Eighteen hours before the 1998 baseball season began, the Cincinnati Reds called a press conference to announce a trade with the Cleveland Indians. We have a new first baseman, the Reds general manager beamed. Sean Casey, a minor-league phenomenon, the wonder of the double-A. And this kid, this Casey, he's... oh, he's a sweetheart. Huge enthusiasm. Great work ethic. Very approachable. Magic with the fans and you are going to love him.

There followed comparisons to Jeff Bagwell and David Justice and Barry Larkin and-- listen to this: Joe Morgan. Joe Morgan, everybody!

The media, the Channel Five camera and the web guy from the Reds Today, stared back at him: right... and who had been offered in return? The Reds, from the day after they swept the 1990 World Series forward, sucked, and they sucked hard; they were like the Apollo spacecraft in that Tom Hanks movie with no steering, no oxygen, no power, and no food; who, then, was the lucky player loaded into the escape pod?

Well... that's the thing... see... the Indians, their starter... their starter has this thing going on with his shoulder, they're desperate for pitching, and we've had our eye on this Casey for quite some time now, and... and we sent them... Dave Burba.

The sportswriters stirred: Burba? Dave Burba? Like(it was beginning to sink in now, into their skinny wide-ruled notebooks and chewed-on pen caps) as in Opening Day pitcher Dave Burba? (big O, big D; we capitalize such things, here in Cincinnati.)

And then the front office leaned into the microphones to invoke the Holy of Holies: "Sean Casey," he said, "with success, will be second in popularity only to Pete Rose. Sean Casey will own this city."

The city settled in to hate him.

Well... screw THAT... Pete Rose that is one name you just don't throw around in this town.

In the hours before the first pitch (and just who was supposed to throw that now, Mr. Series-Rings-All-Around?) the newsprint dissectors and the insurance claims adjusters by day/sports experts by talk radio weighed in. This was a shock, yes, but all in all a Smart Trade. Lookit, Burba was a fairly solid pitcher, but he was streaky, perhaps he's already peaked; here are Caseys minor league numbers.... these are great numbers, he batted .396 in the Arizona Fall League, come on! The future is the hot young bats, and what was better, we'd snatched this one right out from under Cleveland, the enemy of all that was southern and western in Ohio. We must suffer for the short term in order to reap championships in the long term... let us be patient, then, and allow the lad to prove himself... so... a Smart Trade... yes, a very Smart Trade indeed.

What no one was saying very loudly was that this very smart trade made Cincinnati look, as a city, very stupid. We had grown used to looking stupid, accustomed to appearing in the national news only when one of us was doing something laughable. Take Marge-- oh my God, Marge Schott, would the woman ever just take her St. Bernards and her Kmart stretch pants and her "Hitler started off all right, but he went too far" and... please God... just GO AWAY? People were starting to think thats what we were like! And now here they've dealt away our Opening Day pitcher (we believe in our best starter so much that we just sent him packing! Happy season, everyone) and now you present us with this this Casey, out of Cleveland, and were expected to fling ourselves at his turf shoes in sheer orgasms of Cracker Jack joy?

Cute trick, one that made us look so stupid that the sheer stupidity of it penetrated even the thick styrofoam cooler of self-absorption that is a college campus. I was immersed in Saint Mary's College of Notre Dame; whole weeks would go by and I'd think little to nothing of Ohio, collecting news from home only via my mother, which left me under the impression that the most compelling word out of Cincinnati was that my father had a head cold and was handling the crisis by manfully draping himself on the couch.

So when a friend grabbed me by the ponytail and informed me that the home team had dealt our Opening Day pitcher, I reacted the same way everybody else did when their state or city of origin pulled a Mapplethorpe: unabashed mortification, followed by general disownment.

"For what?" I said, expecting the answer to involve, at minimum, Manny Ramirez, four wide receivers and an opportunity to hit Drew Carey upside the head.
"I technically grew up outside the city limits, you know," I shouted, once I knew the truth.

As for the young marvel himself, Casey was reported as having mixed feelings. Yeah... well.... join the club, pal.

Opening Day, an elephant trucked in from the Cincinnati Zoo, outfitted with a gigantic Reds batting helmet, took a crap on the infield of Riverfront Stadium (thanks, Marge; as always, your discreet touches of class delight the masochist in all of us,) one of the relief pitchers gave up six runs in two-thirds of an inning, and Sean Casey.... Sean Casey, The Future, appearing at the plate precisely once as a pinch-hitter, struck out swinging.

Joe Morgan.... our white German asses, Joe Morgan. Sean Casey! The Future! Go ahead; pile on more of THIS guy, he's great.


That was the first forty-eight hours.

Before the next forty-eight had passed, Casey was flat on his back along the first base line with his right cheekbone in about a thousand pieces. Fielding practice, some unexpected high heat screaming in from a few yards away, and behold your savior, Cincinnati.

An "orbital fracture," the doctors called it.

"Freak accident," the newspapers added.

"Told you so," said the fans.

"Oh, he'll be fine," said the front office. Six weeks on the DL at the most.

But just between you and me and the base path, no one was sure if Casey would ever regain his sight, period, let alone the ability to properly measure the hitability of a tiny sphere spinning at him at ninety-eight miles an hour. Was he blind? Would he go blind?

The (Supposedly) Fabulous Sean Casey had far more serious problems to deal with other than his current image as an Opening Day-wrecker who caught line drives with his face. He needed to see if he was going to hit; and hitting, really, was all Sean had. He could field all right, and hed smack it over the fence a respectable number of times, but he ran like a camel with an overwhelmingly fully bladder, and no one had ever accused him of committing acts of Splendor & Beauty in the in the infield. He had no ass to speak of, and military-issue legs like the thick barrel of a highlighter marker.

But though we hadn't seen it yet, Casey could hit and hit and hit. That was partially due to whatever arrangements God makes when the sperm meets the egg and the Almighty declares, "And this one shall bat .364 with runners in the scoring position," but largely it was due to the fact that once Casey curled up on the couch with the reality that he could hit and hit and hit but not throw or catch or run with a natural grace, he practiced dusk and dawn, wrapping his hands in a batters grip around anything, everything, that happened to meet his palms.

He told everyone that he was going to be a ballplayer and they took one look at him and said Whatever, Sean, and Casey shrugged and then he went to practice hitting some more. The college scouts whatevered him too, all except the University of Richmond, which gave him an athletic scholarship for a grand total of one thousand dollars. Casey proceeded to win the conference batting title and lead the team to a championship.

There were summer camps and extra practices and the chain-link confessional of the batting cage and shattered windows in his parents garage, all so he could not just hit, but hit and hit and hit. It was all he ever wanted, and all he ever knew, from his first year of high school until the day he lay motionless on the Astroturf mattress of Riverfront Stadium, the high strong bone of his face reduced to shards of glass by the very object hed squinted at, crushed on, for so long. His ticket here had wrought its vengeance, little caring that the only thing hed wanted to do, from the age of fourteen, was play baseball. One last shattered window for Sean Casey.


I don't recall hearing about Casey's injury; I barely remember that season at all. Baseball held little comfort or meaning for me at the moment, as I was too busy having my ass kicked by the real world.

In May, in 1999, this was my resume looked like:

*Regular contributor, Regina Hall Rap (newsletter) *Political Science Society (four-year member)
*Salesclerk, Notre Dame Video, 1998-99
*Cleaning crew, Pines Ranch, Terrayall, Colorado *Columnist: The Observer, 1995-1999

I wouldn't have hired me to shovel the horse shit in Colorado.

The column-writing: Was this not my calling, from the instant the first high-octane math class I took presented the fact that I did not have the righteous stuff required to pass freshman algebra, much less the first round of astronaut selection, as was the original plan?

Also about this time I was discovering that I couldn't debate at all, preferring to place a fine point on an argument by bursting into tears and slamming out of the room; I couldn't dissect the squid without hurking, I couldn't sing or shoot or even drive very well, and what was more, extended contact with individual or large groups of children made me want to sterilize myself with the high end of a grapefruit spoon; that, in fact, extended contact with people in general made me want to sterilize myself with the high end of a grapefruit spoon.

Profession-wise, this left wheat threshing, and writing.

The news writer who showed up for Career Day drew me aside to ensure I knew what I would be getting myself into. This was how it would probably work, he said: some dues-paying in hard news or features journalism for a couple decades with a little magazine work on the side, then, in my mid to late forties, I might get lucky and scratch my way into a column; if I was any good (it never occurred to me that I might not be) I could get a shot at maybe, possibly, after ten years or so, becoming syndicated. There's your Dave Barry for you; now go cover the Epsteins garden party.

He worried about that? THAT? The dues-paying? That was nothing, the dues-paying. Dues-paying... I was a fifth-generation German Catholic. German Catholics are loathe
to pluck a splinter out of our asses until weve put in a full twelve hours at the barrel factory first.

I announced an early-decision engagement with Saint Mary's because I'd been told that little girls who wanted to become big girls, literarily speaking, attended tiny liberal arts colleges with lousy volleyball teams and big English departments. I joined the newspaper staff my first week on campus, and there followed a great deal of trailing after the new head of the theology department to get his take on his favorite color.

Before I graduated a small daily in New Hampshire called for an interview. This was several months before the first primary of the 2000 presidential election, and the newsroom needed extra reporters to handle local news while the muckety-mucks trailed the candidate pack around, because God only knew what the Republicans were going to throw against the wall this time.

New Hampshire... brave colonial souls... where people wore vests... and toiled the land... and straw polled the candidates for the next torchbearer of the free world... and all. Great stuff. I boarded a plane armed with my BA and my destiny and my eight years of thoughtful commentary on the unacceptable smallness of the dining hall trays, and I went.

The editorial staff gave me a phone-access code and a yellowing computer with no Netscape and began sending me on assignments. Just to see how I would fit, they said, before we made this all nice and legal and apartment-ready.

They sent me to a police press conference announcing a Memorial Day sobriety checkpoint.

They sent me to a nursing home to hear a senator address the bar association at a meet-and-greet brunch.

They handed me a style guide that told me I was supposed to write in terms of humankind rather than mankind.

They gave me the phone number of a man who had researched every single American genealogical tie to the Fernhand family. ("They keep telling me that I'm somehow related to the Fernhams in Boston, he told me, but missy, I know better.")

I hated it. And because I hated it I filed four terrible, terrible stories. The senatorial appearance alone (it had been breakfast casserole day at Sunny Meadows) sent me into a five-alarm panic attack, folding me into the fetal position in the drivers seat of the rented Triumph.

I drove, back very straight, no radio, to the newsroom, typed the piece, returned to the hotel, gazed into the mulch surrounding the begonias by the front office, and proceeded to have a nervous breakdown. I wedged my big-girl navy pumps up onto the leatherette interior; I creased up my sensible jacket as I drew my knees up against my best Special Occasion bra and snotted into the skirt of my power suit. The Twain of the Twenty-First Century the Clanging Voice of Generation X flashing the parking lot of the Holiday Inn, East Concord, NH.

What... was that? What WAS that? What was this box Id been living in? That wasn't writing.... That was... God... that was showing up with a skinny notebook to try and get a rise out of Officer BigHat and then participating in the strangulation of the English language. That was writing from the inside of a Tic-Tac box; I fluttered frantically up against the sides, trapped and furious about it.

And: thirty years of it! Thirty years at least. Paying dues, that was all right, that I could handle; I'll attend your blockade press conferences and hyphenate-American all day long if you want me to but thirty years? Thats an entire papacy, thirty years. And it was never going to change, this crap, no matter how high I climbed on the features and news ladder. County-level civil bureaucrat blah blah this and Mr. Tim Prentice, of North Podunk, IL, indicated that and then a mad, mad discussion of the Channel Seven viewing areas snow removal policies issued forth. Fernhand or Gerald Ford it was all squishy, slippery facts, it was all angry protest marches that never got angry or marching until the affiliate cameras showed up, it was all assignments, it was all nonstop contact with other people, and in the end it was all... crap.

Meeting deadlines in a college newsroom something else entirely. It was a thing to be done, not a bylined air tank meant to replace normal-people oxygen. Between classes you lightning-interviewed the guy who covered the ceiling of his dorm room entirely with bottlecaps, you churned out the story sitting on your boyfriends lap, you hit the Class of 1999's 99 cents pitcher night down at Heartland, and the next day you propped a Baggie of ice cubes against your head while you screeched via email at the sophomore who screwed up the headline. There had been no orders to barge up to a mother who has just discovered that her eight-year-old was found lying in a dumpster with her fingers cut off to ask her how she felt. There was none of this kissy-kissing Julia Roberts royal ass so shed deign to tell me how difficult it had been to stand around on a movie set and spew a few lines at Brad Pitt. It was going to be all bottlecaps... all barging... all the time. If I took this job, or any job like it, I was going to die. I would give lap dances to Communists, I would ask the drive-thru customer to pull around to the next window, I would scrub floors using a Brillo pad strapped to my pale blonde ass if it meant I would never, ever have to live like this again.

The sun slanted in broad bars through the fence surrounding the parking lot, and the woman at the bell desk peered worriedly at me through the picture window a fourth time. Still I sat.

If not journalism--GOD no not journalism-- then what?

For the first time in my life a cold, gelatinous, and entirely unwelcome emotion formed in my trachea, slid through my chest and between my ribs, puddling in my gut. I held myself, left arm clutching right side, right arm over left shoulder, grounding the ions, the increasingly leaden sense of Oh Shit that had followed me back from the newsroom. Half my life Id spent narrowing everything down to writing, and here I couldn't write at all.

That is when it occurred to me what this feeling was called: Now What. Eight years, and all those theology professors, and all that practice, all to become a journalist and now what? Lectures and extra classes and hanging around the AP wire mocking OJ: and I never had a clue that I had been going the wrong way.

Well-laid plans, it had been ground into me from conception, were automatically rewarded with an excellent benefits package and a 5000 count box of raised-lettering business cards: but those plans had been the wrong ones, they were ash now, and when you brushed the ash aside all that was left was the hard cold concrete of frozen-over Now What.

There was no air in the car. I dropped my head between my knees as Now What oozed and chilled, because it did not care that all Id wanted to do, from the age of fourteen, was write.



Sean Casey, meanwhile, was opening his eyes in the morning and seeing nothing. He stumbled for the bathroom, barely made out the shape of the stall and rejoiced. At least he knew where to aim.

There would be surgery. Three bones in his face were demolished, probably four. They needed to work from beneath his lip, the doctors told him, and insert a plate that would allow his eye muscles a normal range of motion.
So they did that, and the ballclub rested him for a few days, and then sent him to the triple-A Reds in Indianapolis to recuperate. After collecting five hits in three games, he was bumped back up to Riverfront.
Now now, he could go about his business. This doctor folderol, this triple-A crap, that was behind him, now, and he could at last begin his major-league career; a month late, maybe, and kind of tender above the neck, but in the dugout, chewing Bazooka and spitting spit just the same.

Then the elevator dropped.

Quickly, quietly, Casey dropped entirely from the RBI radar. Over sixteen games, he hit .135. He connected exactly once in twenty-eight trips to the plate. At one point, he was 0 for 25. These were the worst numbers of his professional career, of his life, of the entire Major League year... decade... millennium... that was what it felt like, anyway. Casey batted and batted and batted, but he could not hit.

It pained everyone around him to watch it. The sound-bite testimonials and the beer mug stories were already beginning to circulate: Sean Casey was one hell of a guy. Hell of a guy. He spent hours with hospitalized and disabled children with his right hand and raised money for charity with his left. He smiled, smiled, smiled, all the time, and threw his arm around the shoulder of everyone from the general manager to the beat reporters to the guy sweeping the clubhouse floor. The word neat was prominent in his vocabulary. He went to church on a regular basis, as if he wanted to or something. People... oh, people loved him, and well, they kind of loved themselves, too, when he was around.

Once, during a night game against the Phillies, the skies opened over Cincinnati. The baselines blurred and teared and ran for the dugouts and the curried grass of the outfield bent its slender head. Lightning, jagged thunder raged across the river valley. The grounds crew ran to tarp the field, the heavy sheeting they dragged behind them a billowing white ocean, tearing from their hands in the whipping winds. The fans saw two Reds burst from the dugout to help to control the tarp, run it from home plate to the foul lines, racing to shelter the soft even dirt of the infield. One player was the Reds ace pitcher, Pete Harnisch. He was laughing, daring the lightning bolts, clearly delighted by this tornadic lark in the rain. The other, teeth clenched with frantic effort, very clearly not smiling as he struggled to protect the diamond, to hurry this heaving shielding blanket over baseball, was Sean Casey.


So he was socking away the gold stars, Sean Casey was, in the Plays Well With Others department. But... but my God, this slump.

Worse: what if it went beyond that? What if he couldn't hit again... anymore... ever?

If he couldnt hit?

If he couldnt hit...

Twenty percent of all minor league players make it for good in the big leagues: more numbers, more numbers stacked against Sean Casey. It was all well and good to turn the world on with ones smile and twirl at the intersection of Fifth and Vine while flinging ones batting helmet in the air but you had to have the numbers, by God, and not just any numbers... the numbers the press and the fans expected. Given the Rose Bowl parade the front office had thrown in order to make straight the paths of the one-man Red Machine, the press and the fans expected Jesus Christ in a cup.

You were nothing, in baseball, if you did not have the numbers. Pete Rose: Here was a person currently smushed into the windshield of the national consciousness as a Home Shopping Network hawkman with a WalMart haircut, but no one, nobody, not Bart Giamatti or a board of inquiry or any damn fool lifetime suspension could take away the number, the 4192 hits that made him the king of all hitters. Put him in the Hall, put him in the Hall, people were to this day yelling, the loudest of the voices clustered around the intersection of Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky: the very people, the very Reds fans who stood to be the victims of Roses bet-on-baseball gambling. Put him in the Hall... after all, the man has the numbers.

Numbers... number of games played, number of pitchers faced, number of this and number of that nearly asterisked poor Roger Maris to death, the scrutiny of the baseball world stressing him to the point where his hair began falling out in clumps as he jogged alongside Babe Ruths home run record; and all this in the early sixties, man, before stress had been invented.

A far lower profile had Sean Casey, but the nightmare flowed from the same ink: the accountants, the auditing sportswriters, notching every pitch he missed and every double play he dribbled off. Baseball has no hiding places, no armor of hockey pads to burrow beneath, no basket to mob under. He was out there, alone, in his blazing failure. The numbers, the container of baseball, its language and its measure, the stitches and seams holding each season in place, would not stop and they would not lie. Casey's Arizona Fall League triumphs and college batting title slid right out of the rearview mirror, shoved aside by the harsh blankness of hits he was now not getting. The credit had run out on his potential card.

Baseball is a sport measured by such instances as how one bats against boxer-wearing Methodists vs. right-handed pitchers with outie belly buttons, and in Sean Caseys case, as he plummeted end over end through the month of May, all the tight-assed little scenarios, every last one of the who-cares sportscaster statistics were horrific.

The front office saw this, saw he didnt have the numbers, and sent Casey back to Indianapolis. The former WonderBoy must have wondered: Now What?


Three o'clock in the morning, and movie-raining in the dark. I am driving jagged, aimless circles around the west side of Cincinnati, tearing obscenities from my gut, slamming the creased part of my palm into the steering wheel. I have just been dumped.

This was where Now What had led me, stealing beneath my feet, greasing the floor as I windmilled towards some semblance of an adult life. I was a graduate student, five months from an MFA in nonfiction writing. I would teach college, I decided, to put saltines on the table until Oprah called. Now What slinked away, for the moment.

Halfway through the program a boy came along, an NCO in the Air Force, and told me I was beautiful and perfect, tra-la, tra-la, but the military was sending him to Korea for a year, and possibly England after that; but he didn't care, he said, he wanted me with him, would run to me in Ohio from the Far East and carry me away to Europe with him over three weeks leave between assignments, that was how much he loved me.

Delightful, I said, and began pondering bridesmaid logistics, but no question on bended knee issued forth, no phone call to my parents, no tiny velvet box hidden in the glove compartment.

The email arrived eight weeks after he settled into Korea. An email he did it in an emailI propose, hed written, that we go back to being friends.

Ah... well at least I couldnt say I hadn't gotten a proposal.

Long-distance visits to his airbase Colorado Springs and stiff conversation with his mother in Hawaii and several versions of the Marriage Talk, and he JUST FRIENDS me, in the middle of the night, in the middle of my thesis semester, in the middle of an email. Terrific inbox I'd signed myself into:

RE: Your Amazon.com order

Alumnae Update

FW:FW:fw: great joke!!

You Know What, On Second Thought I'd Really Rather Not Marry You

Occasionally I would meet another car; the drivers saw me signal and downshift and break, all very normal, all very okay; they'd splish past me in the rain, these other drivers, heading home or back to the bar or off to work, none of them with any idea that the occupant of the 95 Corolla had just been dumped flat on her ass, that Now What was sliding in through the window cracks, curdling up beneath the accelerator no matter how hard I stomped on it. I kicked the dust mats, I screamed at the curve of the dashboard, but I could not keep it out.

I would dearly love to tell you that I did something desperate and dramatic and writerly that night and drove through the sunrise to, say, the side of my best friend in Washington, DC, or flung myself north into the misty Camelot arms of Notre Dame, but the lame nonfiction fact is that I was expected to report for a receptionist position in the morning and I feared losing a nine-dollar-an-hour, free-parking-till-six-job before it even started. And that is how I wound up in the parking lot of a Hobby Lobby, staring at the PRE-CHRISTMAS STITCHERY SALE sign and wondering if anyone would ever be in love with me again.

I placed my hand over my sternum, National Anthem style: ba-dum, ba-dum, still there and thought, of all people, of Sean Casey.

His next season.... barnstormer. The eye surgery, although the medical community warned him that it might not help at all, in time actually left his vision better than it had been before the accident, sending his right contact lens into the saline recycling bin. He grunted and shoved his way hit, hit, hit back into the Reds lineup, hauling his average to a generally respectable .271. Such things... simply never happen, the doctors said.

The following spring the Reds hung on, after all, to the cure-all bat theyd promised everyone and as foretold, he buckled the city's knees. Casey hit .331 and put in an appearance at the All-Star Game. Little children pressed around his knees, his name on their backs, beseeching his autograph, his benevolent glance. Casey grinned down them, squatted down from his six feet, four inches to their height, asked questions about their Little League feats, signed cards made in his image, balanced baseballs on his knee as he scrawled his name and number. Press demands for a few moments of the mighty Casey's time were so insistent that the Reds limited them to the ballpark only. When rumors, heady rumors, surfaced that the Mariners might be willing to trade a homesick Ken Griffey Jr. to Cincinnati, the front office earmarked Casey-- don't touch him don't touch him don't touch him-- as non-negotiable. The Reds won and won, often coming from behind in the last pitches of the ninth, and celebrated each victory by huddling along the first base line and bouncing up and down in a Major League mosh pit of joy. "We're this little red wagon that cant be stopped," one of the players said at one point, and that of course whipped through the sports columns to the talk radio shows and back again, and came out as the Little Red Machine. And Sean Casey, darling Casey with the John-Boy grin and the cant-miss bat, was churning the generator. He was looking like... young Casey was looking an awful lot like... Joe Morgan.

They won ninety-one times that summer, this Little Red Machine did, and faced off with the Mets for a wild-card prom invitation. The entire season came down to one game, the stadium was standing room only, Casey struck out a lot, and in the ninth he got so frustrated that he splintered his bat against his knee; and the Reds lost, 5-0.

I couldn't tell you how that games last out came down, but I do recall the morning-after Cincinnati Enquirer photograph of a shellshocked Sean Casey. Instead of the way I was used to seeing him-- foot on the bag, right arm stretching for the outfield, or twisted sideways, his bat blurring towards the ball-- this time he was standing in the Reds dugout, gazing miserably up at pitcher Orel Hershiser. Hershiser's right hand rests benediction fashion on top of Caseys head, whose glove wilts at his side, folded in half, finished with. He seems very much in need of a hug.

"It's not so much that we lost," he later said. "It's just that the season's over."

Intertwined with the box score were several allusions that Casey was quite... well... emotional when the press showed up in the locker room with their follow-up questions and microphones and massive humming floodlights. Emotional: that is one of those dance-around words men use while discussing other men who happen to be struggling with their composure, for where our Nike warriors are concerned it is simply Not Done to say, "The man stood before Channel 12 and Sports Illustrated and ESPN and God and everybody... and cried."

Given Casey's perennial hooray-lets-play-attitude, it's safe to assume that the next morning or so, as the sun indeed rose again and the city awakened to Kodak's announcement of his heartache, he collected himself and his glove and eventually returned to baseball as usual, this business of facing the numbers and going ptui with ones bubble-gum spit.

It was that photograph I thought of now, as I huddled in the bucket seat against the clawing Now What. The thousands of tiny little newspaper pixels forming the image of Sean Casey, All Star, The Future, swallowing the fact that sometimes the Earth tilts precisely the opposite direction wed like it to they formed the scene I was sitting in now; shaped the high-note young pain of nope, sorry, no World Series, no wedding, right there in the orange glow of the Hobby Lobby. It was summer, the very first hours of July 30, 2001, and such things were important then.

I leaned my head against the spattered driver's window as the parking lot melted into shades of five AM gray. It's not so much that he dumped me... it's just that the relationships over.

The 2001 baseball season sucked yaks for the Reds; it was all-sucking, all the time. The team dropped fifty-four games at home, an all-time Cincinnati low, an entirely fresh baseline of shame and ignominy for the numbers to dance along.

The bungee drop to the division undercroft scathed all except Sean Casey, who, although his average dipped slightly, RBIed and smiled and sent doubles crashing and basically did everything he was ballyhooed to do. And in return, the city remained wrapped around his legs, clutching his calf and gazing adoringly up into his cork-underlined eyes. The advertisers knew it, and so around Labor Day a cell phone company sent him to make a personal appearance at a Northern Kentucky strip mall.

I was there, right between the Pier One and the Drug Emporium, dodging my thesis by convincing myself that what I really needed, right that very second, in order to secure my eternal personal happiness, was a new bra. This was before a cluster of red and white balloons and a ladies room-sized line called my attention to the presence of Sean Casey amidst the flip-top phones and the leatherette carrying cases.

I peered around a line of children sheparded by worn suburban drivers. Casey, seated at a table, was indeed greeting and signing and smiling and waving: hello, everybody... sorry about the crappy season, and all... I had nothing in my hands, not even the bra, and frankly I had no idea what I was doing as I joined the line without even a five year old for Psycho Stalker Appearance protection. Around me second graders thudded brand-new baseballs to the ground ("Oh my God, Tyler, let me hold that, youll scuff it") and gazed down at one of the eight million incarnations of Casey's baseball cards ("Goddammit, Brian, youre bending the corners, hold it by the sides, by the sides, I told you!") The wretched perpetrators quailed, maybe stuck a thumb in their mouths, and stared across the room at Casey.

As for the origin of the fuss Himself, it was clear, from forty-five feet away, that the stories, the sap and the weeping, had not been manufactured from pressbox air and wisps of cotton candy. Casey is one of those extraordinary people who listens with his entire body: arms, spine, hands, everything, focusing in on every single person who trooped past him with a jersey or a program or a Louisville Slugger; even when that person did not focus back, even when the moment was approached with all the warmth and intimate eye contact of a bank transaction (Hey, increase the value of this for me, okay? Thanks, youre a doll.) Sean Casey, two feet away, and except for these poor ball-scuffing little kids, nobody saw him there at all.

A cluster of five boys bounded away from the table, and I dropped into a Johnny Bench crouch across from Sean Casey... The Future... The All Star... The Commodity... the sweetheart of I-275. It was perhaps an inopportune moment to realize that I hadnt thought to figure out what, precisely, I was doing there.

I will now attempt to describe the eyes of Sean Casey. Someday, when I am a grownup and I will have gained the ability to capture them properly in print, that is the day when I will have become a Really For-Real Writer.
Until then, we must settle for the fact that they are blue, and yet greater than the sum of blue. They are unphotographable; they are unpaintable. They look like what might happen if God one day decided to end the careers of kindness and depth as characteristics, and decree that henceforth they shall be colors instead.

Is that good enough? Can you understand at all? That's the closest I can come, for now, with merely the entire English language at my disposal, to tell you what you see when you look at-- into-- this man.

And Sean Casey is looking at me with these eyes, and I am staring back with my ordinary mortal political science major eyes, and this is what I said:

"Do you mind... can you and I have a hug, please?"

In terms of forfeiture of personal dignity this was perhaps a fraction of a step above flinging my arms around the guy corralling the shopping carts in the Kroger's parking lot, but Sean Casey did not look nearly as afraid as you might expect. Instead he gazed at me for a moment longer, stood up, and held out his arms.

A fine trade the Reds had made, a very fine one indeed. You had to hand it to the front office; they knew what they were doing, for once, when they brought Sean Casey to town.

Back in the car, as I put the Corolla in gear, I got a little emotional.