Fresno is the fifth-largest city in California.

Brandon rehearsed the phrase in preparation for his regular Thursday evening conversation with Nana. 

Brandon, I never see you on the television anymore.  Your mother never tells me anything.  You’re much better than those other boys out there.  I always tell people you’re the next Dom Dimaggio!   Are you going to get a haircut anytime soon?  Are you still dating Whitney?  She’s such a nice girl!  Her hair’s a little too short but a nice girl anyway.  All the women look like boys.

Nana, I’m back in Fresno, but not for long.  Did you know it’s the fifth-largest city in California?

He hadn’t seen Whitney since the breakup in March.  He wasn’t coming back to Fresno and the season would keep him too busy to keep things going long-distance.  He had Major League baseball and she had three years in at Justice.  The management trainee program would allow her to travel throughout the district.  She’ll get to see a lot more of Santa Clara, maybe get down to Anaheim if she played her cards right.  The two of them were just going in different directions.  If it was meant to be…

The fifth-largest city in California.  That line wouldn’t work for Whitney.

Brandon pulled onto Tulare street and parked in the metered spot next to the entrance to Chukchansi Park.  It was a beautiful façade.  He wondered what the Chukchansi would think of their park, sitting in the grass behind second base bewildered by the last twelve thousand years.  What use is 108 thousand square feet of grass without roots or berries?  Who would want a land like this?  The devil.  Maybe they would eat something from the Taqueria.  Maybe their men would steal bashful glances at the half-shirted women misting themselves on the second deck.  It was 110 degrees some days.  They were bronze lionesses out there in bare shoulders and ball caps.  Poor, adolescent men scurried and sniffed the air like brainless gazelles. 

Walking past storage and training rooms, Brandon left his bag, four gloves, four bats in the stall and took one of the maples with him to the empty field.  He stood at home plate and listened to the sound of sprinklers swell like cicadas.  He gripped the bat and fell into his stance, taking a quick glance at the 385’ off the left-center wall as he had hundreds of times before.  He brought the bat back and forth through the zone and settled in.  Orient yourself, face the gap.  Tell the bat where to hit the ball.  The other way, he thought.  The other way.  He wondered at that very moment whether Aubrey faced second base or the gap between left field and shortstop while he set his feet.  Just do something little every day, and you’ll be back to the show. 

Brandon tapped his foot and loaded his hands.  He swung evenly through the zone and dropped the bat, imagining the ball scorch right toward 385’ and over the wall.  He rounded first and thought of Clayton Richard’s face, pale and tense, his hands on his knees.  Richard was surprised, thinking of the pitch sequence and how the batter was able to keep his hands inside his swing.  Brandon chuckled to himself a bit at the thought that he would ever get to face a left-handed pitcher; but this was Fresno: the fifth-largest city in California.  Anything was possible here.  

Just want to point out that our dearly departed Left Fielder of the Future just had his fifth consecutive multi-hit game, batting leadoff in the AL East.  The intriguing part of the story is that Fred was able to produce after going 5 for his first 24 (.208).  This despite the fact that, as everyone knows, an inexperienced player is incapable of production after a string of unproductive games and must be sent away to gain major league experience at the minor league level.  Apparently the talent-evaluation druids in Toronto employed their unique brand of sorcery (Career .OBP?) to predict that lolFred wasn't a lost cause.  

You have to respect our coaching staff/front office's commitment to white magic, but sometimes i wish, for just a few weeks, that we'd walk on the wild side.  Could you imagine the adorable animals we'd have to slaughter to make use of OBP?  Shudder.

We never knew you, but we loved you.  We never saw you, but then of course we were crying some of the time and some of the time we were drunk.  

The summer of 2009 summoned our great hopes from somewhere in that hoping place, deep down beneath the heavy, heavy disillusionment place.  Damn, it's dark in the disillusionment place - hard to find the hoping place so you kind of have to keep digging.  Our hoping place told us that from somewhere else, somewhere very much outside of San Francisco (but not so far that Benji Molina wouldn't try to hit that place from the batter's box) we would find you.  You would be our batters and fielders, our run-scoring people - as soon as we did a little wiki research so we could know what the run-scoring people do.  

We found you in Fresno and we bought you a ticket to our little hopefest where pitchers pitch and batters pitch too.  You were going to be the ones that combine with our pitchers to field one entire baseball team.  We would pitch, and field, and when the pitching and fielding was done?  Oh, my, when the fielding was done we would bat the ball.  And when the ball was batted it would leave the infield, a place we learned was just outside the batter's box - but not so far outside that Benji Molina wouldn't swing at it.  We even gave you uniforms.

And, oh, you thought those uniforms were for playing.  For playing!  For playing the game with the batted ball, but you must have understood after we pinch hitted for pitchers with pitchers that something was wrong.  You were so sharp, we loved that about you.  And I confess, we fans thought something was wrong too - and we whined and we cried.  We gesticulated, we genuflected, and in our spare time we merrily rosterbated.  We LOL'd, we bitched, we moaned with great moans, we may have self-medicated a little.  We and you were together, all of us wondering why you were here - batting ball people - if the ball you were never to bat.

Now we know, surely we know why you were here.  Now we know, surely we know you were here to bring fear.  Fear to the Molinas and Winns and Rowands.  Fear to the Rents and the 'Kawas and the non-Panda pwn-ends.  Fear to those swingers of bats at non-baseball objects.  Fear to non-fair-bunting, non-pitch-taking fail-jects.   You were fear for the gamers to get into gamer-type shape, to dive and run (though not past the plate).  To say that "we're in this" and hit the air with a punch, to wear some eye-black and play pepper and such.  To not suck, to not suck, to not suck to not suck.  But a-sucking they would do, with gusto and defensive tones they told us that we - with our hoping places - could all go to hell with our non-gamer faces.  

Oh.  We also rhymed, because we knew you were too - in the dugout in new uniforms.  With nothing to do.