The Tuesday Meeting

Bats distributed to date: zero. Equipment managers contacted: ten. Pitches made on this stop: one, by proxy. Status of the field correspondent: still holding the bat.

---

Denver was farther than I thought. I had been telling myself for two hundred miles that the Walla Walla turnoff hadn't cost us anything.

We left there Monday afternoon and spent Monday night in a Boise motel. Tuesday morning we made Idaho and Utah.

The radio cut to a weather alert. Heavy snow moving into southeast Wyoming and the Front Range. The Colorado Elevation Bureau had postponed Game 2. An hour after Rock Springs the WYDOT signs lit up: I-80 closed between Rawlins and Cheyenne. The Roadmaster had no chains. We hunkered down in Rawlins. Tate had not said anything in two states. He kept checking his phone, tapping a thumb on the door between checks.

Wednesday was a no-go. I spent it at the motel mirror, practicing my pitch. The TV said the makeup game would be Thursday at one-ten.

WYDOT opened the gate Thursday at first light. The wind was up across Elk Mountain. We tried the Roadmaster's heater for the first time. The cabin stayed cold. The windshield crack on Tate's side grew an inch. The Front Range came up midmorning, a wall not a transition.

Pioneers had crossed the Mississippi, then the prairie, then the Rockies, and most kept going to Oregon and California and Washington. A smaller party stopped at the Front Range and called it.

---

We made it to Coors Field at eleven-thirty Thursday.

"Ed was expecting you gentlemen Tuesday morning."

The kid couldn't have been twenty-five. Clipboard. Purple polo. He had walked us into a service hallway behind the equipment room because there wasn't anywhere else to put us. Ed was out of town through Friday.

"Sorry about that," Tate said.

"First spring storm? Pretty much every one that comes through closes I-80." The kid checked the clipboard. "Ed left a note. Said you had something to show him." He frowned. "Asked if you'd run into Pronk yet?"

Tate handed me the bat. "Tell him not yet."

The kid pointed his phone at me. "When you're ready."

I looked for the kid's eyes. He was behind the phone.

I gave the pitch I had been writing in my head since Hillsboro, and saying to the motel mirror since Wednesday. New-growth Douglas fir off the eastern slope of Mount St. Helens, the volcanic ash mineralizing the soil through forty-six years of regrowth, the kind of provenance you don't get from federal lands in Oregon or Washington and won't get from anywhere else for another century. I said we believed the density profile was a real thing. I said the bats had held up in our active accounts.

The kid was looking past me at the equipment-room door.

I said something about the way the grain seated in the hand. I said new growth flexed in cold air. I think I said it would stand up to altitude. I finished.

I had been turning the bat over the whole time.

The kid had not reached for it.

He stopped recording. "Thanks, I'll get this to Ed."

Tate paused at the door, turned back.

"Tell Ed I'm sorry I missed him."

I carried the bat back out to the car.

---

The Rockpile is a wedge of bleachers behind center field. Four dollars a seat. Despite the sun, the bench held a chill.

A hot dog vendor came up the steps. I ordered two dogs. Leafed through my wallet and discovered I didn't have enough on me. Tate handed over a twenty. The vendor said he'd be back with change. We never saw him again.

I tried to hand Tate one of the dogs. He said he wasn't hungry. I ate both.

In the second, the Outer Borough Club scored on a single to left. The hitter was thrown out trying to stretch. I did not see it leave the bat because Tate had his phone out. He kept typing through the inning. He set the phone face-down on his thigh, picked it up again. I did not look at his screen.

I had my phone out too. The text I had sent Asher Tuesday morning was still unread. I did not refresh it.

I had been reading the game through Tate for a half dozen ballparks. This was the first time his head was somewhere else. The game ran without him.

In the sixth, Tate's phone rang. He stood, swayed, sat back down. "The altitude," he said. He stood again and made his way down the aisle. "Hey Ed," he said as he passed me.

I typed something to Asher. Deleted it. I typed something blunter. Hit send.

When Tate came back he didn't sit down. "Time to go."

We left in the middle of an at-bat.

---

South on I-25, the sun off the right shoulder, the Front Range receding. From Coors Field the nearest big-league ballpark east is Kansas City, six hundred miles. The next one west is Los Angeles, a thousand. Denver floats alone between mountain and prairie. The radio held the game until just past Castle Rock. By Trinidad it was full dark.

— Freely