“Ready?” she asked, with a small smile.
“Yeah,” he said, adjusting his jeans as she looked down to settle into her seat. When he was seated beside her, hand on the stick shift, heart still loud in his chest, she spoke.
“You know, there’s got to come a time in my life when everything doesn’t revolve around my dad.”
“Probably,” he agreed, starting the car and pulling back out onto the road. Shifting into third, a thought came to him as they picked up speed. “Won’t it be a strange day when that happens?” he said. “For both of us?”
He dropped her off and even walked her to her door. The lights were off in the house, and he was tempted to kiss her again on her doorstep, the way he was sometimes tempted to do anything risky, but as usual, his practical side won out.
It took him almost two weeks before he could work up the courage, during a morning workout, to ask Billy about her. The boys raced back and forth on the field, running lines. Billy’s eyes followed them, tracking who would run well, who would slow them down, who simply needed to hit the ball frequently and who had to hit it well.
“Casey?” he said, never looking in Ben’s direction. “She’s fine. She left for college two days ago. Drove off with Lee to find an apartment before school started. Lee tells me she’s got some tiny room in one of those shared houses, which scares the shit out of me because I know what sort of boys live in those places. I can’t trust Lee to look out for a damn thing, apparently.”
Ben opened his mouth to reply, to say something about boys and shared houses and girls. Then, thinking better of it, he merely licked his lips and stayed quiet.
Choosing Your Stance
1998
Three years before Kevin Costner plowed under half the family farm to create his field, Ben stood in the swampy back grass of his grandparent’s home and decided to put in a diamond. What the hell, he figured, no one but his grandmother’s long-dead pet cow had ever used the space. Not wet enough to be wetlands, not dry enough to till, the thick grass rose to his knees and poked him, prodded him to action. It wasn’t as fancy, when finished, as the Field of Dreams. There were no bleachers, and the dirt paths from base to base were really dirt, not something he’d had carted in from another state. In the winter, it was soggy. In the summer, well, it was soggy. But it served him now, on this impossibly hot afternoon, giving a few boys from the team a place to practice without pressure.
Cale Grochow, Billy’s pride and joy this year, was developing a stance. It was something they allowed the boys to do around their junior year. Before that, they were required to stand with the same perfect form, like Little Leaguers, and hit that way again and again until the ideal swing of the bat was imprinted on their brain as surely as the motion required to run. “But Coach,” they would whine, “I hit better when I hold it like this...” and then some nineteen year-old boy with no more sense of his own potential than a baby would hold the bat up above his head, helicopter it around a few times and swing so hard he’d threaten to put his own sweet face in the dirt. “Right, that’s great,” Billy would reply. “Now do what I say.”
Ben leaned forward and studied Cale. The boy lifted his bat up above his head, without helicoptering, and stepped back a bit. He looked strong, sturdy, a bit short, but Ben knew he could plow into the grass of the outfield like a bull. Nodding to the pitcher, Ben watched the boy let go with a mildly fiery fastball. Cale’s body hovered in its new position for a moment, then just before the ball reached him he slipped into the old classic, stepping up to the ball and following through in one smooth motion. It was perfect, Ben mused, how all the drilling and yelling and endless battling paid off in that one moment. Cale would think of the stance as unique. He would practice it until he could stand that way without thinking about it. Modifying it over his years in the Majors until some diligent sports reporter would line up the photos showing the progression from raw recruit to seasoned player. And the whole time, as he thought he was swinging with Grochow’s own, he would be wrong. At the last second, his body would relax into the same predictable shape he’d been using since grade school. The most efficient way to hit a ball, refined through generations of practice and applied science, and it would never even occur to Cale to thank them for making him do it until he couldn’t help himself. There was a certain logical science to the sport that appealed to Ben. It was wonderful to have something steady to rely on, something not worth changing.
Ben smiled as the ball sailed forward and to the left, skirting the foul line to land in fair territory, deep in the thick grass just beyond the field. One of the boys out shagging balls scrambled after it.
“Good,” Ben called and was rewarded by a nodding grin from Cale. “Do it again.”
The pitcher, a boy from the inner city who had come to them with a shiny coat of bravado covering a well of insecurity, now drew back and threw another fastball, straight down the pipe. Batting practice was boring for a pitcher. Ben could remember standing on the mound, throwing the same dull balls at least fifty times, watching the batters whack them out into the bleachers with an ease that wasn’t just annoying, but infuriating. He had wanted to cut loose, just once, surprise them. But again, without meaning to, he had been learning. Not just the feel of throwing straight and true, but he was developing an immunity to the sound of a perfectly hit pitch. It couldn’t rattle you, or someday during a big game, with everything on the line, you would hear that distinctive sound and that would be it. Your ability to concentrate, your confidence, would be gone the instant the ball sailed over the far wall. Sometimes it happened anyway, but batting practice helped. Ben wasn’t even sure it was supposed to, but it did.
He hadn’t been sure, this morning, if calling the boys had been the right thing to do. It didn’t feel disrespectful, exactly, to be out here on a perfect early summer day. Still, it couldn’t help but feel like they were somehow rubbing their lives in the dead man’s face with each powerful movement of muscle and tendon. Ben wanted the boys to have a sense of security in their own futures, even if he didn’t share it. Perhaps the familiar routine of standing out here in the early afternoon sun, sweating and swearing and laughing with one another would keep them from feeling the pervasive strength of death. After all, there was still the rest of the season, short as it was.
In the pale white distance, he could see rain clouds sweeping forward. Right on time.
“Ok,” he shouted, “Let’s wrap it up.”
Cale took a final swing at a last fastball and sent it sailing up and out, a perfect pop fly. The right fielder stretched out a lazy hand and caught the ball.
Ben enjoyed these afternoons, just him and the boys; their intensity tempered by the sun and the knowledge that it was, after all, just practice. This, he realized suddenly, watching the boys deposit balls and bats at his feet, was what he would miss most. What the hell was he supposed to do with his afternoons? What did other people do?
When he’d first realized that he would never play again, it seemed impossible that he would someday find himself standing on a field with sweat beading around his hairline, shouting and laughing and waiting for the moment when the ball soared into the sun and was lost. He wasn’t sure he could bear losing it again.
Cale jogged up last, wiping his face on his sleeve and grinning.
“I think I’m finally getting it,” he said and Ben agreed. Cale would be picked up after next year, he was sure, barring injury. Most of the boys weren’t ever chosen to go forward, even to the Minors. They had degrees, career goals, and their years here would only resurface later at cocktail parties or with their mistresses, when they talked about the chance they’d had and didn’t take, forgetting that it was never theirs to decide. “I want to keep working on it,” Cale told him as Ben zipped up the duffel bag and began to carry it inside. “That way I’ll be going into next year ready to play, you know?”
“You’ve got the whole summer,” Ben said, noncommittal.
Cale hesitated. The others had alread
y piled back into their cars and were peeling out of the driveway like extras in Road Warrior. He could remember driving like that, working with the sleek strumming of the engine instead of tempering it. Ben slung the duffel in through the door of the back porch and turned to his remaining student.
“Are they going to keep you on?” Cale asked, and he had the grace, bless him, to look nervous about it. Ben, not for the first time, wondered at the sudden tightening in his chest.
“I don’t know,” he answered, then thought better of the lie. “I doubt it.”
They were standing on the back steps, awkward for the first time since meeting each other three years before. Ben sighed. He wanted, above all, to be honest. Strangely enough, it was what he’d always wanted, he just hadn’t realized that’s what the feeling was. “You wanna come in? I’ve got root beer or something inside.”
Cale seemed to think about this. Ben knew that just a few days before, he wouldn’t have had to.
“Nah,” the boy said at last. “I’ve got a ton of homework. Finals are week after next.”
For a moment neither seemed to want to move. Ben understood what Cale wanted to say and wished the boy wasn’t finding it so difficult. At last he stepped down and began to walk Cale out to his car, the noisy gravel shifting beneath their feet to keep them from feeling the silence. At the door to his rusted old Mustang, Cale paused, his hand hovering by the window. Here it comes, thought Ben.
“I just wanted to say that I think you’d be a great head coach,” Cale said. “I don’t know what the fuck they’ve got up their asses, but...”
“It’s all right,” Ben soothed. “I’m not that surprised.”
Cale nodded and stared past Ben briefly, back at the field.
“You were a good pitcher, right?” he asked.
Ben shrugged. “I knew how to pitch, and for a while I was good at it. I guess my body let me down, in the end.”
Cale seemed fixated on the field, watching the grass in the outfield move like water.
“Can I ask you something?” he said at last.
“Sure,” Ben replied easily, though the tightness was constricting until he had to force himself to breathe.
“Do you... miss it?”
Every year there was one; one special boy who felt, just for a moment, the injustice of it and wanted to understand how something so monumentally ridiculous could have happened. Ben knew that nothing he said would make any of it any clearer. It was part of growing up, Ben thought, letting go of your expectation that all dreams could be fulfilled, though he sure as hell wished in that moment that it wasn’t. Or at the very least, that no one ever had to see him for what he really was, just a dusty middle-aged man waiting for the rain.
“What do you think?” he asked gently.
Cale sighed. “I know I would. I can’t imagine making it all the way and then, boom, it’s over. I would never get over it.”
Ben felt like laughing, though he knew how insulting it would be.
“I’ve found new things to make me happy,” he said instead, “over the years.”
“That’s why you’re here, huh? Because this kinda makes up for it?”
“No,” Ben replied. “No, Cale. This doesn’t even kinda make up for it. But it’s great to see you guys play, to watch your dreams develop.”
At that Cale looked away, and opened the car door. “Yeah, I just hope…”
Ben cut him off. “That you don’t end up like me? Washed up a couple years in, then sitting around twenty years later hoping you don’t get laid off from the only avenue you’ve found back into the game?”
Cale shook his head. “I wasn’t thinking that. I was thinking about Billy. I just hope I can be as great a player as he was.”
Ben had the good grace to blush.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said. “Six o’clock.”
“Yep,” Cale said, and shut the door.
As the boy backed out onto the road, Ben stood in his driveway and thought about tomorrow. Not the tomorrow on the calendar, but the grand theme. If they were to let him go now, he wondered if he would tumble straight to the bottom without recourse once again, or if something unexpected would happen.
He was still standing there, watching the approaching clouds and thinking not of rain, but of thunder, when another car pulled into the driveway.
“Hey,” Casey Wells said as she stepped from one of Jake’s many luxury cars, and for a brief second, Ben thought perhaps fate had decided to give him a bit of a breather.
Control and Velocity
1976
The fourth game was going badly, which was no surprise; and Ben struggled to reign in his disappointment. His world had taken on a certain finality lately, as if everything was preordained and he was only a small, flailing thing in the face of Fate. His whole arm hurt. Not in a good, or even in a mildly over-worked way, but in a way that had moved him from starting pitcher to middle relief. The doctor had looked him over again the night before and assured him that everything was fine, that he could still play, but he felt off kilter, and his happy sense of controlled movement had vanished when he threw. That, and it was hotter than hell. The air in the stadium seemed to have been sucked out the open roof, taking the fan’s enthusiasm with it. Ben shifted nervously on the hard wooden bench as he watched Billy toss up another flat curve ball. He’d blown game two for them in the first few innings, then managed to regroup and hold the other team at bay for the rest of the game. Even so, they’d lost by more than five points. But Billy was the ace, and Ben was hurt. Their other starters weren’t as strong under pressure. Ben had hoped Billy would come out strong, but he was struggling. The score was getting downright ugly. The phone rang.
“You think you could be ready?” the bullpen coach asked, digging a toe into the piles of seed casings covering the bullpen floor, woeful reminders of gnashed teeth.
“Yeah,” Ben said, rotating his shoulder, feeling the twinge of sharp pain.
“Go on and get warmed up.” The coach was less bombastic than usual today, perhaps moved to a bit of tenderness given Ben’s injury. Or maybe he was just subdued by the previous days’ losses.
Donny, the bullpen catcher, looked up from the bench as Ben approached.
“Arm any better?” Donny asked, and Ben fought not to wince.
“Yep,” he answered shortly. “I need to warm up.”
Donny nodded without further comment, handing Ben his mitt. He threw with progressive strength through the bottom half of the inning, watching the score creep up, until they were behind by six. He could feel the sweat collecting beneath his collar and the hot burn in his arm as he wound up.
Normally, in the moments before he would jog out into the stadium, into the full sun and the full view of the crowd, Ben would stand at the door and psyche himself up by trying to pin-point the individual shouts and cheers, the random scatterings of praise. Nothing quite compared to running out to the mound before a hopeful home crowd. But today he found he couldn’t hear their voices, couldn’t really see them. Donny came to stand beside him as he waited, one hand on the bullpen door. He felt the older man’s hand come to rest on his shoulder, the gnarled and smashed fingers filling the periphery of his sight.
“You just play the best you can,” Donny said quietly. “No matter what happens later, if you’ve played the best game tonight that you know how, you will be all right. Your body will get you through.”
Ben reached up to quickly tap his fingers against his friend’s.
“I know,” he said, and stepped through the door.
The crowd didn’t roar, exactly. There was a stirring, a shifting in their seats. Ben had a solid reputation as a reliable man in a pinch, and here they were, nearly being crushed by the other team. He would deliver, wouldn’t he?
Looking up at the rows of expectant faces, Ben thought he might be able to do just that. Perhaps Donny was right. Perhaps salvation lay in doing the best he could, in just playing through.
The mound was
a familiar dark spot in the center of the outfield, a bulls-eye. Ben stood on the crest and tossed a few warm-ups to Eddie, the catcher. The first batter stepped up to the plate and tapped it with assurance.
Ben eyed the other team’s catcher, the bottom of the line-up. Most catchers, like Eddie, were big men, good hitters but slow runners; used to accuracy, not speed. This man, however, made up for poor hitting with an ability to run like a terrier down the line to first base. If he got any part of the ball, Ben knew, it could easily be a base hit, and from there, a steal to second and even third.
Eddie requested a split-finger fastball, which was a perfectly good choice. Winding up, Ben delivered his first pitch of the 1976 World Series, a sweet splitter that left the batter swinging high and hard. Eddie nodded and Ben relaxed, slightly.
His shoulder still hurt, though not as much as he had expected. A sharp prickle of pain ran down his arm and into his wrist, and along his shoulder to his lungs when he threw, but he no longer felt as if his left arm weighed more than his right. Apparently, the warm up had worked its magic. Ben could only hope it held for the rest of the two or three innings until the closer stepped in.
Ben glanced at Eddie and read the sign. He closed his eyes briefly and stepped back, then released the ball. To his dismay, it seemed to curve away from the batter, ending up outside. Ball one.
Control and velocity. Those were the twin demons of any man with an arm injury, and Ben angrily readjusted his muscles with a hearty shrug. This was the wrong time to be worried about where the ball was going to go after it left his hand. It absolutely had to arrive where he’d intended, or the other team would walk all over him. Pitching allowed little room for error, particularly with the Series at stake. Everything had been ramped-up, amplified until this small mistake was screaming in his ear: maybe this is it, maybe this is where you lose it and let everyone down.
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