Pitchers and catchers always report a little early to spring training
February 15th, this year
“Why not the 14th?” you might ask,
“Baseball’s romantic, why not V-day for the batteries?”
One battery would say it’s far more romantic this way
Giving them one last day, keeping the illusion going just a little longer
A little
But they can still live in the snow globe for a moment
Live in the moment just before a curious child spots it, picks it up, shakes it
The battery takes their last day
They bask in it, letting themselves
They’ll be together for the season of course, at least they have that
But it’s the end of letting the illusion of belonging to each other more than to the team envelope them
You might think otherwise, but does not and can never outweigh their contract to play baseball and do what they’re told by management who wants more than they’d ever care about a gay battery that’s a punchline more than people
The battery doesn’t know it yet, still sealed in the snow globe that is February 14th, but this day is to be their last one like this
They don’t even have the whole season, really
The team , it sells, and he’s sold at the deadline
He finds out on a clubhouse TV (isn’t that just fucked) and his pitcher…
Not his pitcher anymore?
His pitcher calls him up (he isn’t even there, he’s been on the IL for weeks) and
What else is there to do?
They can’t make sense of anything, this terrible season, how they’ve been playing together for so many years and now it ends like this
Broken, thousands of kilometres apart, and they can’t even have a moment to in each other’s arms before he gets swept onto a plane to a new city and a new team
Gord once sang “Up high and aloft, wherever winds may blow / Don’t let your balloon touch the ground / Or get so high that you can’t let go”
The pitcher probably watched that Kingston show (that very last concert before letting him go) on CBC television like every other Canadian back in 2016 (his catcher almost certainly didn’t know or care it was on)
The pitcher and the catcher knew each other, back then, but not like now
One of them wonders aloud if it would have been better to have never tried at all, never had something to let go of, then shakes his head
No, they need this, they decide, they don’t have to let go
And even if they drop their balloon one day they’ll
So they lie in the mess that spills out when you smash a snowglobe and trade one half of a battery at the deadline
Doctors can reattach their snapped ligaments and broken bones but nobody can glue that back together
It’s almost animal cruelty, the catcher jokes once his tears have run out and , to keep them more than 60 feet 6 inches apart
Dogs don’t understand being separated like people do, like they do
Would it be better or worse if each day they had hope they’d be together again that night?
His pitcher says that if they just had one more day like they had before spring training, just one more fucking day, that they’d be okay
One day without journalists or flights or packing up one half of the condo
His catcher tells him that there’s no way to leave that wouldn’t hurt
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Note: reloading the page will get you a somewhat different poem with randomized phrases (the red parts), so try a few (or a lot)!
This work on ao3, written for the Time Begins On Opening Day prompt meme (see all of the options at once): Up high and aloft - idlt
Tags: Danny Jansen/Jordan Romano, Poetry, Toronto Blue Jays, Trade deadline blues, Weird formatting involving blank spaces and a randomly selected phrase from a word bank
Me on tumblr: @based--ball