Authors: Jessica Minier
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.
Ben could remember very few of
the specifics about his father anymore, other than the known: he was an
aerospace engineer, he had brown hair and blue eyes. As to what that meant,
outside of a few photographs, he didn’t know. How had he laughed? Ben couldn’t
hear it any longer. What had he cared about? Who knew, now? But he could still
feel the weight of the older man’s hand on the top of his head as Ben worked
math problems at his desk, as if his father’s palm was a conductor, giving him
the knowledge to solve the equation without further assistance. For years, that
weight had bothered him, frustrated him. Like a phantom limb, it would reappear
whenever he felt the dull possibility of failure. Today it felt as if his cap
were going to sink into his skull, but he no longer recognized the pressure as
some remnant of his father, but rather as a distinct part of himself.
It wasn’t as if he’d never thrown
a bad pitch, he rationalized. He’d even thrown the year before in his first
Series, and had put out one or two real duds. Everyone did, even the best. Even
Billy, especially in game two of this Series. He’d thrown as badly as Ben had
ever seen at first, but then he’d held the other team there, suddenly finding
the ability to stop the bleeding with that unerring accuracy Ben had so long
admired. And then, of course, there was tonight’s massacre.
The batter waited, his compact
figure shimmering with the heat of the dirt around the plate. Eddie was
watching him cautiously, signing with a conservative motion. Fastball, again.
Well, why not? Ben slid into the throw and watched as the little man caught the
edge and sent it back over his head into the crowd. Well, Ben thought, that was
lucky. He hadn’t intended to throw it as high as it had been, but that extra
height had brought the batter up under the ball and tipped it gently back.
Fine. Anything would do at this point.
Eddie nodded and again, asked for
a fastball. This wasn’t bad or particularly good signing. Fastballs were what
Ben mostly threw. While not totally overpowering, he could get them out at a
good clip. He renewed his concentration, focusing on the batter and trying to
see the arc of the ball in his mind, pushing aside all the anxiety of the last
few days. When he let this one go, he watched as it slipped neatly over the
center of the plate, leaving the other team’s catcher blinking at his
motionless bat as the ump called the third strike.
Thank God, was all Ben could
think, raising praise more out of habit than any genuine belief. One down, just
a few more to go. Oddly, though his shoulder pinged and throbbed, he felt
better than he had in weeks. A bit of a wince as he rotated his arm, but that
was it. Maybe it was all salvageable after all. Maybe when this was over, he
would take a vacation. Go somewhere cool and pleasant. It would be wonderful to
sink his aching hands into a thick bank of snow and bring up a perfect ball of
ice, fingers tingling and alive.
Ben watched as the top of the
other team’s line-up stepped up to the plate. Greg Arthur, their pull-hitting
first baseman. Arthur stretched out with the bat over his back and squinted
toward Ben. He wondered briefly, not for the first time, what it would be like
to be a great hitter. Certainly, he had hit the ball on occasion, but never
when it mattered. Did they see the ball coming or did the mind merely register
the presence of a projectile shortly before it arrived? He knew that the
average hitter had less than a tenth of a second to decide whether or not this
ball was worth swinging at. How did the mind choose, in literally less than the
blink of an eye? His father might have known, but he would not have understood.
There were some things that physics and biology couldn’t begin to explain.
Ben watched Eddie carefully. He
was fully prepared to ignore a sign if he felt it was stupid, but that rarely
happened with Eddie. Ben couldn’t remember the last time they had disagreed.
The catcher nodded and tapped his thigh. Splitter. Ben was fairly sure that
Arthur wouldn’t be expecting one again so soon. He wound up and went through a
text-book delivery, with a slight, ghostly finger of pain in his left shoulder.
Straightening up, he was
surprised to see Eddie scrambling after the ball as it sailed far to the left,
bouncing hard against the advertisements behind the plate. He hadn’t thrown a
pitch that wild in years. Ben stared at the ball as Eddie scooped it up, half-prepared
to feel some huge gust of wind, the prelude to a hurricane, a tsunami. Eddie
lifted his mask briefly as he walked back, sending a worried glance Ben’s way.
Ben shrugged and stepped back. That was interesting, he thought, but didn’t
know quite what to do about it.
Eddie returned to his squat and
Arthur lifted the bat again, heaving it over his shoulder as if he were Santa
with a bag of toys. Touching his thigh with one finger, Eddie signed for a
change-up. Ben wound up and let it go, knowing that on a good change-up, the
batter sees the delivery and thinks: fastball, swinging too soon for the slower
ball. His palm still felt the imprint of the ball as it swung wildly to the
left, sending Eddie scrambling a second time.
Ben felt like staring at his own
arm, but that seemed a bit too much like conceding that he had just thrown the
two worst pitches of his adult career. Eddie called time and sidled to the
mound, mask up and a strange expression on his face.
“You ok, McDunnough?” he asked,
voice gruff. “How’s your arm?”
“It’s fine,” Ben answered
truthfully. “It’s less bad than yesterday.”
Eddie nodded, his lips compressed
to a thin line. “Well, you holler if it starts to really hurt, ok?”
Ben agreed and watched as the
catcher, a man he had always considered his ally and his guide, lowered his
mask and jogged back to the plate. Eddie signed for a fastball and Ben nodded.
This time he was determined not
to throw left. He adjusted his mind, loosened his muscles with a shake and
stepped up to throw the ball.
The pain was mind-shattering. He
heard, clearly, the crack of the humerus in his arm as it shattered, the noise
ricocheting off the stands like the report from a gun. A sickening, deadly
sound in the restless air. He felt his knees buckle and heard his own voice in
a high, strangled stream of screams as he grasped his arm. Something swelled
beneath the polyester sleeve of the uniform, something unthinkable – the
bizarre appendage of a monster. But in the end, really, it was blistering, throat-closing
pain that he registered fully. When he was able to open his eyes, there were
men gathered around him, shadows against a sky of blindingly white light.
“Oh no!” someone shouted in the
stands and he could hear it as clearly as if they had been kneeling there
beside him. The whole park was anxiously silent, waiting with their hands up to
their faces, over their ears as if they could will the sharp sound out of their
memories. Ben groaned and tried to press his face into the dirt of the mound.
Anything to cut out the light and the screaming in his mind. He had a moment of
evil epiphany, where it occurred to him that now he couldn’t lose the game. He
couldn’t lose any game, ever again. But that was terrible, he realized in the
same moment. He should get up, straighten out, win this one for the Gipper.
Waves of guilty relief swept through his mind and tumbled around his pain like
water in a wild rush over rock. Had his arm broken because he didn’t want it
bad enough, because he was somehow weak? And the game, the fans sitting out
there waiting for him... He had to get up again and pitch, or they would lose.
He tried to tell the frantic team doctor this, as the man’s hands closed over
the lump in his sleeve, but his mouth wasn’t forming anything through his
clenched teeth. The doctor patted Ben’s good arm and called for “a stretcher,
goddamn it!” Ben closed his eyes and saw the man’s shape burned into his
retina, probably forever.