“Baseball is a game where a curve is an optical illusion, a
screwball can be a pitch or a person, stealing is legal and you
can spit anywhere you like except in the umpire’s eye or on
the ball.”
~ Jim Murray

“What are you teaching fall semester?”

“Apathy,” Darryl replied, with little regard for my question.

“Seriously, what are you teaching?”

“Speech.”

“Speech?”

“Yeah, speech.”

“Morning class?”

“Yes.”

“Those kids are screwed.”

I was driving my Beirut-inspired Chevy Malibu north on Walnut Street. It was maroon with what I like to refer to as custom sport ripples down one side. Sport ripples sound more exotic than telling people I had hit a post, scraping and denting most of the passenger side of the car. It was a wonderful car if you didn’t go in for things like air conditioning, stereo systems, and working windshield wipers.

Gracing the faded red cloth interior next to me was Darryl. In the back seat were my friends Klondike and Pete. Pete had arranged this trip to Ladyman’s Diner the night before. He owned a movie theatre and a restaurant in town. Ten years older than Darryl and me, he had invented a special type of heart catheter when he was in his early thirties. Then he sold the company and the patents for millions of dollars. But like so many Southern Indiana millionaires, it was hard to tell him from the average Freddys.

The Four Freddys were what we called each other. A Freddy is a catch-all word for us, sometimes used as an insult and sometimes as a term of belonging. At any rate, the Four Freddys were hungry for breakfast. And a couple of the Freddys wanted to talk business.

We turned right onto Fourth Street and made a quick left into a parking lot. The lot was bordered on the north and west by the backs of several hundred-year-old buildings. Alleys divided the rows of buildings to give access to the storefront sides of the shops and restaurants. To the east and south were Lincoln and Fourth streets, respectively. The southeast corner of the parking lot doubled as a mini-hub for the city bus lines.

We parked in a space close to the buses and the north side row of buildings. On the storefront side of the buildings was Kirkwood Avenue. Kirkwood was the heart and soul of Bloomington; six blocks that run east-west from Indiana University’s campus to the downtown square. It continued west of the Square for another couple of miles, but those
six blocks were where everything happened in town. That’s where the freaks came out to play. Business deals were done at The Uptown or the Diner. Protest marches, Fourth of July parades, funerals, weddings, all were threaded together in the fabric of Kirkwood. When Indiana University won national championships in basketball, this was where people came to party. It was the hub of the city. It was where we hatched the scheme.

From the parking lot behind the buildings, it was difficult to tell which business was which, except for the Diner. Noxious gases emitted from its dumpster. Refuse blended with grease to form an impenetrable wall to the left. However, you had to go left to get to the alley. To the right, bus fumes from Lincoln Street and the city bus terminal were mixing with fresh brewed coffee aroma from the Diner. Our options were mochamonoxide or greasy bio-funk. I chose mocha-monoxide. It got me out in the sun and on the dry sidewalk.

Darryl walked ahead of me on the Lincoln Street sidewalk. We passed by a line of fifteen people waiting for the plasma clinic to open. Next to the clinic on the Lincoln Street side of the building was a shoe repair store that wrapped around to the Kirkwood Avenue side.

Pete followed Klondike towards the alley, finding it still damp from an overnight rain. The tall brick buildings kept the alley cool and wet, wet enough to cause Klondike to slip and fall only inches from the bio-funk dumpster.

I, on the other hand, fared worse. Just as I came around the corner, a maroon custom van barreled down Lincoln Avenue. The driver, a Neanderthal I call The Wolf, drove through a puddle doing forty miles per hour. The mud hit me doing eighty-five miles per hour. I saw The Wolf laughing in the reflection of his side mirror. I hated The Wolf.

The Wolf was a self-important blow-hard of a man. He was an attorney—reason enough for loathing—with a stranglehold on nastiness. I once reported that his son went hitless in a Little League All-Star game. He tried to sue the paper for libel. Apparently, I had failed to mention that he made a “spectacular catch in the outfield.” The only thing spectacular
about it was that he never stopped picking his nose when he raised his glove for the catch. His poor mother didn’t know whether to be embarrassed about the nose-picking or proud
that he could multitask.

He was also mad that I didn’t mention that his son scored the winning run. Technically he was right. I did fail to mention it—on purpose. I was trying to save the kid some long-term teasing and embarrassment by not detailing how the run was scored. With the game tied, he was hit by a pitch in the groin. The next batter hit a home run. In the history of baseball, no runner has ever taken longer to get from first base to home plate than The Wolf’s son. He did this sort of painful looking waddle that took an eternity to complete. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. The kid could have been scarred for life. Then again, he was The Wolf’s son. Where would his psyche squeeze in another scar? Anyway, that started a long-running feud between The Wolf and me. Today’s well-aimed mud bath had given The Wolf the lead.

Klondike and I met at the door of the Diner, looked each other over and shook our heads. Someone once said, “Each man must find his own path.” I’m pretty sure this is not what
they had in mind, but still, here we were—two wet, smelly men who took different paths to the same destination.

As we entered the diner, my worst fear was realized. Penny was working. She was in her late twenties, cute, with a pretty smile. I always made eye contact when she was working. Now, I wanted to crawl back through the mail slot. I stood behind Klondike and Darryl. She smiled and waved us over towards a booth on the right.

Klondike, of course, bolted for the booth, without as much as a warning. There I stood with mud from my neck to my thighs. She looked me up and down, and then suppressed a giggle, causing her to snort. “I’ll be right back.”

She returned with a towel and tossed it at me. “I heard you on the radio,” she said.

“Thanks,” I said. “What did you think?”

“I think you’re crazy. But I have to admit you have the town stirred up. There isn’t a table in here that isn’t talking about it.”

“Maybe they’re stirred up because it’s a good idea.”

“No, it’s crazy. You’re just lucky to be living at the epicenter of crazy. It sort of clouds their judgment.”

Penny took our orders and scurried off to the kitchen. I’ll just eat my last meal and die, I thought. She thinks I’m a loser. A steak knife. Yeah, that’s it. I’ll take a steak knife and cut my wrists. No good. Klondike would pass out. I can’t have that on my conscience. I’ll do it in private later on tonight. Sitting around me were my three best friends and the
three best reasons I could offer for not going into business and certainly not trying to buy a baseball team. Darryl and I had no business background. Pete and Klondike were
both businessmen, but they were from opposite ends of the spectrum. Everything Pete touched seemed to turn to gold.

Klondike, on the other hand, often made money in spite of himself. Klondike, a.k.a. Frank Lopilato, ran a small hotel in town, pitched for our softball team, and originally was from the East Coast. A short, funny-looking man, Klondike was a cross between Barney Fife and Michael Corleone. He was loyal, generous, and always coming up with a crazy marketing idea. That’s how he got his nickname: Klondike. One day he had
the kind of idea that you wish his wife had been around to talk him out of—or at least convince him to get counseling.

“Every hotel is putting mints on the pillows at night,” he said. “It’s been done to death. I’m going to make people remember the Bloomington Oaks Hotel. My guests are going to come home to ice cream bars on their pillows.”
So Frank put Klondike bars on all the guests’ pillows. Somewhere around nine-thirty that night, the calls started to flood the front desk. One lady slid into bed without turning on the light. She still sees a therapist. Another guest’s dog had been loose in his room. The otherwise docile collie vomited in seven places. Although the man’s open suitcase saw most of the action, hotel workers to this day can’t explain the splatters on the window. It was as if the dog was somehow trying to signal the wedding reception down by the pool.

Anyway, that’s how he earned the moniker. For the most part, he was a successful businessman. Now and then, though, he went off on one of those wild tangents, and you wondered how he ever made a nickel.

Penny returned with our breakfast. “Now, judging by the amount of mud you guys tracked in here, do you want me to bring you extra napkins?”

“No, but could you take away all the silverware?” I shot back. “We’d prefer to eat with our hands.”

Penny laughed and walked away. Then Pete threw out the first pitch. “I’m ready to do it,” he said. “I’m throwing in a million bucks of my own money to get the ball rolling.”

“What ball rolling?” I asked.

“The baseball rolling. As in the Dodgers. Hello, I’m talking about us buying the Dodgers. I figured I would be the president; Klondike can be vice president or marketing director—”

In unison everyone turned to Klondike and said, “No ice cream.”

Pete continued, “Andy, you could be the media relations director.”

“Why do you get to be president?” Klondike asked.

Before he got the chance to answer, Chris Moeller, the deputy mayor, interrupted us. It wasn’t until he did that I noticed the other people in the diner. They were all looking at us. Some were whispering. Some waved their arms and talked loudly, pointing at us like
animals at the zoo. Penny was right. Every table and booth was talking about the Dodgers and looking at us. In that moment, I realized this thing was alive. It was bigger than us. People had actually read the column and tuned in to the radio show. They might really want to do this. A crazy idea, born out of a need to fill my weekly requirement of nouns colliding with verbs, was about to change this town forever.

Was I reluctantly going along with this idea? Or was there a place deep inside me that wanted this more than anything? The twelve-year-old was still unsure.

“Mr. Moeller, what can we do for you?”

“What can you do for me? What can I do for you? By the way, call me Chris.”

He said it in a way that made me think I was about to be sold a timeshare in Myrtle Beach. “The mayor is behind you guys one hundred percent. He got the letter from Pete this morning and he loves the idea.”

All heads turned to Pete. “What? I just sort of greased the pump a little!”

“And what sort of grease did you use on the pump?” I asked.

“The mayor is hardly a pump,” Chris said.

“Butt out, Deputy Pump,” I said. What did you do, Pete?”

“I told the mayor we really would name the stadium after him.”

“What?” I said.

“And I told him that the four of us were forming a corporation and would start selling shares.”

“What?” Klondike and I, in unison.

“And I said we could raise the money by the end of September.”

“What?” Klondike, Darryl, and I.

“Are you crazy?” I said. “This community can’t raise that sort of cash.”

“We’ll get outside investors. We’ll sell shares to anyone who wants to invest.”

“We don’t know how to run a baseball team.”

“We’ll get somebody to help us. Look, for as long as I’ve known you, your dream was to bring a minor league baseball team to Bloomington. Now we’re going to help you go one
step better. We’re going to bring the Dodgers to Bloomington. The Dodgers, man. Doesn’t that get you excited?”

Pete was right. Since I was twelve, I had the dream. Since I had gone to work for the Bloomington Daily News, I’d been trying to sell the idea of minor league baseball in B-town to anyone who would listen. It was my dream. But there’s something safe about having your dream stay a dream. Keeping it a dream keeps it in a box. People think that dreams are where the possibilities are limitless. Maybe it’s the other way around. Maybe reality is where things are limitless. Reality is surprising. Reality is an adventure. Reality is the intersection of everybody’s dreams. Now my dream was about to become a reality, and I was scared.
The deputy mayor was staring at me. Klondike and Pete were staring at me. Darryl was staring at Pete (and stealing his hash browns). Then I realized the whole room was staring at me.

Pete lowered his voice and looked me in the eye. “We can’t do this without you. And that means you, buying into this one hundred percent. You are the voice of baseball in Bloomington. You’ve got the attention of the community. They are ready to go. They just need a cheerleader. We know how to talk business. You know how to talk baseball. We’ll sell people on the investment opportunity. You sell them on visions of pennants and World Series games. Say yes, and we’ll go buy a baseball team. Say no, and it’s another quiet summer in B-town.”

“Another quiet summer in B-town.” Pete’s words echoed in my mind. Every summer since I graduated from Indiana University had been quiet. They all seemed to blend into each other. I didn’t have much to show for the past eight years. I had worked my way up from beat reporter to a weekly column, but there was nothing distinguishing about my career, or my life, for that matter. It was time to do something. Something big. Something that people would remember. That televangelist was back in my head.

“I’m in,” I shouted. “Let’s buy the Dodgers.”

The entire restaurant roared with applause. Darryl stole Pete’s bacon.