As Good as Gold
by Piper Wright
Vault 81 – The row of shacks, known as “The Dorms,” all look exactly the same except for the sprinkles of personality and painted numbers on the doors. I sit at a worn metal table with a faded orange and black-striped umbrella in the middle. The lounge chair creaks and adjusts to my weight, telling secrets about its pre-war life.
We are at dorm WB2, the row of dorms set closest to the Charles River. When players first moved to The Dorms in late February, there was a sense of newness to the players-only facilities and players quickly became a team because of it, especially when a fire wrecked one of the rows. This team is the Vault 81 Dwellers. None of them live in the vault itself, but they all represent the vault, and the vault thanks them by providing a mostly-private place to call home and three free daily meals.
Dorm WB2 belongs to the Dwellers’ third-round pick and current league leader in just about every batting category, Erns Gold. At the time of this meeting, Sunday, April 12, Vault 81 had just hosted and swept the Diamond City Swatters thanks in large part to the bat of Gold. In the series, he was 7 of 12 with 3 home runs, 2 doubles, 6 runs batted in, and 6 runs scored. He has now hit a home run in 6 straight games, meaning every game he has played in so far.
Looking at the two-weekend accumulation of stats in the Railroad League, Gold is 59 points ahead in batting average (.583), 4 homers ahead (6), 10 RBI ahead (18), and 0.3 WAR ahead (0.9), among other statistical categories kept by the league, than the second-best player in each of those categories. Quite simply, he has been “gold.”
“I don’t think that I will remain this dominant,” Gold said. “At some point, I would expect to struggle. Like life, baseball is a game of struggles.”
While he may struggle in the future, the first two weekends have shown that the third-round pick, number 64 overall, has been a major steal so far.
“I want to do my best every day,” Gold said. “I tried to tell the teams that when they interviewed me and I had tryouts for the league. I think I had a reputation from before that I had a low work ethic, but that’s not true. It was just, my job before, you know. Not everyone loves their job.”
Gold was a “caravaneer” before joining the Commonwealth Baseball Organization. Born into a life of caravaneers, Gold knew only one thing: transporting goods from place to place. While his earliest memories have mostly been in the Massachusetts area of the Commonwealth, he also remembers his family going as far as Appalachia for various reasons. He even claims to have seen the ruins of The Statue of Liberty.
“There wasn’t much to what I saw,” Gold said, a faraway look in his eyes. “You could see that the statue was in half. The legs were still normal looking from far away, but the top half from the torso up was sticking straight up from a beach. There was a man there, crying and yelling out things like, ‘you maniacs,” and ‘you blew it up,’ and something about hell. I was only 8, but it stuck with me, you know?”
When Gold was just 13, his family started moving farther east from their usual patrol area in Springfield towards Boston. Their trip took just over 14 months, that included several stops in less-than-reputable locations.
“Yeah, we were attacked a lot. You think of a creature or a bad human, and we met them along the way. Outside of Boston, the Commonwealth is wild. It is a miracle that it’s even like this here. We really are lucky.”
Gold and his family finally made their way to the Commonwealth in early 2288. By the time they arrived around, there were many differences Gold could spot.
“I remember we walked up to Egret Tours Marina from the south. Dad had his hunting rifle ready in case it was a raider settlement, but then we could see several traders coming through. We found out later that they were provisioners working for a network of settlements. We couldn’t believe it, you know? Actual civilization!”
Gold and his two younger brothers discovered the joys of life that day. Not only was Egret Tours Marina welcoming to a family of caravaneers, but their dad was able to start working and earning money right away. The settlement worked to set up the family of five in temporary housing, which later became permanent. Also, the still-14-year-old Gold was able to learn about two of his loves right away.
“The first night there, one of the teenagers, David Shovel, rest in peace, showed me and my brothers the local pool hall. We played pool until the radstorm came through that night. It was unbelievable. That was exciting, but the next day, well, that was the day that spoiled me.”
The next day, the same David Shovel, who Gold said lost his life during a roving super mutant attack about one year later, brought Erns and his two brothers, Potter and Strike, out to an open field.
“David handed us all a glove and a baseball cap. We then joined 10 other people and played baseball all day. I never went a day again not thinking about that day. David got me started in baseball, and he would be playing in the CBO, too, if he was still around.”
Gold’s two younger brothers have not joined the CBO, though Gold said he’s still trying to convince them. For now, they still work for their father’s provisioner business out of Egret Tours Marina, the same business Erns just left late last year to pursue his baseball dreams. Gold’s father often called him lazy, but Gold claims he just didn’t love the provisioner life.
“Day and night, night and day, I just thought about baseball and pool. When I heard that [Nate Howard and other league founders] were going to start a baseball league, I just knew that was my way out of caravaning. Then I couldn’t ever focus on my work. I think my pop was glad I left because he didn’t have to yell at me every day to get me to move.”
For Gold, overwhelming talent may give way to the reputation for laziness and disinterest. Sitting here on his porch west of Vault 81, I can see through his front window that he did little decorating inside his home, except for one thing: baseball posters. It looks like he has some passion after all.
“I don’t know if I’m the best in the league, but I want to be. I’ll try to be. Gosh darnit, I will do whatever it takes to play ball and not have to pull a brahmin. I don’t think good is good enough.”
For the rest of the players in the CBO, they may only hope that they can be good enough to match him. They can only hope to be as good as Gold.