By Doug Olmsted
THE FLASK
The dark oak grains of the desk in the general manager’s office still stretched and spiraled along its length like he remembered. The black and white photo taken during the fire that burned the St. Louis Beaver’s first stadium – the sinister work of the crosstown-rival Reds – still hung next to the door. And the squat sofa with its dyed orange leather matching the Beaver’s team colors still sat along the wall opposite the room’s lone window. It seemed to Doug Olmsted that nothing in the office had changed since his departure six seasons ago.
Or was it seven?
He had lived the years in between in a haze, and his hasty departure from the Beavers organization had been even hazier. Kentucky Bourbon was an easy thing to blame. During the time, he had rarely spent more than an hour without sneaking a swig from the silver flask given to him by the team’s previous owner, Robert Schilling. It had been a gift for winning the Frontier League in 1902, his first as general manager. But Olmsted knew it wasn’t the bourbon that caused the haze.
For as long as he could remember, the haze had come and gone like a slump in baseball. One day every pitch coming his way in life looked four times its size, and he was able to take a big swing and drive it into the gap. But the next day he’d wake up and every ball was nothing but a series of blurs, if he could make them out at all. He’d sometimes have enough in him, enough will or false pride, to take a wild cut at the foggy mess, hoping to make contact, to put it in play, maybe leg out an infield hit. Most often, though, he couldn’t bring himself to offer at them at all, content to wait for life’s umpire to ring him up on a pitch outside the strike zone and send him scuffling back to the dugout.
During the haze he found himself over the past several years, the dugout had been a ranch on the western edge of North Dakota. Fully smothered in its embrace and wanting to escape, he couldn’t think of a place more remote and with less people, and one he could travel to with the $48 in crumpled bills he had shoved into his lone pair of pants.
The old rancher who took him in didn’t mind the drinking as long as the cattle were cared for and the work was done on the expansive ranch sitting alongside a series of high, painted bluffs. He minded even less the agreement Olmsted made when he got there, saying he would work solely for meals and lodging, as long as whiskey, or what ended up being the hard bitter cider the rancher’s wife made, was included in the meaning of meals.
It wasn’t until a young buck happened upon the ranch and started working with them that Olmsted’s love of the game of baseball, or more likely his competitive baseball spirit, sprung back to life and caused Olmsted to come running back to St. Louis with his tail between his legs.
The young buck had been full of stories from out east about the winning ways of the outfit from Brooklyn winning title after title. But it wasn’t until the kid mentioned how the St. Louis Reds were really on the up and up and how they were likely to give the Brooklyn squad a healthy run in the coming years that shook all the haze – and a thick amount of grime and dust – out of Olmsted’s head.
He was on a train back to St. Louis the next week. For Olmsted, the only thing worse than the ghosts floating in the shadows of his mind were the real life demons from the north side of St. Louis winning baseball games.
He hadn’t planned on how he was going to get his job back upon arriving in St. Louis, but, seeing as how the previous general manager had spent more time away from his office than in it, the Beaver’s new owner, a Mr. Clyde Rogerson, a man Olmsted had never heard of, was more than thrilled to bring him back. Rogerson’s only stipulations were that Olmsted needed to stay away from the bourbon and that more butts would be seen in the seats at Riverlands Field.
But now, back in the office again, despite it looking just as it had the day he had left all those years ago – the same desk, the same picture, the same orange leather sofa – Olmsted felt something wasn’t quite right. The ledgers added up as they should. Ticket sale numbers and the money from the sale of barbecue at the concessions was all accounted for, and player payroll was well within reason. But the way the team had been run over the last couple seasons – the scarcity of foresight; the lack of engagement; hell, the incomprehensible dogmatic accumulation of burly, poor fielding first basemen littering every position through the organization – all of it had the same stench as the fire did back when the stadium was burned.
Shaking his head, Olmsted reached into the pocket of his coat and took out his flask. He looked at it for a moment then turned his head and stared out the office’s window. After a bit, he lifted the flask up in front of him and, with his other hand, traced the words Mr. Schilling had inscribed on the flask’s front:
Beat the Reds
Olmsted opened one of the side drawers of the desk and closed the flask inside.