Inside the Empire by Bob Klapisch

Author:Bob Klapisch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HMH Books

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Night School

Nobody wants to cover baseball in August: it’s the school-detention month of the regular season. Your friends are at the Cape with their restive kids, or they’ve stashed them at camp to go hike the Adirondacks and wash down pan-fried trout with a tart rosé. You, on the other hand, are brined in your own juice as you stand there, sweat-soaked, watching BP. The field is a furnace, it’s three hours till game time, and the players you need to talk to are sick of your face, having answered the same questions for five months. You know they have nothing to say, and they know you know it. But the game is on the schedule, and so you hover. Damply.

Beyond the heat and tedium, the hitters are exhausted. Imagine wielding a sledgehammer for five straight months, with no weekends off or personal days. The act of swinging a bat many, many dozens of times a day is hell on your ligaments and spine alignment. Everything hurts on these guys, especially hips and wrists. There used to be a cure for that—first, greenies and steroids, then Adderall and HGH. Now there’s only Red Bull and Tylenol. Neither of those boost one’s mood around writers.

The Yankees, more than most, had cause for the August blues: their players kept dropping like flies. While they treaded water till Judge and Sánchez returned, down went Sabathia with a flare-up of arthritis. A week later, it was Didi, upended on the base paths and sidelined with a badly bruised heel. The day after Didi, Aroldis Chapman motioned that he had to come out of a game. All year long, he’d battled inflammation in his left, or push-off, knee. “Previously, I’ve been able to manage it,” he said, “but the pain was more than usual.” The Yanks placed him on the ten-day disabled list. They weren’t optimistic that he’d be back that soon.

In total, seventeen Yankees had hit the DL since the team broke camp in March. Eight were on the current list, including three who were done for the year (Ellsbury, Montgomery, and Heller). Clint Frazier, who was still in concussion protocol, hadn’t even resumed “baseball activities.” Judge’s wrist was worse than the Yanks were letting on, and Stanton (hamstring) was a bad step away from being lost for a month. The deepest lineup in baseball now had the density of a Pringle: essentially, it was Andújar, Stanton, and . . . stand by.

In addition, Gardner hadn’t hit a lick since May. At thirty-five, he looked, frankly, finished. Bird was a basket case, taking strikes down the middle and chasing balls a foot off the plate. Torres was healthy, but his batting average wasn’t. For most of the summer, the Magic Rookie had ridden the interstate, hitting .145 and rolling over sliders instead of slapping them to right for hits. Aaron Hicks, their sixth hitter, had been bumped up to third and in this, his best year, was struggling to hit .

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