stood there looking at the car for a while. It is a 1991 Buick Roadmaster Estate with wood paneling — a lumber company car hauling wooden bats, which is either a branding decision or an accident of inventory, and Gary's face when I asked suggested I not pursue the question. The back was already loaded: forty-eight sample bats, Douglas fir, bundled in sixes, wrapped in moving blankets, stacked to the headliner. Gary and I went to Western Washington together. He has done well. I have done other things.

The assignment: drive to Scottsdale, Arizona, where I am to meet one Cecil Tate, a former professional ballplayer the company has retained as a product consultant. Together, Tate and I will spend twenty-five weeks visiting all thirty major league ballparks, distributing bat samples and filing dispatches from the road. This is the first. Gary assures me the readership can go nowhere but up.

South out of Knockwood, Mount St. Helens sat in the rearview for the first sixty miles, then dropped away. I should say a word about the mountain, since the bats are the reason for everything and the mountain is the reason for the bats. Wallop's timber comes from the blast zone — new-growth Douglas fir, forty-six years after the eruption, drawing from volcanic soil rich in calcium, magnesium, and phosphorus. The company literature, which I found in the glove box alongside a gas receipt from 2019 and a breath mint of uncertain vintage, calls the mineral content "demonstrably distinct." Whether distinct wood makes a better baseball bat—I could not tell you.

Oregon was four hundred miles of the same species we're selling — Douglas fir along the interstate in such unbroken abundance that you stop seeing individual trees and start seeing the idea of trees. I stopped in Ashland for lunch at Omar's, which the internet had recommended with the kind of enthusiasm usually reserved for things that are about to close. It was fine. Everything in Ashland is fine. I talked to the bats somewhere around Grants Pass. Not in a way that concerns me.

South of Sacramento the trees gave way to farmland, then to scrub, then to desert. The AM radio, which is all the Roadmaster offers, cycled through fundamentalist sermons and born-again Christian rock ballads for most of northern California before finding a Mexican polka station outside Barstow that it held for a hundred and forty miles. I did not change it. It seemed right for whatever kind of crossing this is.

East of Barstow on I-40, I hit a seam in the road and the entire load shifted. Forty-eight bats, formerly stacked, now loose and rolling. I pulled over in the kind of desert where the shoulder is the same temperature as the surface of a competent oven and restacked the bundles by hand. Moving blankets, when heated to a hundred and twelve degrees, smell exactly like what they are. I was out there for forty minutes. Nobody stopped. Several people slowed down, which is different.

I am writing this from a motel in Scottsdale that I booked at a competitive rate to protect my per diem. I have not met Tate. I know almost nothing about him. The home office says he has been "in the game a long time." Tomorrow I drive to Chase Field and find out what that means.

— Freely