Epilogue: draft day

I look around the dugout and realize in a new way that this phase of my life is almost over. I’ve come a long way in four years at BSU, from freshman walk-on batting leadoff and trying to earn everyone’s respect to #3 hitter and team leader. I’ve even gone from being completely unplayable in the field to being tolerable at first base, though our best defensive lineup still has me at cheerleader. Which is where I am today, penciled in as our DH; everyone’s healthy, and we need to give our pitcher every advantage.

Which is important, because we’re in for the fight of our lives. We’re facing Astor in the postseason—again—and we’re staring down the barrel of the toughest pitching matchup I’ve ever faced. I don’t know how they do it. —Well, I do in part—a lot of it is Ken Garrido and his pitching coach, Dave Marcello. But that’s not enough to account for their luck in finding ridiculous late-bloomers on the mound. When I was a freshman, they had Zack Khatri, who went #3 overall as a junior and is already doing just fine in the majors. That was bad enough. But turning around the next year and finding Ben Shades—that’s stretching luck past the borders of plausibility.

Shades is a lot less imposing than Khatri was, and he doesn’t throw as hard. Thing is, he has five pitches, they all move, they all move differently, and when he’s on, they all tunnel (they all start out with the same initial flight path). Now, when he’s off, his release points are inconsistent, his control gets wobbly, and you can hit him. But for all that he’s 6’4” and built like a tree frog, he’s a very good athlete, aside from being a very slow runner—he was a star point guard in high school despite his footspeed—so he’s on more often than not.

I wish Shades was a fast runner, because then he’d probably have stuck with hoops, his first love, and I wouldn’t have to deal with him. He only got serious about baseball when he realized he didn’t have a future playing orangeball, and only started pitching on a lark. Garrido and Marcello got hold of him and realized he was generating high spin rates almost effortlessly; he took to pitching like a duck to water, and for a while there, every time you saw him, he’d learned another pitch—not just learned it, but mastered it. Nobody ought to be able to make the ball break as many ways as he does. He might not look like a physical freak the way Khatri does, but he’s even more of one.

Shades’s arsenal makes him a threat to no-hit you any time he has his mechanics together. His four-seam fastball has a lot of rise and a lot of armside run, and then he throws a cut fastball that moves almost as much gloveside. He throws a hard slider which breaks gloveside and down, and a hard change which moves similarly to the armside; and as if that weren’t enough, he also has a hard 12-6 curve. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen him establish all five in the same game, but he doesn’t need to—the threat of them is enough that you never know what the fuck the ball is going to do. If he ever did, no one would even put bat on ball unless they got lucky.

My only hope might be if Shades is distracted by the draft. I don’t think we were supposed to be playing this game on draft day, but screwball weather has caused some delays, and so here we are. Like Khatri, he’s going to go high; in point of fact, it looks like he’s going to be the first college player outside a major conference to go first overall. I can only hope his mind is on that instead of the game. I hit most pitchers these days, but Shades pretty much owns my ass. I’ve run into a handful of long hits over the last few years, but I’ve collected more strikeouts. I think he may have fanned me more than any three other pitchers. It certainly feels like that.

Of course, I need to be careful I don’t let the draft distract me. I actually got picked last year, somewhere down in the twenties by Houston; teams were intrigued by my bat, but they knew I intended to come back to BSU for my senior year, and I wasn’t worth trying to sign away from that commitment. I know the book on me. Scouts have me with a plus to plus-plus hit tool and above-average to plus game power, but below-average to minus everywhere else with little physical projection.

One national prospect writer expressed the general consensus, I think, when he wrote, “If Lane’s bat plays—and I think it will—he could be batting third for a playoff team in three years. The bat-to-ball skills, strike zone judgment, and plan at the plate are that good, and let him get to all of his above-average raw power. If the bat doesn’t play, however, he could be out of baseball in three years, because the hit tool and power tool aren’t just his carrying tools, they’re his only meaningful tools. His baseball intelligence allows him to compensate in the field and on the basepaths, but he lacks the raw ability to contribute in those areas if he doesn’t hit. In an odd way, one of the biggest boom-or-bust prospects in the draft due to the immense pressure on his bat.”

With all that, he mocked me in the second-round range, in the back half of the first day of the draft; the conversations I’ve had with various teams seem to support that. Probably the most interested is Seattle, with Jerry Dipoto’s regime emphasizing “C the Z”—controlling the strike zone—but there are several other teams that have told me I’m on their target list, anywhere from the high second to the second competitive-balance round. I’m good with that. I could legitimately be looking at a million-dollar signing bonus, which is more than enough reason to put my long-term career goals on hold for a while.

It’s also more than enough to enable me to propose to Heather. This is what we were envisioning when we decided to have her join me at BSU. Once she felt good about her program if she transferred from Metternich, the two issues that swung the decision were my future in baseball and the housing situation. On the latter, Erin and Rhiannon came through for us in a big way; we got a delightful little apartment to ourselves, which has been our home for the last three years—we’ll honestly be sad to leave it. Obviously, we had already known life would be a lot cheaper at BSU and we’d probably be able to get a better living situation, but somehow seeing it made a real difference. Call it irrational, but there it is.

As to the former, Butch and his staff sold us hard on their belief that they could mold me into a high-round pick if I gave them four years to work with me. I don’t just mean they were emphatic about it, I mean they had clear ideas as to what they were going to do and how they were going to do it. That’s a lot of trust to put in a freshman in the middle of his first season—which made me realize they must have been developing their plan for me ever since they first started seriously considering me for the team. It wasn’t something they could have whipped up in a few weeks. Metternich’s coaches, by contrast, were certainly interested in me, but they didn’t know me, and they weren’t invested in me. Maybe they could have done as much for me, but we had no way to be sure. The idea of a career in baseball would have been an impossible dream a year ago—maybe even more impossible than the idea of dating Heather. We talked it through and decided that if I had a real shot to go two for two and make legitimate money doing it, it was worth doing everything we could to maximize that shot. And here we are, and it’s worked out.

In fact, it’s been the best three years of my life. Sure, it hasn’t been all daisies and sandalwood; we’ve had fights, though neither of us tends to fight dirty, and I’ve discovered various things I don’t like about Heather. That didn’t surprise me, though. My dad has always said you never really know anyone until you’ve seen them throwing up at 3 am, and (as usual) he’s right. He also likes to say love is work, and he’s right about that, too; but he always goes on to say that if you love someone worth loving, it’s the only work that’s always worth doing, which is a real encouragement.

Actually, my dad is prone to dispensing relationship advice, often at the most random times. I figured that when he found out Heather and I were planning to live together, he’d sit me down and give me a few home truths, and I was right. What I didn’t expect was that there were some I’d never heard before. At one point, he said, “With all apologies to Rick Astley, you can’t say, ‘I’m never gonna let you down,’ ‘I’m never gonna make you cry,’ or, ‘I’m never gonna tell a lie and hurt you.’ You’re a good young man as young men go and I’m proud of you, but you aren’t that good. And quite frankly, even if you were, you’d still let her down sometimes, because you’d have to be omniscient not to. Letting people down is about their expectations, not just about your expressed intentions, and you can’t control their expectations. But you can say, ‘I’m never gonna give you up . . . never gonna run around and desert you,’ and, ‘I’m never gonna say goodbye.’ That’s a matter of your own commitment, and you can always stand up like a man and stick to your word. And you should. That’s part of being a real man.”

(I had to look up Rick Astley. He’s the guy who did that weird video that was popping up in all sorts of odd places when I was a kid. I don’t think I’d ever known his name before.)

The best thing my dad told me was, “You’re gonna fight. You’re gonna disagree, you’re gonna have conflicts. That’s not bad. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t help each other grow. You’re far from perfect—just like your mother and I—and she’s gonna have every right to be furious at you sometimes. You need to own that. She’s far from perfect, too, and you’re gonna have every right to be furious at her sometimes, too. When that happens, you need to remember you have no right to be self-righteous about it. The most important thing is to always remember, even when you’re fighting, you’re both on the same side. It’s not you against her. It’s never you against her. It’s the two of you against whatever the issue is. If you both remember that, you can fight smart and actually solve shit instead of spreading it around and making it worse.”

. . . I’m woolgathering. It’s getting close to game time and I need to focus, or I’m going to get hosed. Even if I do focus, the next few hours might not be any fun at all—I don’t want to make things harder than they’re already going to be. I like our starter this afternoon, Teo Sanchez—he earned the top spot in our rotation as a sophomore, and he’s an uncomfortable at-bat—but he’s probably going to have to ball out and pitch the game of his life to keep up with Shades. But you know, even if it all ends here, it’s been a great run, and tonight should make this one of the best days of my life anyway. If I get the call I’m hoping for and hear a major-league GM on the other end of the line, we’ll have reason to celebrate . . . and though Heather doesn’t know it, I bought a diamond solitaire last Saturday to celebrate with. Whatever franchise drafts me will be my team for a while. I’m on Team Heather for life.