Last May, the Santa Fe Fuego, an expansion team in the lowly Pecos League, the minor leagues of the minor leagues, threw their first pitch into baseball ignominy. Their starting pitcher was 47-year-old Rodney Tofoya, a former has-been in various Mexican and Canadian leagues, and a V.P. at the Albuquerque branch of Bank of the West. He was supported by an active roster of 22 players, each of whom the team paid $54 per week and 15 of whom Tafoya put up in his own house. The Fuego somehow won their opener, 14-8. Though some people believed the score was 16-8. Whatever. There wouldn't be too many more wins to savor all year long.
I learned all this while reading Abe Streep's terrific article/minibook about the Fuego season, "The Legends of Last Place," in The Atavist. Some disclosures are necessary here. Abe and I are friends, and we share a history — baseball history. Abe played center field and I played third on a couple of great 1990s Fieldston School baseball teams. We also suffered through one endless summer of doubleheaders on forgotten fields all across the Bronx. (Our poor parents . . .) I'm sure that if you locked us in a room for a couple hours, we could recount most of the throwing errors, base hits, blown calls, hit batsmen and hits that were really reach-on-errors from those years. Or the time when our friend Will was robbed of a double by a sliding Dalton outfielder. I know that because we still talk about this stuff and don't really find it weird. I also recently recruited Abe as a ringer to the Times Magazine's recent walloping of New York magazine in our annual softball grudge match.
So now that that's out of the way . . . I'm not going to spoil the plot of "Legends," though the title isn't really holding its cards to the vest. Anyway, this article isn't really about suspense. "Legends" acknowledges the truth about sports: they are often sad, occasionally tragic, usually comic undertakings by people (including middle-aged men) who know they should be doing something else. Yet for some people (I among them), there are few sensations more fulfilling than watching a throw as it sails from the left fielder's hand into the catcher's glove or hearing the flat smack of a ball exploding off the sweet spot of a bat. And that's doubly true when you're doing it yourself, especially when your baseball days are supposed to be over. This quote from Tafoya has stayed with me for days: "I would love to get married, I would love to have a family. But the one thing I'm not willing to give up is baseball." I can only hope that my heat is still in the 80s when I hit 47.
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