The chaw in his mouth had lost its flavor several minutes ago, but the pitcher, behind in the count, three and one, kept chewing. It was something he had to take his mind off the situation. Ninth inning, two out, game on the line.
He stood, on the clump of dirt that passed for a mound, in some sorry excuse for a mid-west town, the name he barely remembered and couldn’t find on a map if his life depended on it. The crowd was sparse, so sparse he could hear the individual voices. It wasn’t the harsh, impersonal vacuum of sound you heard when you made it to “the Show”, when you got to play in a big-league domed stadium. He’d been there once for his “cup of coffee”, two years ago. A half-inning stint in the bigs. The highlight: a sinking fastball that Tony Gwynn parked over the right field fence for a three run shot.
And now, here he was, playing in front of maybe a couple of hundred people, most of which seemed more interested in shouting obscenities at him, than the score.
“Go home, ya bum.”
The pitcher let that one pass. He cared little about the people in the stands, with one exception. The only person he was concerned about was sitting three rows up, just to the left of home plate. He was a scout for the Cardinals. He had come to take a look at the team’s prospects. The pitcher hoped that included him.
The pitcher got the sign- fastball- and went into his windup. He had hoped for something smooth, fast and inside to go to a full count, perhaps even, in a worse case scenario, a soft grounder to short.
What headed toward homeplate was wild and outside. The catcher scrambled to block it, less it rolled into the dugout.
The umpire’s ruling a foregone conclusion, the hitter was already jogging to first base. The pitcher watched him, then looked to the scout. The scout scribbled something down in his notebook then adjusted his radar gun for next offering. For a moment, the pitcher’s greatest wish was to know what the scout had written down. Within that small, ringed notebook lay perhaps the pitcher’s entire future.
The pitcher had confidence, (every ballplayer worth his jockstrap had to have confidence, or he might as well go home and sell insurance) but he wasn’t about to kid himself. He was a junkball pitcher with a just-fair curveball and a fastball that couldn’t get a ticket for speeding in some states. He joked that his ERA was only as good as his infield. During his career, he had seen more roadside cafes, cheap motels and small town ball diamonds than he had ever thought existed.
He knew he needed something special to impress this scout. And just maybe, the gods of baseball were shining on him. Here he was, pitching in the regional championships, as his team, the Tri-State Tigers took on what local sportswriters considered the best team in the league, the Border City Bandits.
He’d never had much use for sports writers, and he liked proving these armchair experts wrong. He was well on his way, as the Tigers lead the Bandits 2-0.
He snuck at peek at the Tiger’s bullpen, expecting to see the team’s stopper going through his warm-up, preparing to come on and close out the ballgame.
To the pitcher’s amazement, the bullpen was empty. The stopper, in fact, the team’s entire relief staff, was sitting by the edge of the bullpen, waiting to see how this game turned out.
Another quick look, this time into the dugout. The coach just sat there, staring back at him, his face expressionless. And then, the realization hit. It was his game. His game to win. His game to lose.
“So far, so good,” he thought to himself, wiping his brow. Nine innings and 109 pitches after he’d first walked to the mound that afternoon, he was still there. He had given up just three hits, a couple of singles and a rather scary triple in the fourth. Throw in a walk- no, make that two walks now, and he hadn’t done too badly.
Suddenly, though, the pitcher’s perspective changed. He recognized the batter striding toward the plate. It was the Bandits left fielder. He was a monster, 240 lbs. of muscle, more pro wrestler than baseball player. He was hitting .312 for the season, leading the league in home runs, RBIs, and slugging percentage. He was known as “The Frank Thomas” of the region. And he ate junkball pitchers for lunch.
Sweat started to spew from every pore on the pitcher’s body. And just as everything had been looking so good only moments before, now all the pitcher could see was what was wrong with the situation.
His arm suddenly felt as though he had thrown 1009 pitches. He looked toward home plate. It was a million miles away. The strike zone has shriveled up to the size of a pea, and the hitter’s bat has mushroomed to the size of the CN Tower.
His guts felt like he was sending them through the laundry with his sweat socks, and he was suddenly certain that he could pinpoint the exact location of that ham-on-rye that he’d had for lunch.
He couldn’t even look to his catcher for re-assurance. His regular catcher had hit the DL list during the last week of the regular season. This kid today was the back-up shortstop. Before the game, the coach handed him a catcher’s mitt and mask, and told him to go squat behind homeplate.
The “catcher” gave him a sign. Again with his fastball. The pitcher wondered if the catcher even knew what he was calling. It didn’t matter; there was no way he was going to throw anything down the middle, not to this guy.
He knew his curveball would someday fail him. He just had to hope today wasn’t that day. He went into his windup and followed through. The batter swung. The pitcher waited for the crack of the bat, but it never came. The pitch had nicked the outer edge of the plate. Strike One.
The pitcher breathed a sigh of relief. The catcher gave him another sign. The pitcher ignored it. Another tight curveball hugging the corner and it’d be all over but the shouting.
The wind-up and all at once the pitch was on the way. But instead of catching the edge of the plate, the pitch once again went wild. Only, unlike before, the catcher was unable to block the pitch. The baserunner slid into second base, well ahead of the catcher’s throw.
The pitcher uttered an obscenity that he hoped no one could hear. The second baseman tossed the ball back to the pitcher, giving him a “What can you do?” grin. The pitcher gloved the ball, and decided to answer his baseman’s unasked question: “Change my strategy.”
The pitcher hadn’t thrown a slider all season. In fact, he figured he could probably count the number of sliders he had thrown in his entire career on one hand. Still, he wasn’t entirely unsure about throwing one, and he was willing to bet the hitter wasn’t looking for it.
The windup, the pitch, and the sickening crack of the bat. The pitcher’s head snapped around to follow the path of the ball, as it rocketed down the first baseline, until finally it drifted into the bleachers.
“Foul” came the cry from the umpire. Relief washed over the pitcher, as if someone had doused him with a pail of water. He was ahead in the count, one more strike and the game was over.
But, at the same time, the batter had tagged him but good…and everybody knew it. But for a couple of inches, that last pitch would have ended up a game-tying home run.
The batter was confident. He knew he had the pitcher’s number, now more than ever. All he needed was one mistake. One opening, for the ball to hang one inch too far over the plate, for one second too long.
The pitcher cursed again, damning this catcher for not knowing what to call and his old catcher for getting injured and not being there for him, damning the batter for the arrogant smirk he wore on his face, damning the coach for not having the bullpen up, so that they could come in and finish the job, damning the scout for showing up on today of all days, when he had so much else on his mind. Finally, he swore at his curveball for failing him. He didn’t even want to think about his fastball…
His fastball. No one would expect it, not now and certainly not after the way it had gotten away from him during the last batter. The coach would have had a conniption fit if he knew, and the batter would have fallen over laughing.
But, the element of surprise was all he had left, that and whatever reserves his arm had left after 112 pitches. Hopefully, it had just enough for one more.
For a moment, he stood there, ignoring whatever signals this excuse for a catcher was giving him to the point where he would have been hard-pressed to say whether the catcher had even given him any.
The pitcher once again became aware of the sounds around him. The chatter of the infielders behind him, catcalls from the spectators, the shout of “red hots” from a hotdog vendor in the crowd, a threat from the batter about how he was taking this next one downtown, and finally the scrape of the scout’s pencil.
But the only sound the pitcher wanted to hear was the comforting thump of his fast ball against the catcher’s mitt. Right now, it seemed to be the most beautiful sound in the world. And then, there was the sound that the pitcher feared, the sound every pitcher feared, the sickening crack of wood against horsehide, the stomach-churning sound of a home run.
The pitcher took a deep breath. No sense prolonging the unknown. He went into his windup, and then the stretch. Finally the release. The wind whistled as the pitch hurtled toward homeplate. The pitch looked okay, as good as any he had thrown today, but who knew what twists and turns it might take in the next slit second.
The batter swung. It was a mighty swing, full of power and precision, like the ones they show in training films. The space between ball and bat seem to vanish in an instance.
And then, all at once came the sound.
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