Motoring east on River Drive, away from the business district of Davenport, Iowa, at 5:15 on a Tuesday night, and the livin’ is easy. “Rush hour” sounds different in Davenport than it does in the giant important cities of America: instead of the concentrated sound of a million straining shackled engines, it’s the put-putt-put-putt of garden sprinklers and the soft hissing of summer lawns, clearly audible between the evenly spaced swooshes of the passing cars. This traffic does not snarl.
These you can see in great detail, since so few of them are obscured by spectators. In fact, at game time on this Tuesday night, exactly 117 people have settled in to watch their Quad City Angels. (There’s no need to estimate this crowd–why estimate, when you can use the far more scientific method of counting the fans one by one?) John O’Donnell Stadium, in other words, is filled to roughly 2 percent of its capacity, even though this is Family Night–Mom, Dad, and the kids admitted for just a five spot, provided they’ve clipped the Family Night coupon from the Quad City Times–and even though their opponents are the first-place South Bend White Sox.
This Tuesday night in May, the game opens uneventfully–except for the 7:13 arrival of a Soo Line train as it passes the ballpark, so close to the left-field bleachers that it seems to pass through the ballpark. The tracks run only a few yards behind the bullpen, and when the train comes into view–after a few presentational squawks of its diesel horn–it’s unexpectedly enormous, resembling some prehistoric animal that’s been suddenly time-transported into modern surroundings that can’t quite contain it. The engineer decides to showboat: he slows the train to a crawl and pulls on the horn, blat blaaat BLAAAAAAAT, drowning out the public-address announcer, the crack of the bat, and for that matter the conversation of your neighbor in the stands.
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Meanwhile, despite giving up two runs in the third, Chavez is breezing along, staying ahead of the batters, giving up 12 hits but walking only one; he leaves the game after eight innings with a 12-4 lead. Virgil Cooper, a fireballing relief pitcher with control problems–he can really bring it toward the plate (but not always near the plate)–comes in to pitch the ninth and gives up one run in one inning, which is about his average. Throughout, South Bend’s vaunted hitting is on display: center fielder Randy Warren collects four hits, Lukachyk goes two for five and drives in a couple, and designated hitter Jay Hornacek scores three runs, two in the same inning. It’s a game that, as they say, has “a little of everything,” including a balk, nine errors by both clubs, and a few oddities they don’t leave space for on the scorecard–such as when South Bend catcher Joe Singley, in returning the ball to his pitcher, tosses it four feet over Chavez’s head and into center field, allowing an Angels runner to score from third.
But watching them play in the Midwest League fosters a renewed appreciation for how hard it is to play baseball. When you follow the majors, when you watch the game played by the big boys, you get used to the spectacular, because you see it every day; you expect the backhanded stab behind second base, the caught-stealing catcher-to-shortstop, the unhittable strike-three fastball low on the corner. Then you see these young players–professional ball players, mind you, boys getting paid, however minimally, to play baseball–torpedo the common plays you thought were routine, the plays you thought every ball player could make. You suddenly understand, or else you’re reminded, how hard it is to make the pickoff, to turn the double play, to hit the curveball, to throw the curveball, because although these things all happen dozens of times every day in the majors, they happen very rarely at John O’Donnell Stadium.
The backside of the Lanphier Park grandstand is open, so as a fan goes through the main gate behind home plate he or she looks up into the underside of bright aluminum. No less elegant is the press box, which presents a facade from the black-velvet school of architecture: it resembles the side of a mobile home, chopped off its blocks and strapped to the back of the grandstand. On this evening, a sign over the entrance welcomes the Illinois Department of Revenue on “Revenue Night,” a festive occasion that all but guarantees a good crowd.
Because Chavez is not sharp. It isn’t that he’s utterly off, it’s just that he has to fine-tune his various pitches. He is a smallish pitcher, with a relatively short stride that hurls him over the top toward the batter at the end of his delivery. This probably diminishes his speed, but with the benefit of added snap on his curveball. His curve and his fastball are clearly his two best pitches. In the first inning, he finds trouble after surrendering a two-out single. Ahead of the next batter in the count 1-2, he comes in with his third-best pitch–a common mistake for a youngster–and the batter swats the slider into left field for a double. With runners at second and third, however, Chavez bears down, gets ahead of the next hitter 0-2, and then strikes him out without dallying on a fastball.
