The Game Player

by Rafael Yglesias

  My teammates were lined up behind a fence that is supposed to stop balls that elude the catcher. I heard one say, “He swings like a fairy.” And others: “Even if he hit the ball, the bat would break.” “Well, this’ll end the inning.”

  I turned to face them but when I did, Brian said, “Work on the pitcher, kid.”

  So our argument did have an effect, I thought. Thus silenced, I stepped back into the batter’s box and looked out at the blinding, endless field that dwarfed the outfielders. While I watched Danny’s aggressive, chaotic motion I thought of Brian’s analysis—Danny was afraid of really trying to win.

  I was angry. I felt betrayed by Brian and at my lowest. There was really nothing to lose, I realized. No expectation I could fail to fulfill. I remembered how smooth a swing I had developed in New York while playing stickball and when Danny released his pitch I told myself, coldly, to do the same with this heavier, shorter bat.

  But something exploded the calm I had achieved and when I swung, though it felt easier and more natural, I rushed and missed the ball by a lot. Strike two. Again there was jeering from my team and smiles amongst the opposing players. If a person can literally puff up and swell with pride, Danny did. He caught his catcher’s throw returning the ball, with a quick, confident snap of his glove.

  I didn’t even look at Brian for encouragement. I knew there would be none and suddenly I didn’t care. They were assholes, all of them, to think it mattered. I would strike out, finish the game, and never play again.

  I felt contempt for Danny’s absurd gyrations and watched him coolly, somewhat annoyed that I had to wait so long to meet my fate. I watched the ball come towards me with the same feeling of contempt and building rage. I almost thought, as I leveled the bat on it, that I spoke directly to the ball, informing it of the stupidity that surrounded me.

  Brian actually had to yell at me in order to get me to run. I didn’t know that I had hit the ball, much less that it was landing safely in right field. My slow start kept me to a single, but I watched a teammate cross home, and then the full joy of my triumph penetrated.

  My team clapped and yelled only harder because of their surprise at this fortunate outcome. But Brian seemed at ease, even a little offended by the atmosphere of amazement. I had batted ninth in the order and it was somewhat remarkable that Brian was picking up a bat to hit next. I had assumed he would bat cleanup—Mantle’s usual spot—since his reputation as a hitter was so good. He cleared home plate of our team’s celebration and while Danny prepared to pitch to him I asked the first baseman what the score was.

  “Two-nothing.”

  “Our favor?” I was delighted.

  “Yeah, jerk. You just knocked in a run. How could you guys be scoreless?”

  I smiled at him, enjoying this new sensation of winning. We had a man on third and I was on first with our best hitter at the plate. When Danny finally threw and I watched Brian, his elegant figure relaxing and regally allowing the ball to pass, I was struck by the quality of this game. This game I was fit to play in. “Was that a ball?” I asked my opponent.

  “Yeah. He’s gonna walk him.” He looked disgusted. “He should walk him.”

  “I’m batting a thousand,” I informed him. “One for one and an RBI.” He looked suitably annoyed at my bragging and I returned to observing Brian’s batting stance. It was an odd one: instead of positioning his left leg farther from the plate than his right, he did the reverse, so that he seemed curiously turned away from the pitcher. His face was partially hidden by his shoulder and he tilted it to one side in order to get a better view of Danny; he had the sinister aspect of a hawk-thoughtful, concentrated, and patient.

  Danny’s first pitch had been fast and wild. So was his second—even a little wilder since his catcher had to leave his position to prevent it from sailing away. His third attempt was a curve ball, I assumed. It was much slower and tantalizing than the others, though it was still going to be wide of the plate. I thought that Brian wouldn’t swing, not only because it would be ball three, but because he didn’t move a muscle until the last minute. And then his body moved forward, the bat keeping pace, toward the pitch, and he, very evenly, made contact. It was a line drive hit between me and the second baseman, hit so hard that I didn’t move until it was well past me. I ran almost hysterically to second and had a terrible moment of hesitation about going to third. But I heard my teammates yell for me to keep on and I did, with the wonderful scare of being chased making my safeness at third a relief of great burdens.

  I hopped to my feet, brushed off the dirt my slide had left on my pants, beamed at my cheering teammates, and modestly accepted a slap on the back by our third base coach. Our next hitter grounded out—I had a moment of thinking that there would be a play on me at the plate, but they threw to first—and, when I asked Brian what position I should play, he said, “We’ve got a lot of extra people. So Chuck will come in for you.”

  I must have looked shocked because he patted my shoulder and said gently, “We like to let everybody get a chance and, since you’re new, we only let new people play for one inning. Listen”—he raised his voice to a public tone—“we’ve got this sewed up. You’re our star hitter. I’m resting you for tomorrow.”

  “It’s all right. I understand.” But I said this uselessly; he had already turned to go to his position. I watched my teammates jog to their bases and begin warming up, not knowing what to do with myself until someone holding a notebook came up to me and asked, “Your name’s Howard?” I nodded. “I’m Paul,” he continued. “I was just checking for the scoresheet.” I looked over his shoulder while he marked my name in next to the statistic of my base hit. The notebook was printed on light green paper and divided into columns by thin red lines. “This is a pain in the ass,” he said after writing my name in. “But Brian’s a nut about it.”

  “You want me to do it?” I asked.

  “You know how?”

  “Sure. I’m from New York. I used to score the Yankee games.”

  He handed me the notebook. “You must have needed a big scoresheet. Okay, Brian wants a record of play by play on this.” He showed me another page covered with the numbers of the fielding code. “And then you put each hitter’s statistic on this page.” He then turned to another section of the book, somewhere in the middle, that was marked with a strip of white paper sticking out on top. “And this is for Danny’s team. Same thing, play by play and then the hitters.”

  I took his pencil and, feeling justified about my presence, walked confidently to the almost empty bench of my team. I didn’t know about half of the players on each team but I had been told that Brian played first base and left the significant job of pitching to a tall, skinny, curly-haired boy with an odd, triangular head. I checked his name while watching him make practice throws. It was Stanley. He must have been nearly six feet tall and his motion was a confusion of arms and legs. Besides, he threw so hard that each throw was punctuated by the pop of its impact in the catcher’s mitt.

  I followed the game’s action enthusiastically. I was free to root hard and make demands of performance from the players because of my hit. It was also a good spectacle: fast, professional, and dramatic. Stanley struck out the first two batters he faced and then walked the next two. His throws seemed to become wilder with each pitch and what had been a mood of oppression on the enemy bench turned into a kind of malicious jubilance. Stanley, his fair skin reddening, threw two balls to the next hitter that, despite our catcher reaching them, were chaotic. Brian walked to the mound deliberately and I was sure that we had seen the last of Stanley. Brian looked so angry and merciless that I felt sorry for our misshapen pitcher. Brian stood astonishingly close to him, their mouths almost touching, and talked quickly for a minute. Then he stood to one side of Stanley and put his arm around his shoulder. Our opponents became restless over this break of their ascendancy and taunted Brian, accusing him of stalling. He ignored them and didn’t walk away from the mound until he had finished.

>   I was surprised that Brian allowed Stanley to stay in. Not so much because I was convinced that he wouldn’t be able to throw a strike, but because I didn’t think that Brian had so much patience with incompetence. Stanley’s motion was altered when he threw again. Instead of immediately kicking his leg and hurling, he now started much more slowly, and only rushed his movements as he was releasing the ball, his face strained from the effort. His pitches were slower and more accurate. The batter fouled off the first one and completely missed the second. Up to this point, all of Stanley’s pitches had been fast balls and I was watching his motion lazily when I suddenly noticed, on the third pitch, that he had twisted his body in a different direction to throw sidearm. This was his first curve ball and the batter just watched it swing from in front of his body and cross the plate. Our umpire enjoyed his yell of strike three and my team ran off the field with quick shouts of triumph.

  As Brian and Stanley reached the bench, I could hear Stanley’s excited gratitude. “It really worked. Did you see his face?”

  Brian smiled apologetically at me and patted Stanley on the arm. “You did it perfectly. But don’t overuse it. If they see that pitch a lot they’re gonna beat the shit out of it.”

  Stanley nodded his head, his eyes drinking in Brian’s words as if no amount of attention could be adequate to their importance. “Boy, did we fake them out,” he said, his eyes meeting mine. They were wide open, dazzled.

  “It was beautiful,” I said.

  Brian turned away from us and stopped Adam on his way to the plate. “Listen, we got a three-run lead. All we gotta do is scratch for another run or two. So just try and get on. Make Danny pitch to you. Don’t swing at the first couple of pitches unless they’re really fat. He may walk ya and that’s great.”

  “Okay,” Adam said earnestly, and continued on to bat. Brian sat down next to me and asked, “So you’re doing the scoring?”

  “Yeah, is that okay?”

  He looked exasperated. “Of course it is! What kind of question is that?”

  “Well, Paul was hesitant about letting me do it.”

  “Don’t know why,” he said.

  Stanley’s head appeared on the other side of Brian, “What’s my ERA going into this game?”

  Brian took the notebook from my hands and turned to a section I had not seen before. In large, evenly printed letters someone had written: Lifetime Stats. “One point seven-nine,” Brian said.

  “That’s incredible,” I couldn’t help saying.

  Brian looked at me solemnly. “He’s real good.” There was noise and I turned to see Adam running while an infielder waited for the pop-up to land in his glove. My teammates yelled at him while it descended: “Drop it! Drop it!” And then cursed at him when he coolly closed his mitt around the ball as if he had done so merely to spite them. I recorded the play and Brian said, “He’s in a slump.” He said nothing when Adam shrugged abjectly while returning to the bench, but when he was out of earshot, Brian continued, “Adam’ll be leaving the game and that kid”—he pointed to a short, muscular boy—“John—will come in.”

  I nodded yes in a slow, questioning way.

  “Defensive replacement,” he explained. We sat quietly and watched the next hitter ground out. After I had marked it down, I said calmly, “You don’t know how well I field. Is that why I didn’t stay in?”

  He looked delighted and searched my eyes with interest for a moment before answering. “You’re smart. Yes. You see, we have a good enough lead with Stanley pitching to win the game. All we gotta do is catch the ball.”

  “I understand. You don’t have to explain. But why did you let me hit in such a crucial spot?”

  “I had put you in the lineup to hit then. If I took you out, then I couldn’t give you a chance to play. I thought you’d misunderstand.” I smiled gratefully at him and something happened in his eyes that led to his adding, “Besides, we had a run already.”

  We won the game four to two. Stanley surrendered the two runs in the seventh inning when he fell in love with throwing the new pitch Brian had taught him and gave up successive singles followed by a booming double that was misplayed into a triple by our left fielder. Brian took Stanley out and Paul, who had given me the scoring job, got the last two outs of that inning and shut them out in the eighth and ninth. I discovered from the notebook that Paul was used exclusively as a reliever; another measure of the seriousness of these games.

  We walked to our homes with a number of our teammates. Brian listened to their at first tentative, but later raucous bragging. I learned that they now led the summer series by eleven games. It was an amazing organization: dividing a group of forty boys into two teams and playing every day. I became aware, from the talk of the others, that Brian had pushed and maintained this single-minded, almost mythical, daily battle. I thought of it as a domination like dictatorship: he had coaxed a community to play with him.

  When we reached my house I asked Brian to come in and he accepted. Before dismissing the others, he took a good five minutes to settle various questions of performance that his players asked. Some were thinly disguised requests for compliments and approval; others were attempts to excuse a mistake, blaming the weather or mysterious illnesses. There were questions about what he would be doing later and he answered all of them by saying he would phone. Inside, Mom offered us sandwiches. After they were made, we took them upstairs to my room. Brian sat at my desk alternately eating and collating the day’s statistics with the large, black figures in the section called Lifetime. He would make appropriate comments: “Adam’s dropped below three hundred.” “Danny’s ERA is over three.”

  “What are you hitting Lifetime?” I asked after it became clear that, though he was reciting everyone else’s statistics, his were going to be skipped.

  “Um”—he flipped through the notebook—“let’s see.”

  “You don’t know it by heart?”

  “Well,” he said, glancing at me with a self-knowing smile, “I wanted to give you the exact figure. Here it is. Point four-seven-zero.”

  Despite being prepared for something astonishing, I had to fight my impulse to scream with surprise. “It figures,” I mumbled.

  “I’m hitting four-seventy in thirty-four games, one hundred and thirty-one at bats, sixty-two hits, nine walks, twenty-six doubles—that’s impressive, I must admit—one triple, ten home runs, twenty runs scored, and twenty-two runs batted in. Also, fifteen stolen bases.” He turned to face me and looked apologetic about his outburst of self-congratulation. “It’s really not that big a deal.”

  “It’s not?” My tone barely made it a question. I was slouched against the wall that my bed was next to and I looked at him in mock disgust. “What bullshit.”

  “Seriously,” and he was in earnest now, “it’s not that amazing. My runs batted in is quite low considering my hits. And I don’t have many home runs. Danny’s got sixteen, Bill’s got nineteen, and George has twenty-three.”

  “Yeah, but who’s hitting four-seventy? Who else is hitting four hundred?”

  Brian looked expressionless.

  “Anybody, besides you?” I continued. “Who’s closest to you in average?”

  “George. He’s hitting three fifty-eight.”

  “So enough of this modesty.”

  He propped his head on one of his hands, cupping his chin, and stared at me. “You don’t understand,” he said listlessly. Brian was ready with a speech but he only allowed his eyes to communicate—I would have to demand it.

  “What don’t I understand?”

  He didn’t release the search of his gaze. “You don’t understand, like the rest of them don’t, that I hit for such a good average because I know that I can’t hit home runs like George. There are other players who could hit for my average, but they keep trying to hit it over the fence. So they fly out. Or they strike out. Or they pop up.” He broke his pose, his body gathering the energy explaining gave him. “They all stand at the plate like pull hitters.” He pu
t his hands around an imagined bat and imitated the hard yanking motion of someone trying to pull a pitch. “They don’t lean over the plate or move into a pitch and try to hit it the other way. They’re fools. They try and pull pitches that you have to go with.” He paused to emphasize this last point: “They just don’t accept their faults.”

  “Brian, that’s the point. You do.”

  “So? They act like it’s some special God-given talent. It’s not. I’m just willing to work hard.”

  I thought, Maybe this isn’t false modesty. Perhaps he really thinks it is just discipline that makes him great. “Could you teach me how to hit the way you do?” I asked.

  “Sure,” he said immediately, happily. “You should even be able to hit to the opposite field better than me. I have a big strike zone. You can ham me if I move into the plate too quickly, but your body’s more compact.”

  So we stood in the center of the room for an hour or more, Brian showing me how to stand and step into pitches. He told me to move my hands farther up on the bat so that I would have better control. He cured my tendency to hit the ball from underneath, the way a power hitter would, and, instead, to level the bat on the ball. “You want to spray line drives all over the field,” he said, and I fell asleep that night to a vision of blurred white lines, like netting, dropping silently between frustrated fielders.

  The thirty-fifth game of the year was my first as a starter. Brian’s judgment to use me immediately went unquestioned by his players. He also had me bat second in the order, directly behind him in the lineup. He explained this to me while we walked to the field. “I get on my base more than half the time. If you try and hit to the opposite field, or work out a walk, the worst we should do is get me to second. So don’t worry about getting a hit, just try to advance me.”

  I spent the time it took to prepare playing noticing what I did not feel: no insecurity about my lack of height, no anxiety about my ability to hit the ball, no tension over the taunts that my team was doomed to lose. I searched for them as if they were articles of clothing I had lost, a wallet I had misplaced. The first familiar concern I had was when Brian stepped into the batter’s box. I wouldn’t know how to bat unless he were on base and I was scared that he might fail. But I calmed down after the first two pitches to him were balls. He stepped out of the box after each of the umpire’s calls and surveyed the field with such casualness that his competence seemed beyond doubt. The third pitch was so hittable that our whole bench leaned forward with excitement. Brian swung hard and the impact brought Frank to his feet. “Wow!” he said, but that seemed like an overstatement since Brian’s line drive to left was just a single. I looked at Brian while walking to the plate and felt the cool of his manner become part of myself. While the pitcher began his motion I swung the bat slowly, menacingly, feeling sure that I was armed with a purpose and knowledge he couldn’t have.