Ian, but I wasn’t one hundred percent convinced. Guys at North Central were always saying things like Starting tomorrow, I’m going to come to school every day, and then two days later they’d be cutting class again.
Our next game was in West Seattle. Technically, West Seattle is part of Seattle, but the neighborhood is separate from the rest of the city. From Alki Point, the Space Needle and downtown seem miles away.
The team bus got stuck in traffic on I-5 through downtown and then got stuck again on the West Seattle Bridge. Rain was predicted, so we’d hardly warmed up when the umpire screamed “Play ball!”
It didn’t matter that nobody was loose. Ian tripled in a run in the top of the first, and he scored one pitch later with a headfirst slide after a wild pitch bounded ten feet from the catcher. In the bottom of the first, Andrew Comette came busting in on a little dribbler, fielded it barehanded, and—all in one motion—fired to first for the out.
That’s how the game went—heads-up baseball from the first pitch to the last. I had good stuff, not my best, but the defense sucked up every hard-hit ball.
The score was 10–0 after four innings. The mercy rule ended the game, and I was sitting in the back seat of Mr. Thurman’s SUV heading to Seattle when the sky opened and sheets of rain poured down.
Friday’s home game against Chief Sealth was a rerun of Tuesday’s game, only without the rain. Ian hit a home run in the first and pushed the score to 6–0 with a two-run double in the third. I kept the ball on the corners, throwing loose and free. I hit 92 on the speed gun, and my pitches darted just before they reached the plate. When Kevin replaced me in the fifth, we were up 7–1, the one run coming on a walk followed by an opposite field double that was fair by six inches. Kevin pitched a scoreless fifth, and the twins pitched the final two innings, with both giving up a couple of runs. The final was 10–5.
When I got back to my room, I wrote to Tommy Zeller, laying out for him my totals for the two games. Eight innings. One run. Four hits. Twelve strikeouts. Three walks. Fastball in the low nineties. I admired those numbers for a while.
Then I hit send.