A siren was sounding in the bottom of the fifth inning. Rain was falling in Hoover, Ala., just persistently enough to persuade the few fans at Hoover Metropolitan Stadium to open umbrellas, or retreat to the covered part of the grandstand, or just head home, where they had been told they all belonged Wednesday night. Suddenly, with the Birmingham Barons up, it did not matter quite so much that Wil Cordero was in the batter’s box.
Until that siren sounded in the distance, Cordero’s presence had mattered a lot. The circumstances of his arrival, the assault on his wife Ana last June, the release from the Boston Red Sox, the guilty plea, the signing with the White Sox had raised the attention to a level compared locally to the arrival of Michael Jordan. From the time the White Sox committed to Cordero on March 23, he had been given more than two weeks to polish his swing and his story, and now it was clear that both needed work.
For the second straight night against the Carolina Mudcats, Cordero, a bargain-basement $1 million player facing the challenge of Double-A pitching, failed to hit a ball out of the infield. His story was more alarming, a restricted remorse that segued much too smoothly from responsibility for the assault to contempt for reports that labeled him a wife-beater.
“The way some of the media came out and put it out there, like I’m the kind of guy that would go home after the game and beat my wife,” he said. “That’s not the way I am. That’s not the kind of person I am.”
As if there is some minimum number of incidents to warrant the reputation. How many people with serious issues to address have used the same form of denial? A person listens to a suggestion that there are clear signs of a problem with alcohol and points to someone slumped in a doorway with a bottle to maintain with assurance, now that’s a drunk.
By limiting his admission to the one incident, when court papers suggest strongly that his behavior has been far more widespread, Cordero gave the strong appearance of someone who was saying exactly what he had to say, and nothing more. When he was pressed on the issues, including claims made by his first wife, Cordero’s response became personal.
“I can’t put words in your mouth,” he told a reporter. “If you say that I did something that I know in my heart that I didn’t do, why should I argue with you?”
His defiance missed the point as clearly as the White Sox did. This is not to question a person’s right to work while dealing with complex, personal problems. The larger issue is an organization’s stance within an industry that still seeks, often unsuccessfully, to regain the confidence of its customers.
When the Barons take the field at the start of a game, a charming and inventive promotion allows members of Little League teams to accompany each player to his position and stand there, hats over hearts, for the playing of the national anthem.
The Rockwellian sight of Little Leaguer and prospective hero standing side by side at attention is everything baseball once was and would love to be. But the scene at first base, as a pair of children waited with the new, temporary first baseman of the Barons, captured the problem.
Miles and miles from Boston, where the pain within the Cordero household created a flashpoint for those concerned with spousal abuse, or Chicago, where his reputation precedes his arrival, the response was indifference. But in Fenway Park or Comiskey Park, how many parents would be thrilled to turn their children over to Wil Cordero?
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And then a siren sounded, and the whole question felt far less significant. To a generation older than the players on the field, the siren was a memory of the Cold War, and tests that blared at noon, creating an instant of terror before the realization that all it meant was that it was lunchtime. The routine inspired the comedian Robert Klein to produce what could have been a foolproof Soviet war plan: “We’ll bomb at noon. They’ll think it’s lunch.”
But on Wednesday night, that feeling of terror never, ever subsided. A scratchy voice from the field level, belonging to a Barons employee, relayed a question upstairs:
“The umpires want to know what the sirens are for.”
The laughter in the press box was nervous, not reckless. Eventually, a rain delay would be caused by harmless-looking showers. A tarpaulin was removed, a game resumed and Cordero and the Barons went back to work. Even in hindsight, as the death toll from the tornadoes continued to rise, the only immediate hint of the suffering in Rock Creek and Oak Grove, as close as 20 miles away, was the memory that lights within the stadium had flickered. A survivor, in a television interview, said the only warning had come when the lights flickered.
By the end of the game, with much of the horror elsewhere concealed by darkness, Cordero’s place had become much clearer. Anyone in Birmingham last Wednesday night, expert or not, would advise him to embrace his wife and children, and just be grateful he can.