Cardboard Gods

Marty Barrett was often able to manipulate baseball reality, to make himself or the ball seem somewhere it wasn’t. This skill came out most memorably in his mastery of the hidden ball trick, which he pulled off several times. I haven’t been able to unearth any video of Barrett performing the hidden ball trick, but you can read an excellent Boston Globe retrospective of his devious exploits, and you can get some idea of his preternaturally nimble body and mind in this clip of him duping Billy Ripken. Marty Barrett was a magician.

***

Did you ever feel like you had an almost magical certainty that a player at bat was going to get a hit? I remember getting that sense sometimes with Nomar Garciaparra during the hottest streaks of his glory years in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I’d be watching him go through his series of obsessive pre-pitch tics, and a conviction would arise within me: Screaming liner into the gap coming up. And I was right every time, or so it seems to me now. A decade earlier, while sitting in the upper deck at Shea Stadium, I remember being convinced by something in Darryl Strawberry’s body language as he sauntered to the plate that he was about to pound a soaring shot into the right field stands, which he promptly did. It’s not exactly a miracle that I had premonitions of success about two of the more talented hitters of my lifetime, but the first player I remember having this psychic connection with was Marty Barrett, a decent but decidedly unspectacular slap hitter from when my childhood was ending.

For most of my life to the point of Marty Barrett’s arrival in the majors, I’d been a kid growing up in rural Vermont, staring at baseball cards, listening to games on the radio, studying the Sunday batting averages, and once a year going to a game at Fenway. The game existed, for the most part, in my mind. It was really only in the summer of 1986, Marty Barrett’s second full year with the team, when I was 18, that I began to actually see major league baseball on a regular basis. I spent that summer at my grandfather’s house on Cape Cod, which had a television that picked up the Red Sox games on Channel 38, and I distinctly remember as my grandfather sat in his remote controlled La-Z-Boy, eating Cheese Nips, and I sat beside him in his remote controlled hospital bed, raising and lowering my torso periodically, how Marty Barrett’s hot streaks would appear to give him an aura of potency. When he had it, I felt certain that he was going to line a base hit into the outfield. And he would!

Like all magic, I guess, my predictions of Barrett’s success can be explained by the mirrors and shadows of probability and perception. Barrett’s hottest streak of that summer coincided with what would have been my heaviest period of watching, late June into early July, after I quit my job as a canvasser for Greenpeace and hadn’t yet accepted that I was going to crawl back to the gas station I’d worked at the summer before to beg for a job. During a fourteen-game stretch in that span, June 23 through July 7, Marty Barrett collected 26 hits in 55 at bats for a .473  average, plus 7 walks for an on-base percentage of .532. Predicting that he was going to do well in any given at-bat during that phase was about as much a miracle as flipping a quarter and guessing which side would come up.

But magic is based more than anything in need. Marty Barrett was my portal into magic, into believing that the magical season that I had always been waiting for was finally appearing.

***

I know how to make a quarter disappear. It’s the one magic trick I ever learned. I learned it the year Marty Barrett starting playing professional baseball, in 1979. I was eleven years old, and after reading about the trick in the Magic Wanda column in Dynamite magazine, I performed it once, successfully, before retiring forever as a magician. I couldn’t take the burden of deceiving someone, of knowing the trick, of knowing the mundane source of wonder in the eyes of the tricked, in my case a slightly younger kid at school named Aaron, who thought that I was able to rub a quarter so hard on my forearm that it disappeared. I knew the truth of how I’d made it look like I had done this, and I told him immediately. He was disappointed, or maybe the more accurate term would be disillusioned. He would have preferred not to know. It had been for the thinnest moment a thrill to pull the trick off, but I couldn’t bear it even for a few seconds and didn’t want to have any part of it again.

I preferred to be the witness to magic, rather than its author.

***

In late October of 1986, in a dorm room in northern Vermont, I watched with three other Red Sox fans on a little television as Marty Barrett laced a single into centerfield to drive home Wade Boggs and give the Boston Red Sox a 5–3 lead in the top of the tenth inning of Game 6 of the World Series. From the start of the playoffs all through his at-bat in the top of the tenth, there had been a magic link between me and Marty Barrett, that feeling of certainty that was absent from any other part of my life. I watched and expected a base hit, and virtually every other time he came to the plate he delivered, winning the American league Championship Series Most Valuable Player award and performing even better in the World Series. In the bottom of the tenth inning, with the Red Sox one strike away from a World Series championship, the television broadcast brought up a photo of Marty Barrett, and he was congratulated as the player of the game.

One night a few weeks later, after all notions of magic had collapsed, I walked from my dorm to the empty building next door, which housed classrooms and administrative offices. On the first floor, just inside some double doors, was a vending machine. I was hungry, or maybe just bored. I put some money in, whatever it was in 1986 to get a candy bar or some chips, and made my choice. I don’t remember what it was, or what prompted me to start pressing more buttons once the metal spiral started to uncoil my selection, but I did start pressing more buttons. I also don’t remember what exactly my style was at first as I pressed those buttons, but once some tremors and sparks began emanating from the machine, once other metal spirals began shuddering and then uncoiling wrapped chocolate tubes and little plastic bags of salt and fat, I began rolling both my hands over as many of the buttons as I could. Bags of chips and candy bars and gum thunked down into the plastic catcher by my shins. Thunk! The machine began to smoke. Thunk! Thunk! Most of the spirals kept spinning until they were empty. Thunk! Thunk! Thunk! Finally, the glorious malfunctioning ceased. There were only a few products left inside the machine. I took off my jacket and shaped it into a makeshift sack to haul every bright mass-produced piece of this miracle back to my dorm.

Before I tell the rest of that story, which I’ve probably told you before, I want to revisit another story that’s been told many times, of the famous ten-pitch at bat by Mookie Wilson that ended Game 6 of the 1986 World Series in the bottom of the tenth inning. Just before the ninth pitch of that at bat, Marty Barrett stood on second base and yelled at Bob Stanley to turn and throw to him. Barrett had snuck over and, in the estimation of television color man Joe Garagiola, had Mets’ baserunner Ray Knight dead to rights. Stanley needed only to look and see this, and then to turn and toss a reasonably accurate throw to the sure-handed second baseman. By then the lead established by Marty Barrett’s run-scoring single had evaporated, and the game was tied, but at least the inning would have been over.

The Mets were well aware of Marty Barrett’s intelligence, and had probably even prepared to be on their guard against him. In Roger Angell’s report on the 1986 World Series, “Not So, Boston,” Angell veers momentarily into a meditation on Doc Gooden’s dip in performance from 1985 to 1986, and after quoting Barrett’s observation that Gooden’s problem was with his mechanics, Angell writes, “One of the Mets regulars said to me, ‘If Marty Barrett says anything like that, you can believe it. Anything from Barrett is a message from Western Union.’” But Barrett, like the greatest magicians, could manipulate his illusions even when everyone was consciously trying to avoid being entrapped by them. He found a blind spot in Ray Knight’s vision and slipped through it like a portal to the second base bag. However, Bob Stanley neglected to look back at him and, over the Shea Stadium din, couldn’t hear him shouting. Mookie Wilson fouled off Bob Stanley’s ninth pitch and, as you know, slapped the tenth pitch of the at bat on the ground up the first base line.

***

When I got back to my dorm with my coat full of snacks, among those who glimpsed my magical cache was the girl of my dreams. I’d had many girls of my dreams before that particular girl, whose name I can’t even remember, if I ever even knew it, and I’d have many girls of my dreams after that particular girl. She was perhaps the prototypical example of the central figure in this recurring, formative fantasy of mine, which relied on anonymity, uncrossable distance, and long, vague scenarios of complete and utter knowing of one another deep inside forever. My connection with this girl amounted to a few times in which she crossed in front of me on a walkway between buildings while I sat on a bench outside the library. She was small and cute and seemed shy, and I imagined the two of us magically connecting to shed our poetic loneliness. I was profoundly a virgin, eighteen years old and still without a kiss from anyone except my mother. I didn’t have the slightest idea how to talk to a girl, and even less of a conception that leering dreamily at one from a bench might have produced discomfort or worse rather than, say, some acknowledgment of the invisible pulling I was imagining myself to be doing, and then some sort of magical, reciprocal pulling back. Like all my dream girl scenarios, nothing came from my benchwarmer leering and daydreaming, but for a moment that November, on the night of the vending machine miracle, I thought it might.

She was with a guy, whose name I do remember, Paul. He was a year ahead of me in the creative writing program at the school and seemed to be garnering the most attention from the school’s two writing professors at that time. I envied him. It was unclear if the two of them were boyfriend and girlfriend, but they seemed to be in some sort of league together. In retrospect they were probably both stoned, which tends to produce that “in-league-with” feeling. I don’t remember what precipitated it, but the three of us ended up going back together to the vending machine. I wanted, I guess, to show this girl the magic I had found, and handing her a tiny bag of Doritos wasn’t doing the trick. I needed her to see what I had seen, a smoldering, absurd bounty piling up at my feet.

She put coins into the machine and pressed a button at random.

“Press them all,” I said. She did, hesitantly, and then I joined in, using my rolling palms method. Paul stood off to the side a little, smirking. Just one thing had thunked down into the plastic catcher. She reached in and pulled it out, and I guess I’ll remember what she said for the rest of my life as she looked down at it in her hands.

“Smoky bacon shit chips,” she said.