The Sound

Bats distributed to date: zero. Bats swung by a major league hitter: one. Status of that swing: under review.

We stayed in San Diego for the Saturday game — Detroit at the Diablos again, same series, different errand. Tate had been quiet through the continental breakfast at the motel, which is not unusual, except this was the particular quiet of a man who has already made a phone call. By the time we left for Petco he had a name and a tunnel entrance, and I understood that I was not driving us to a baseball game. I was driving us to a meeting that happened to be near one.

The name belonged to a San Diego Diablos equipment manager — not the head guy, but one of the assistants who handles the auxiliary cage. Tate had played with someone who had coached someone who had hired this person, which in baseball is the same as a direct introduction. We parked in a garage on K Street, Tate put the moving blanket over his shoulder with two bats underneath it like a man carrying rolled blueprints, and we walked to the service entrance on the third-base side as if we had been doing this all spring.

The equipment manager met us in the tunnel. Young. Polite. "Rusty Gonzalez sends his best," he said, and Tate said, "How's his arm," and they both smiled in a way that excluded me entirely. He examined a bat the way a mechanic looks under a hood — turning it, sighting down the barrel, testing the taper with his thumb. He said the grain was tight. He said the weight distribution was unusual. He started to say something about the knob geometry and then his radio went off and he said he'd be right back and walked away with the purposefulness of a person who might not actually be right back.

So we were standing in the tunnel with nobody supervising us, and through the opening I could see the field — bright, open, the downtown skyline like a postcard someone had hung behind the outfield wall. Tate did not wait. He walked out of the tunnel and onto the field with the bat under the moving blanket, and I followed him because I have learned that following Tate is easier than asking Tate where he is going.

A practice pitcher was lobbing balls from behind an L-screen to one of the reserve outfielders. I will not name him. He is the kind of player who made the roster for his legs and his glove — a defensive replacement, a pinch-runner in the seventh, a name in the box score that you skip past to find the ones that scored. Tate waited for the round to end, then stepped forward and held out the Wallop bat, handle first. "Do me a favor," he said. "Put one in play with this."

The outfielder looked at Tate. Looked at the bat. Took it. Rolled it in his hands — not the way the equipment manager had, slowly and analytically, but the way a hitter handles wood, checking the balance by feel. He stepped back in and the practice pitcher put the next one over.

The sound was different.

I don't know how to write about the sound a bat makes without sounding like ad copy, so I will just say what happened: the ball came off the bat in a way that did not match the player. This was a contact hitter, a singles-and-doubles guy, and the ball carried to the wall in left-center like it had been hit by someone who gets paid to hit it there. The practice pitcher stopped throwing. A coach standing near the cage turned around. The outfielder stepped out, looked at the bat, stepped back in, and hit three more. Same sound. Same carry.

He stepped back and looked at the bat again. "What is this?" he said.

"Douglas fir," Tate said. "Volcanic soil."

The outfielder asked if he could hold onto it. And here is where the tour's first real decision happened: Tate looked at me, and I looked at Tate, and we both understood that we had forty-eight bats wrapped in moving blankets in the back of a 1991 Buick Roadmaster, and no protocol whatsoever for what to do when someone asks for one.

We said no. Politely, with the kind of language that leaves the door open without actually opening it. The outfielder shrugged, handed the bat back, picked up his own, and went back to taking regular cuts that sounded regular. Tate rewrapped the bat in the moving blanket and we walked back to the concourse without discussing what had just happened, which is how I knew it was significant.

The game itself was quiet. Diablos picked up their first win of the season, 3-0. No home runs. The most interesting thing that happened with a bat in Petco Park today happened two hours before the first pitch.

I am writing this from the motel on Pacific Highway for the last time. It is Sunday morning. The bay is doing what the bay does — reminding those who live inland that this is a beach town. We're planning to stop at Richard Walker's Pancake House on the way out — a place that has been making Dutch babies since 1948 — and then I-8 east back to Arizona, where the Copper Works host this same Detroit team on Monday and where I will return to Chase Field under circumstances I have already described as better-organized.

It is possible that the bats are just bats. They may also be more than bats. I'm just thinking about what I saw on Tate's face when he rewrapped the bat and walked away — not excitement, not confirmation, but the particular expression of a man who now has a reason to keep going.

— Freely