Life in baseball's middle class: Angels, A's trying to survive
ANAHEIM, Calif. — The gray-haired men in the durable pants and work boots knelt before a ring of red and white flowers early Wednesday afternoon. They spoke to each other in Spanish while they shaped the miniature garden with tiny clippers, then added water and kneaded the soil.
The older of the two looked over his shoulder at a stranger.
“What kind?” he said, repeating the question.
He gestured to the flowers.
“Begonias,” he said. “The name is ‘begonias.’”
Told they were beautiful, he nodded and said, “Thank you.”
He did not create the flowers, of course. But, every day, he drags a bucket along the perimeter of Angel Stadium, filling that bucket a sprig and a stray and a gasping leaf at a time, until he must strengthen his grip and give his bucket a good tug to get it moving again. So it is fair that he accept the compliment on behalf of the begonias.
This is the routine. The routine is what keeps them upright. The flowers. The men, too, perhaps. These relationships tend toward symbiosis.
It’s not yet 2 p.m. and a man in a green cap with an elephant on the front sat on a stool behind a screen, feeding baseballs to another man, who whacked the baseballs into the outfield. An hour later, a coach in a red T-shirt schooled a young man on the finer details of defense, how to get that running sidearm throw to carry true across the diamond, and the temporary first baseman who is by consensus the best player in the game, wearing a shirt with the sleeves cut off, shouted, “C’mon kid. Yeah. You got it.” Because that is the routine. It’s what gets them from here to there, and there remains a vague destination, which is the good news.
This is what it looks like five days into June, one routine folding into the next, when garden maintenance becomes swing maintenance, when the rigors of repetitive arm-slot drills darken a T-shirt, when the people at the patio bar across the street count backward from the first pitch, to finding their seats, to navigating the security line, to walking to the ballpark, to settling up with the waitress, and time their last round to whatever the math shows.
The Oakland A’s are in town, so one member of baseball’s competitive middle class of 2019 visiting another. They pitched two openers on Wednesday night at Angel Stadium, relievers acting as starters, the managers working backwards like the people on the patio, both trying to arrive at 27 outs while suffering the least amount of damage. It was going to be an effort on Wednesday night because just because it’s a strategy doesn’t mean it’s going to work.
The A’s, like the Los Angeles Angels, exist today in that place where not everything has gone exactly right or wholly wrong either, where the division is almost (and inevitably) out of reach already, where the new Holy Grail is the second wild card, where the more common offseason strategies of go bold or surrender brought the responses, “Neither.”
After two months, they are running hard for the gift that is weird and uneven seasons in Boston, especially, and Cleveland. The kind, had it been predictable, that may have talked the Seattle Mariners from selling off. But, it’s not predictable, which makes sell-offs like those even less honest. The era provides those sorts of alibis, however, long as folks remember how the Astros did it, or the Cubs.
So, midweek in the middle class, hours after the conclusion of a draft that will solve everything someday, neither apparently engaged with a former Cy Young Award winner who is a free agent or the best active closer who was one until about game time, brings a half-filled stadium and double-digit deficits in the AL West. What they’re doing for the moment is surviving. Trying to get healthy in spots. Trying to get hot in others. Hoping for better. Sticking to the routine. Watering the begonias while putting Mike Trout on the marquee.
Another season is a third gone and in Anaheim, at least, the routine is to be present if not entirely relevant, participatory if not particularly competitive, building if not rebuilding. It sometimes feels here like baseball for the sake of the game but not the outcome. Just enough not to embarrass anyone and not near enough to be dangerous, as if to play the same season over and over, on rented arms and borrowed time.
But that’s the competitive middle class, right? Where other people’s seasons come or go. Where nearly half the league rests. Where Mike Trout toils. Where the salvation is the routine, which they water every day and drag around whatever’s left and expect a tiny miracle will grow.
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