{"id":1735,"date":"2012-10-08T10:00:41","date_gmt":"2012-10-08T14:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/?p=1735"},"modified":"2022-08-03T13:16:57","modified_gmt":"2022-08-03T17:16:57","slug":"potential","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/fiction\/potential\/","title":{"rendered":"Potential"},"content":{"rendered":"
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 <\/p>\n

Number One Draft Pick Conflicted.<\/p>\n

Speculation from ESPN, superimposed over leaked footage from a private batting practice four months back. The Number One Draft Pick watches from his couch, feet propped on the coffee table, the smaller version of himself in a perfect stance on TV\u2014weight back, hands loose around the bat handle, spraying line drives all over the field. A little mechanical, he thinks, a little like a machine, but good. He has to admit, there aren\u2019t many left-handed batting catchers\u2014in the bigs or otherwise\u2014with bat speed like his.<\/p>\n

Fox Sports re-airs the clip from the draft, when he tried on the jersey and donned the cap. He is smiling in the video, a smile he practiced at home with the same intensity he used for forearm exercises, but the Number One Draft Pick can tell his heart isn\u2019t in it. The commissioner calls his name, the camera zooms in on his face, but one side of his mouth doesn\u2019t rise the way it should. Something cloudy settles behind his eyes.<\/p>\n

He has until midnight to make his decision\u2014sign with the club for $12M over three seasons, or go back to college for his senior year. Earn a paycheck on a team of strangers, or a degree alongside the guys he\u2019s known since he was eighteen. Begin a professional career, or risk injury another year as an amateur.<\/p>\n

But even if he can go another college season keeping his rotator cuffs and cruciate ligaments intact, even if he can put up the same numbers that made him\u00a0Baseball America<\/em>\u2019s Player of the Year, more than one owner would probably pass on him for going back to school in the first place. No one forgets a stunt like that. The Number One Draft Pick is pretty certain you can only be the number one draft pick once.<\/p>\n

His parents have left voicemails: they\u2019ll support him no matter what he decides.<\/p>\n

His girlfriend said to call if he needs anything, anything at all.<\/p>\n

His agent wants to know what the fucking hold-up is. No position player in the history of the draft has signed for this kind of money. It is, he says, a win-or-get-fucked situation.<\/p>\n

ESPN has a sound bite from last year’s number one draft pick, the phenom who pitched just twelve games in the minors before his debut in The Show. The former number one draft pick says the Number One Draft Pick will sign if he wants to sign, if he believes in the team and the steps they are taking to turn things around.<\/p>\n

The team is on its third city in fifteen years, this one in the northern Midwest, where spring seems little more than a moment and summers are spent in anticipation of football. No fanfare, a borrowed stadium, but the owners keep trying. They\u2019ve been promoting the hell out of that golden-armed boy-child drafted last year, the one with the slider so sharp it makes your eyes go crossed.<\/p>\n

Fox Sports brings on a pundit, who speculates about what signing The Number One Draft Pick might mean for the organization.<\/p>\n

He speculates about what it might mean if they fail to sign him and waste their selection.<\/p>\n

He speculates about what, exactly, is going through the Number One Draft Pick\u2019s head.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s this kind of speculation that annoys the Number One Draft Pick the most. He wishes he could tell this pundit, and all of the people sitting at home like he is, flipping through sports networks and doing their own speculating\u2014it\u2019s not about the money.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not about being afraid to sign to a team with the worst record in the league two years running. Losing baseball games, he thinks, is something that happens, like bad knees or calluses. A fear of losing would keep only an idiot from taking twelve million dollars.<\/p>\n

Yet even if he could make this known, it wouldn\u2019t begin to explain what the real problem is. Because the real problem, the thing that has kept the Number One Draft Pick up at night worrying when he should be out celebrating, is a thing he can\u2019t exactly put into words. It\u2019s more of an image. A memory of a very specific moment in time.<\/p>\n

The Number One Draft Pick is sixteen, a sophomore, and the varsity coach has just called to let him know he\u2019s traveling with the big boys tomorrow, not the JV. The Number One Draft Pick has waited for this call since late March, when he was assigned to the JV roster even though he was twice as good as the varsity catcher. He has expected it, but still, he\u2019s never felt nerves like this.<\/p>\n

The Number One Draft Pick is lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, fairly certain he won\u2019t get to sleep tonight, and what kind of varsity debut will he make tomorrow if he\u2019s nodding off behind the plate?<\/p>\n

He gets out of bed and walks down the hall toward his parents\u2019 room. He lifts his hand to knock but the door swings open instead. Here is his father, a balding career chemist with his round belly and shoulders only half as wide as the Number One Draft Pick\u2019s; he\u2019s wearing sagging white boxer shorts and pulling on a robe as he yawns without a sound. He slips into the hallway and pulls the door shut, then heads to the bathroom, telling the Number One Draft Pick to meet him in the kitchen.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not uncommon, a meeting like this. Saturday nights in the spring, when back-to-back games have left his knees aching, the Number One Draft Pick might head to the kitchen for a bag of frozen beans and find his father hunched over a legal pad, scribbling down numbers and symbols and scratching out others just as quickly. Work stuff, he says, as far as the explanation ever goes. Formulas, equations\u2014a language foreign to the Number One Draft Pick, as obscure as the hand-signals he gives his pitcher must be for his father.<\/p>\n

He never was a baseball dad, one of those guys who shouted at the umpires or talked at your neck through the chain link of the dugout. His father brought his own folding chair and sat down the first baseline rubbing blades of grass between his fingers, his eyes always on something beyond the field or the game in front of him.<\/p>\n

When they meet at night they don\u2019t talk about baseball or school or his father\u2019s job at Eli Lilly. The hour excuses any conversation. His father will usually grease a baking sheet and saw off a dozen discs of frozen cookie dough, and while it bakes they will wait in a tired silence with the TV on the late-late show or a bad movie. The Number One Draft Pick has already taken the tube of dough from the freezer, but when his father arrives downstairs he digs around in the cupboards instead, coming up with a bag of chocolate chips, the double-boiler, a sack of sugar. He snags a carton of eggs from the fridge.<\/p>\n

\u201cI know it\u2019s late,\u201d says his father, \u201cand I know you have a big day tomorrow. But I want to show you something.\u201d He holds up two shiny silver bowls and says it\u2019s time to get cracking. \u201cYolks in this one, whites in here,\u201d he says. \u201cThere should be no sunshine at all in this bowl. Make it look like the inside of a cloud.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Number One Draft Pick has hardly ever cracked an egg, much less separated one.\u00a0 There are six of them and the process grows more unnerving with each. He splits the shell and juggles the yolk between halves, certain he has never held anything so delicate in his hands, certain his thick fingers are incapable of it, that it\u2019s just not something they were meant to do. It takes time, but eventually he fills one bowl with gold and the other with murky white. The double-boiler has begun steaming on the stove, making the whole kitchen smell like chocolate, so thick and fragrant that just breathing feels like tasting. Only now does he think to ask what they\u2019re making.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re making a reaction,\u201d his father says, smiling now, as animated as a TV host whisking the whites into a thick froth. \u201cAn egg yolk is all fat,\u201d he says, \u201cbut these whites are all protein. Right now I\u2019m mixing air into them, and the protein forms a skin around the bubbles, turning it into foam.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Number One Draft Pick can\u2019t help but laugh.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a meringue,\u201d his dad confesses. \u201cThat\u2019s what it\u2019s called. We\u2019re making a souffl\u00e9. I know it sounds\u2014you know, French\u2014but at heart it\u2019s science. And we have to move fast now, because the air can still leak out. Hand me that bowl.\u201d<\/p>\n

His father beats the yolks just as quickly and then combines all three colors into one\u2014the thick gold and sudsy white and the rich brown chocolate\u2014folding it all together until it looks and smells like the inside of a candy bar. The Number One Draft Pick has never seen his father at work, but now, watching the care he takes in greasing the baking dishes and swirling them with sugar so it coats the sides, he can imagine the man his father becomes inside a laboratory, among all the strange glassware and perfect blue flames.<\/p>\n

\u201cLet\u2019s fill \u2018em up,\u201d his father says, pouring the mixture into each of the dishes, explaining how the bubbles will expand in the oven, and the heat will stiffen the proteins, how the souffl\u00e9s should explode over the top. \u201cBut still,\u201d he says, \u201cthere\u2019s no guarantee that will happen. If there was any trace of fat in the meringue, the bubbles will break. That\u2019s why I said\u2014no sunshine. But you did fine. You did the best you could. Just like you\u2019ll do the best you can tomorrow, and whatever happens will happen.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Number One Draft Pick lifts one of the white baking dishes, barely heavier than it had been when he held it empty. He imagines both outcomes at once: the souffl\u00e9s risen, puffy like clouds, and fallen, dense as cake donuts. Why not just eat it now, he wonders. Why even risk ruining them?<\/p>\n

And this, this is the unexplainable thing he has been thinking about ever since the commissioner called his name. That night, and how he turned on the oven\u2019s interior light and knelt at its glass window so he could watch for whatever was going to happen to them. How the whole time all he really wanted was to pull them from the oven right then and there. To keep them just the way they were.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week we revisit the story of baseball’s Number One Draft Pick, released last week in Chad Simpson’s award-winning collection Tell Everyone I Said Hi<\/em>. Just remember\u2014you read it here first<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":12187,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[115,314],"class_list":["post-1735","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction","tag-growing-up","tag-pressure","writer-chad-simpson"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1735","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1735"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1735\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12186,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1735\/revisions\/12186"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1735"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1735"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1735"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}