Authors: Barry Lyga
Maybe a lot of things, but it doesn't matter, because I'm running pell-mell from third and I need that extra second. While the catcher's distracted looking over at Ash (who now is taking an additional, doubtful step toward first), I'm halfway home.
The catcher looks up just in time to see me coming. He dives for the ball and I deliberately run right into him, knocking him down. I keep going and I cross the plate and that's it. That's it. I'm home.
A second later, the catcher spins up on one knee and rifles the ball to first, where Ash has no chance and is called out five feet from the bag. The next guy pops up to center. Inning's over, but we scored.
***
Somehow, our defense keeps the Sledgehammers from scoring in the top of the fourth. It's not easy, though—they rock our pitcher from start to finish, taking him deep every time. They get three men on and strand them all.
Zik's up first in the bottom of the fourth. He does something amazing. He takes the Heat's first pitch of the inning and he hits a home run.
I can't believe what I've just seen. I keep blinking, as if there's something wrong with my eyesight and the ball will reappear if I just keep blinking.
The bench goes absolutely insane, hooting, hollering, stomping, shouting. The Brookdale crowd's berserk. And Zik takes a leisurely jog around the bases, blowing kisses to the fans as he goes.
I don't move from my seat. I watch the Heat. He doesn't seem too upset. Maybe it's because he's never lost. Maybe he can't even imagine such a possibility. I used to be like that, a long time ago, when I first started to get my batting chops and I was playing against pitchers who just weren't ready for a hitter of my caliber. Every time I stepped up to the plate, I hit the damn ball. Every freakin' time. It was
easy.
And when one day I
didn't
hit the ball, I figured it was a fluke, an accident, a goof. It never occurred to me that the pitchers were catching up, getting better. Not until I started getting struck out.
Then
it hit home.
Zik pauses in front of home plate, turning to observe his worshipful public. The crowd obliges his showmanship by going even wilder, a thunderous, endless stomp of feet on the bleachers that rattles my bones. Just step on the goddamn base, Zik. Stop showing off.
Batting average: .390. Slugging average shoots up to 1.078. And the Zik Lorenz IPA towers over the world at .688, higher than when he started the game. All on one pitch.
With a flourish and a bow, Zik finally goes home—he jumps up in the air and lands on the plate with both feet, as if crushing a huge rat.
The Heat stretches a little bit, then proceeds to strike out the next three batters with pitches that get progressively faster as he delivers them. The crowd shuts the hell up and you could hear a mouse fart in the sudden silence.
Top of the fifth goes pretty well for us, all things considered. We keep them to two men on base and while the last out is a tough one, we eventually get it. In the bottom of the fifth, as if in revenge for Zik's homer, the Heat takes us out 1-2-3. I manage to get on base, but no one else can find the ball and I'm stranded there.
In the top of the sixth, the Sledghammers load the bases with their best batter coming up. I figure this is all she wrote, but we get lucky and he drills a line drive to Jerry at short, who plucks it out of the air lightning fast.
The Heat retakes the mound for the bottom of the sixth. Is he going to pitch the whole damn game? No relief?
He doesn't
need
relief, it turns out. His defense lets him down and allows Jerry Springfield to take first on an error before Zik pops up to center. In a moment of comedy we desperately need at this point, the catcher drops the ball on a third strike to let a second man on, but it doesn't matter. The Heat still manages to retire us in short order.
Our bench has gone as quiet as a funeral home. We're two runs down, but it might as well be a million against the Heat.
Entering the final inning, we kill ourselves to keep them scoreless again. Coming back from a one-run deficit against this kid is bad enough; we can't let Canterstown pull any further away.
Pat Franklin leads off for Brookdale in the bottom of the seventh. Unbelievably, he gets
walked.
The Heat's first and only walk of the game. Even machinery breaks down every now and then, I guess. The Heat looks at his pitching hand like it's broken or something. I could swear I see his lips move, as if he's scolding it.
So now it's my turn at the plate.
Coach grabs me and now our faces are inches apart. His eyes are wide with anger, desperation, fear. I can smell his sweat—stale, anxious. "This is
it,
you understand? You're a guaranteed hit. You're the tying run." He licks his lips and looks over his shoulder into the stands. That must be where the scout is sitting. I look, too, though I wouldn't recognize the scout if he bit me.
I shake Coach off me. The ump's going to call us for delay of game any second now. "I know how to fucking play baseball, Coach. OK?"
He snarls. "Pick it up, Mendel," he says, his voice low.
Pick it up.
It's his favorite phrase. The one he uses when he's serious, when he wants you to pay attention, when he figures you're not bothering to listen.
Pick it up, Mendel. You never slept with me, so I ain't about to take it easy on you!
I hustle to the batter's box. The ump gives me a look that says,
About time.
"Batter up!" he cries.
Out of the box. Knock dirt off my left shoe with the bat. Forward. Knock my right shoe. Back into the box. Turn my bat a quarter-turn. Tug helmet brim down. Push it back up.
Ready.
The Heat shoots me a nasty grin. It says,
I've got a little something I've been saving for you, asshat.
And he does. The first pitch isn't just fast—it's
invisible.
Even my eyes, trained to watch for the fastball, can't track it. There's just a white blur, a blink, and then the horrible sound of the ball slapping the catcher's glove leather. The catcher mutters, "Ow! Damn!" under his breath. I don't think anyone here has a radar gun, but I know that ball
had
to be traveling over a hundred miles an hour. It's not impossible—a bunch of guys have thrown heat over a hundred miles an hour: Ryan, Wohlers, Benitez, Jenks, Johnson...
The Heat goes into his wind-up. Breaking ball this time, I'm sure.
I'm right. He cuts the corner of the plate. I resist the urge to swing, reminding myself that Ted Williams was a great hitter
and
a great not-hitter.
The ump calls it a ball. I'm one and one.
The Heat brings his fastball again. Not sure what fraction of the speed of light this one is, but it's definitely slower than the first—not that that's saying much. But I think he did his shoulder in with that first one. That's why he went to the breaking ball for the second pitch.
I let this one go by. It looks a little outside to me, and I'm right—the ump calls it ball two.
The Heat winds up and hurls a burner at me. This time I
know
he's slowing down. I can
see
this one. I swing at it and foul it off for strike two. On the mound, the Heat looks a little worried for the first time.
Yeah, that's right. You better panic, you little piss-ant. Thought you could psych me out with that first pitch, huh? Get me freaked out and scared? Doesn't work, pal. I've been threatened by cops and judges. I've had an insane husband hold me down and beat the shit out of me. I'm not scared of some skinny kid from Texas, even if his arm does come straight from God himself.
I foul off the next pitch, too. Staying alive. I've got his range now. It's only a matter of time. And he knows it. He shakes off the first two pitches his catcher suggests before nodding to the third one.
Curve ball. A beautiful thing, snapping left at the last possible instant. I should let it go. I should let it be ball three, but I can't resist. I poke it over the third baseman's head and into foul territory. The count's still two and two.
On first base, Pat's dancing about six or seven feet away from the bag, ready to dart either way depending on what I do. How long can I string along the Heat until he delivers the pitch I want, the pitch I need? The pitch I can take over the fences, like Zik did, the pitch that wins the game.
Another pitch. This makes seven, the most pitches he's thrown to any single hitter today. There's anger and frustration in it, and his shoulder's gonna regret it later, but it's a hot, fast one. I have no choice—I swing and get a piece of it, sending the ball spinning down the first base line on the foul side.
The Heat stomps his foot like a little kid who's been told to go to bed.
Pat cups his hands over his mouth: "That's it, Josh, baby! You got him! You got him! Send me home!"
Josh, baby?
Pat barely even talks to me. Who the hell is he to call me "Josh, baby"?
Another pitch, and this one's almost too easy. It's a strike, but nothing I can take to the cleaners. Still, I have to swing at it, so I manage to foul it off behind the plate. Still alive.
"Bring me home, Josh!"
The crowd starts chanting "Bring him home! Bring him home!" Over on the Brookdale bench, the team's stomping in rhythm on the ground. Zik's on his feet, his eyes alight with joy. He's clapping his hands in time to everyone else, chanting along with them.
Everyone's
Looking
At
Me
New pitch. I foul it into the stands near third base, where a mad scramble ensues to grab it as it rolls around on the bleachers. He's slowing down, but he's not throwing anything I can shoot into a hole or over the wall. I have to be patient. Have to remember Ted Williams. You don't swing at
any
pitch. You swing at the ones you can hit.
Coach is practically peeing in his pants. He's hopping up and down, ecstatic. Anyone who knows anything about baseball knows at this point that I've got the Heat's number. That it's just a matter of time. Now it's me and the Heat. One of us will blink. One of us will screw up, because we're both human (yes, even the Heat), and when that happens, the other one will be forgotten. It's just a matter of odds as to which one of us breaks first. It's a matter of math.
I take a quick time-out to step out of the batter's box and catch my breath. Coach gestures frantically for me to stop stalling and get back in the box.
Pick it up, Mendel.
And I realize: it wasn't just desperation and anxiety in Coach's eyes and sweat—it was greed and lust, too. His whole life changes when I hit this ball, when we tie it up. The scout came to see the Heat blow us away and instead—even if we lose in extra innings—he sees a team that made the Heat work harder than he should have. A team run by Coach Kaltenbach. A team he'll watch from now on, including visits and dinners for Coach and press attention and—
I foul away another pitch.
—and I'm starting to wonder why the hell am I going to give him everything he wants? This guy has tormented me for my entire high school ball career. Why am I going to make his life easy? Do I really think he's gonna say anything good about me to Graves? There's nothing I can do about it, after all. Like Kaltenbach's really going to forget that I punched him, that I
humiliated
him in front of the entire team. Yeah, right.
Another pitch. Another foul ball. Coach is going insane. The entire bench is up and cheering for me, something they've never done at any other moment in my life. Zik is screaming himself hoarse, veins standing out in his neck. The whole field is alive, a single living, sonic
thing
that wraps around me.
At first base, Pat dances back and forth, ready to dash for second.
The Heat shakes off the catcher, then nods. I dig in. Turn my bat a quarter-turn in my grip.
The wind-up. Watching that left leg. It's straight as a base line. No breaking ball this time.
It's a perfect strike, or it
will
be, when it reaches the plate. A
laser
doesn't move in a line this straight.
It's going to cross right over the center of plate and right at my letters. Irresistible. Impossible not to swing at it.
And it's slow. Relatively speaking, of course. Slower than his other fastballs.
You have two-tenths of a second to react. Two-tenths of a second for the quad-A cocktail.
I do what I've trained my whole life to do. I watch the ball. I keep my eye on the ball. I never stop watching.
I watch it as it sails past me and lands in the catcher's mitt, a perfect and glorious strike three.
Well.
OK.
It didn't feel as good or as liberating as I thought it would.
For the first time in my life, I
let the ball go by.
Wow. So
this
is what that feels like.
It's weird. I let down the team, but you know what? There are a million other times when I
didn't
let down the team, when I was right there for the team, when I saved the team's ass. We let each other down every day of our lives—all of us. Whether it's Dad freezing for those crucial seconds before jumping in to stop George Sherman from kicking the shit out of me, or whether it's me ignoring Rachel for five years because I let my own guilt overwhelm my common sense and judgment.