ANSWERING THE QUESTION

Backstory and history of a particular player- make them come to life!
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RonCo
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ANSWERING THE QUESTION

Post by RonCo » Sun Mar 08, 2020 10:52 am

It is earlier in the morning than Lucas McNeill wants to know. Outside it’s still dark, and the wind was skittering leaves over the concrete as he walked into the stadium, the guard tipping the bill of his cap at him as McNeill passed through the gates. He’s sitting at his locker now in the middle of an immense silence.

There is a smell here, a smell that has always been here in the way that it's always been in every locker room he's ever been in, but that he’s never been able to define. Clean. Powerful. A mix of hope and struggle, bottled up in ego and brashness, then given a sheen of infield dirt that is so distant as to almost not be there while also being impossible to miss. He scans the hall, breathes deeply to stretch his ribs, and gets to business.

To the rest of the world, Lucas McNeill has the perfect life. He is rich now, richer than his daddy could have ever imagined he’d be growing up in Tobaccoville, North Carolina. He is married to an amazing woman, certainly one more amazing than he’d ever be. He’s adopted two kids and they are off doing amazing things, both are back home again for the first time in a year. All four of them together again because of this series.

The Landis Memorial would play soon. Well. Not really that soon. The game would start at 7:05 PM if the program was right. Seventeen hours away. That’s soon in certain circles, but feels like a decade away as McNeill sits there, remembering. It will be great to see Jose Chavez again. It made him choke up to hear the team had signed him to a minor league deal to keep him in the fold at the end. That’s something he’s grown to love about the Nine. Yeah, the game is a business, but there’s a humanity here that he doesn’t see in certain other places.

The fans are great. Management is bumbling, but well-meaning, and lucky enough at times that … well …

He looks at his uniform hung so perfectly on the knob at the wall. #31 in red blazing against the perfect white. His name across the top. He turned 35 just a month ago. Last time his team was in the Landis he was 27. He remembers other names and other numbers. De Castillo. Guerra. Garcia. LaLoosh. Lopez. He reaches out and lets the fabric of the uniform play between his fingers. It’s smooth and sleek. Designed for maximum flexibility. He’d wear sweatshirt and glove to play tonight, of course. Both red. The color would remind him of those guys. Of 2031, and 2033, both played against Jacksonville.

He remembers the question.

There have been a million of them, of course. You don’t get to be a major leaguer without facing questions from the press—and you don’t get to be a major leaguer married to the most successful pop star in history without those question amped up to a billion. So, yeah, there have been questions, most of which he forgets as soon as he answers them. But there was one.

One he remembers often. One that wakes him up some times.

“If the Nine don’t win a championship with LaLoosh, Chavez, and you, will that mean the whole decade is a failure?”

He stands up and draws a breath, dressed now in sweats and a heavy T-shirt.

No, he thinks, recalling faces of the names he’s already thought about, and then the faces of a couple hundred more players who have funneled through this locker room in the fifteen seasons he’s played. That can’t be true. That’s not what life is about, he thinks as he imagines his son and his daughter still sleeping in that way that only growing teenagers can sleep.

Yet, still, the question lingers like it always has.

Is he a failure?

Lucas McNeill pulls a batting glove onto each of his hands, flexes his fingers to let the leather settle just right, then reaches to the rack over the locker to pull down a piece of lumber. With two hands, he waggles it back and forth, feeling the precise way the wood pulls at his wrists and how the weight of the bat presses through the muscles of his forearms.

Then he strides through the empty pre-dawn locker room, and down the hall to the batting cage. The Jackrabbits will probably be throwing Julio Alicea, a tough, tough lefty. The skipper, Bill Inkster, has been setting him against the toughest of tough lefties this year, which means that maybe Lucas McNeill will be playing ball tonight and maybe he won’t.

Either way, though, he will be ready.
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Re: ANSWERING THE QUESTION

Post by HoosierVic » Sun Mar 08, 2020 12:13 pm

Wonderful. And, no, how can you call a decade of winning a failure? May be not the heights of success he (and you) had hoped for, but certainly not failure.

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Re: ANSWERING THE QUESTION

Post by Clayman » Sun Mar 08, 2020 3:16 pm

Cracking story but ggrrr beat me to it lol, I was looking at McNeill as a player spotlight. I was thinking on the lines of "I've danced this dance before" but you did a better service to him than I could have.
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Re: ANSWERING THE QUESTION

Post by RonCo » Sun Mar 08, 2020 3:18 pm

Feel free to post it. No problems with twice the fun. :)
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Re: ANSWERING THE QUESTION

Post by Clayman » Sun Mar 08, 2020 3:39 pm

RonCo wrote:
Sun Mar 08, 2020 3:18 pm
Feel free to post it. No problems with twice the fun. :)
Good thing is I hadnt started writing it, I'd looked up he's been with the 9s through their near ever present play offs. This is were my wife says "silly bugger" and rolls her eyes when I say "you have to feel sorry for that McNeill guy, he deserves a championship" then tell her its OOTP :cool:
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Re: ANSWERING THE QUESTION

Post by jleddy » Sun Mar 08, 2020 5:10 pm

Heavy is the head the wears the crown.
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