Danny was home by himself the next morning, still shaken by Reuben’s jeers and feeling major pressure from Katelyn’s comments, when the doorbell rang.
Which of the usual pains-in-the-neck could this be? he wondered.
Was it the girl down the block who sold Girl Scout cookies and would always say, in a high-pitched, Chipmunks-sounding voice, “Thin mints? Tagalongs? Or how about a few boxes of our dee-licious peanut butter cookies?”
Was it the roofing contractor who seemed to show up every week and prefaced his sales pitch with “We just happen to be working in the neighborhood and wondered if you’d given any thought to putting on a new roof?”
Or was it another brochure-wielding young man in a red polo shirt and khakis trying once again to get the Connollys to switch back to cable from their current fiber-optic network?
Danny answered the door and groaned inwardly.
It was someone even more irritating than the cookie peddler, the roofing browbeater, or the cable drone.
Actually, it was two someones: Hunter and Elmo. Elmo, bent under the weight of a huge backpack stuffed to capacity, looked like a Sherpa readying to climb Mount Everest.
“Morning, D,” Hunter said as the two swept past Danny and plopped themselves down in the family room.
“Why don’t you guys come on in,” Danny said drily, still holding the door. “Make yourselves at home.”
“Sorry it took so long to get back to you,” Hunter said. “Elmo was at camp all week. What was the name of the camp, E?”
“Talented Youth Physics Camp,” Elmo said, brightening. “It was all about lasers and optics. We worked on using lasers for possible teleportation, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement—”
“Whoo-hoo! Sounds like a fun time,” Danny said.
“With optics,” Elmo went on, “we studied the principles of reflection, refraction, diffraction, that sort of thing.”
“So it was just party, party, party,” Danny said.
Elmo gave him a puzzled look. He turned to Hunter for a clue, but only got a shrug.
“Anyway,” Hunter said quickly, “Elmo finally got a chance to break down the videos of the Terminator and look at the measurements. Show him what you found, E.”
From his backpack, Elmo withdrew a huge stack of printouts—at least three inches thick—and tossed it on the coffee table.
“What…is that?” Danny asked.
“That’s the raw data collected from the videos,” Elmo said. “I studied your arm action, elbow bend, release point, etc., took a number of precise measurements, and compared them to—”
“So I’m supposed to do what?” Danny interrupted, gazing at the printouts. “Take two years out of my life to go through all this? Skip my freshman and sophomore years of high school and just stay in my room, thumbing through reams and reams of data on my pitching mechanics?”
“Or,” Hunter said quickly, “we could have Elmo just go over the high points. You could do that, couldn’t you, E?”
Elmo nodded and pulled a thin laptop from his backpack.
“It might even be better this way,” he said, tapping a few keys. “I doubt either one of you could have followed the computations anyway. They’re simply too complicated for most people to absorb.”
Danny turned to Hunter. “He’s doing it again. That condescending stuff. It makes me want to just want to grab him by the neck and push his pointy little head into a—”
“E,” Hunter said nervously, “can you, um, leave out the ‘I’m a genius’ attitude? And just give us the results?”
“Yes, of course,” Elmo said, shooting a worried glance at Danny. “Okay, when you study the two videos of when the pitch was effective and when it wasn’t, you see, for instance, no difference in arm hyperabduction—”
“In English, E,” Hunter said. “Not geek-speak.”
“Hyperabduction,” Elmo said, “has to do with getting your pitching arm above the level of your shoulders. Anyway, no difference there. The arm slot looks the same, too. So does the release point.”
“Fascinating,” Danny said, rolling his eyes. “So far it’s been a really illuminating report.”
“There is a slight difference in wrist angle when he snaps the ball,” Elmo continued.
“So you think that’s the problem?” Hunter asked.
“No, I don’t,” Elmo said.
He tapped a few more keys on the laptop. Another screen opened.
“And the trajectory of the pitch is a little different in the two videos,” he said.
“Okay,” Danny said, “so you think that’s the problem?”
“No, I don’t,” Elmo said.
Danny and Hunter looked at each other.
“Okay,” Hunter said. “Now I feel like murdering him myself.”
“Then what do you think the problem is?” Danny asked.
Elmo brightened. “Oh, I know what the problem is. It’s in the grip. Definitely in the grip.”
“Okay, now we’re getting somewhere!” Hunter said, rubbing his hands together excitedly. “Where in the grip?”
“I don’t know,” Elmo said, still smiling.
“You don’t know,” Danny repeated. “Let me get this straight. You know the problem is in the grip. But you can’t tell us anything else about it?”
“Correct,” Elmo said. “That’s my conclusion. Based on all the metrics from the videos. With a margin of error of about, oh, two percent.”
Danny and Hunter exchanged another look.
“Elmo,” Hunter said in an even voice, “that’s like someone going to a doctor because he doesn’t feel well and being told the problem is in his back. And when the guy says, ‘Where in my back?’ the doctor throws up his hands and says, ‘I don’t know.’”
Elmo seemed to consider this for a moment.
“Regrettably, your analogy is accurate,” he said. “We know—well, I know—the grip is the problem. Because we’ve eliminated all the other factors. What I don’t know is if Danny is squeezing the ball too hard or holding it too lightly. Or whether he’s doing something else with the grip that’s interfering with the Magnus Force—”
“WARNING, WARNING: GEEK-SPEAK!” Hunter intoned in a robotic voice.
“Sorry, that’s the force that results from the ball’s interaction with the air,” Elmo said. “The force that causes movement on a pitch. Why isn’t the Terminator dropping like it used to? We don’t know, because we can’t get a spin-rate measurement in RPS that would effectively let us calculate—”
Danny held up his hand.
“Could you possibly—you know, for those of us who aren’t world-class physicists at the age of thirteen—explain what RPS is? Thank you. Much appreciated.”
Elmo nodded sheepishly.
“Revolutions per second,” he said. “Bottom line: we don’t know how your grip pressure is affecting how the pitch rotates and drops. Or how it doesn’t drop, in this case.”
The three of them sat in silence as Elmo’s words sank in.
Finally, Danny stared at the stack of printouts and said, “You killed a lot of trees for that report. Which should probably be titled ‘The Terminator: Still Not Sure Why It Sucks.’”
Hearing this, Elmo looked ready to cry.
“But look on the bright side,” Hunter said. “At least we know more about why it sucks than we did before.”
He jumped to his feet, stretched, and said, “Now that we got that out of the way, got anything to eat?”
Elmo perked up immediately.
“And would it be organic?” he asked. “Or at least vegetarian?”
A half hour later, fortified by a microwaved mushroom pizza and iced tea, Hunter and Elmo left. Danny watched them go with an empty feeling.
In forty-eight hours, the Orioles would be playing the Yankees in the biggest game of the season.
And their so-called closer—ha, like anyone would still call him a closer!—was as lost as he’d ever been in his pitching career.
Oh, Katelyn would just love to hear that.