Behind the Cage

Bats distributed to date: zero. Equipment managers contacted: one, fleetingly, who was walking somewhere else. Product consultant located: affirmative.

I was told to meet Cecil Tate at Gate C of Chase Field at ten o'clock on Tuesday morning. Last spring training game of the year — the Arizona Copper Works against the Cleveland Cuyahoga. A day game that counts for near nothing. I arrived at nine forty-five because I am the kind of person who arrives at nine forty-five, and stood at Gate C in the Phoenix morning sun, which in late March is already direct enough to have an opinion about you.

Tate was not at Gate C at ten. Nor was he at Gate C at ten-fifteen or ten-thirty, and the woman at the ticket window, when I described him — former ballplayer, late sixties, the company's product consultant — gave me a look I have since come to understand means you must be the other one.

She pointed me toward a service entrance on the third-base side. I walked through a tunnel that smelled like concrete and bleach and came out at field level, where batting practice was underway and where Cecil Tate was standing behind the cage with his arms folded, watching a kid take cuts, as if he had been there since February. Maybe he had been.

I'd put Tate at sixty-seven or sixty-eight. I did not ask, because something about the way he carries himself suggests that certain questions would not be received. He is not tall. He is built like a man who was once fast and is now deliberate about it — every movement accounted for, none wasted. He was wearing a white polo and a Coppers cap that had been through more than one spring. A coach in a Cleveland uniform was talking to him, and Tate was listening in a way that made the coach want to keep talking.

I introduced myself. Marshall Freely, I said. From the Lumber Co. He looked at me, nodded, and said: "You drove the wagon down." Not a question. I said yes. He said all right. He looked back at the cage.

We stood there through the rest of BP. Somebody cranked one onto the pool deck in right-center — there is a swimming pool at Chase Field, because this is Arizona and the question is not why there's a pool at the ballpark but why do they need a hot tub too. Nobody was swimming. The ball bounced off concrete and rolled to a stop against a chaise lounge. We stayed for the game, sat behind home plate because four thousand people in a forty-eight-thousand-seat stadium means you sit where you like. The Coppers pulled their starters by the fifth. Tate watched every inning with the same attention, starters or replacements, which I am learning is how he is in most places — no hierarchy of what deserves his focus.

After the game we walked to the lot where I'd left the Roadmaster. The car had been sitting in the Phoenix sun for five hours with forty-eight Douglas fir bats sealed inside, and when I opened the back the heat that came out was botanical — resinous and close, like opening a kiln that someone had filled with Christmas trees. The moving blankets had gone stiff. The bats were too hot to pick up. Tate picked one up anyway, turned it over in his hands, and took a half-swing that was so mechanically sound I forgot for a moment he was holding a product sample. He set it back down. "Wood's not bad," he said. This was the first thing Cecil Tate said to me about the Wallop Lumber Co. bat business, and as of this writing it is also the last.

I took him to dinner at Carolina's, a Mexican place on East Mohave that I'd found on a list of Phoenix restaurants that real Phoenix people actually eat at. Flour tortillas made on a comal in front of you, green chile that means it. Cash only. I had researched this. Tate ordered a burro in Spanish — unhurried, American-accented, grammatically perfect — without looking at the menu. The woman behind the counter answered him without switching to English. I ordered in English and pointed at things.

I carried forty-eight bats into my motel room tonight, six at a time. After what the Phoenix sun did to them in the parking lot I've got them leaning against the wall by the air conditioner. Through the wall I can hear nothing from Tate's room, which may mean he is asleep or may mean he has gone back to wherever he was before the Lumber Co. found him. He has been in professional baseball for over forty years, and he said yes to riding around the country in a 1991 Buick selling Douglas fir for a lumber company nobody has heard of. This is not a decision that explains itself. I will report back when I understand it, or when I stop expecting to.

— Freely