My Spanish isn't great, but it's better than Google at translating an article I found in La Prensa ("El Diario de Los Nicaragüenses") that mentions the whirling dervish of third base, Freddy Tiburcio. Between Google's charmingly incomprehensible rendering and mine, I have determined that Freddy is the batting coach for the "A" Team at the New York Yankees satellite training facility in the Dominican Republic. Guess what? He's from there. If I could talk to Freddy, first I'd find out how he likes being Home Again. Then I'd ask him about 1990, when he went to Taiwan to play in the startup Chinese Professional Baseball League. He starred for a team called Brother Elephants (I believe they were named after the office products company). Like most foreigners recruited for the league, Tiburcio was given an honorific Chinese name chosen for its vague homophony with his own. "Di-bo," as he was called, means "imperial waves and billows" -- did the Elephants know about Freddy's sleight-of-body maneuver at the DAP? I sought Maximo del Rosario online, figuring there would be too many Pat Hodges and David Joneses to keep up with; but I doubt the Filipino insurance salesman my search retrieved is the same Maximo del Rosario who, until just this year, held the Bulls' all-time record for saves (!). Speaking of names too common to track, I thought Jeff Wagner would be one of them. So I am thus doubly indebted to Mark Gold of Round Rock, Texas, a suburb of my former stomping grounds in Austin. Mark emailed me just today to report a helpful correction: Jeff Wagner was, like Mark, a Round Rock native, not an Alabaman as I'd speculated. I don't know where Jeff went, but now we know where he came from. Thank you, Mark!
Colleen, the teacher who boarded at our house the year of the seventeen-inning Most Exciting Game I Ever Saw, and who was the first to hear our late-night account of it, still lives in Durham right near my mother. A few years ago, she contracted a rare neurological disease and now lives with constant pain, limping in stiff slow-motion.
Rita the Junior High School English Teacher, with whom my stepfather ran off, now runs an orchid nursery here in Durham. My mother has sent some of her own orchids to Rita for rehabilitation.
I just try not to think about that.
