The ride to the field for the Rays game seemed to take forever.

Danny couldn’t remember his mom ever driving so slowly before. Did she really have to stop at each and every stop sign for five seconds?

Did she really have to look fifteen different ways at each intersection before making a turn?

Not that these moves were terribly unusual. The fact was, Joey and Danny had made fun of their mom’s driving for years. They kidded that she drove like a nun—Sister Patti, they called her—and they warned her not to whack them with her rosary beads or they’d tell the mother superior and get her in trouble.

But today Danny wasn’t laughing about his mom’s turtle pace behind the wheel.

Today it was driving him nuts.

Finally he couldn’t take it anymore. “C’mon, Mom,” he implored. “Punch it!”

She looked over at him and sighed.

“Can’t punch it here, hon,” she said. “Speed limit’s forty-five. And there are police cars everywhere. Haven’t we gone over this a thousand times? You want to see your dear old mom go to the slammer? Then who’s going to cook for you people? God knows none of you can cook for yourselves.”

Danny snorted. This was an old routine of hers. They’ll take poor little ol’ me to jail, and then you’ll be sorry. What will you kids do by yourselves when you can’t even open a can of soup?

But he wasn’t buying it today.

“Yeah, right,” he said. “Worst that’ll happen is you get a speeding ticket. Big deal.”

“Oh, so it’s not a big deal?” his mom said. “You want to pay my car insurance when the rate skyrockets, smart guy? All due to a ticket I got for driving like a crazy person because my son—for some ungodly reason—had to get to his game way earlier than the rest of the kids?”

She looked at him again. “And why are you so antsy anyway? You’ve been like this since you woke up.”

Danny shrugged and went back to staring out the window, groaning silently over the endless drive.

Yeah, he was antsy, whatever that meant.

The good news was that his mom at least would be at the game to watch him. The bad news was that his dad was working late. And Joey had gone to the movies with his girlfriend to see some dumb Planet of the Apes sequel.

Initially, Danny was bummed that neither would be in the stands. But he knew that his mom would fill them in about his outing soon enough. Heck, sometimes Patti Connolly’s postgame play-by-play recap was better than actually being there live. Her breathless tone and dramatic flourishes could make even a routine performance by one of her sons sound like it came in the nick of time, during the ninth inning of the seventh game of the World Series, with two outs and the bases loaded.

When they finally got to the field, Danny made a beeline for Mickey.

“If it isn’t Mr. Eephus himself,” Mickey said.

“Shhhh, not so loud,” Danny said, looking around. “Warm me up quick.”

Mickey frowned. “What’s the hurry? Zoom’s here. Which means you won’t pitch until at least the fifth inning—unless he just loses it and somehow blows up.”

“I know,” Danny said. “I just want to see if”—he checked again for eavesdroppers—“that pitch is still working.”

“Ohhhh, that pitch!” Mickey said, even louder now. Danny clamped a hand over his mouth and led him away.

They went far down the sideline to a spot near a shady tree where no one could see them, and Danny began to throw.

Right away both boys could see that the new pitch was working just fine: stopping and dropping beautifully.

Danny was feeling more and more comfortable with it. All week long he’d practiced throwing it at his bounce-back net, which he’d moved to a new location in the backyard so as not to shatter another one of Mr. Spinelli’s $200 windows.

Now Danny was eager to see how he’d do throwing it to real live batters.

He didn’t have to wait long.

In the fourth inning, with the Orioles leading 2–0 and two outs, the Rays batter hit a hard comebacker to the mound. The ball caught Zoom squarely on his right shin before bouncing away.

He managed to limp after the ball and underhand it to Ethan at first for the third out. Then he dropped to the ground as if he’d been shot.

“Danny, get with Mickey and warm up!” Coach shouted as he ran to check on Zoom.

After Danny loosened up and returned to the dugout, he could see that Zoom was done for the day. The bone wasn’t broken, but he was wincing and icing a huge knot on his shin.

“You’re going in!” Mickey whispered. “Showtime!”

Can’t wait, Danny thought. Though he felt bad for what had happened to Zoom.

“Wrap up the win for us, dude,” Zoom said with a grimace. “Put a nice bow on it, okay?”

After the Orioles went down in order, Danny practically sprinted to the mound to begin the top of the fifth inning. As Katelyn passed him on her way to the outfield, she slapped him on the butt and said, “No pressure, nerd. Just their three-four-five hitters up, that’s all.”

Danny nodded and said nothing. This was no time to let Katelyn’s big mouth get to him.

He took a few warm-up tosses, lobbing some easy fastballs to make the Rays think that was all he had, that they’d hit him like a piñata.

As the first batter dug in, Danny could feel his heart beating in his chest. His mouth was suddenly dry, too. I’m nervous, he told himself. But it’s a good kind of nervous. The kind that makes you focus and concentrate, not hurl all over your cleats.

He took a deep breath and looked in at the batter.

Mickey was right: it was showtime.

Danny went into his windup, rocked, and kicked.

The ball floated to the plate harmlessly. He could see the batter’s eyes widen. He could practically hear him thinking You gotta be kidding! You’re throwing me this slop? This is going over the fence, meat.

Just as the kid swung, the ball wheezed to a stop and plummeted downward.

Mickey gloved it and yelled, “Way to go, D!”

The umpire shot his right hand into the air: strike one.

Now the batter stepped out with a puzzled expression. He glanced back at his dugout, as if to say, Did you guys see that? But his teammates were already gaping at one another. Yes, whatever that pitch had done, they had seen it, too.

From behind him, Danny heard murmurs from the Orioles. But he didn’t want to look at them. Not just yet.

The next pitch he delivered was even more tantalizing than the first. Again, the kid swung violently. Again, he hit nothing but air as the ball died on him and plopped into Mickey’s mitt.

Strike two.

Now there were more quizzical looks from the Rays, louder murmurs behind Danny. He could hear a buzz coming from the stands, too. He wondered what his mom was thinking. With my luck, he thought, she went to the concession stand for a Diet Coke and missed all this.

The Orioles could see how frustrated the batter was now. He dug in again and banged his bat noisily on the corner of the plate. Then he held it high and waved it in menacing little circles, scowling at Danny the whole time.

Kid, making dumb faces at me isn’t going to help you, Danny thought. He couldn’t believe how confident he felt. In a way, he had never felt more confident standing on a mound.

He went into his windup again, rocked, and kicked. This time the ball drifted to the plate on an even higher arc. It looked like something out of a slow-pitch softball game.

The Rays batter was practically looking up at the sky when he started his swing. But the ball dropped so sharply that the kid missed it by two feet, nearly corkscrewing himself into the ground in the process.

Strike three.

The batter threw his bat in disgust. Mickey whooped, held the ball up, and pointed at Danny.

Now Danny permitted himself to turn around and soak in the moment.

Sammy looked as if he’d seen a ghost. Katelyn stood slack-jawed, hands on her hips. Coach was smiling from ear to ear and pumping his fist.

“Whatever you’re doing,” Coach yelled, “keep doing it!”

Finally, Danny glanced at the stands and saw his mom on her feet, cheering wildly along with the rest of the Orioles fans. Any second now, he thought, she’ll pull out her phone and call Dad to tell him all about this. Even as Danny turned back to the game, he could see his mom reaching for her purse.

The rest of the inning seemed to go by in a blur.

He struck out the next Jays batter on four pitches, this kid taking the same violent swings as the first batter. On the third strike, the kid actually raised the bat over his head and swung like someone taking an ax to a piece of wood. Or someone wielding a mallet and trying to ring the bell at a strongman competition at the state fair.

The batter after that tried to coax a walk, ducking theatrically on Danny’s first two pitches.

But after both were called strikes, he took a vicious hack at the next pitch and missed it by a foot for strike three, the bat flying out of his hands and crashing into the backstop.

In the dugout, Danny got jubilant high fives from the rest of the Orioles and a big hug from a hobbled Zoom.

“Keep this up and I’ll be out of a job,” the ace starter said.

“Never gonna happen,” said Danny, with a huge grin.

“Nerd, what’s going on with you?” Katelyn demanded. “Is this a case of alien abduction? The aliens snatched the old Gas Can Connolly and left a new and improved version in his place? Is that how you got that ridiculous pitch?”

“Whatever, Katelyn,” Mickey said. “Just sit back and enjoy it. In fact, you could literally bring a lawn chair out to right next inning. The Jays won’t even hit a loud fly ball off my man here.”

Mickey’s words proved to be prophetic. After the Orioles went down in order, clinging to the same 2–0 lead, Danny cruised through the Jays lineup in the sixth inning, too.

Spectators were now recording his new pitch with their smartphones, the winking lights giving the place a concertlike atmosphere in the gathering dusk.

He struck out all three batters he faced, each kid flailing away helplessly at a pitch that simply wouldn’t stay still long enough to be hit.

When he walked off the mound after the third out, the Orioles surrounded him, whooping and pounding him on the back. In the stands he saw his mom beaming and waving with one hand, the other holding her phone to her ear—shouting the final score to his dad, no doubt.

For the first time all season, he felt like a real closer.

The Rays coach jogged by just as Danny was throwing his gear in his bag.

“Terrific pitching today, kid,” the coach said. “I don’t know what you were throwing, but whatever it was, it was nasty. My guys are still shaking their heads over that pitch.”

In that moment, as he headed out to join his mom, Danny knew one thing for sure: he hadn’t felt this good after a game in a long, long time.