AT SEA -- Every day there’s a story at the ballpark. I’m lucky enough to have been able to tell some of those stories. Sometimes a team comes from behind to win. Sometimes a rookie gets the big hit. Sometimes the manager comes out and yells at the umpire. This story isn’t like any of the others I’ve ever written. It’s a baseball story. And it’s a story of bosses and workers, crooked politicians, intrigue, and much more. It’s a story the likes of which I never expected to witness, much less record. And it starts out where all the greatest stories start out. In a dumpster.
A baseball journalist rarely needs to do much digging. Most of the information is quite literally out in the open. How many batters a guy struck out is public record, and the scribe is usually there to watch it alongside tens of thousands of others. But a story about baseball business is a little different. Men keep secrets and tell lies. To get to the bottom of it, I found I had to dig, literally, through Abilio Boye’s garbage.
Now, normally I would not resort to such desperate measures. I never have before, and I’m very hopeful I will never feel the need to do such a thing again. But Boye’s death stuck in my mind like a nail driven into cement. I couldn’t let it go. I couldn’t sleep. I was driven by a need to know as much as I possibly could -- to put myself in his shoes, in his eyes, in his thoughts. And so I went to his house. And I saw the dumpster outside. And I climbed in instinctually, the way a baby turtle marches toward the sea. And I dug around for whatever I could find.
What I found was shocking. Private communications between Boye and GM Jake clearly indicated that Boye had massive influence over nearly every aspect of the Dolphins’ front office strategy. There were scouting reports, draft notes, budgeting plans, discussions of in-game strategy, and more. I took the documents with me and sat down to write a story of Boye’s outsized influence over the general manager. That’s when I realized something was not right. There were notes on in-game strategy that ran entirely counter to managerial logic. There were scouting reports that seemed entirely divorced from the player’s actual skillset. I studied the letters. I pinned them to a bulletin and drew lines connecting various aspects. I drank whiskey. I smoked cigarettes. And as the sun came up through my kitchen window, I fell asleep with my forehead resting on top of an ash-tray.
I’m a pretty straight laced fellow. I have, heretofore, approached all claims regarding spirituality with what I have regarded as a healthy dose of skepticism. People would say to me, “Everything happens for a reason.” And I would nod slightly while thinking to myself, “Does it? Does it really?” Where others see divine intervention, I see coincidence. This is all to say that I am in all cases inclined to explain the unexplainable through earthly, rather than supernatural, means.
But that morning I dreamed as I have never dreamed before. Of the sea. Of Dolphins. Of escape. And I awoke knowing just what I must do.
I gathered my things. I took nothing that could not fit in the pockets of my slacks and my coat. I stepped out my door and looked back at my lonely studio apartment, knowing that this may be the last time I saw the place. I laughed to myself. And then I realized. I could see! All I’d known had been darkness since the day that elective eye surgery had ended my pitching career and begun my career in letters. But now I saw clearly, just as I had before that day. I muttered to myself the phrase, “Well I’ll be darned.” I walked back into the apartment and poured whiskey into a flask, then I tucked that flask into my coat pocket and walked out the door. I didn’t even bother to lock it as I left.
Even though I’d only been to the marina once before, my walk was as familiar to me as my route to the ballpark. I suppose an invite aboard Jorge Lopez’s yacht, The Grandmother, sticks with a man, even subconsciously. I found that I even remembered at which particular pier and which particular dock the vessel could be found. As just about anyone who has lost their vision will do, I have, over the past few decades, read stories about people who have regained the gift of sight. I dreamed of it happening to me. I thought about all the things I’d stop to look at, a bird in flight, a flower in bloom. But on my walk to the yacht I looked straight ahead. There would be time to observe nature, I thought. That time would come after this business was settled.
I recognized the ship’s guard from the last time I had come aboard. He and I had swapped recipes that night. I described to him how Mother makes her famous Farnell Flapjacks, and he gave me a recipe for corned beef hash. Naturally, we chatted for a time about our experiences with each other’s recipes (both quite positive), then I told him I’d been instructed to come aboard the ship to drop off a copy of my latest article for Mr. Lopez’s approval. The guard was accustomed to such arrangements with journalists and waved me aboard with little hesitation. I went below deck into a storage room close to the ship’s entrance, and I hid there.
After a few hours, I saw a figure I’d imagined thousands of times before. But as he approached the ship, I saw that he was more beautiful in living color than he had ever been in my mind’s eye. Standing there before me, standing 6’6” tall with an unmistakable blonde moustache, was Pat Vinson. He carried a large briefcase. He spoke to the guard and informed him that he had come to deliver documents to Mr. Lopez. The guard had been expecting him and waved him aboard. Vinson left the briefcase in Mr. Lopez’s quarters, then exited the ship. As he did, the guard’s steely facade collapsed.
“Mr. Vinson. God I’m so sorry to do this, but I’d really love an autograph for my son. He’s a huge fan of yours. We both are really.”
Vinson smiled and told the man that he had a bat in his car that he could sign for the boy. He asked the guard to follow him to the parking lot, so he could retrieve it. Together they walked out of sight.
What I witnessed next was a maneuver that was executed with surgical precision and lightning speed. Mere moments after Vinson and the guard stepped off of the pier, men began to emerge from hiding spots all over the marina. Abilio Boye led a group that had been submerged under a neighboring vessel in full wetsuits and snorkels. Shang-de Foong offered men a hand as they boarded The Grandmother. Within seconds, and without making a sound, the entire Dolphins active roster had boarded the ship. Vinson sprinted up the dock to meet Boye at the ship’s entrance.
“Did you take care of the guard?” Boye asked.
“He agreed he would take a nap in my car and tell the cops he’d been drugged. We’re all good there. Let’s get out of here,” said Vinson.
“Wait. He’s not here.”
“Of course he’s not here, Abilio. He’s not coming. We’ve all been trying to tell you this. We have to go.”
“Shhh,” said Boye. “I hear him.”
And then I heard it too. A motorboat approaching the yacht.
“I told you,” said Boye.
The driver of the motorboat idled it expertly right next to the ship. I heard the sound of three men hopping aboard. Then I heard a familiar voice. One I’d interviewed more times than I could remember.
“Sorry I’m late,” said GM Jake. There he stood, just absolutely jacked as fuck, wearing a super cool leather jacket, super badass sunglasses that he removed with a flourish before every line of dialogue he spoke, and old school jeans like Patrick Swayze might wear in, like, Dirty Dancing or Roadhouse or something like that, but with, like, an ass that just would not quit, like, even compared to Swayze’s. He removed his sunglasses again and said, “I couldn’t leave without my top 3 prospects, Truckstop Hoad, Juan Bojorquez, and Jacopo Manelli. As you know,” he said, removing his sunglasses again, “We have one of the best farm systems in the WBA.”
“Better late than never,” said Boye as he and his GM embraced in a super manly hug like you might see in Lethal Weapon or something.
With everyone aboard, Boye took control of the ship. He hollered commands and his teammates followed them like seasoned Naval officers. Within minutes we were in motion, within an hour we’d left the harbor. Within two hours, I’d been caught.
Hiding in a storage space is very uncomfortable, and storage spaces very rarely have bathrooms. I really had to go, so I tried to sneak through a hallway unseen in order to use the facilities. I should have knocked on the bathroom door, but I didn’t. I just opened it like a fool, and there on the toilet sat Jaime Cavazos reading a collection of Angela Davis essays. I apologized for barging in on him, but that didn’t stop him from yelling things like “Stowaway!” and “Pinkerton Spy!” Soon I’d been dragged before Boye and Jake.
They set about interrogating me, assuming that I was working for Lopez. But old Dan had a little trick up his sleeve. I had something they could use to bring EVILCORP to its knees, and I let them know that. They eased up on me pretty quick, and I told them that I had years and years of private communications of EVILCORP brass going all the way to the top. I told them that they could be privy to all of that information as soon as they chilled the fuck out and told me the plan. And so they did.
They told me that they’d been training the entire offseason for the heist of the century. But unlike most heists, the thing they were stealing... was themselves. They were stealing the Dolphins. They were taking the team to Havana, Cuba, where they knew they would be received warmly by the Communist and baseball-crazed government. They had been assured that the team’s employees would be able to own and operate the club as a worker self-directed enterprise. I asked them what they would do when Lopez declared the team illegal and attempted to establish a legitimate Dolphins in the Galapagos Islands. They told me that they’d been assured by WBAPA president Falco Venema that the union would be issuing a blanket statement refusing to ever play for Lopez again. They hoped this would be enough to prevent WBA from recognizing the Galapagos Island Dolphins.
Once I was satisfied with the details of the scheme, I reached into one of the many pockets of my cargo slacks and pulled out a floppy disc that contained all the most damning secrets in EVILCORP history. Probably not enough to put Jorge Lopez behind bars, but probably enough to prompt the WBA to fully sever ties with him. I even began to reach out to some contacts at La Tribuna de la Habana who I thought might like to publish the information. Abilio Boye told me I had done a good job!
And so we sailed on. To Havana. To a new day. To a future free of any owner except the laborer himself. And of all these great things, most of all, we said on... to Baseball.
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