Cecilia Tan has been writing about baseball since she recorded Dave Righetti’s no-hitter in her high school diary in 1983. She is the author of The 50 Greatest Yankee Games and has edited the Yankees Annual every pre-season since 2007. In 2011, she became publications director for SABR, where she edits the Baseball Research Journal and directs the SABR digital books program. Her short fiction has appeared in Ms. Magazine, Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, Best American Erotica, and many other places. In this story, Tan balances the hope of a Red Sox spring training with the reality of the game no matter how informally it is played, as a young player works to reverse the curse in his own small way.
THE INFIELD WAS BAKED red clay, that Georgia clay found on fields all over the country, brought in by the truckload. Kirby could smell it from the runway to the dugout, such a familiar smell. It was the smell of Little League, and the field behind the school near his uncle’s house, and the smell of learning to block balls in the dirt.
He emerged from the damp shade of the dugout into the bright but weak February morning sun. The breeze was cold but the grass was green; a groundskeeper trimmed the verge beyond third base with a manual push mower. Beyond him, the jigsaw puzzle of advertising signs that made up the outfield wall shone bright and riotous. Kirby shifted his bag on his shoulder. He should have gone straight to his locker to put it down, but something made him want to see the field first. His first spring training with the big club.
The crunch of a set of spikes on concrete behind him made him turn, and there was Mike Greenwell, suited up in uniform pants and a ratty gray T-shirt. His dark moustache was matched not so much by a goatee as an untamed offseason lack of shaving.
“You’re here a little early, aren’t you?” Kirby said, without thinking.
“Eight a.m.? Not really,” Greenwell replied as he went up the dugout steps to the grass.
“No, I mean, isn’t it just pitchers and catchers today?” “Like I have something better to do…?” Greenwell joked as he began a jog around the warning track.
It was only later, when Kirby found the locker with his name on it and saw Greenwell’s was across from his, that he realized he hadn’t introduced himself. Wouldn’t want to seem like a brown-noser, he thought, after the fact. The locker, the one with “Wilcox” over it, written with a magic marker on a wide strip of what looked like medical tape, had a pile of brand new catching equipment in it. The elation over the new equipment almost overcame the letdown of seeing his locker tag was temporary. Of course it was—just his first invite to Red Sox camp; he told himself not to get overexcited.
Catchers tended to get the invite to the big club sooner than other position players. It was just math—there were so many pitchers who needed to work out, put in bullpen sessions, non-roster invitees auditioning for jobs. Probably more than thirty pitchers in camp right now. Maybe forty. Prospects were there, too, starters and bullpen guys—pitchers everywhere. That meant a lot of catching to be done. Kirby knew that, but he’d still felt privileged to get the word that, just a year out of rookie ball, he would be lockering with the likes of an All-Star like Mike Greenwell.
Other guys were filtering in now, some he knew from rookie ball, some not. Now introductions were okay, he decided, since they were mostly new guys, both the pitchers and the catchers. Ever since Tony Peña had gone, there had been something of a revolving door at catcher for the Sox, and every guy there knew it. Kirby’s heart started to beat harder just thinking about it. Who knew? Make an impression on someone, maybe someone else tweaks a muscle, anyone could be behind the plate on Opening Day, wasn’t that right? He pictured himself crouching behind the dish, Roger Clemens on the mound, the big green wall visible through the bars of his mask, Clemens’ leg kick…
There was Clemens now, big Texas guy, his hair in need of a trim, shaking hands and exchanging back slaps with some of the other players near his locker. Yes, thought Kirby, this is where I belong. He decided to dump the worry about brown-nosing and went to join the circle around Roger’s locker, but halfway there he saw a satin-jacketed coach tacking up a white piece of paper. There were always too many coaches and assistant coaches to keep track of in Spring Training, but anyone with gray hair and a field jacket was probably in the know. Kirby veered toward the bulletin board. The notice had the day’s workout schedule and rotation. He and ace pitcher Clemens were in a group together and he couldn’t help but take that as a little ego-boo. Maybe they do like me, after all, he thought.
An hour later he was in the bullpen, his gear on, while Clemens and two other starters prepared to take the mound under the watchful eye of a coach. Kirby kept forgetting the names of the other two guys. One of them he should have known, too, because they had faced each other in college. But try as he might, the name Gar Finnvold was too ridiculous to stick in his brain. The other one, same problem, Nate Minchey, for whatever reason it was like these two guys could not be for real. Finnvold took the mound first and tweaked something in his landing leg within the first five pitches. He and the coach went off in search of the trainer, and Minchey took a seat on the bench to wait for his return.
“C’mon,” Clemens said to Kirby, “I’ll have a go. It’s not like I’m really going to air it out on the first day.”
Kirby crouched behind the plate and tamped down the spike of anxiety in his throat. He had caught plenty of fireballers in his time and besides, as Clemens said, he wasn’t going to be trying to light up the radar gun today.
Still, the first fastball popped loudly in Kirby’s mitt, and he felt the sting in his left hand. He plucked the ball out and lobbed it back to Clemens who stood waiting at the bottom of the mound, his glove bobbing impatiently for the return throw.
The next pitch was the same, and soon he and Kirby sank into a rhythm. All Kirby did was think about catching it, throwing it back, catching it, throwing it back. That was plenty to think about. He didn’t know Clemens’ form, his habits, his tendencies, any of that stuff. His job right now was singular: get the ball back to Roger.
“All right if I try Mister Splittee?” Roger called as the ball sailed back to him.
“You sure?” Kirby asked, tipping his mask onto the top of his head so he could talk. Pitchers typically didn’t start on the breaking stuff until later in the spring. But maybe Roger didn’t count the split-finger fastball as a breaking pitch.
“No, are you sure?” was Roger’s reply, “meat?”
“Bring it on,” Kirby said with a smile as he yanked the mask back down. He pounded the glove for emphasis.
The first one, as Fate would have it, got by him. Bounced in the dirt right at the plate, and then went through his legs and hit the chain link fence, startling some reporters on the other side. Kirby felt his cheeks burn under his mask. That’s baseball, he repeated to himself, the mantra he had picked up long ago when he learned that it could be a humiliating game. That’s baseball.
No more balls got by and after a few more minutes, Roger was done. Minchey shrugged, not wanting to throw until the coach came back. So Roger and Kirby sat together on the bench, companionably sweaty and drinking water out of Gatorade cups.
“So how did it look to you?” Roger asked.
“Good,” Kirby replied.
“Good?”
“Good.” Kirby shrugged. “I’ve never caught you before so…what do I know?”
Roger crumpled the lime green cup in his hand and tossed it on the ground. “You were a Gator, weren’t you.”
“How did you know that?” Kirby had, in fact, gone to the University of Florida, Gainesville.
“I play golf with a sports administrator from there, nobody you’d know,” he said, which didn’t answer the question. “Did you always catch or were you converted?”
Was I that bad? Kirby wondered. “I caught and pitched in high school…”
“Red, hey Red!” Roger shouted to a coach passing by and gave him an exaggerated hieroglyphics-style shrug. “What gives?”
The coach, a wizened fellow with a shock of white hair Kirby didn’t recognize, pointed back the way he had come.
“C’mon,” Roger said then, giving Kirby a slap on the shoulder, and jogged off to the practice field where the next phase of the workout was beginning.
That night Kirby found himself at the local steakhouse the players favored, sitting around the square of a bar in the center with six or seven other guys, all pitchers except for him. He ordered a beer, a steak, and a tall glass of iced tea, “Hold the tea.” The bartender was a cute blond who didn’t get it, but the pitcher on his left, a bullpen hopeful named Hiram Green, burst out laughing.
“Just do it, honey,” Green said to her. “In fact, put that cup of ice on my tab.”
That got a smile out of Kirby. Green, despite his name, wasn’t—he had been bouncing around the league for a good number of years already before getting the invite to Red Sox camp. Kirby didn’t know much about him.
When the ice came, Kirby clamped his swollen left hand around the glass, and sighed.
“You catching Roger today?” Green asked.
“Yeah.”
“Thought it was you. Can’t really tell you guys apart with the fucking masks on, of course. What number you wearing?”
“Eighty six.”
“Well, my sympathies to both of us, brother. They gave me sixty seven.” Hiram shuddered. “If I get a chance I hope to switch it up.”
“Why?”
“How old are you? Aw, you would have been only two. But sixty seven, that was a cursed year for the Red Sox, didn’t you know?”
“Uh, eighty six wasn’t such a great year either,” Kirby said, still not quite sure what Hiram was going on about.
“Cursed,” Hiram said, shaking his head sadly. “You don’t want nothing to do with that number.”
Kirby felt a shiver run through him as the image of that ball going through his legs earlier in the day suddenly popped into his mind. It wasn’t anything like what happened to Buckner and yet…? He shook himself. Snap out of it. Ridiculous.
He sipped his beer in silence and let the pitchers indulge their superstitions. Catchers had to be better grounded, squatting down instead of perching up on the mound like flamingoes surveying their domains. He was used to this kind of thing. Pitchers, when in groups, invariably talked about three things besides women, and that was breaking balls, jinxes, and hitting. Yes, hitting. Even American League pitchers seemed obsessed with it. The rumor that Major League Baseball was going to institute interleague play during the regular season within a few years persisted, and of course here in Spring Training, when they played a National League team, they would use the National League rules.
So Kirby wasn’t surprised when, halfway through his steak, the pitchers started talking about wanting more cage time. “Yeah, I want to get my cuts,” Hiram said. “But I’m a bullpen guy. Like I’m going to be out there more than one inning anyway.”
“Don’t say that, Green,” a blond, red-faced lefthander named Jones said, a little breathless. “Some of those split squad games, they don’t bring that many guys. If you come in to face the last batter of an inning, and then have to pitch the next inning, and the pitcher’s spot comes up to bat…”
“Keep dreamin’,” Hiram replied. “’Cause that’s the only way you or I are getting any licks in this spring. Really. No way, José.”
One of the Latin pitchers jumped in at that, though Kirby hadn’t determined if the guy’s name was José or not. He stopped listening. Everyone knew pitchers couldn’t hit. The National League clung to their stupid rule out of tradition, but they were pretty much the only ones at this point. Kirby had been a fairly good pitcher in his time, but one of the reasons he had given it up was that his hitting talent would have gone to waste. Well, that was the rational reason his coaches and he gave. The less rational reason was that he somehow knew that because he could hit, he did not belong in the fraternity of pitchers. His eyes scanned the bar. Where were all the other catchers tonight? Did they have some other watering hole he didn’t know about?
The pitchers around him, egged on by booze and the presence of the blond bartender—her baby blue shirt seeming to grow tighter as the evening wore on— were now actually bragging to one another about which one was a better hitter than the next. Kirby put a twenty dollar bill on the bar and stood up to leave.
“You ain’t goin’ now, are you, man?” said José, or whatever his name was.
“Catchers have early cage time tomorrow,” he said, unable to resist making it a subtle dig.
“Okay, mister high and mighty,” said Hiram. “But just wait until you see how I hit.”
Kirby didn’t mask his chuckle, which was maybe a tad on the condescending side. He figured it was all in good fun, but he hadn’t counted on how much
Hiram had drunk, or maybe why Hiram—despite deceptive stuff and a high strikeout to inning ratio—never stuck with a club.
“What are you laughing at? Are you laughing at me?” Before Kirby could answer, Hiram proclaimed, “I’m sure I hit better than you pitch, meat.”
“Don’t bet on it,” Kirby said and walked out.
* * *
The next day went much like the first, bullpen sessions, fielding practice, wind sprints, the usual. It was some time around noon when Kirby realized he was the subject of a larger than usual number of stares and looks.
“What is that all about?” he asked Roger, as they walked back to the foul line to start the next wind sprint.
“Heard any trade rumors?”
“No.”
“Have a hot date last night?”
“No.”
“Then it’s probably nothin’.”
But when Kirby got back to the clubhouse, he found Hiram and a small cabal of pitchers hanging around his locker. Kirby’s locker, that is. A twenty dollar bill was tacked next to Kirby’s name tag.
“So, when are we getting it on, amigo?” Hiram said, his smile and his arms wide. He was wearing only a towel around his waist and his shower flip flops.
“Sorry, Hiram, you’re not my type,” Kirby replied, drawing guffaws out of some of the guys.
“No, no, man, our bet.”
“What bet?”
“Don’t you remember? At the bar last night, you bet me twenty dollars that you can pitch better than I can hit.” Hiram indicated the sawbuck with one long finger.
“No, I didn’t,” Kirby said. “That twenty was to pay my bill.”
“Don’t you remember? I said I was paying for you last night.”
Kirby paused for a moment. That wasn’t the way he remembered it. But his argument clearly wasn’t going to get him anywhere, not if they were all in on it. He just wasn’t sure what kind of clubhouse prank this was leading to. It wasn’t that he didn’t expect a little hazing—that came with the territory—but he really wasn’t sure where this was going. “That was just talk,” Kirby said, pushing his way through the group to the locker. He sat down on the stool and started unlacing his spikes. They were caked with red infield dirt.
The group did not disperse, looking to Hiram to take the lead. “All I know is, we have a bet, you and me, and we ought to find a time and place to see who wins it.” There were murmurs of approval from the others. “I mean, who said pitchers couldn’t hit?”
Did I say that? Kirby wondered. He didn’t think he’d actually said it. “Later, Hiram. I gotta go lift.”
“Oh, right, build up those muscles so you can get that fastball of yours by me,” the pitcher sniggered, but sauntered away.
* * *
By the time the regular position players showed up at camp, Kirby’s hands, knees, and his throwing arm were more sore than they had ever been in his life. Thank goodness for the trainers, who had a ready supply of ice, liniment, analgesics, and rubdowns. He didn’t mind being sore when it meant being taken care of so well. And he was catching Roger Clemens every other day, which he figured if nothing else he could tell his grandchildren about. All in all, Kirby was in baseball-player heaven except for one thing: Green and his bet.
Somehow things had escalated to the point where now half the pitchers in camp were getting ready to take swings against him, and the other half were placing bets themselves.
He knew it was at the point of no return when Clemens himself said, on one of those wind sprint walk-backs, “Heck, I’d like to get in there and take some cuts against you myself.”
“Can you hit?” Kirby replied.
“I dunno,” Clemens shrugged. “I’ve been in the American League all my life. But I never back down from a challenge.”
Kirby sighed. There hadn’t been any challenge, but everyone was acting like there was, and in a team situation you had to go with the group’s idea of reality. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.” The Rocket spat onto the grass.
“Can you show me how you throw the splitter?”
* * *
A couple of days later in the showers Kirby snapped Hiram on the ass with a towel and said “So when are we getting it on?”
“Whenever you’re ready,” Hiram replied, clapping his hands with glee, ignoring the welt on his ass, and scrubbing his head with vigor under the spray of the high showerhead.
“What about tomorrow, since it’s a light day.” Kirby started the flow on the next showerhead over. They were the big ones, like sunflowers, and they never ran out of hot water.
“Sorry, couldn’t hear you,” Hiram said, shaking water from his hair and ears like a dog. He raised his voice. “Did you say tomorrow?”
“Yeah.” Kirby grabbed the soap and began to lather his chest, gently because there were a couple of bruises there from getting crossed up and taking bouncers in the dirt off his equipment. “I hear there’s some other guys want a piece of me, too.”
“Yeah, me!” shouted José—it turned out his name was José—from across the cinderblock room.
“Fine.” Kirby ducked his head under to wet his hair and then turned to Hiram. “Get as many guys together as you want.”
Hiram had raised an eyebrow and was unsure what to say now that Kirby had made such a dramatic about-face. “So what’s the bet then? You gonna pay us each twenty bucks if we get a hit off you?”
Kirby shook his head. “Even a blind chipmunk finds a nut sometimes.”
“So, what, no lucky hits?”
“Hiram, Hiram,” Kirby said, not sure where the confidence in his voice was coming from, since he didn’t actually feel it. “Have you really thought about how this is going to work? We gotta do it schoolyard style.”
“What do you mean?”
“Any ground ball on the infield is an out, any pop-up is an out. Line drives, anything that lands on the warning track, hits the wall, or goes over, is a hit. You guys get twenty seven outs. Every three outs clears the bases.” He ducked his head again then came out blinking water out of his eyes. “I’ll give you twenty bucks for every run you score.”
“You’re on,” Hiram said, and they shook on it, ghetto style, to the whooping of José in the background.
* * *
Kirby found, much to his annoyance, that he could not sleep that night. He was housed in a two-star motel a couple of miles from the park, the same place most of the other low-paid players and coaches stayed. Nice little place, the kind with a breakfast room and a coffee dispenser that ran 24 hours. Kirby was as perky as the coffee when midnight came around. It wasn’t as if he really cared whether Hiram, or any of the other pitchers, got a hit or a run off him. It was Hiram’s ego, not Kirby’s, that had a lot at stake.
But something one of the coaches had said to him in the lobby had started him worrying. As he was grabbing a little iced tea from the dispenser there, Red had come up and wished him good luck.
“Oh, you know about it?” Kirby had said.
“Kiddo, everyone knows about it. Didja think you were just going to waltz out there and no one was gonna care?”
“Well, I…”
“Even the groundskeepers are going to be out there. Heh, should be fun.”
Kirby lay in bed after that wondering how he could have missed the fact that he was now the center of everyone’s attention. That hadn’t been his intent. He just wanted to get it over with, in fact, so that he would stop being the recipient of so much attention. But he couldn’t call it off now, he just had to get out there and do it. Just like any other day in baseball, he told himself. Sure, it was something out of the routine, but it was still baseball. The whole key to success was just being in the moment and doing your best in that moment. Right? That’s baseball.
The next morning he arrived to find the other catchers—or someone—had festooned his locker with red, white, and blue bunting, and there was a ball stuffed into one of his cleats. He shook his head—he knew what the ball meant. In the old days, before strict pitching rotations, managers used to leave a ball in the shoe of that day’s starting pitcher so he’d know it was his turn.
There was a glove there, too, a pitcher’s glove. Kirby picked it up gingerly, as if it might be booby-trapped, but it appeared to be free of joy buzzers, roaches, or dog poop. He turned it over and saw the name on it was “Clemens.” He had a moment of panic, wondering who stole it from Roger’s locker and looking around to see if he might be able to slip it back in there without Clemens noticing. But then Clemens himself came up beside him, clapped him on the shoulder, and said “I thought you might need that.”
“Holy crap, Rocket, thanks.”
“No problem, man. Now let’s get out there.”
Kirby found it hard to concentrate on the workouts that day. He had to catch Hiram, for one thing, and everywhere he went, people were full of cracks and comments. He found himself blushing under his mask a lot. He tried to shut it out, stay within himself, but he couldn’t.
He paid for it when catching Roger in the bullpen around noon. They got out of synch, Kirby got crossed up, and Roger let go a forkball when Kirby was expecting the fastball, or maybe it was the other way around. Either way, Kirby didn’t see what he expected, caught the pitch awkwardly, and the next thing he knew Roger was leaning over him asking “Are you okay?”
Despite the fact he was scrunched up on the ground like a turtle he automati cally replied “I’m fine, I’m fine.” It’s what he and every other athlete always says when asked “are you okay?” despite the fact that they are not. Then the trainer and some coaches were there with more specific questions like “Can you stand up” and “Can you take your glove off”—the answer to both being “not yet.” Kirby was hunched over the hand inside his glove, his eyes squeezed shut like he could somehow wish away the pain if he just tried hard enough.
Now there was the long walk from the bullpen, along the foul line, down the dugout steps, and Kirby felt like if every eye hadn’t been on him before, they were all watching him now. The trainer walked on one side and Roger on the other, holding him by the elbows like it was his leg he had hurt, not his fingers. The midday sun was hot like a spotlight, and it seemed to Kirby like the whole camp had paused to watch his slow march to the trainer’s room. The normal sounds of a spring workout, the smack of games of catch, the steady chop of wood in the batting cage, all were silent.
As they went up the tunnel he thought he heard Hiram’s voice from across the grass, “Aw, man!”
* * *
Twenty minutes later Kirby was breathing a sigh of relief. They had an X-ray machine right there, and nothing was broken. Hell, it was only his pinky, and it was only sprained. He might have dislocated it but it had popped right back in. He had it wrapped in ice and resting on a shelf as high as his shoulder when Roger came in.
“So, Doc, what’s the prognosis?”
The trainer told him. “He won’t be catching for a while.”
“Yeah, but can he still pitch?”
The trainer looked at Roger like he had grown another head.
“Can you just tape the two fingers together?” Kirby asked. “I don’t really use my pinky very much.”
“You’re a catcher, right?”
“Right.” Kirby caught Roger gesturing at him from behind the trainer’s back. “Am I cleared to do other things besides catch, though? Like can I still do my running and lifting?”
“Oh, I suppose,” the trainer said with a sigh and reached for a roll of white medical tape. “Let me see it.”
* * *
And so it was that Kirby “Nine Fingers” Wilcox, pumped full of ibuprofen and wearing Roger Clemens’ glove, took the mound in Fort Myers to face a motley lineup of eleven pitchers who were all milling around the on deck circle, fiddling with their stiff, new batting gloves and their borrowed bats. Three different catchers sat in the shade of the visitor’s dugout with their shin guards on, playing rock, paper, scissors to determine who caught first.
Kirby hadn’t expected to have a catcher. Then to his surprise he saw he had fielders, too. Scott Hatteberg, another catcher, stood at first base, one of the other guys out of the minors at third. And how about Mike Greenwell and Roger standing in left center, talking? When they saw him look back at them from the mound, they jogged apart. Kirby blinked. Roger was going to play center field?
There were whistles and cat calls from the rest of the team, players, coaches, and other employees sitting behind home plate, but back about twenty rows so they were under the shade of the roof. Rich Rowland crouched behind the plate and gave Kirby the sign to start his warm-up pitches. Red stood close by, working his chaw absentmindedly, until Kirby had thrown his eighth warm-up pitch, when Rowland and Red shouted simultaneously, “Coming down.” And just like before a real inning, the catcher threw the ball to second base, and then Red stepped up in the role of umpire.
Hiram tapped his bat on the plate, unperturbed by this turn of events. He must have known there would be an umpire, a team. Kirby took a deep breath and tried to put out of his mind the thought that everyone else knew more about what was going on than he did. He cleared his mind of all thoughts except the one that he was grateful to have a catcher. Having a target made it so much easier.
He kicked, and threw his fastball. Hiram stared at it, it hit the glove, and Red called out “Hype!” and raised his fist.
Hiram waggled the bat, exchanging looks with his teammates, the other pitchers who had now taken seats in the home dugout. “You’ve seen him now, you’ve seen him now,” one of them shouted.
Kirby kicked and dealt. This time Hiram swung, late, and missed.
“Hype-oo!” Red shouted.
“What was that!” Hiram called to Kirby, jokingly, as if Kirby had thrown some trick junk pitch. But it was just a fastball, a plain fastball.
Kirby blinked; Rowland had just put down a sign. Two fingers. And Kirby heard Roger’s voice from behind him, in center, where he had probably seen the sign, too, shouting “Come on, give it to him, now, come on now!”
Kirby threw the forkball. He held onto it a tad too long, and the ball bounced in the dirt, but Hiram had started his swing early, and he golfed at it and missed.
“Hy-ee! Yer out!” Red screamed and gave a theatrical flourish as he pumped his fist.
Hiram didn’t joke now. He stared at Kirby all the way back to the dugout. The guys on the bench gave him a hard time, some of them imitating that last duckassed swing, and laughing. José was next.
Rowland called for the fastball and Kirby threw it. And again, and again. And José went down swinging, though it was a better swing. Hoots were coming from the stands now—“I told you none of you could hit the side of a barn!”—and the pitchers were starting to sit up a bit on the bench. Their jocularity was undiminished, but each man began to pay a bit more attention to Kirby’s delivery. They groaned wildly when the third of their number also went down on strikes.
Rowland jogged out to the mound. “So do we take a break between innings or what?”
“I just need some water,” Kirby said, and Rowland motioned for one of the bat boys to bring him a bottle. He took a swig, resettled his cap, and was ready to throw again.
The first batter to hit a ball into fair territory came in the fourth inning, when
Hiram came to bat again. This time he swung late at a pitch, but got wood on the ball, and hit a soft three-hopper right to Hatteberg at first. An easy out.
“Thank god!” Roger shouted. “We’re starting to get bored out here!” But he did not sound bored.
Kirby, for his part, had stopped counting the outs. There had been no one on base so there had been no need to know when the third out came and cleared them. The breaks were brief. In one, a new catcher came in, had a brief chat with Rowland, but to Kirby nothing had changed. He would set, look for the glove, throw, and then wait for the ball to come arcing back to him. Sometimes he would grip the ball across the seams, sometimes along the seams—that was the only change in his world. Oh, and sometimes the batters were left-handed, but even that didn’t seem to matter since none of them could hit him.
When it got to be the end of the sixth, he started to hear the shouting again. There was a lot of it, and more of it was aimed at him. “C’mon Kirby, attaboy!” Things like that, from voices he did not recognize. But it echoed against the inside of his skull—he heard it without noticing it. He was too intent on just keeping his motion the same, his leg kick, his follow-through.
Here was Hiram again. There were no jokes from him this time, no smile on his face. He dug in and waggled the bat. Kirby blinked as his brain did the math. If they had eleven men in their lineup, and this was the start of the third time through, then Hiram was the twenty third man. Almost done.
Perhaps the thought broke his rhythm or perhaps he was tiring, but the next two pitches were wide of the strike zone by an obvious margin.
“Whatsa matter, Wilky?” Hiram called, suddenly animated again. “Afraid I’ve figured you out?”
The catcher called for time and came jogging up to Kirby. Kirby was shocked to realize it was Hatteberg, which meant someone else was at first base, now. He filed that away in his brain as he tried to hear what Hatty was saying. “I’m flying open?”
“Yeah, your shoulder. Down and hard. Come on.” He gave Kirby a pat on the butt and then jogged back behind the plate. Kirby blinked. It was word for word what he had told many pitchers, many times. Surreal.
Hatty pointed at him with the glove, pounded his fist in it, and called for the fastball.
Kirby kicked, fired, it went in for a strike, right down Broadway. Hiram shook his head as if to clear it. Kirby could almost imagine what Hatty was saying, under his breath, to Hiram then, because it was what Kirby would say. “You just don’t expect it to be right there, do you?”
So now, come back with it again, or try the splitter? The splitter. Kirby nodded, kicked, and brought his arm through his motion. Hatty caught the ball just below
Hiram’s knees and then whipped his glove up an inch or two.
“H—” Red began, but then thought better of it. “Ball three.”
“Nice frame job,” Hiram said to Hatteberg.
Kirby kept his eyes trained on Hatteberg’s hand and his glove. Okay, again. This time Hiram tried his golf swing again, but fouled the ball off. Full count.
Come back with the fastball, Kirby thought, and nodded as Hatteberg thought the same thing. Kirby was already visualizing Hiram’s swing, how he would swing late on this extra-fast fastball, and have to go back to the bench, defeated. The sun was hot—the morning breeze always died by mid-afternoon—and Kirby could feel sweat making the sleeves of his undershirt stick to his armpits. Here it comes, he thought.
As soon as he released the ball, he knew he had made the classic mistake. Trying to put a little extra on it, he had muscled up and instead slowed the ball down, flattened it out. Hiram put a huge swing on it and the ball sailed up and up, straight over Kirby’s head.
“Roger!” Kirby wasn’t the only one shouting.
Clemens turned this way and that, everyone on the field, in the whole ballpark thinking, that’s the toughest play a center fielder has to make, the ball hit straight to the middle, but Roger kept going back and back, and finally turned, backpedaling and then stretching back over his head, giving half a leap and snaring the ball in the edge of the webbing of his glove. He somersaulted backwards and then sat up, holding the glove in the air to the whoops and hollers of all assembled.
“Hot shit! Sign that kid up!”
“Rocket, who knew?”
“Yahoo!”
And Hiram’s voice, too. “No way! No fucking way!” He had already passed second base when Roger made the catch, and as he jogged back to the dugout he did not make eye contact with Kirby.
Kirby waited for the ball to come back to him, then got a drink. He glanced into the pitchers’ dugout and found most of them sitting in dejected postures, batting gloves strewn about. Hiram was shaking his head and still saying “No way, no way.”
Red hollered. “Four outs to go.”
José stood in, and barely waved at three pitches before going sheepishly back to the bench.
“Aw, c’mon!” Hiram chastised him. “Didn’t you see that drive! We’re getting to him now!” But none of the others looked like they really wanted to go through with it. “Gimme that bat.”
Kirby just shrugged when Red gave him a look like “is this in the rules?” If Hiram wanted to make the last three outs, that was fine with Kirby. Hiram was jazzed now, surely he’d overswing—and indeed, they got him to pop up a high fastball which Hatty caught right between the plate and the backstop.
“Two to go,” Red said.
“Dammit,” Hiram said, digging in again.
They went after him again, with a similar result, this time the pop-up went to Kirby himself. He felt it land in his glove and his pinky twinged horribly. He shook it off, climbed back up on the mound, and waited for Hiram to get back in the box.
This time he tried to start him off with a splitter, but it bounced in the dirt, Hiram didn’t swing, and it was ball one. Kirby tried to come back with the fastball but it sailed outside, and it was ball two.
Hatteberg visited the mound, his red eyebrows pale in the strong sunlight. “Do you want to walk him?”
“What?”
“Is this the unintentional intentional walk, or are you really just so gassed that you can’t hit the strike zone anymore?”
“I don’t know. How many pitches do you think I’ve thrown?”
“Ninety? A hundred?”
They both thought about that a moment and Hiram shouted “Come on, guys, we haven’t got all day!”
“Jerk,” Hatteberg said, but where only Kirby could see it. “Hang in there, let’s get him.”
But the next one was a fastball that Kirby overthrew and Hatteberg had to jump up out of his crouch to make sure it didn’t hit Red.
Hiram began to crow. “He’s got a perfect game on the line and he’s going to walk me? Lil’ ol’ me?”
Kirby coughed. Perfect game, my ass, he thought. This isn’t a game. In fact, I don’t know what it is. Then he realized he was about to walk a pitcher, for god’s sake, and if there are cardinal sins in baseball, that had to be one of them, no matter what the situation.
What am I doing out here, anyway? he thought. This is all about Hiram’s ego, not mine. Maybe I ought to just cookie one in there, let him hit the damn thing, that’d make a good story, wouldn’t it? How I no-hit them all day until the very last out…? It was tempting, like he could be Fate for one moment.
But then he could hear Roger screaming. “Come on, damn it, Kirby, let’s finish this and go home! Just put him away already! Don’t make me come over there and do it!”
And the people in the stands, the other players, the office girls, everyone, they were all shouting. It didn’t matter this was just a lark, that it didn’t “count.” Kirby suddenly didn’t want to disappoint anyone, either.
Just throw the ball, he thought. That’s the only part I can control. Just throw the ball.
Hatty dropped down two fingers. Kirby adjusted his grip, kicked his leg, and let it fly.
Hiram, who had gotten stiff standing there while Kirby mused, swung late, just got a little wood on it, and it was another pop-up. Hatteberg screamed “I got it! I got it!” Flung the mask away so hard it hit Red in the stomach and doubled him over, and then he did get it, the ball landing nicely in the round pocket of the catcher’s mitt.
Hatteberg leaped in the air “Yes!” and ran to give the ball to Kirby. Kirby had pumped his fist as the ball came down, but now seemed bewildered by the rushing, jumping teammates all around him, slapping him on the back—no, pounding him on the back—and shouting. And the next few minutes were a blur, of Hiram shaking his hand and saying well, you know, pitchers can’t hit worth a lick, and Roger signing the ball and getting the other guys to add their signatures to it, and asking what the date was so it could be written on there, and more slaps on the back and invitations for dinner, drinks, rounds of golf on the next off day, as the whole gaggle of players made their way back into the clubhouse finally to get out of the afternoon heat and humidity.
So it was, flushed with success but with his pinky and his arm hurting like never before that Kirby Wilcox came to his locker to stow the souvenir ball, only to find all his gear neatly packed, the bunting gone, his name gone—though the twenty was still there. Hatteberg stared with his mouth open, but Roger just shook Kirby’s hand—the one without the sprained finger. “Thanks. That was fun. Keep the glove.”
It was Red who came by and told him he was on the disabled list, officially, and so was booted to minor league camp.
Kirby ripped down the twenty, suddenly feeling like a gate-crasher. His ticket had been revoked. He couldn’t leave fast enough. He handed the twenty to the bat boy on his way out the door, as he repeated to himself over and over, That’s baseball, that’s baseball.