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My Own Special Frankenstein’s Monster

by Bill Cushing

Before I moved to California to marry in 1996, my wife never paid much attention to baseball, which makes sense. She arrived to the states in 1987 from Peru, so soccer was her focal point in sports, not baseball.

It’s also odd that I introduced her to the game that year — being still upset over the ’94 strike. However, I succumbed that summer as Cal Ripken chased Lou Gehrig’s consecutive game record. I lived in Baltimore during Cal’s rookie year, and even though I leaned to the Yankees as a New Yorker, I admired him as both player and person.

So, I suspended my personal boycott against the pros and watched those games.

Occasionally, Ghisela would stop and watch, asking about the game. While explaining the action on the diamond, I told her the best way to watch baseball was in person, promising to take her to a Dodgers game sometime.

That Fall we got tickets to a home game at Chavez Ravine. In the opening inning, Mike Piazza came up to bat and hit a grand slam, which was not that unusual in those years, but for my wife, was a grand treat.

“You know,” I turned to her, shouting above the crowd while Piazza ran the bases, “I’ve been going to games all my life and have never seen one of these in person. You go to your first and whaddya get?”

Perhaps it was the manic environment, although statistics, the mainstay of baseball, may have appealed to her clinical mindset. Of course, there is the fun in the game’s connection to superstitious beliefs and behavior.

Whatever the cause, she was hooked — on baseball in general and the Dodgers in particular, a love that blossomed into passion — with all the necessary accessories that condition entails: hats, water bottles, shirts, license plate frames. She even forbade me from wearing my old Yankee hats around her.

Now we are season ticket holders for the Dodgers; my wife is a baseball fiend, and I created the monster.

This story first appeared in the collection, Time Well Spent, published by Southern Arizona Press.

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RETURN OF THE MACK

In the first three installments of this satirical short tall tale (links here—Part I, Part II, Part III), the re-animated Philadelphia A’s owner-manager Connie Mack (b.1862- ???) has hitchhiked to Oakland and hired a lawyer to lay claim to his former team. Baseball Commissar Roi Mangled and neglectful A’s owner Joe Fissure were getting mercy-ruled in the PR battle, and it seems that with a flood of GoFundMe dough, Oakland fan groups just might have a toehold on the revolving door vortex that’s been sucking their squads to the desert. Rocky Balboa ain’t got nothing on Connie Mack—he’s the ultimate underdog from six feet under.  (illustration: Gary Lucy –  IG: @instagarylucy)

 FINALE – Part IV:

“What Color Is Your Parachute (Pants)?”

When the “Nightline” camera crew is snickering at your ass, you know that any semblance of dignity has left your building. MLB Commissar Roi Mangled had just been humiliated by an undead icon who pointed out that he shouldn’t be afraid of zombie ownership, since he himself had brought “ghost runners” to the game.

Mangled tried to climb off the canvas and score points by reminding folks that Mr. Mack’s nose had fallen off recently. How could he possibly keep it together as owner, if he couldn’t keep it together, period?

But body-shaming a zombie will get you nowhere, fast. Howard Gumption, the mercurial Oakland lawyer, cut in and said that his client had recently undergone a procedure by celebrity plastic surgeon Brad Chiselder to take care of “that little schnoz issue,” and flippantly added that there were many current owners who might want to upgrade various drooping appendages of their own as well.

Message boards had his back. Fans pointed out that with such a stinky on-field product, maybe Mr. Mack was just being sensorially sensible.

It got to the point where the Oakland players, already surprisingly vocal about their dismay with management’s plans, rose up and took their civil disobedience next level. It was impossible to tell if longtime infielder Stoney Camp planned to rip his pants when he slid into second on a double, but the fact that it revealed green underwear with “Sell” lovingly embroidered on the backside sealed the deal. Plus, it earned him a standing ovation from the Green Moon Odom posse out in left.

But the real capper was in Sunday’s home finale. When closer Tremayne Vork was warming up in the 9th, his usual thunderous rock-and-roll prelude suddenly switched to Johnny Paycheck’s “Take This Job and Shove It.” With that, Vork strode off the mound, unfolding a piece of paper from his back pocket that simply said, “Bye Bye Billionaire!” He moseyed past the protective netting down the right field line, climbed into the stands, and exited the stadium, high-fiving delirious fans on his way out. The “Norma Rae”-meets-Lou Gehrig moment was the sport’s first in-game retirement. Vork later confirmed his decision on a podcast but reiterated that he would happily come back if Mr. Mack was in charge.

Public opinion polls were overwhelmingly in favor of Mr. Mack being able to purchase his team back. The “contract” he’d produced, an agreement scrawled on a cocktail napkin from a Waldorf-Astoria owners’ meeting in the 1950s, seemed to be growing sturdier by the day.

While the grand jury was being seated, cascades of currency flowed into the GoFundMe, eventually landing at over $3 billion, more than double the franchise’s estimated value. Despite it all, owner Joe Fissure, the scion of an acid-washed jeans empire, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that he had “zero interest in selling the A’s, as they are a treasured folder in my family’s portfolio.”

The very next day, Green Moon Odom had printed out “Treasured Folders” to pass out at the team’s last home series. Zelda Gumption interviewed fans outside the gates for her skyrocketing TikTok account, asking “What’s in your family’s portfolio?” The answers ranged from the vague to the vulgar, but the consensus was clear.

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Recap: In the first two installments of this short tall tale (links here — Part 1 and Part 2), the re-animated Philadelphia A’s owner-manager Connie Mack has traveled six feet up and 3,000 miles west to lay claim to his former team. Mr. Mack and his new lawyer (gimmicky billboard class-action guy Howard Gumption) have just dropped some bombshell news on the A’s imminently carpetbagging front office: if they try to move to Vegas, he has the right to buy back his team.

 Part III:

“Go West, Dead Man…”

After a whirlwind meeting, Mr. Mack and his entourage left the building. The current owner of the A’s, Joe Fissure, was presently in mid-fume, grilling his high-priced Ivy League lawyer about how the holy hell a dead guy and a billboard clown had him on the ropes.

“I’m not saying we’re on the defensive, Joe,” said the lawyer. “I’m just saying that if that agreement turns out to be legit, they might have a case to present in court.”

Meanwhile Doyle Cabal, the team president, was googling information about the claims that had been put forth in this room. Fissure groaned: “How the fuck am I getting jammed up by a zombie with a cocktail napkin?! I thought zombies weren’t real! Since when is that a thing? I need to be briefed on the new trends.”

Cabal groaned even louder, and all heads in the conference room whipped his way. He grimaced, reading from his screen. “So, it definitely looks like there were league meetings at the Waldorf-Astoria in 1954 when they were trying to sort out the sale of the A’s. So that part of their story lines up, at least.”

Mack’s eldest sons, Roy and Earle, had been the driving force behind the team’s sale, and, by many accounts, were not the sharpest spikes in the equipment room. Mr. Mack, despite being long revered as an icon of the game, was one of the least financially solvent owners in the majors. He’d retired as manager after the 1950 season (his 50th at the helm), but four years later, at the age of 91, had decided that he needed to cash out, for his wife and children, rather than continue the struggle against decreasing odds of success. The other team in town, the National League’s upstart Phillies, had finally tasted some success and stolen much of the A’s thunder, and Mr. Mack couldn’t afford to run a farm system, which was what all the successful franchises were now doing…

It gutted him that he and his sons couldn’t find qualified local buyers to keep the team in Philadelphia. He was not at all pleased that the team would be moving to Kansas City after its purchase by new owner Arnold Johnson, for he knew that generations of Philadelphia Athletics fans would feel abandoned.

So, unbeknownst to almost the entirety of the outside world until seven decades later, the one concession he got that Fall, during special meetings at the Waldorf-Astoria, was an agreement by league owners and AL President William Harridge that, “If the franchise is ever going to head East again, Mr. Mack alone (and not his heirs) will have the first right of refusal to purchase the team back at fair market value.” This codicil (thought to be merely a symbolic gesture at the time) was written on the hotel napkin, and signed by both the league president and Mr. Mack. The man was 91 at the time. Practically insolvent, if not incontinent. It was a gesture. A courtesy.

The Philadelphia A’s weren’t even sold to Johnson’s group until a month later, but it turned out the napkin lasted longer than anything else in that room.

************

And now, 69 years later, the formerly threadbare wallet of Cornelius McGillicuddy was bursting with well over a billion bucks. The GoFundMe started by Ho Gumption had obliterated all previous online fund-raising records, with posts from George Clooney, Stephen King, Kevin Hart and Will Ferrell stoking public interest to the tune of eight figures of donations. Late night TV host Stephen Colbert even had actor James Cromwell, a Mack doppelganger, on the show, portraying the baseball man and “passing the hat.” (Colbert had initially invited Mack to come on the program and do the solicitation, and the gent was game, but the CBS lawyers kiboshed that plan, leery both of his undead status and the legal implications of soliciting funds. Colbert waggishly said CBS was intentionally spiting its top demographic, “centenarians into boring sports.”)

As you may have noticed, billionaires usually get what they want, so it’s kind of extra fun when two are at odds. Current A’s owner Fissure had the support of MLB Commissar Mangled, some of the other owners and some Vegas movers and shakers, but Mr. Mack had… pretty much everyone else.

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PART II:

A Zombie Lawyers Up

Can there be pep in a glacial step? 

The musty corporeal being of 2023 Connie Mack, humming a remix of the 1927 chart-topper “California, Here I Come,” tipped his hat at perplexed receptionist Coco Gentilly on his way out– did old boy just wink at me??– and decamped the Oakland A’s offices, lurching outside. Late morning sunlight perforated the marine murk like buckshot and scattered gaudy coins on the estuary. Mr. Mack’s humming got louder and his stride grew bolder. 

His crumbling jaw was set as he moseyed by tourists and vagrants and contemplated his new goal. This new acquaintance Demetrious Adair was most assuredly right– he would need legal assistance if he was going to make this unlikely transaction happen. Unfortunately, the Philadelphia lawyers he knew were thousands of miles away and presumably six feet under. Reluctantly, the reanimated teetotaler considered that he would do well to find a watering hole and engage the citizenry about his need.

Mr. Mack recalled that the esteemed batsman Lefty O’Doul of the Phillies and other clubs had opened a saloon in his hometown of San Francisco in the last century. And also, Lefty owes me a favor– because he once fleeced me out of $25,000 for a no-hit shortstop. However, a detour across the bay seemed overwhelming at the moment. Despite his recent good fortune in hitch-hiking across the great swath of America– Rube would be so proud of my gamboling spirit–Mr. Mack found that he was down to just a pair of Ben Franklins in his billfold.

Most fortuitously for his present circumstances, he had been buried in Philadelphia’s Holy Sepulchre Cemetery on a rainy Sunday in 1956 with 500 dollars and the documents secreted in his suit– and here he was, inexplicably resurrected and somehow on the verge of meeting with the current A’s ownership! The metaphysical mysteries could be investigated later, but right now it was baseball season, and a challenge was before him! But he required a lawyer if this obstacle was to be surmounted. 

The solution to this dilly of a pickle, although obscure, must be under my nose… just like Ehmke, he indulged in a smirk to himself, reveling in a managerial memory from the glory days of 1929.  

The 35-year old journeyman, Howard Ehmke, had been Mr. Mack’s surprise starting pitcher in Game 1 of the World Series. The nation’s sports reporters were flabbergasted by the unlikely selection, but in the end, it was the bats of the mighty Cubs which were most flummoxed. Ehmke twirled a dandy, the A’s won Game 1 and never looked back, rolling on to an impressive championship.

A few strides later, it was the name of the tavern that caused him to stop undead in his tracks. “Heinold’s First and Last Chance.” 

Perfectly poetic. 

Mr. Mack crinkled a grin, ravaged flesh cascading over outpost cheekbones. “Established in 1884,” read a plaque just inside the door, where the dark wood and old framed photos made the visitor feel more in his element.

“That was the last year I had a strong spirit,” Mr. Mack cracked, hooking a long, gnarled finger back toward the plaque as he strode in, traversing the ancient, bowed floor. The bartender nodded stoically, while a few patrons chuckled. When asked if Mr. Heinold was present, the barman informed him that the owner was long extinct. Mr. Mack got straight to the point, removing his hat, clearing his desiccated throat and asking if anyone present happened to be, or know, a well-connected barrister. Silence. Maybe they didn’t know what “barrister” meant?

He then made piercing eye contact with each person in the room, shuffling around in a resolute semi-circle, and an epidemic of goosebumps broke out. “I’m an honest, God-fearing baseball man, and seeing as how I’m back in the game, back on this plane, somehow,” Mr. Mack said, “I see fit to seek some justice for the Oakland A’s.”

Those assembled in Heinold’s First and Last Chance that weekday afternoon may not have been the finest minds of this or any generation, but they knew exactly how to respond to a perfectly calibrated stump speech. Soon, though, the cackles and whoops and cries of “Let’s go A’s!” dimmed down, and after a few more pregnant pauses, it became clear that no helpful answer was forthcoming. 

Once the heady intoxicant of false hope wore off, Mr. Mack’s spirit and spine sagged. He realized with a disquieting jolt that he felt the gravitational pull of his deserted tomb. He was starting to think the “Last Chance” was the more apt half of the bar’s name at this point and planning to turn on his heel and find another public house, a robust potato of a man caressing a vodka and tonic beckoned him over.

As Mr. Mack approached, the human spud, nearly twice his weight and encased in a polo shirt and a cheap windbreaker, dramatically extended his left fist for a bump. Not wise to the social conventions of the day, Mr. Mack regarded the meaty paw, creakily sighed at what he interpreted as a hostile invitation, and, flaring his hat-rack shoulders, squared up into a classic Marquess de Queensbury pose. 

“You’re a bit stout for the job, my good man,” said Mr. Mack, “but I daresay I’ll mop the floor with you if I must.”

“Oh shit!” called out an observant grad student to his friends, who whipped out their phones in tandem. The bartender tilted his head sideways and sighed, then suddenly remembered something in the back office that needed tending to. Continue reading “”

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PART I:

Corpus Connie

Coco Gentilly was about to check “Lost and Found,” because her last good nerve was nowhere to be found. The phone calls today had been more unsettling than usual.

Five years ago, she’d figured that taking the job as front-desk receptionist for a Major League Baseball team, the Oakland A’s, would have been a fairly low-stress environment. Perfect gig for a single mom, raising a rowdy, sports-loving boy with ADD. And for the first few years, it had been. Especially with that pandemic.

But 2023 was different altogether. Oakland, the baseball-loving Oakland anyway, was presently an electric rodeo shitshow of hurt feelings, unwavering corporate greed and legislative pandering. Coco fielded dozens of irate, irrational and unhinged phone calls on the daily; everything from sobbing season-ticket holders and power-hungry wannabes to local celebs and politicians, all desperate to save the day, and maybe somehow fend off another Vegas invasion. After all, those no-good Nevadans had already seduced and stolen the town’s beloved Raiders a few years back. And now the A’s, less treasured but still the last kid left in town, were rumored to be abducted and desert-bound. Gertrude Stein’s infamous Oaklandian summary – “There is no there there” — was sadly becoming a sporting prophecy.

Truth be told, Coco hadn’t given two hollers about baseball when she landed this job, but over time, the underdog nature of the team and its fan base (plus repeated lobby viewings of the movie with that delicious white boy Brad Pitt), had worked its charms on her. As a bonus, her son Miles deemed the gear she brought home, in the team’s green and gold colors, “fresher than fresh.”

Even worse than the plaintive voices were the occasional wackadoo walk-ins. Like this one right now, a truly decrepit gentleman with piercing eyes and paper-thin skin approaching her desk in Heritage Hall, wafting distinct hints of mothballs, mildew and… were those diesel fumes?

Nonetheless, she resumed re-watching her favorite Instagram video of the day: a herd of wild goats on a county road, feasting on a buffet of Reddi-Whip cans disgorged from an overturned semi, all thoughtfully set to the tune of Kelis’ “Milkshake”. The oldster was only about fifteen feet away, but judging from his rickety gait, Coco figured she had an eternity of buffer before she’d need to plaster on that fake smile her bosses insisted upon.

However, BLAM.

The seriously senior citizen dropped a piece of gum or something on her desk. As she looked up, he blushed, while oddly clutching his prominent nose against his lean, weathered face. Coco scrunched her eyes and scanned the counter for the offending item. But the gum or whatever was nowhere to be seen. Weird. There was, however, a significant stench about. Old boy doffed his round straw hat, revealing where the vintage vapors emanated from. Although his dark suit, with the severe white collared shirt, no doubt also kicked up some serious funk.

“Apologies, young lady,” he said. “It’s been quite a journey.”

The old man sighed and looked around the lobby, taking in the World Series trophies, and did a double-take at the myriad pristine A’s jerseys prominently displayed on stands, bearing names like Eckersley, McGwire, Fingers, Jackson. The corners of his wide, friendly mouth tugged upward, and his pale seastorm eyes shone brightly under cloudy brows. “Do they launder the fellas’ pants on different days from the jerseys, I wonder? More cost efficient that way, I suppose?”

Coco, gaping at this dignified yet marginally deranged visitor, decided not to answer that one. As a teen, she’d been involuntarily enlisted to care for an elderly great uncle for a few months at the end of his life. Maybe because of those surreal conversations, she could sense when spoken words were not exactly intended for the outside world, and were more like stray dogs, italicized terriers, wandering from their unkempt yards.

Then the gentleman snapped out of his reverie, patted his lapel as if to reassure himself, and cleared his throat. “What I mean to say is… Might I speak to the owner, please?”

Oh lord here we go again. Coco suppressed a sigh and smiled tightly while calculating how best to send grandpa packing.

“Well sir, he’s a little busy right now,” she said. “What with running the team, the vigilante mobs and protestors and whatnot. Maybe you could leave a message for Mr. Fissure, or come back tomorrow?”

She figured politeness would probably work with this brittle beanpole, seeing as how he’d actually tipped his hat on the way in, like some Charlie Chaplin movie or something. And she’d also clocked that his posture was about 1000% better than Miles’s, so elder-berry was at least raised right.

“I’m afraid that won’t do, my dear. I was overly patient with Roy and Earle at the end, and that’s how we’re all in this fine mess today,” the man said. “No, no, from what I read in the morning edition of today’s paper, the sooner we speak, the better. Unless of course he’s out scouting the bush leagues somewhere, to shore up this lackluster roster of yours.”

The silvery senior winked, and Coco could’ve sworn that his nose shifted ever so slightly on his face when he did so. Like false teeth, only… a nose.

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