—
I was an indifferent student in high school, smart enough to skate by. Math and science could keep my ping-ponging attention, but not much else. Unless I was moving, doing something physical, my brain was flighty and distant. As a boy, I’d go off walking and would find myself miles away from home before it even registered that I’d gone anywhere. I didn’t notice anything. Or nothing that stayed with me. I just kept moving, propelled by some instinct I had no words for.
I found solace in the hierarchy and definitiveness of competitive sports. Later, after spending many years examining the nature of my difficulty connecting with life outside the chalked lines—the irony of fleeting chalk on top of dirt and grass being able to contain so much of my life is not lost on me—I came to understand things a little better. How the diamond and the field and the court were where I found escape from the chaos of the house I grew up in.
That house seemed to grow more dangerous as I got older and my facility for connecting things to other things increased. My father got more and more unpredictable—his tempests, his contrition, his stunted love in a pitched battle with his self-absorption. He tried churches, he tried swearing off, he tried going to meetings in the city, he tried college courses, he tried to start things, but nothing stuck and nothing could give him back what had dried up and blown away. His resentment could be explosive. Not knowing when it might erupt was the worst of it.
I grew bigger and faster and stronger than he was when he was my age. I was good, too. He could be proud and encouraging and he could be cutting and cruel. We were pampered and soft, he’d sneer. We didn’t know what it was like back in the day. He’d go on about how the equipment and gear and training practically played the game for us these days. Not a particularly original trick, but it’s surprising how well it worked. How it made me feel like I wasn’t real. So, I started wearing my socks high, like they did in the old days, and took an extra-sized jersey for modesty. I painted my cleats black and stopped washing my cap until it looked a hundred years old. I wanted it to seem as if I stepped out of one of those old baseball cards my dad kept in Ziploc bags inside of shoeboxes inside a chest in the attic.
Sometimes, I’d come home late at night, later than I was supposed to come home—I was out doing nothing much more than staying away—and I’d find him at the kitchen table, thin latex gloves on his hands, going through the cards as if he were handling something made of delicate glass. He’d call me over to sit down and tell me about the people pictured on the cards, names that would mean nothing if I said them now, but names that made those cards worth ten times their weight in gold.
“Do you know how much this is worth?” he’d ask.
I didn’t.
“A lot,” he’d say, and carefully put the card back in order in the Ziploc bag.
“That’s a Tony Taylor rookie-season card. Not many people remember Taylor, but he was one of the first Cubans to come into the league. Nineteen fifty-eight. A solid second baseman. Made the All-Stars a couple years. Remembered best for two things. One was the infamous two-ball, Stan Musial out at third in 1959. The other is the great play he made at second to save Jim Bunning’s perfect game in 1964. Nobody gets a perfect game without one or two of those. He also stole home six times, which nobody seems to care about, but that was enough right there to make his mark.”
He’d tell me to grab another beer for him out of the refrigerator and to get one for myself. I didn’t care about the beer, but I indulged him. And he’d talk about the people on those cards and their passing through this game, how each left some kind of mark on it, however faint. And it would always end with him packing those cards away and saying, “It might not look like much, son, but these cards are worth more than you think.”
Those were the times that worked for us.
When I began moving past him in the high school record books, he tried to act as if he was proud, and I know that in some dim region in the back of his heart, he was. Still, he couldn’t keep the spark of resentment from igniting in his eyes or hide the fact that every time my name replaced his at the top of some list, he seemed to age in dog years.
—
I’ve retired eighteen in a row. Struck out eight. Three swinging, five looking. Getting them looking is good. It means we’ve got them all mixed up. Dickey has them all mixed up, I should say. Pitch counts, patterns, locations, rotations—he’s running numbers these batters can’t begin to fathom. I’m right there with him. Algorithms pass between us in flashes of fingers and nods. The right-handed brute has gone down swinging twice and my admiration for him grows. He’d rather swing at phantoms than get called out with his bat on his shoulder.
So far, only three balls have made it out of the infield, all lazy flies. The rest have been routine grounders, nothing to raise a pulse. But now all our pulses are raised. It started with Dickey: his pats on the back, his glares, his clenched fists, his pointing, his encouraging. He’s done the recruiting for this mission. Games like this can get a team on a run to the postseason and Dickey knows he doesn’t have too many runs left in him. Mack and Jack signed up early. Now everyone’s on board.
The dugout is strange and silent, almost grim. No one has said anything, but after eighteen in a row everyone will be held accountable. After eighteen in a row, only my mistakes can be forgiven. I look over at our third baseman. He’s just a kid. He’s staring straight ahead, out beyond the centerfield wall into the night. Sunflower seed shells are flying out of his mouth like pulp from a wood chipper.
—
We lost the state championship finals my senior year in high school because we couldn’t win any of the games that I didn’t pitch. By then, I had grown to my full height, six-foot-three. I weighed twenty-five pounds less than I do now, barely two hundred pounds. But I was strong and even though I wasn’t fast, I had a feel for my body that you could call graceful. I went 10-0 during the regular season that year and gave up no earned runs. I played right field when I wasn’t pitching. I didn’t much care for it. It reminded me too much of shagging flies with my dad and his red-faced frustration at not being able to hit one out to me after he’d reached into the cooler too many times.
The ball, not the bat, was what I wanted. I needed to hold it, feel it, massage it, coax it, and pitch it with all the intent I could summon. The ball, I believed, held the key to solving the game. But my bat was too valuable for the coaches to keep me out of games. I hit fifteen home runs, eighteen doubles, and five triples my senior year. Drove in half our runs. I lent our team a stature it didn’t deserve, and our success pumped some oxygen into our wheezing town. The hopes and expectations were directed at our team, but they landed on me, a conscientious objector. I just wanted to pitch.
I was a mid-rounds draft pick out of high school. The team that drafted me offered me a signing bonus, small by pro standards, but the money would have been a windfall where I came from. When the offer came in, my father’s eyes lit up with desire and desperation. He was sick then; asbestos and alcohol had kicked off a parade of cancers. If the money came in, and it came from baseball, he believed he could lay some claim to it.
I turned down the offers and took a scholarship to a junior college in the state capital with a baseball program that fed kids to big-time schools or the minor leagues. I wasn’t being spiteful. It was just that if I was going to get a bonus, it was going to be big enough to get my mother and little sister out of there.
In my second year at JuCo, I went 15-1. I had a no-hitter, a one-hitter, and eleven shutouts. I had perfect games going into the ninth inning three times. My dad died halfway through that season. I didn’t find out until after, but I pitched on the day he died. It was the one game I lost.
I was drafted in the first round.
—
I take the mound at the top of the eighth. Twenty-one straight have gone down with barely a protest. It’s put me in a dangerous state of mind, one where looking for easy answers could make me alligator armed if I let it. I tug at my bri
m, toe the rubber, tug and toe, and then step off. I walk to the edge of the mound and tug at my brim some more, but I can’t find myself. Dickey calls time and trots out toward the mound. I meet him halfway because I don’t want him or anyone else stepping onto my dirt. I don’t want to talk. I need to stay in command of time.
Dickey knows I’ll turn away as soon as possible, so he puts his gloved hand behind my back to keep me in place. His short arms are surprisingly powerful. He looks past me, into the stands, around the stadium, turns his back to me as if I weren’t there, surveys the crowd, and then faces me again.
“You come here often?” he says, straight-faced.
I almost laugh.
“Relax,” he says, and lets me go with a pat on the back.
I scale the mound again, feeling lighter, feeling something unfamiliar. Trust, maybe.
Past the outfield, the hills rise above the parking lot in silhouette, palm trees and scrub bushes making sketchbook shapes in black and gray. On the other side of those hills, the city roils with millions of different pulses and prerogatives. Some part of me recognizes that what’s going on here is part of it, part of what shrinks the distances between us and makes it all seem slightly less frightening, for a while, maybe.
I tug on my brim, massage the ball and stare out into the shadows, take a few breaths and pull at my brim again. I’m ready.
I should mention that I am not a great pitcher.
In ten years in the majors, I’ve barely won more than I’ve lost. My ERA is respectable—above 3.00, below 4.00—and I strike out one in every 4.75 batters. My fastball is good, but I’m no flamethrower. I need location and movement. I’ve got decent off-speed pitches, but I have to mix things up or I can be caught up with by the late innings.
But I get to the late innings. And that’s made me more valuable than my record. These days, when every manager watches the pitch counts of his number-one starter and top closer, lest he be blamed for burning out those expensive arms, you need a workhorse to take pressure off the rest of the staff. That’s me. I give innings and I keep us in the game. If our bats are hot, we might win.
Their cleanup hitter is leading off, then the brute, and then a solid bat in the sixth spot. They’ll be pressing. Trying hard to break my spell. I can feel them gripping. I can feel each one believing it’s up to him. That’s how pitching can unravel a team.
Dickey gives me three fingers for a slider. He wants to see if they’ll bite on a bad first pitch. I shake him off. It’s not time for that yet. I want to go one inside, send a message. When I’ve been here before, I’ve tried too hard to hold on to what I had. It made the air too heavy and the ball too sticky. Now, I want to surrender the ball to the night and the city and to everyone in it, including their cleanup batter. I can see Dickey smile behind his mask. He gives me the one, inside and high.
I collect, kick, and unleash. Their cleanup batter swings so hard his helmet comes off, but the ball was in Dickey’s mitt before he even started.
They’re hacking at anything around the plate now, respecting the game too much to try to work a cheap walk. I return their respect by not cheating too far off the plate, knowing the umpire isn’t immune to the buzz filling the stadium. All three go down—the number-six batter on a changeup right down the middle, the ball hidden in plain sight. He could have swung three times before it got there, but he didn’t swing at all.
The crowd rises as I walk to the dugout, its cheers muted and wise.
I don’t look up.
—
I live alone in a furnished apartment downtown, close to the stadium. This is my third team and my third city since I came up to the big leagues. I haven’t bought a house or a piece of furniture anywhere. I don’t have a wife. I haven’t had a girlfriend in years. When I need sex, I get it. It’s not difficult in my position, but it’s nothing more than that. I drive the same car I bought with my bonus. I’m not an ascetic. I just don’t care. I don’t know why. Or maybe I do. Those things—girlfriends, wives, homes, the artifice or artifacts of life outside the lines—they have their own gravity and logic, their own science and riddles. I don’t have room for them. I need to keep my space for baseball. Maybe someday, when this mystery’s been solved, I’ll want other things. Not now.
I pay for my sister’s education. She’s pursuing advanced studies in synthetic biology and molecular programming. Soon, she says, we’ll be engineered on a molecular level. I wonder how I will feel when science takes metaphysics out of the mysteries that drive me.
I also pay for my mother to live in an assisted-living facility in the city that’s a two-hour drive from where we grew up. Dementia came on fast after my sister and I left home. Where she is now is first-rate, as these things go, but she doesn’t know me anymore and I don’t visit.
The membrane I’ve built around me, I’ve worked on my entire life. It’s nearly impenetrable. But this crowd, this moment, these teammates, it’s all getting so close to me now that I can taste their coughs, hear their laughs, and feel their rising hopes that for once, with them as witness, some tiny prayer might be answered. Time is smashing into my eyeballs like a tsunami hitting land. It’s all sending ripples through my skin, blowing my cap back, rustling through my jersey, working its way inside me. It hurts a little in a place I can’t quite put my finger on.
We score another run in the bottom of the eighth. We’re up 3–0.
I have to stand up. I have to face this. But I can’t move. I try to lift my butt off the bench, but it won’t budge. Everybody has taken the field. The warm-up catcher is waiting behind the plate. The kid at third base ran out there in a spray of sunflower seed shells. They’re ready for me, but I can’t move.
Dickey, always the last one out, especially in the late innings when putting on his armor takes all the energy he can muster, comes over to me. I try to get up before he’s in my face, but I can’t.
“What’s going on?”
“I don’t know. I can’t move.”
The ump comes over to the dugout and says something to our manager, who looks down at us and starts in our direction. Dickey waves him off.
“C’mon. You’ve done this a thousand times,” he says. “It’s just another inning. It’s the same as a first inning, except it’s the last. One more and we’re done.”
“I can’t…” I point to the sky. “It’s like everything is on top of me. Those stars. The night. The black. The air. It feels like it’s all on top of me and I can’t move it.”
Dickey looks up like he’s studying something and for the longest moment says nothing, just stares. Then, “Yep, it’s there all right. It’s on top of all of us. And those stars don’t weigh any more on you than they do on anyone else. We all have to get up and do some things whether we want to or not. Now you get up and do this or I’ll never look you in the eye again and all those guys out there in the field waiting for you, they’ll never wait for you again.”
He grabs my shirt with his right hand and hoists me to my feet like I’m a child. I don’t fall down. My legs are beneath me. My arms are beside me. I’m standing.
“Take the mound,” Dickey says, and walks toward home plate.
I leave the dugout and the crowd rises to meet me.
—
I tug and caress my brim in a pattern only I can make sense of, the tics seeking a rhythm I can ride. Dickey calls the one, low and outside. I gather and deliver. I can’t feel a thing, but the ball is in Dickey’s mitt. A strike. Something happens. Some time passes. I tug and pull and caress the brim. Then, same call, same spot, same result. And now a fastball, just off the inside of the plate. The batter chases, misses. Strike three. The ball goes around the infield and back to me. I don’t look at anyone. I don’t look at anything. I’m not in a hurry, but I have to keep my rhythm. It’s eighth notes in double time, the beat of my heart. I’ve never felt it like this before, the blood throbbing into my earlobes, pounding into my toes.
The eighth batter, their shortstop, fouls off a curv
e after watching a fastball go right down the middle. With two strikes on him, Dickey calls the three, the ace in the hole we’ve been holding on to all this time. I nod in agreement. The shortstop waves badly at the first slider of the night and goes down for the second out of the inning. The crowd is on its feet. I can barely hear them roar, but I can feel them on my neck like dragon’s breath.
A pinch hitter comes on deck. He’s an aging star in his final year. He’s on the team to coach as much as to play. It’s a good choice. He won’t be rattled. Nothing else would be right. He tips his batting helmet toward me before entering the box. I nod back. And here we are, locked inside an equation that has no right or wrong answer, just an irrefutable result. He digs and points the bat toward my mound. He’s ready.
I’m square to him. My arms are at my side. Loose and light. For some reason, I feel no urge to reach for the brim of my cap. I just stand there loose-limbed, my hands falling toward the dirt. The crowd is standing straight up like forty thousand quills on a technicolor porcupine. Camera flashes explode in the corners of my eyes.
Knowing the slider has completely shuffled the deck, Dickey goes into his crouch and signals the one, low and inside—surprise the batter by giving him exactly what he wants. I nod in agreement.
I kick up my leg, high in the old ways, high like my socks, and come to first position. I lead and point with my left leg, shifting everything into the opening up before the snapping shut, before nothing else will be known, before I surrender all to the uncertainty of what comes next.
I pitch.
A fastball.
I hear a sharp crack and feel a vacuum rush past me and I know without seeing it that the ball is screaming for the hole between short and third. I turn my head over my shoulder and see Mack diving to his right faster than thought, fast enough to spear the ball before it tears into the outfield. He’s on his back with the ball in his glove. There’s no throw he can make to first and suddenly everything has stopped. There is no mound, no crowd, no Jack, no Mack, no Dickey, no time. There is only this snake of nothingness wrapping around my gut, buckling my knees. And just as I’m about to go down, I catch a blur at the edge of my vision. It’s Jack, in full stride moving toward Mack like Mack somehow knew he would be, and the ball is already making a perfect arc toward him, and I watch as Jack softly swipes it from the air with his bare hand, pivots, and throws it to first.
The O. Henry Prize Stories 2016 Page 9