Barry Bonds's Head

There was malaise in the clubhouse. Guys looking over their shoulders and wondering who they could trust. Even though this was the minor leagues, baseball is ostensibly a sport of honor. True, guys have been known to run the odd small-time con. A couple hundred bucks a game and a per diem don't go that far. But extortion was a whole other thing.

The polyphony of murmurs suggested that Vincent "Happy" Tortorella was to be indicted on federal racketeering charges. Over the course of the season, his importunate manner had led guys to agree to loan him cash, a few hundred bucks at a time, to get him off their backs. Happy would repay them the following week via bank wire under a couple different names. When questioned about it he would offer some equivocation, raising further suspicions.

The nature of the minor league scene is young guys with cash in their pockets looking to curry favor with the putative club leader. Then they're off to another back-water team, or perhaps home to Palookaville. Most of these guys are not masters of deduction and polemics. It's all kinesthetics with these meatheads; if they can't figure it out with their muscles or their cocks they're not figuring it out.

So, what's the likelihood that a bullpen catcher could posit a scheme to go Charles Ponzi by laundering rookies' lunch money using only platitudes and peer-pressure as collateral? About as likely as Barry Bonds's head growing to twice its original size.

Seed words: putative, Kinesthetic, polemics, platitude, posit, importunate, polyphony, malaise, equivocation, ostensibly

(These words came out of a notebook I found from college in which I kept track of new words culled from my reading.)