“He’s doing it again, Mom!” Ashley shouted.

Robbie shot her a death look and hissed, “Shush!” But Ashley was giggling too hard to pay any attention.

“He’s making those weird faces!” she yelled. “Check it out!”

It was the next night and Robbie stood in front of the mirror in his bedroom. He was in his full Orioles uniform, including socks and spikes, with his cap pulled low over his eyes. For the past ten minutes he’d been practicing a scowl he hoped would make batters quake each time they stepped in against him.

The whole time he’d been under the impression that his door was locked. But somehow his sister had crept in undetected. Undetected, that is, until she started howling with laughter.

Aren’t ten-year-old girls supposed to be noisy? he thought. This one moves around like a deer in the forest.

A particularly annoying deer.

“OUT!” he said, grabbing Ashley firmly by the shoulders and pushing her toward the door. “You’re in my personal space.”

“Keep making those stupid faces,” she said, “and you’ll have all the personal space you want—permanently.”

After ushering Ashley out of the room and making sure the lock was turned this time, Robbie shuffled wearily over to the computer and searched for pitchers with control problems. He was surprised to find dozens of stories, quite a few about major leaguers whose promising careers were cut short when they suddenly couldn’t find the plate.

“Guess I’m not the only wacko with this issue,” he muttered. “Just the only twelve-year-old wacko with it.”

Practice that afternoon had started as a virtual repeat of the day Marty had filmed his delivery at the ball field. As long as Robbie threw on the sidelines to Joey, every pitch was around the strike zone. On many pitches Robbie was so dialed in Joey barely had to move his catcher’s mitt. For Robbie, it felt like old times, the carefree days when he just reared back and threw hard and didn’t worry about where the ball would go.

But the minute his dad asked him to throw batting practice, and a real, live kid stepped in against him, Robbie’s control vanished—again.

It got so bad that, at one point, Connor watched six straight pitches go by without lifting the bat from his shoulder. The rest of the Orioles, bored out of their minds in the field, began hooting at Connor to swing.

“C’mon, C!” Willie had shouted. “Thought you were the big slugger on this team!”

“Maybe he’s asleep!” Jordy had chimed in. “Either that or he’s doing his impersonation of an ice sculpture!”

“Can’t swing when every pitch is three feet outside!” Connor had snapped, staring balefully at Robbie.

Robbie had felt his face redden and his stomach churn. Finally, on his eighth or ninth pitch to Connor, he managed to throw something hittable. But that was only because he took so much off his fastball it practically crawled to the plate. To no one’s surprise, the big shortstop promptly smacked a towering drive over the left field fence, then looked at Robbie and said pointedly, “That’s your fastball? That’s weak.”

After watching his son struggle with a few more batters, Ray Hammond had finally brought in Mike to pitch the rest of BP. Greatly relieved, Robbie had slunk off to right field to shag fly balls alongside Marty.

Now, bathed in the soft glow of the computer screen, Robbie grew more and more worried as he read about three big-league pitchers whose careers went up in flames when they couldn’t throw strikes.

There was Rick Ankiel, the young phenom for the St. Louis Cardinals, who finished second in the National League Rookie of the Year voting in 2000. But in the playoffs that year, Ankiel suddenly lost his control and uncorked nine wild pitches in three games as the Cardinals lost the series to the New York Mets.

He was never the same after that. Finally his control was so erratic that he gave up pitching altogether and returned to the minor leagues to become an outfielder in the hope of someday getting back to the big leagues.

Before Ankiel there was Mark Wohlers of the Atlanta Braves. Wohlers had a fearsome 103-mile-per-hour fastball and was one of the best closers in the majors. But in 1998 he suffered mysterious bout of wildness and walked thirty-three batters in twenty and one-third innings. Shortly after that he was sent down to the minors to play in obscurity.

Finally there was Steve Blass, a veteran pitcher with the Pittsburgh Pirates. After winning nineteen games in 1972, he, too, suddenly couldn’t find the plate with his pitches. In 1973 he walked eighty-four batters in a little over eighty-eight innings and was out of baseball within two years.

In fact, Blass’s struggles were so well documented that whenever a pitcher inexplicably lost the ability to throw strikes after that, the pitcher was said to have come down with “Steve Blass disease.”

Reading this, Robbie thought: Great. With my luck, whenever some dopey kid starts sailing pitches all over the place, they’ll call it “Robbie Hammond syndrome.”

He logged off the computer and stared forlornly at the poster of Jim Johnson that dominated one wall. Johnson was Robbie’s favorite pitcher on the big-league Orioles, a tall right-hander who could dominate opposing hitters with a fastball that routinely hit the mid-nineties on the radar gun.

How horrible would it be, Robbie thought, to have to give up pitching forever, just because you couldn’t get the stupid ball over the plate? And would he, Robbie Hammond, be the first twelve-year-old in the whole wide world to ever experience such a fate?

Just thinking about it now made his hands sweat.

The truth was, Robbie loved everything about pitching—at least he used to love everything.

He loved how the pitcher was always the main focus of attention on a baseball diamond. He loved how the inning couldn’t start until the pitcher went into his windup, just the way a concert couldn’t start until the orchestra leader raised his baton.

He especially loved the feeling of standing on the mound and knowing he could locate a pitch anywhere he wanted and throw a fastball past any kid who dared step in against him.

I’d like to feel that again, he thought. Even one more time would be nice.

There was a knock at the door and his mom peeked her head in.

“Almost bedtime,” she said. Then, seeing him in his Orioles uniform, she added, “Hey, those are some snazzy pajamas you got there. But I’d take the spikes off if I were you. They could be a little hard on my sheets.”

Robbie managed a weak smile before she closed the door.

He looked in the mirror one last time and sighed.

If I could pitch the way I used to, he thought, I wouldn’t have to practice these lame faces.

Once in bed Robbie found it hard to fall asleep. He tossed and turned for what seemed like an hour. Then, even though he wasn’t supposed to, he grabbed his cell phone from the bedside table, turned it on under his sheets, and sent a quick text message:

Hey Marty. How’s yr Uncle Moe? Give him my best ok?