The Refosco

Bats distributed to date: zero. Equipment managers contacted: seven. Status of the field correspondent, Wednesday afternoon in Napa: tipsy.

"I got in touch with Dale. Turns out he retired in December."

Tate said it across a small outdoor table at Matthiasson Wines in Napa's Oak Knoll District, fingers drumming lightly, his gaze trailing the vines running off toward the fence line. I had found Matthiasson on my phone at eleven-thirty the night before, sitting on the motel floor with the bats beside me, and booked a slot because I needed a plan that got us well away from Oracle Park. We had driven up from San Francisco that morning because yesterday's pitch — the Creeping Fog hosting the L.A. Trolley Problem — did not happen. Dale was the reason it was supposed to.

Dale was Tate's "in." An equipment guy from his Pacific Coast League years, a friendship built on parallel bus schedules across a decade and a half, who had moved up to the big leagues twenty years ago.

Instead we stood outside the stadium entrance in front of a much younger man wearing a fleece vest whose name I did not catch. He was polite for about three seconds. Then: "I'm sorry, I don't have time for this." Door shut.

---

Our host is a woman named Marisol — late thirties, pressed white shirt. A faded blue-green sprig of something, rosemary or thyme, tattooed on the inside of her forearm shows and disappears depending on how she lifts the bottle. She pours the first white — a chenin blanc — and tells us about the soil. Tate swirls his glass with a practiced hand and asks about the diurnal swing at Oak Knoll. Marisol looks at him like he just said exactly the right words in the right order. "Are you in the business?" she asks.

"No, I played ball," Tate says. "Eastern Washington. Walla Walla, when their wine country was just getting going. You pick things up."

"Cayuse is doing some special things up there," Marisol says.

I have known him a month. I would not have imagined Tate anywhere in Washington — let alone on the dry side of it.

He tastes the chenin, swishes it in his mouth and leans forward to spit into the bucket as I'm taking my first gulp. "I don't really drink anymore," he says to nobody in particular, and does not elaborate.

Some part of me had been planning to be the expert at Matthiasson. I had read about Oak Knoll and volcanic-alluvial soils the way any lapsed newspaperman reads about anything on his phone at eleven-thirty at night — that is, skimming exhaustively. I had imagined being the one in his element at this upscale spot a world away from any ballpark. Out here it was all small sounds — bees, a car on Dry Creek Road, a dog at the next property — the kind of quiet no stadium can make room for. Tate was out in front of me on every beat — the diurnal swing, the spit into the bucket, Marisol facing him for the next pour. The expectation deflated somewhere between the chenin and the rosé.

Marisol sets down a small board halfway through — cheese, picholines, pieces of grilled bread — a courtesy, she says, for the three-o'clock slot. Tate takes one of the olives and spits the pit into his napkin.

---

Between the third and fourth pour, I tell Tate about last night.

"After we got turned away and you headed into the stadium," I say, "I walked. I needed to think."

Tate nods. Marisol pours the fourth.

"Down to the water. Under the Bay Bridge. Up the Embarcadero toward the Wharf."

He looks at his glass.

"There are more people living on that sidewalk than I remembered. I walked past a guy outside a consignment store arguing with a parking meter about whether it had stolen his hat." I swirl the fourth glass. "I sat at the railing at Pier 39 with my notebook open for a long time, and I—"

I had the sentence. I could not say it.

"I didn't know how to start."

Tate sets his glass down. Takes a breath and leans forward. "This one was on me. My guy wasn't there."

The wine is beginning to open me up. "But we can't be entirely dependent on your personal network at every stadium."

He sits with that.

---

"Monday," I say, after a minute. "We're due in Knockwood on the way up to Seattle. Gary wants a progress report."

Tate is quiet for a moment. "0 for 6."

We stare at our empty glasses. Marisol pours one more. The bottle isn't on the tasting card — a Refosco, she says, not usually part of the standard flight. She says it in Tate's direction. The pour is dark enough that the stem of the glass looks lit from inside. I will remember the Refosco for a week. Tate reaches for his water glass.

---

Tate drove. I didn't ask him to. He went around to the driver side without a conversation and I went around to the passenger side, and that was that. A few miles down the road he pulled into the first motel with a vacancy sign. The wagon wasn't going north tonight, and neither of us needed to say so. Monday in Washington still feels a world away, a world still devoid of the story we need to tell.

Writing this now, the morning after, I notice something.

Tate had whatever he had with his contact Dale — the text, the reply, the confirmation that an old friend had gone quietly out of the game — before we pulled into the winery. He could have said it on the freeway. He could have said it in the parking lot. He said it after we sat down, after the first pour, after the table was between us and the afternoon had settled around us and I had had a minute to be somewhere that was not yesterday.

He picked the moment.

I do not know what to do with that, except write it down.

— Freely