Now, That Was a Game

This is an excerpt from the short story, "Now, That Was a Game," currently being expanded into a novel. Some things have changed in the transition (the novel is somewhat less talky, for one thing), but the characters of dying ballplayer Jeremy Elliott and reporter Jamie McGrew have not.

"Jamie McGrew, World News Source." His hand was back in his pocket rather than offered to the old man, fingering the AV recorder like a pitcher feeling for the seams of the ball. Before, he'd been sweating. Now he was cold.

"McGrew, huh? Good name." The man's face was as full of creases as a well-used mitt. He stroked the cleft in his chin where gray stubble had escaped the razor. His lips were pale and cracked, and Jamie thought he detected a bit of a whistle in the man's breath as air escaped through cracked yellow teeth. Jamie slid the AV recorder out of his pocket and set it on the end of the bed. It brightened, emitting a soft glow that strobed around its surface as it took in the full circuit of the room. The old man regarded it with narrowed eyes, but didn't object.

"Mr. Elliott, I came to ask you about the Cubs' final season."

"Last game, you mean. Nobody cares about the season. Just that game. Just Roth. All you want to know about." He leaned back against a rumpled gray pillow. The man in the next bed, burrowed under a wrinkled sheet, moaned. Jamie kept his eyes on a fist-sized dent in the plaster just above the old coot's head as the man continued. "That's all that's important."

"They didn't record it. The game. Why was that?" he asked.

"It was part of the whole experience. Stopped recording home games a year or two before the end. The whole take-me-out-to-the-ballgame thing. Wrigley was just as it had been when I was young, when you would get tickets from your mom and dad, or maybe they'd take you, and you would ride the el out to the game. Not watch it on the tube--or the tank, or VR set, or whatever. Last place that still had green grass, that you could smell, and a crew of groundskeepers to keep it up. Last team with real players."

"You mean, unenhanced."

"I mean real." The old man hawked and spat again. This time the phlegm caught on the rim. The air hiss sucked the jiggling gray-brown mass away. "Yeah, kid, I'm old enough to remember when we'd sling a Louisville Slugger over the shoulder, and a mitt under the arm, and go over to the park to play."

Jamie sighed impatiently. "We did that. My friends and I, we'd get in our VR rigs--" But the old man wasn't listening. A drop of spittle bobbed on his lip as he went on.

"I'd shuffle down the sidewalk, trucks rumbling by belching clouds of black, acid-smelling exhaust . . . then I'd turn the corner by the river, walk up a couple blocks, and the spring smell of the grass would greet me. Soft under foot--not like that spiky lab-grown stuff you see everywhere now, that we had at spring training for a couple years. That stiff, prickly, plastic-feeling, so-called grass, you couldn't walk barefoot on it, which was hell on Joey Bates when he broke his toe right before the season that last year. He kept on practicing, but his foot was too swollen to wear a shoe."

"Bates," the young man said, his sky-blue eyes scanning back and forth as he mentally searched his sports data implant for the reference. "Played third base, right?" An old video clip of Bates making a tag played out in the corner of his eye.

"Yeah, third. Nice enough guy. Kept to himself. Would get real quiet after a game if he felt he'd made a mistake, you know, missed tagging a runner by a hair, let a liner get past him, that kind of thing. Real quiet, like he was mulling it over, analyzing the error in his play. Calculating how he would play that batter next time. We called him Mr. Computer." The old man cackled.

"But he wasn't enhanced in any way, right? He couldn't be. And still be a Cub."

The old man snorted. "That's the point, boy. That's the joke." He shook his head. "No, Bates wasn't bioengineered, or DNA treated, or any of it. None of us were. That was our gimmick. Baseball au naturel." He rolled the l on the end of his tongue. "Didn't win many games, but hell, owners found out early they could fill the park on the gimmick, so why spend the money on high-paid, high-maintenance enhanced players? And the gimmick took off. After a while, we were the only team you could still see in person, so they made sure that was the only way to see us. League even stood for it, as long as we'd win forty games a season. We were a tourist attraction. A time trip. Baseball the way it used to be played, before everyone reinvented themselves, and talents became literally a dime a dozen."

They weren't that cheap, Jamie wanted to say. Maybe the old man was misusing the word "literally." Pet peeve of Jamie's. But he kept his mouth shut and let the recorder record and the geezer talk. He was glad he hadn't brought the bigger recorder, that did smells and sensations as well. He wouldn't want to inflict the fetid odor of the place, or the stifling, dirty-feeling air on the home audience, and that stuff was always such a bitch to edit out.

McGrew was still talking. "Of course that meant people were there to see the freaks--that would be us--rather than the game. If they wanted to see a game, they'd plug in from the comfort of the living room and see a couple of the other teams. But that isn't baseball. No element of chance about it: whoever has the most technologically advanced hitter is gonna hit the ball outa there, and whoever spent the most on tinkering with their pitchers and fielders will always get the other guys to strike out or fly out or hit into double plays. No such thing as a miracle."