VII. The Open Window

VII. The Open Window

In Dallas, a manager at a combined comic book and card shop put us in touch with a serious collector, a retired attorney who bought the whole stack of cards for $56,000. Mom and I sat there while he and the manager went through the deck, assigning values to each card: $3,200 for the 1933 Gehrig, $1,500 for each of the Mantles, $750 apiece for the Clemente and Campanella cards. When the list was done, and the individual values were tallied, the collector pulled a checkbook out of his sports coat and wrote out the amount like it was a trip to the grocery store, nothing more.

Seeing my arm in a sling, he asked if I played.

“No sir,” I said, knowing it was true then, even if it hadn’t been just days before. My mother and the store manager exchanged glances, but neither said anything.

The surgeries to fix my arm cost $39,000 and the remaining $17,000 was just enough to catch up on the mortgage and hire some help to get us through the rest of the summer. In the end, I didn’t quit baseball to help my mom around the farm, and I certainly didn’t quit because I lost interest or met a girl, like some of the other guys. No, I gave up baseball because it would never be the same for me again. Sure, I could have come back as an outfielder like the guy in the John Tunis novel, but after tossing the ball around with Mantle and Gehrig and receiving pitch advice from Drysdale, what would that look like really? After it was all said and done, I gave up baseball to focus more on life.

They’re similar in so many ways, that it’s easy to get one confused with the other. In both “games,” a person has to overcome disappointment, unfair circumstances, and even deal with a few bad calls now and then. And speaking metaphorically, a guy (or gal) has got to know how to throw a fastball when the situation calls for it, when to go with the curve, and when to throw the slider. It also requires a lot of listening to the “catcher,” the coaches, friends and parents. And honestly, it’s all about practice, practice, practice. The old adage about a person playing the way he or she practices was never more true. Still, the best advice I got on the game of life was from some guy calling himself “Charles” Mantle. He once said, “A win’s a win.” It took me several years to know just what he was getting at, but I think I understood it better after my baseball days were finished.

He and his friends, “Henry” Gehrig and “Robert” Clemente also taught me that, “only one game matters” and that tomorrow is for getting better. In 1997, I thought they were only talking about baseball, but sitting on a tractor in the middle of a pasture some years later, I know that it was about so much more. I look back now and I realize what that seventeen year old kid needed to learn most was that the best game on earth is life. I needed to hear that because I hadn’t really been living it much, not since dad died in Iraq.

Mantle also said that we have to hurry, “we don’t have much time.”

Yeah, I made it through all those lost days and nights, went to school, did my chores and woke up and did it all over again. But for a while, I wasn’t really there for any of it. It was something more like, I moved to the rhythm of it all, playing my part, saying my lines and swaying with the other dancers, but it wasn’t me, and it wasn’t living. Through it all, the farm was the place where my mom and dad took long walks out along the fence row, sat and watched the sunset under the oak tree, kissed and fell in love and made a life. It is also the place where some bend in the rules of the universe allowed the ghosts of Mickey Mantle, Lou Gehrig and Roberto Clemente to walk out of a freshly mowed hay meadow and toss a baseball around with a seventeen year old kid.

I don’t know how that happened or why, only that it was and is. I said before that I never saw my dad again that summer, but I never said a word about the summers that came after. And I never said a word about Mantle or Gehrig either.

On summer nights, sometimes in the late spring, and on occasion, the early fall, just before sunset, mom or I would see a shadow walking out across the field, moving past the oak tree or the pecan tree, coming up the fence row or stepping out from behind the barn. Most often, it was dad, stopping by for a quick conversation, a brief hug, but sometimes it was Mantle or “The Iron Horse” checking in on their former student. A smart man would probably make some observation about cosmic doors closing and other windows opening. I don’t know about any of that.

What I do know is that there’s a farm and a barn, a hay meadow and an oak tree just off of Highway 19, out on Route 5 in Ramblewood, Texas where ghosts stop by on seemingly random afternoons. They walk across the pasture and talk about the old days while the whippoorwills and quail call. And if there’s a place like that in Texas, then I bet there’s another somewhere, maybe in Iowa.

In the years that have followed, the farm has changed in ways that I never imagined. After the turn of the century, we converted the south pasture into a field for growing soy beans and it created a nice boon for a farm that previously had always existed just inches from the brink of bankruptcy. The neighbors asked why we didn’t expand our new crop into the pasture to the west. We told them we wanted to keep some of the old farm “the way it was”, and left it at that.

As for me, well I never made it to college, but in 2001, I met a girl named Marcie at the J & C Farm and Implement store over in Mt. Verdant. She has dark hair, bright eyes and a smile that fills me with a happiness that I never knew was possible. We re-modeled the farm house and made it our home in 2003, put in a new kitchen with granite counter tops and a deep industrial sink, just like they show on all of the home renovation shows on Saturday mornings. The next summer, we re-finished the carriage house for mom. She said that dad felt a little weird stopping by to visit mom with Marcie in the house.

Marcie and I were blessed with a daughter the following year, and coincidentally, I published a little book on pitching techniques for adolescents to help with the increased financial demands around the house. With no more baseball cards to sell, I had to find some way to cover the cost of diapers!

Still, the non-fiction sports market is a precarious one. It takes the name recognition of a former star player (or a Ph. D. in the field) to really succeed; so my next book was a fictional offering, a tale about a sheriff in a small town in west Texas, who utilizes his uncanny connection with the paranormal spirits that hang around the family ranch to solve murder mysteries. One might say that the idea just came to me one afternoon….

I changed a few details, made it a ranch instead of a farm, west Texas instead of east and made the protagonist a sheriff instead of an old ballplayer. The series caught on just enough to get a multi-book deal, with a nice advance that arrived around the same time my second daughter was born. So, sitting on a new John Deere tractor out in a hay meadow in the middle of east Texas in 2013, I have to admit that so far, it’s been a nice life. And if I ever think about baseball, it’s only when and if my kids show a little interest in whatever game is showing on television on a Sunday afternoon. If they ask, I tell them (again) how their dad pitched the first four innings of the Ramblewood state championship game, the really close one that clinched it all for the 1997 Wrangler baseball team. Ramblewood 2, Westlake 1.

THE END



Notes

First of all, I have to acknowledge the tremendous debt owed to John R. Tunis for his 1940 book, The Kid from Tomkinsville. Take out all of the ghosts, and this story could have been titled, “The Kid from Ramblewood.” As it stands, the piece is at the very least, an homage to Mr. Tunis’ far superior work!

Second, many of the avid baseball fans “in the audience” will recognize a few not so subtle references to David Clyde, the eighteen-year-old “phenomenon” who pitched for the Texas Rangers from 1973 to 1975. I was a youngster growing up in Texas around that time and kept my fingers crossed that Mr. Clyde would make a successful come back, either with my favorite team, the Rangers, or in one of his subsequent attempts with the Cleveland Indians and Houston Astros. The protagonist’s family name (“Davidson”) was an intentional choice, as at least one part of this tale is based (albeit loosely) on real events.

And finally, many, many thanks to the writer and director (Phil Alden Robinson), as well as the cast and crew from one of my all-time favorite movies, Field of Dreams (Yes, that is the one about the other magical field up in Iowa.). Their wonderful adaptation of the 1982 book by W.P. Kinsella, Shoeless Joe, was an obvious point of inspiration in crafting this work.

VI. The Circle Changes

VI. The Circle Changes

At the far edge of the west pasture, just beside the place where the fence row ran parallel to the hard top oil road leading down to Highway 19 and off into town, a large oak tree marked the corner of the Davidson land. When I was ten, maybe eleven years old, it was the place I’d go when things weren’t going well back at the house. It being the farthest point away from the kitchen table without actually stepping off the property most likely had something to do with it, but there’s also something about the great leafy stretch of shade that a giant oak tree gives in the middle of a long summer.

I still remember running there – full out panting and breathing hard, lungs aching, tears streaming from the side of my face – the day we heard that dad was killed in action in Iraq. By the time I got to the oak tree, I was all out of tears and angry at the cruelness of a world that could take a father away from his son for such a paltry thing as oil stuck in the sand some place I’d never heard of until Operation Desert Storm. Later, many years later, I learned about things like ideological differences and the politics of a global economy and it still did nothing to assuage the burning rage I felt in that moment.

In a sense, baseball saved me that summer. I spent days, weeks actually going through dad’s things in the house, in the loft in the barn, in his workspace out in the garage and I collected all of the things that seemed most dear to him, or at least most personal to me: an old safety razor, a pocket knife, a cane fishing pole, his tackle box with the last swimsuit edition folded inside, a brand new set of socket wrenches, his favorite flannel shirt, an old pea coat – far too big for me, but worth saving for whenever I grew into it, a stack of Robert Parker detective novels – tattered and yellowed, but obviously read and re-read, a coffee mug, with the fading logo for Kramer Tool & Dye fading on the outside and a permanent ring of deep brown coffee stains inside and three shoe boxes filled with baseball cards, mostly from the late 1960s through the mid-1970s.

I kept all of these things in the loft of the barn, visiting them regularly throughout the winter of 1991 and on into the spring of 1992. Obviously, the baseball cards held my attention longest and when the season started in the spring of ’92, I was dedicated to the notion of honoring my dad’s memory with the best little league performance I could deliver. Over the course of that season, I listened to every suggestion the coaches offered, choking up on the bat when they said, knowing and hitting my cut-off man when the situation called for it and practicing a little bit, every day.

At the end of that season, I gathered up all of the loose balls around the house and spent hours working with them that winter, bouncing grounders off the side of the barn wall, taking swings out in the hay meadow, long-tossing balls up onto the roof of the house and “getting under them” to catch them like fly-balls hit deep to center. The following year, I was so far ahead of my peers that the coaches let me work with some of the other players as sort of a surrogate instructor; and by the time I was a freshman in high school, I was striking out seniors from other towns, getting clutch hits in big games and daydreaming about which college program would get me the exposure needed to make it to “The Bigs”.

It was certainly a promising beginning to my baseball career, but on Memorial Day in 1997, I sat under that same old oak tree, knowing that win or lose, the state playoff game that Thursday night would be my last baseball game. I was only seventeen years old, a junior in high school, and yet in a lot of ways, I was already washed-up and done. And it sounds strange to say it now, but when the shadow of a man walked up from behind me out in the pasture and sat down next to me in the shade of that tree, I thought it was the ghost of Mickey Mantle again. I’d certainly seen a lot of that guy and his pal, Gehrig over the course of the spring.

“You know these are probably worth something by now,” the stranger said, handing me a stack of baseball cards held together by a rubber band. I looked up and saw the man that looked like me, but wasn’t. I recognized the sharp nose, the intense blue eyes and the short Army haircut.

“Dad!” I hugged him and simultaneously felt the solid nature of his chest and arms, back and shoulders, but I also sensed the fluid untenable motion of it all. It was real in one sense, but also a thing that couldn’t be fixed and held onto for very long without concentrating. Years later, I realized that the feeling, the emotion connected to that embrace was real, but the physical structure of it wasn’t.

“What are you doing here?”

“Well,” he smiled my smile, a sort of nodding half grin that I knew I did, but didn’t know where I’d learned it. “That’s a long story, but it’s not the one I came to tell you today.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I know,” he nodded “But I need you to pay attention to what all I am going to tell you.” He removed the rubber band from the stack of baseball cards and began sorting through them. I watched as he ran his thumbs through the stack, sliding each card past the next: a 1953 Mickey Mantle, a Lou Gehrig from 1933, a couple of Clementes, a ’61 of Mantle, a Campanella, a Bob Gibson, a Sandy Koufax and several more. They were all there, the greatest to ever play the game, and nearly all of the ones who had passed on had signed their cards.

“Some of these cards aren’t in great shape,” he said, “But hopefully, the autographs will make up for that. They were your granddad’s and mine and now I’m telling you to take them to Dallas and sell them all. Get what you can for them and save the farm for you and your mother.”

“But dad,” I said, confused and wondering what he must know that I didn’t.

“Listen son,” he showed me the cards again. “These are worth a lot of money, enough to change some things, some very important things.”

“Dad, what is it?” I pleaded with him now. “What is it you’re not telling me?”

“I can’t,” he said. “It would ruin everything if I told you. Hold on to these.”

He pressed them into my hands.

“You’ll know what to do with them,” he said and then mused to himself a minute before repeating the phrase. “When the time comes, you’ll know what to do with them.”

“Is it mom?”

He shook his head.

“The car? The tractor?”

Dad didn’t answer, but he hugged me again, and harder the second time, longer, as if it was going to have to last him a while. It was the last and only time I saw his ghost that summer.

In 1940, a guy named John Tunis published a book called, The Kid from Tomkinsville. It is a bittersweet tale about a kid name Roy Tucker who is in many ways, a true baseball prodigy. At a young age, he finds himself pitching for the Brooklyn Dodgers, but suffers an unfortunate accident after a big game and never pitches again. I’d never even heard of the book when I took the mound that Thursday in the state playoffs against the Westlake Vipers, but it’s fair to say that I’ve read it a few times since.

Everything was going so well that night. The fastballs were getting the calls, the curve was getting the swings and the slider was practically untouchable. Still, it’s worth noting here that my short career was unusual in that I never really developed what insiders like to call an “off-speed” pitch. The most common is probably the “circle change”, a pitch thrown like a fastball, but where much more of the hand makes contact with the ball, increasing the friction at the point of release and taking momentum off the ball once it’s thrown. I had two good, hard fastballs, a four-seamer and a two-seamer. I threw a mean curve and a decent slider. The coaches never thought to encourage me to develop a slower pitch that would add some variety into my repertoire. I guess they all got caught up in the excitement of having a hard-throwing righty like me on their team.

Against Westlake, I first noticed the pain after a hard curve in the third inning. It was everywhere inside my arm, everywhere all at once, the muscle, the joint, the bone. The pain stabbed and throbbed, both at the same time, but it flashed and went away. The pitch produced a good hard swing for strike three to end the inning, and I went back to the dugout, rubbing my elbow a little, but not really concerned. I’d gotten over too far on my curve a few times before and winced in pain as a result. A little ice after the game usually did the trick, but Mr. Peterson noticed the look on my face as I walked off the mound and mouthed the words, “Everything okay?”

Nodding, I released the arm and went and sat down next to Jefferies, my catcher.

“Let’s stay away from the curve in the fourth,” I mumbled, “If we can.”

He shrugged in agreement and that was all that was said about it.

These days, they don’t even recommend introducing the curve ball to kids younger than fourteen years old. Their arms aren’t developed, their mental toughness and discipline aren’t ready. My curve was always an erratic pitch for me, one that worked perfectly sometimes and not so much on other occasions. That being said, I had the mechanics of it down by the time I was twelve and was using it regularly by the time I was a freshman. Still, I probably forced it too much on the days when it wasn’t working and when the science teacher is the baseball coach, well who’s going to say “Knock it off kid, you’ll blow out your arm.”

Fourth inning, second batter, the count was two balls, one strike. Jefferies called for the curve and I started to shake my head, but decided to try the pitch again. It had been several minutes and most of the pain had subsided. I came to a set position, ball in my glove, both tucked neatly at the center of my chest. My eyes locked on the batter at the plate and I started my throwing motion.

This time, the pain flashed like a bright light in my eyes. It was a clear night, but I seriously thought I saw lightning blink on the horizon. Then I registered the ripping sound and became aware of the dull numbing sensation in my lower arm. It felt like my forearm had separated from the rest of my body and was this unreal appendage hanging dead and limp at my side. I pulled it in against my torso and the ache was so intense that the grey fog of a faint passed over the corners of my vision.

By the time Jefferies and Mr. Peterson arrived, I was kneeling at the base of the pitcher’s mound, holding my arm and shaking my head, saying “No, no, no” over and over again.

CONTINUED...

V. Regional Playoffs: Ramblewood 5, Bon Homme 3

V.  Regional Playoffs:  Ramblewood 5, Bon Homme 3

First inning, first batter, first pitch.  Fastball right on the imaginary number seven!

“Ball!” the umpire called.  I looked at the catcher, Ryan Jefferies and shook my head because that pitch usually goes for a strike.  Yes, it was down low at the knees and yes of course it was right on the corner of the plate, but most of the time, the umpire, whoever it may be, calls it a strike.

Next pitch:  I tried a fastball on the opposite corner, and the umpire called it the same, ball two.  Jefferies could sense my frustration.  It wasn’t that I was a “nibbler”, one of those pitchers who threw right off the side of the plate all day, hoping to get the questionable calls.  Still, we needed those pitches to be called strikes.  Jefferies gave the sign for a curve, and we got lucky because the batter practically threw his bat at the ball.  It made the count two and one, but I had no idea what to throw next.  The catcher asked for another fastball.  I nodded and sent the pitch right back at the number seven spot.

“Strike two!”  Things were worse than I thought.  The umpire was going to call the game inconsistently.  What worked once, might not work again and vice versa.  For me, there was nothing more infuriating.  I liked knowing that my fastball was a strike, relished the fact that my curve was a ball, but highly likely to induce a swing.  Without those assurances, it could be a long afternoon.

Jefferies gave me the sign for a slider.  I didn’t get a good snap on the ball and compensated by coming around too far on the pitch.  It hung right over the middle of the plate, but the batter picked up on that too late and was only able to slap it foul.  Everybody was having trouble it seemed.

We tried another fastball, this time on the inside corner, only to have it called a ball.  Some coaches will preach to their hitters to sit and wait in a full count, that the odds are in the favor to get a called ball and a free ride to first base.  Others press their batters to “go down swinging”.  I think it depends on the guy’s philosophy in life, aggressive or passive, but I can usually tell by the way a player swings if he wants to swing or he’s afraid to do so. 

This guy was afraid.  He’d watched four fastballs sail by, all of which were strikes.  He’d missed on a good curve and pulled the trigger late on a hanging slider.  Not an aggressive hitter at all.  I was going to have to give him something that the umpire would ring him up on, because he wasn’t going to do it to himself.  Jefferies and I agreed on the slider.

I paused and took a deep breath, knowing that I needed one pitch to work for me.  The fastballs weren’t getting the calls and the curve was a risky proposition.  Put simply, I had to make the slider work for me.  As I moved into my wind-up, I revisited my time on the mower in the south pasture.  I’d been working fastballs and curves in my mind, ignoring the slider because it was a new pitch and I wasn’t yet comfortable with it.  For a minute, I closed my eyes and imagined what a perfect slider would have looked like, sitting in the tractor, going down the rows in the hay meadow, motor humming, sunset a burnt orange behind my back; and in an odd way, I could see it there, better than I could standing on the mound in a game situation, sweat on my upper lip, heart beating heavy with excitement.

Opening my eyes, I launched my body towards home plate, mimicking the motion I envisioned for myself on the tractor.  My arm came over and around, my wrist snapped, the ball whipped out of my fingertips and tumbled through the waiting air between me and home plate.

I saw the batter’s face.  At first, he thought it was a curve, but it didn’t break like one.  Next, he seemed to think it might be a fastball, but he didn’t recognize its trajectory, not with the lateral break that it had.  He was stymied by the pitch and still contemplating whether to swing or not when the ball hit the catcher’s mitt behind him.  Strike three! 

For the next three innings, Jefferies and I took our chances with the fastballs, getting the call sometimes and wishing we had it at others.  The curve was switched on and getting the swings, but the slider was the “out” pitch, and it carried it us through the line-up.  I looked up and saw “Charles” Mantle and “Henry” Gehrig sitting about four rows back on the first base side.  I assumed that was “Robert” Clemente and “Scott” Drysdale sitting in the row behind them.  There was a new guy with them and he looked an awful lot like the baseball card picture of Roy Campanella.  They were all smiling.

Still, the fourth inning is when things get interesting.  At that point, the pitcher is facing the batters for the second time, and what worked the first trip to the plate, most likely will not get the hitter back to the dugout the second time around.  These guys were well coached, and they were laying off the curve.  We still weren’t getting a consistent call on the fastballs; so an element of luck was introduced. If we get a good call on the fastball and use an off-speed pitch to induce a foul ball, then the slider would get them for strike three.  They weren’t swinging at much, owing to the favorable calls they were getting.  However, that also mean the infielders and outfielders were having trouble staying focused on the game.  The Bon Homme Bobcat second baseman made good contact with one of my low outside fastballs, driving it into right field for a single that ripped down the first base line.

I couldn’t get the umpire to call anything a strike during the next at bat and ended up issuing a walk on four straight pitches, three of which would have been strikes with any other guy calling the game.  Still, I didn’t complain.  A good pitcher takes what the ump is giving and works with it.  The next guy hit a grounder to short and the guys behind me turned a double play, but it let the man on second get to third.  Two outs and the next guy walks to put men on the corners.  Four innings, four walks.  Not one of my better days statistically.  Then their catcher hit a nice blooper over our second baseman’s head, scoring the first run.  I was so mad at myself, the umpire, everything, that I struck the next guy out on three straight fastballs, all four-seamers and all as hard as I could through them right at the guy’s hands.  Poor guy swung more as a defense mechanism than anything else, but it gave me a good idea.  If I wanted this game, and yes, I most certainly did, then I was going to have to earn it.

One good thing about an inconsistent umpire is that usually whatever way he’s calling the game, the other team is dealing with the same issues.  Our guys got to their pitcher in the fifth inning, grinding out two runs with good base-running and carefully placed singles.  It gave us the lead back 2-1, and made my job a lot easier.  Mantle gave me a knowing look and I went to work on the next few guys in the Bon Homme line-up.  However, after four more batters, I’d issued another walk, an infield single and pitched one in too far on a batter, giving him first base on a questionable “hit by pitcher” call.  That had the bases loaded with only one out.  Up in the stands, Drysdale motioned for me to hurry up and bring the pitch to the plate quicker.  It put the hitters off their game just a little, just enough to get the next guy out with two subsequent sliders. 

Typically, I don’t like throwing the same pitch twice, but sometimes the best move is to stick with what’s working.  Jefferies called for more of the slider, and I obliged.  The next guy saw four of them, managing to foul two off, but missing completely on the fourth for strike three.  At the end of the fifth inning, the game was tied 2-2.

“Let’s keep going with the slider,” Jefferies caught me in the dugout in between innings.  “It’s the only thing they can’t seem to figure out.”

He was right.  The Bon Homme coach had told his hitters to sit on the fastballs and curves, but the slider looked like something in between.  When they decided to swing at it, they usually missed.  When they didn’t swing, the umpire uncharacteristically gave it a consistent strike call.  In the bottom half of the sixth inning, I threw the pitch well and often.  In fact, it was my best inning of the day.  No walks, one hit and two strike-outs. 

In the top of the seventh, our guys took full advantage of a Bobcat pitching change.  The new kid never even got settled in, giving up three runs on two walks and three hits.  It ultimately cost the Bobcats the ball game, as my reliever only gave up one run after Mr. Peterson told me I was done for the day.  It was one of the most frustrating outings of my young career, but we won.  That was enough to prolong my baseball career for at least one more game.

That night, I sat in my room and watched the moon rise up over the oak tree and cast its silver light through the leaves and into the window.  The door was open and my mother stuck her head in as she walked by.

“Not one of your best, huh?”

“Nope,” I said, confirming what we both knew.

“You stuck it out though.”

I didn’t say it, but all I could think was that I didn’t have much choice.  With so few games left in my limited baseball career, I had to hang on to ever second as long as I could.

“I’m proud of you,” she added.

Mantle was proud of me for toughing it out.  Gehrig and Campanella were proud of me.  What I wanted was for my dad to see it.  I wanted him to be proud, not mom.  Not Mickey Mantle.  And not the ghost of Lou Gehrig.  It sounds ungrateful, like something a spoiled brat of a child would think or say, but all I wanted was for my dad to see me play.

My mom must have read some of the frustrated emotions in my expression, because she said the one thing that would console me in that moment.

“Your dad would have been proud of you too.”

I said thanks and she tousled my hair the way she did when I was little.  With a smile on my face, I rolled over and went to sleep, dreaming of what a career in the big leagues would have been like.  I could almost hear the roar of the crowd, smell the dewy scent of freshly hewn grass, marvel at the good solid thump of a fastball hitting the catcher’s mitt. 

My mind also drifted through the grind of a long humid afternoon, hurling pitch after pitch in the bright August sun.  I felt the boredom of an extended rain delay, knew the weariness and monotony of a late season road trip.  I saw all of these things in contrast to the feeling of a nice familiar tractor, running back and forth in the pasture next to an old farmhouse in Ramblewood, Texas.

CONTINUED…

IV. The Long Slow Curve

IV. The Long Slow Curve

But the trouble was far from over and that became evident in the clouds gathering all along the western horizon the next morning. Heavy purple thunderheads tumbled over the rolling hills, ominous clouds, pregnant with the smell of rain and blowing with a fierce wind, far too cold for Texas in May. I wanted desperately to stay in bed, to pull the blanket up around my shoulders and drift back into the darkness of slumber again, to hide and wait there until the sun was a bright blinding yellow and the skies were blue and clear. But it was a school day and I had an algebra test.

In some ways, baseball is a game with a lot of similarities to that thing we call ‘life’. The reverse is also true: In a lot of ways, life is a game with a lot of similarities to the obsession we call ‘baseball’. For me, it was also true to say that when one or the other wasn’t going so well, the other suffered in direct proportion. And as fate or luck or the mischievous furies would have it, the car wouldn’t start that morning. That was something that the ghosts of Mickey Mantle or Lou Gehrig couldn’t fix, and it was just the thing to lock my mood in first gear for the day.

Mom called the neighbors to see if I could get a ride to school, but after my slow start, they weren’t willing to wait around. Instead, she drove back from town in the pouring rain and picked me up in time to catch the second half of third period, a civics class that I loathed.

“Of all the days to sleep in,” mom started.

“I know, I know,” I answered. The roads were thick with mud, the ditches flowing with brown rain water.

“If it keeps on like this –“

“They’ll cancel the game tonight,” I interrupted.

It kept raining and yes, they cancelled the game. I needed to go back out there and get on the mound, to mow some guys down with my fastball and curve, but it rained and rained. And rained some more. The regional office called and re-scheduled the game for the following week, making it a back-to-back Thursday, Friday playoff. Mr. Peterson assigned me the Thursday spot and with that, the long slow game of waiting began. A week without baseball. A whole week with nothing to do but go to school and finish some chores and maybe, the occasional coaching session in the hay meadow beside the barn.

In the interim, I made a 67 on the algebra test. My overall grade was still a B, but mom wasn’t pleased. The alternator was out on the old car, and it took just over $400 to get it replaced. Worst of all, the rain kept falling, a steady flow of intermittent showers every morning fading into a dull, steady hum of rainfall most of the night each night. On the Tuesday night before the regional playoffs, I dozed in my bed, lulled to sleep by the soft rhythmic noise of the wind and the rain gently tapping the window pane. After a couple of hours, I woke to find the curtain open and a bright white moon casting its silver hue throughout the room. It had a way of washing the color out of everything, so that the pictures on the walls, the books on the shelves, the desk and all its contents seemed re-cast in black and white, like some movie from the 1950s. At the foot of the bed, I noticed the figure of my mother, sitting with her back to me, her small form also shaded in the monochromatic light blue and soft grey tones. At some point, she had wondered in to my room, to talk I guess.

“Mom?” I said, reaching out to touch her shoulder, but she stopped me with a wave of her hand. And then I realized she was crying. Maybe she was trying not to cry, but I heard her sniffle, saw her wiping her nose with a Kleenex.

“Mom, it’s okay,” I tried again, “Whatever it is, it’s going to be okay.”

“It’s not going to be okay,” she said. “It’s not.” She shook her head from side to side, emphasizing the denial. “You were supposed to go to college, meet a girl, move away from here, but now….”

I couldn’t say anything. My lips were open to speak, but the words, any word, all words froze in my throat. She knew just what I had been thinking for the last several days. She knew and she understood that I didn’t want to stop playing baseball after my junior year, stop playing so that I could help with the farm. She realized what that meant, that it would probably be an end to any chance of college for me. And though we never talked about it openly, she recognized that it also meant the end of whatever chances I had for a career in baseball.

“I know you’re good,” she continued, motioning towards my glove and jersey resting prominently in the chair across the room. “And I know you can play at a higher level. I don’t know what that means, or if it means you’ll be rich or famous one day, but I know what you have is special.”

Fool that I am, I half expected her next words to be something like they say in movies on television during those lazy Saturday afternoons in the middle of summer. I wanted her to say that ‘Whatever it takes, we’ll find a way.’ Somehow, some way. It was a cliché and a promise that she didn’t really have the ability to keep, but I needed to hear it, just the same.

Instead, she said, “This farm is all I have left of your father.”

The words sank in, their meaning moved through me like a chill, and that feeling trembled through my chest like a roll of thunder.

“It’s all that I have left,” she continued, “And I wouldn’t even begin to know how to let it go. Or what I would do after it was gone.”

“Mom, you don’t have to,” I said at last. “After the season’s over, it’s just you and me. We’ll fix everything. It will all be better then. You’ll see.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, standing up to leave, but looking back at me from the corner of her eye. “I’m sorry and I will always be sorry for this, but I can’t see any other way.”

In the morning, she offered me a cup of coffee, her way of saying that I was a man and ready to take on the world and all of its challenges. I accepted it and we both sat at the kitchen table, cradling our mugs between the palms of our individual sets of folded hands. It was a surreal scene, almost like two people pressing their fingers together in prayer. Neither one of us said a word about the night before, but silence has a way of conveying its own set of emotions. In the stillness just after dawn, I thought I understood what it must be like for her to be so connected to a place, to not know how to be in any other. The picture I imagined was frightening, like a thick stand of trees, where no light penetrates. There was darkness and a sense of loneliness in that place, and I didn’t want to banish my mother to it; so I resigned myself to the fate we had settled on in the silver moonlight. With that resolution firmly in mind, the sun broke through a spot in the clouds and a sliver of golden light spilled across the table between us, illuminating the entire kitchen with a long bright beaming shaft of daylight.

I finished my coffee, got ready and went to school; but all morning I kept thinking about my mother crying at the foot of the bed in the middle of the night. Without even trying, I could still hear her confirming my worst fears. As soon as the season was over, I became a farmer. Forever. Whatever childhood I had left would only last as long as our team’s playoff run. Said differently, when the Ramblewood Wranglers lost and were consequently eliminated from the state tournament, my baseball career ended. Likewise, with every game we won, my innocence was prolonged another two or three days, but at most, I only had the final three weeks of May, the first few days of June.

That afternoon, the day before the regional playoffs, I cut hay in the south pasture, losing myself in the grinding rumble of the old John Deere tractor. The ground was still spongy, but in Texas, the early summer sun has a way of baking the moisture out of the red clay soil.

At the end of each row, I turned the tractor and focused my mind on delivering a perfect fastball, an excellent curve. As I rode down the next line of tall grass, I concentrated on willing that imaginary ball from the mound through the strike zone and across the plate. At the edge of the pasture, I wheeled the machine around and steered it down the next row, again floating with my pretend pitch out across the field and right past the fantasy hitter’s swinging arc. In a couple of hours, I had cut all of the grass in that section and in my mind, I had pitched six innings of pretty good baseball.

During that time, I came to a couple of good sound conclusions as well. I loved baseball. It wasn’t just something I did to try and connect with my dad. It was something that I enjoyed for all of those reasons that are so often cited, but still so hard to explain: The “feel” of the scuffed ball in my hands, the smell of a worn leather glove, the crack of the bat, the sound of the crowd, the warm summer air. All of it made my mind hum with energy, filled my chest with a buzzing pride, and I needed that rush to be truly alive in this world.

The second was that I loved my family – mom, grandma, and especially the memory of my father – loved them more than baseball even, and if the farm was their home, then I loved the farm too. There was a simple, but fluid poetry involved in mowing the pasture in the amber light before sunset with the locusts whining their machine chirp just inside the tree line. I found I quite enjoyed the call of the whippoorwills and the “Bob White” quails, as they passed their nightly news through the tree tops. There was a perfect, solemn music in the lowing of cattle across the pastures, a serious and plaintive calm blowing through the hay meadow. It was a hush that stood in opposition to the chatter and noise of my favorite game, but it was a part of me as well.

When Mantle said, “You can take the kid out of the game,” Gehrig finished his sentence by saying you couldn’t “take the game out of the man.”

Suddenly I remembered that they still watched baseball, even up there in heaven. And I smiled because I realized it wasn’t over for me. They might take the kid out of the game, but the man I was becoming would always be a fan.

Standing there between the oak trees and the old barn, beside the hay meadow to the west and the haggard pecan tree at the end of the fence row, I realized I might have one game left, or I might have two or three, but I was going to play every single one of them like it was game seven of the world series.

CONTINUED...

 

III. District Playoffs: Ramblewood 7, Mt. Verdant 4

III. District Playoffs: Ramblewood 7, Mt. Verdant 4

When I walked out to the mound in the bottom of the third inning, the boys had already given me a 2-0 lead to work with, but for some reason, I did a double take and noticed the three zeros running down the Mt. Verdant line. No runs, no hits, no errors. It took a minute to register and when I thought back through all the batters I’d faced in the first two innings, I realized that we hadn’t given up a hit. No matter, I told myself. There was still a lot of baseball left to be played.

In the bottom of the fourth, when I walked out to pitch, I checked the scoreboard again and still saw no runs, no hits. The same was true in the fifth and the sixth. By then, we were up 5-0 and the catcher and third basemen met me at the mound.

“You okay Davidson?” the catcher, Ryan Jefferies asked.

“Yep,” I shrugged my shoulders. “Never better.”

“Okay,” Jefferies responded. “Keep it down and low.” Not a word about the potential no-hitter. This is how it goes in baseball. No one says a word for fear of goosing fate right in the ribs.

And with that brief conference, we resumed the game. The first Mt. Verdant batter of the sixth was their first basemen, the number four hitter and the one guy on their team who could really smack the ball. I showed him the fastball, a four-seamer down low and gave it to him as hard as I could throw it.

“Ball one!” the umpire signaled.

Jefferies gave the sign for the curve, but I shook my head, wanting to try another fastball. This time, I backed off just a little and sent my two-seam fastball high and inside, jamming the batter right on the hands.

It worked. He took a cut and splintered his bat issuing a soft rolling foul just outside the first base line.

This time, when Jefferies called for the curve, I nodded.

“Strike two!” A swing and a miss.

Now for the slider. I waited for the call from the catcher, came to a set position, then wound up and snapped the slider about as perfectly as I had ever thrown the pitch. “Strike three!” Another swing and miss.

But Mt. Verdant had the luxury of having another guy, their third baseman who could also jack the ball pretty hard. They had him in the number five spot, and while he couldn’t hit as hard or as far as their first baseman, he was a much smarter hitter, one who was more than willing to sit back and wait for his pitch.

In fact, he watched a nice fastball sail by for strike one to begin the at bat. I didn’t want him to think that I was scared of throwing it again; so I worked it just a little lower and out on the corner.

“Ball!” The batter just stood there watching the second pitch rush by on its way to the catcher’s mitt.

Time for the curve, but he was on to that as well, ball two. Then I missed with another fastball, for ball three. Jefferies was asking for the slider, but I shook him off and waited for the sign to bring the fastball again. Instead, he repeated the signal for the slider.

“Trust your catcher,” Mantle had said. “He’s calling the game for a reason.”

I rolled the ball in my fingertips, positioning it for the slider, wound up and fired it towards home, snapping it perfectly without coming around on it.

“Strike!” the umpire called. The Mt. Verdant third baseman shook his head in disbelief. He’d expected a curve. More specifically, he’d expected me to miss with a curve, but the slider caught the corner of the plate. Full count.

The third baseman fouled the next two pitches off. Fastballs, both of them, one at seven, one just between where the seven and the eight would have been. The count was still three and two, and my humble bid for a no hitter seemed like it had met its match. But without a pause, Jefferies called for the slider again. We had the batter on the ropes. He was swinging just to stay alive, anything to keep the at bat going. So why not try to get him out with a slider?

With a heavy sigh, I came to a standstill before starting my wind up, then took a moment to stare past the batter and into the catcher’s open glove. If anything, I willed the next pitch by the batter, forced it to be the thing I wanted it to be in my mind. Then I stepped into my throwing motion, raising my left leg and cradling the ball in my glove. All of that momentum coiled into a jagged scar upon the mound. Opening up my stance, I pressed forward with my left leg, brought my arm out and over my body, snapping the ball out of my fingertips and sending it down range like some revolving projectile, breaking laterally and floating softly down, down and down.

I missed it, but not by much, and the hitter, already thinking he needed to swing to stay alive, did exactly what his instincts told him to do. He unfurled his arms and stroked the very place where he thought that ball was going to be.

Except it wasn’t. The slider faded just as the third baseman’s bat moved through it. There was a grunt and a whoosh and strike three call! Two down. The sixth inning was mine!

The next batter grounded out on an early fastball. It was time to start thinking seriously about what was happening. Mt. Verdant sent the bottom of its order out in the seventh, and we sent them back to the dugout, one, two and three. At this point, Ramblewood was up 7-0 and there were only six outs remaining. I took the mound and opened the eighth inning with a driving four-seam fastball, hard and down low for ball one. That’s when the trouble started.

The next pitch, one of my erratic curves grounded out in the dirt between the catcher’s mitt and the back of the batter’s box. Ball two. Jefferies called for another slider after that, and while it missed horribly, hanging out over the plate like a ball on a tee, the batter swung under it for a strike. After another fast ball low and a second missed curve, the leadoff hitter for the Mt. Verdant Broncos flipped his bat towards the bat boy and trotted down the line for a charity trip to first base.

The second man up in the eighth inning grounded out to short. The ball skipped and wobbled just enough to rob the chance at a double play. And then for some reason, the shortstop rifled the ball over to first rather than flipping it to second to get the runner moving into scoring position.

The third batter pounced on my fastball for a double down the third base line, advancing the runner on second to third. Two men in scoring position and the Mt. Verdant first baseman, their “clean-up” hitter was headed to the plate again.

I knew this guy would bite on my slider; so I gave him one of those first. He swung so hard that I swear I almost felt the breeze out on the mound. Immediately, the catcher, Jefferies called for another one. Stepping back, I tried to settle down and focus on delivering the pitch.

It missed, but just barely and his swing grazed the side of the ball chopping it down and foul for strike two. This time, the catcher called for a curve. The first baseman watched it sail by for a called strike, the ball catching the corner of the plate and bottom inch of the strike zone. Strike three!

Two outs, two men on and the one person I feared most in the Mt. Verdant line-up stepped into the batter’s box.

Their third baseman smiled as he choked the bat and came to a ready position. Jefferies gave the sign for another slider, but I shook my head. I wanted this guy to see my fastball. I wanted this guy to see the very best fastball I ever threw. Waiting for the sign, I took a deep breath, leaned forward and stretched the right side of my back. After the catcher relented on my choice for a pitch, I positioned my fingers on the ball, brought the glove up to my chin and started my wind up.

Something caught my attention in the stands. A guy who looked an awful lot like Roberto Clemente was sitting on the home side, next to a fellow who very closely resembled Mickey Mantle. Finishing my leg kick, I brought my arm through the pitch, down and hard, the ball sailing from my fingers and rolling through the air towards the waiting third baseman.

Almost immediately, I saw the sides of his dark green jersey come to life. He was swinging and he was doing so with a confidence that let me know right away that he knew what pitch was coming to him.

Crack! The bat hit the ball right in the middle of the barrel, a sound both solid and full of meaning. When a bat makes good solid contact with a ball like that, then the little round chunk of leather is going to go a long way before coming back down again. This time, it was over the fence and out of the park. Ramblewood 7, Mt. Verdant 3.

Mr. Peterson pulled me after the home run. He didn’t say much, other than it was time. I’d given up the no-hitter and pitched way too far into the game. In one sense, I agreed, but I still threw my glove against the back wall of the dugout and said several words that I normally try not to use. Mt. Verdant only scored one more run. We won 7-4 and advanced to the regional playoffs. The rest of the team celebrated with high fives and fizzing sodas, splashing 7-Up and ginger ale all over each other like they saw the major leaguers do with champagne.

That night, when I got home, Mantle and Gehrig, Clemente and a guy who looked a lot like Don Drysdale were waiting for me out by the barn.

“Good game, kid,” Mantle said, offering an outstretched hand.

I shook it and shrugged my shoulders. “Would’ve been nice to get the no-hitter.”

“Yeah,” he agreed, “But a win’s a win.”

“But you don’t understand,” I countered. “This is my only chance to do all of this. The team’s get better and better from here on out. Most likely, I won’t ever get a shot at a no-hitter again.”

“You’re getting ahead of yourself,” Gehrig said. “Only one game matters.”

I tried to avoid his eyes, because I knew he was right.

“Only one game matters,” he repeated, “And that’s the next one.”

I thought he was going to say the last one, or maybe even the championship game, something like that. I was wrong and that made the understanding hit me harder than it would have otherwise. I kicked at the dirt and scuffed my shoe in the grass.

“So you missed a few pitches today,” Drysdale said. “We all have. That’s what tomorrow’s for.”

“You’ve got to get back out there and go again,” Clemente added in his thick Hispanic accent.

“Before we’re done,” Mantle said, slapping me on the shoulder, “You’re going to play in the best game on earth.”

“Now knock it off with that hang dog look,” Gehrig concluded.

They were all clichés, and yet every single one of them was right.

CONTINUED...

 

II. The Slider and "The Iron Horse"

II. The Slider and “The Iron Horse”

“But you’re Mickey Mantle,” I said again, almost trying to work it out in my own mind more than anything. “Mickey Mantle, my dad’s favorite player!”

“Listen kid,” Mantle showed the slightest irritation. “We don’t have much time. Your dad sent me to help you out here; so let’s work on that fastball.”

“You know my dad?”

“Guy like me meets a lot of people on the other side,” he said. “Hard to say how well I know any of them. But yeah, you could say I know your dad. He sent me here to give you a couple of tips on some things that can maybe help you become a better ballplayer.”

I have to stop here for a minute, because the memory takes me back to a place in time when I was vulnerable. That summer, we almost lost the farm, and to say that makes it sound like another sad farmer’s story, like maybe the farm didn’t need saving and the laws of economics should have been allowed to prevail. But that’s not a fair assessment at all.

The first couple of years after the Gulf War were the hardest emotionally, but there was some government money and that helped keep things above the water line. Then in 1993, my mom met a guy at the county fair and they dated a while before deciding to tell me they were getting married. Alex was his name. He bought me lots of baseball cards and tried to talk about the game with me, but he always smelled like sour beer and cheap cigars; so I never warmed up to him. Anyway, after a couple of years, Alex just left. No word on why or where, he was just gone. My mother cried a lot when dad died, but I don’t think she shed one tear when she woke up and found her side of the bed empty one morning in 1995.

This being Texas and all, we soon found a Mexican family looking for work and needing a place to stay. They moved into the old carriage house between the barn and the main house and over the course of one long sweltering summer, the father, a thick man named Rodrigo Montoya pieced the farm back together. I befriended his kids, Jaime and Rolanda and taught them to ride the horses, how to put out hay for the cows. We even played an odd kind of three-way baseball with one of us batting, another pitching and the third one covering the section of infield where we always seemed to chop our grounders.

Over time, the Montoyas became like a surrogate family. We invited them into the main house for meals, and honestly, Senora Montoya was a much better cook than my own mom. Still, they swapped recipes, the list of ingredients in mom’s fried chicken batter for the Montoya family secret to making enchiladas verdes. The Davidson family apple pecan pie recipe for a lesson in making carnitas de puercas. In time, Rodrigo’s mother came to live with them, and the cooking got even better. Fresh handmade tamales, camarones a la diabla, and a molé sauce that a guy could sit and eat on corn tortillas all afternoon.

We knew they were illegals, but most of the Hispanics in Texas are as well. This was a desperate time and mom needed more help than I could give; so we made our deal and tried to find some peace about it. Then one day in February of 1997, close to the start of baseball season, the folks from immigration services raided the local Mexican restaurant. Seventeen people were deported that day, including Rodrigo’s wife, Alba and his daughter, Rolanda. I came home that afternoon and found Rodrigo sitting with my mother in the kitchen. He was apologizing and she was crying. The rest of the Montoya family was gone by dinner time the next day.

A couple of months later, my mother caught me in the kitchen before practice.

“You know that I’m going to need your help around the farm this summer,” my mom said.

“Yes ma’am.”

“That means you may have to miss a baseball game or two.”

“But mom!” I shouted at her, not meaning to raise my voice, but not ready to concede after one sentence.

She wiped her hands on a dishtowel and sat down and the table, looking up at me with her hands out in front of her, a pleading gesture if ever there was one.

“I’m sorry,” I answered her expression. “It’s just that I know we’re going to the state playoffs this year. I can feel it. This team –“

“Do you know how much money we have in savings?”

She said ‘we’ and it touched me then and gets me to still; ‘we’, as in, we’re in this together, just you and me, kid. But I looked away, not because I didn’t care how much money she had managed to save. Even at seventeen years old, I knew it was the end to any further discussion. No money, no mortgage payment. No payment, no farm, and no farm meant no place to stay for either one of us.

“You won’t have to miss many,” mom continued. “It’s spring and the farm won’t need as much work until summer really sets in.”

“I’ll work every night after school,” I said, not realizing what I was committing myself to and in the moment, not remembering that I had practice a lot of those nights.

“It’s going to take more than that,” she said.

“At least let me just make it to the games,” I begged. “I can miss some practices, but the team....” I started to say how the team needed me, but realized how ephemeral a baseball season was in the broader scheme of things.

“We can try to accommodate the games when you pitch,” she said shaking her head lightly, “And I’ll call Mr. Peterson to explain our situation.”

In the end, we also decided it would be my last season. We just had to make it through May. The playoffs were held during the first week in June and for the rest of the summer, I could work morning to night to put things back in order.

The next night, after I finished an hour’s worth of chores, I grabbed my glove and the old bucket of balls to go out and throw a few before the sun set.

I had just loosened up my arm with a few stretches and some long tosses from across the pasture when I saw Mickey Mantle walking across the field with another guy. For the briefest second, I thought it was my dad, but the sun was blaring behind them, reducing their faces to darkened silhouettes in the bright light.

When they came under the shade of the oak tree next to the barn, I recognized the newcomer from the picture on his baseball card.

“Hey kid,” Mantle started to introduce his friend. “This here’s –“

“I know who you are!” I shouted, “You’re Lou Gehrig! ‘The Iron Horse’.”

“This here’s Henry,” Mantle said, shaking his head. Gehrig extended his hand and I shook it heartily, beaming from ear to cheek as I did.

“Charles says you have some kind of curve,” Gehrig said.

“But he needs another good pitch,” Mantle opined. “Or else they’ll sit and wait for the fastball, take their chances that he’ll miss with the curve.”

“What about a ‘snapper’?” Gehrig offered. “That thing that Gibson up in St. Louis threw. It kind of sits between a fastball and a curve, breaks across and down.”

“You mean a slider?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Mantle agreed, “Did you see Guidry’s in ’78?”

“But you can’t come around on it,” Gehrig continued. “You’ve got to kind of snap it to get the movement, but not too much or then it’s a curve ball that’ll hang and miss every time. Might as well be throwing batting practice if that happens.”

Mantle showed me the grip, two fingers together over the top on one seam while Gehrig moved down by the tire at the edge of the yard.

“I want to see how this thing breaks,” he called back.

I wound up and tried to fling the ball the way I thought it was supposed to go. It missed like a bad softball, up and out over the plate with no real momentum on it.

Gehrig mimed the motion of smacking through the ball and lofting it over the fence in deep center.

“You kinda came around on it,” Mantle laughed, “But then you caught yourself and left it flat. Henry hit that one all the way to China.”

Looking down, I kicked at the dirt on the mound and sort of looked away.

“Hey,” Mantle said, “It was one pitch. Don’t worry about it. Get your focus back and give me another.”

Reaching down into the bucket, I gripped the next ball and rolled my shoulders a bit before going to the wind up. For a minute, it all seemed too surreal. The ghost of Mickey Mantle was standing behind me, had just encouraged me to try a slider like the one Bob Gibson threw, and Lou Gehrig was standing down by the barn waiting to see if I could get it to break.

“Wait a minute,” I stopped and asked the question that occurred to me as I was standing and getting ready to try the slider again. “Bob Gibson is still alive. I saw him on TV just the other day. That means…” It took me a minute to work it all out. “You guys still watch baseball?”

“Well yeah,” Mantle answered, “You can take the kid out of the game,…”

“But you can’t take the game out of the man,” Gehrig finished.

“And you wouldn’t believe some of the games we get into,” Mantle added.

“Ruth, Campanella, Clemente,” Gehrig agreed. “We got some guys to hit around with.”

“And none of ‘em can hit much off Young,” Mantle said. “It’s like that guy invented baseball or something. He’s got this incredible fastball, and he can put it anywhere he wants. That’s control.”

“I don’t get it,” I said after thinking about it all for a minute. “You guys can be up there playing with some of the greatest players who ever played the game, and…”

“We don’t see many youngsters on the other side,” Gehrig explained.

“And the ones we do get to meet,” Mantle finished the thought for him. “Well a lot of times, they don’t care about baseball anymore.”

“Don’t get us wrong,” Gehrig continued, “It’s a nice place and all.”

“The nicest!” Mantle agreed.

“But sometimes we see a kid who’s got a heckuva fastball,” Gehrig said, “A pretty good curve and the desire to really do something special. Well that combination’s always a winner.”

“Guys, I gotta be honest with you,” I started to tell them about the farm, about the whole entire situation with my mom and the season and these being the last few games I’d ever play. But before I could say a word, Mantle slapped me on the shoulder.

“Try that slider again,” he said. “This time remember to snap it, but don’t come around on it.”

He smiled and pointed at the old tire nailed to the side of the barn wall. I looked down towards the makeshift batter’s box and saw Gehrig smiling as well. He motioned with his hands for me to go ahead and give him the pitch. It was then that I realized they already knew about the farm, about the season, everything. It was also the reason why Mantle said there wasn’t much time the night he first walked out to the mound to coach me.

CONTINUED…

 

I. The Coach in the Hay Meadow

This is part one of a "serial novella" I'm posting over on the Creator and the Catalyst forum as part of their monthly writing challenge.... 

I. The Coach in the Hay Meadow

Even though he grew up right in the heart of “Cowboy Country”, my dad’s favorite sport was baseball. He had several old Rawlings baseball gloves, a collection of dusty team pennants and a stack of shoe boxes filled with baseball cards up in the attic. My grandmother told me his favorite players were Mickey Mantle and Ted Williams. I don’t know why a man who grew up in the small town of Ramblewood, Texas eighty miles east of Dallas liked a couple of players on teams that played so far back east – New York and Boston, or why he was so fixated on a couple of guys from generations long gone, but that’s what she said. I never got to ask him about it myself. He died in 1991, during the first gulf war, one of the 149 American soldiers killed there, fighting the terrorists before that phrase took on its larger meaning. My mom never received any official details, but a neighbor’s cousin relayed word back through an old family friend that he died with honor. Shot in the chest by some unknown Iraqi with an AK-47.

In April of 1997, I was a junior in high school, seventeen years old and a pretty good starting pitcher for the Ramblewood Wranglers high school baseball team. My mom said that dad would have been proud of that last bit. Grandma agreed. I still hadn’t decided if I really even liked baseball on my own, or if it was something I did to try and connect with the man I barely knew. Life has a way of tricking people like that sometimes. But anyway, my science teacher, Mr. Thomas, the guy that got stuck running the baseball program at our school said I had a pretty good fastball, an erratic curve and the stamina to make them work for six good innings every four or five days.

“Davidson,” he’d shout with a wad of chewing tobacco in his right cheek, “Go on out there and do what you do. We’ll try to get some runs for you.”

That was all the guidance I got, and for the most part, it was all I needed. We cruised to a big lead in our district that year and by the time school was getting close to being done and the weather was really starting to warm up, people in our small town were talking about the state playoffs.

Anyway, the day before a game, they’d give us time off from practice just to make sure everyone one was fresh for when it really counted. As springtime set in, I used those afternoons to drive the tractor through the pastures south and west of our small farmhouse, cutting the early hay and rolling it into big round bales. When that was done, I’d go out behind the barn to practice a little ball.

Just before my sophomore year, I had nailed an old tire to the back side of the barn, then put an old bleached board directly underneath it to stand in for home plate. When I practiced, I grabbed a bucket filled with eleven old baseballs that had collected around the yard over the years and I pounded each one of them into the hole in the middle of that tire.

Wham! A fastball down and low. I always liked to show them the heater first. It let the hitter know that I could throw hard. Wham! Another fastball inside. I wanted to scare them off the plate and show them I wasn’t afraid to use the fastball over and over as my main pitch.

Whoop! Then I gave them a curve. They probably figured it’d be something different, but half the batters I faced thought that maybe I was country dumb enough to try the fastball again. By this point in the count, I was usually up one and two, a ball and two strikes. I might miss with one of the fast balls, but they’d always swing on my curve.

So the question became, what did I want to throw next?

“Go back to the fastball,” a voice coming around the side of the barn suggested.

Why not? It was what I usually did anyway.

Wham! The pitch thumped the side of the barn, right in the middle of the tire.

“That one’s out of here,” the voice said. “You threw it right down the middle of the plate.”

“But that’s my out pitch,” I answered.

“Not if you throw it like that, it’s not.”

The man finished his walk from around the side of the barn and came up beside me in the field.

“Your old tire’s a good idea,” he offered, “But you never want to throw it right in the middle.”

He was wearing a white short sleeved button down shirt and some kind of beige slacks, carefully polished loafers and a shiny patent leather belt. All of it was out of place for a town like Ramblewood.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“The center of the tire represents the middle of the plate,” he said, “You get that, right?”

I nodded.

“Well think of it like a clock,” he added. “The center’s where the hands would be attached, and you want to keep the ball down low. So aim for the rubber where five or seven would be. Not six, ‘cause that would be too far down low and a called ball. And not up at nine, because that’s a home run ball for a right handed hitter. Just paint the corners, five and seven.”

With that in mind, I hurled a fastball at the seven spot on the old tire. Thump!

“That’s it!” the man said. “You got him on a called strike. He thought you were too far down and out, but you delivered it right at the knees and on the corner of the plate.”

I smiled and said thank you.

“So who you got next?” the man motioned to my little stack of baseball cards laying in the dirt.

“What do you mean?” I hadn’t realized the cards were still there by the old stained powder bag.

“You got nine cards there don’t you?” I shrugged my shoulders as he bent to pick them up and rifle through them.

“I figure you’re working your way through a line-up, imagining how you’d throw to each hitter. Am I right?”

I marveled at his perception.

“So you going to tell me who’s next?”

He flipped the card to reveal a picture of Willie Stargell, a first basemen for the Pittsburgh Pirates in the late 1970’s, early 80’s.

“Okay,” the man said, “So Stargell liked it out away from the plate. He wasn’t a chaser, but he was big and could reach out and get to an outside ball if wanted. You’re gonna need to jam him back in tight on the hands. He’s a lefty; so throw it right at eight o’clock.”

I wound up and delivered my fastball just above the nine o’clock spot.

“That’s okay,” the man said. “You won’t always hit your mark. You just don’t want to leave it up and out over the plate. Keep it inside and down low.”

After wiping my brow with my cap, I loosened my shoulders and delivered the pitch again.

“That’s it! Right on the hands, right at the belt buckle.”

I exhaled and made ready to go again.

“If he makes contact with that, it’s a foul ball, or…” his voice trailed off, “A broken bat single that either you or the third baseman throws over to first.”

We looked over across the pasture to where first base would have been and laughed a little at the serious nature of our game.

“Who you got next?”

He flipped the card and revealed a picture of Jose Cruz in a Houston Astros uniform.

“Oh man, now he’s a hitter,” the man said. “Another lefty, so let’s talk about this a minute.”

We backed up and stood off the makeshift mound, staring at the tire some sixty feet away.

“You like to lead with your fastball, but Cruz is a classic fastball hitter. So let’s pitch him backwards. Show him a curve first, but let it miss down and low. Then we’ll give him another, make him think you’re having trouble locating the pitch, that you’ve done your homework and you know he’s a fastball hitter, but you can’t get the curve right.”

I lobbed a curve that ended up tapping the baseboard beneath the tire, a miss.

“Now show him another.”

The curve missed again, but scraped the bottom of the tire as it went by.

“Now he thinks you’re stuck on the curve,” the man said, “So give him a fast ball right on the number seven.”

Whump! I hit the pitch.

“So the count’s two and one,” he said, “We either need a pitch he can ground out or to really stick that curve. Because now he knows you’ve got the fastball.”

“Let’s try the curve,” I said, and I stuck it right where I wanted it.

“Whoa,” the visitor said. “That’s some curve!”

I thanked him again and wiped my brow with my arm, adjusting my hat afterwards.

“Now don’t give him too long to think here,” the man continued. “You know he likes fastballs, but he’s not sure if you can really stick that curve every time. Still, the catcher’s calling for it again. What do you do?”

“Give it to him?”

“If you think you can stick it,” he said, “Then heck yeah, you give it to him. Always trust your catcher. He’s calling the game for a reason. Now let’s see it.”

Whoop! The curve missed for a ball outside.

“That’s why you got to have confidence,” the man said. “You can miss, but make the other guy think you meant to do that. You’re in control. It’s your arm, the catcher’s mind, but don’t forget you’ve got a whole team backing you up. You’re not afraid to put it in play, but you got the stuff to get him swinging too.”

“So try again?”

“Heck yeah,” he said. “The count’s three and one. Right now, he’s wondering if you can do it. He’s going to sit back and watch whatever you throw, thinking it’ll be a free ride to first base.”

I tugged at the bill of my cap, then cinched it down a little, focused on my spot on the tire and wound up for the release.

Wham! Fastball right on the number seven.

“Okay, okay,” the stranger said. “I got it. You only trust your fastball. That’s okay. At least you know that about yourself now.”

We worked through the next couple of baseball cards and their corresponding imaginary batters: Reggie Jackson and Frank Robinson. Then the stranger flipped the next card to reveal an older photograph of an amiable guy in a New York Yankees uniform, a young man with a deep, thoughtful stare and an unruly head of sandy-colored hair.

“This guy,” the stranger said, holding the card out and taking a good look at it. “I guess I know a thing or two about him.”

He turned the card so that its face caught the light from the long amber sunset fading behind us.

“You are him,” I said as I looked back up at the blonde haired, blue-eyed man standing next to me in the hay meadow beside the barn.

He smiled a little and I repeated the same words over again.

“Let’s just say that I was a guy who looked like that once,” Mantle answered.

“But you look just like him,” I checked the baseball card again. “You’re Mickey Mantle.”

“Call me Charles,” he said, “And let’s talk about that fastball some more.”

CONTINUED...

Seemingly random updates...

This will seem more like a random series of "tweets" instead of a more official update, but wanted to share some good news on multiple fronts.  So here goes...

Finished the write up of my interview with author Alex Bledsoe and sent it over to the editor over at C&C this morning.  Special thanks to Mr. Bledsoe for granting the interview, and for being such a good sport and answering all of my questions!  Check out his new book, Wisp of a Thing!  Out now in hardcover, by Tor Books.

Also... and if I understood this correctly...  I've got another story accepted for publication, well...  after a few minor (okay, fairly major) edits (combining two similar characters, providing a little more closure for a third).  But stay tuned for more on this as it develops...  I'm really excited about this one!

And while I was feeling industrious, I re-wrote some of chapter 22 and finished chapter 23 in the "ghost train" book.

Busy weekend, huh?!

Writing... listening...

...and writing some more.  Mostly while listening to these:

      Ryan Bingham - Mescalito and Tomorrowland

   Elvis Costello - National Ransom

      Rodney Crowell - "Earthbound"

         Joe Henry - Reverie (especially "Odetta")

   Alison Krauss - Lonely Runs Both Ways and Paper Airplane

      Jamey Johnson - Living For a Song:  A Tribute to Hank Cochran

         Lyle Lovett - Joshua, Judges, Ruth and It's Not Big, It's Large (especially "South Texas Girl"
         and "Don't Cry A Tear")

      Wilco - The Whole Love (especially "Dawned on Me" and "Born Alone")

The "ghost train" is moving faster now....

The desert, part two... All kinds of things

Yesterday's update was a bit cryptic...  hee hee...

So I thought I'd be nice and come back today to add some details.  Just a few, however.  Don't want to give the store away.

The "ghost train" trio, that is the three people pursuing the train -- each for their various reasons -- are out in the desert currently.  At least, that's where chapter 21 has them at the moment.  And in terms of an update, that's it....  I've written chapter 22, but have some gaps to fill in with chapter 21 as the latter gets them from the desert to where they end up in chapter 22 (more on that later!).  Anyway...  Sounds a bit contorted, but I think it works.  We'll see....

And...  I'm thinking the action ends around chapter 34 (or so...) which means we're getting awful darn close.  Only 10 - 12 chapters to go!

Finished the autowriter story and sent it in.  It's off in that never never land of editorial review and what not.  Title is "The Anomalists" and it's a little piece -- about 3,000 words -- that spins its yarn around a paranormal television show.  The action occurs when the team of investigators encounters a "real" ghost.  Some of that is relayed through the peculiar view point of an auto writer, who lives a few blocks from the opening scene.  We'll see how it fares in the old marketplace.

Also, "Shirasawa's Rage", the second installment in Shira's trek to find Miyabe is finished and off in a similar editorial never never land.  Sent it to the kind folks at Aphelion; so hopefully she will find a friendly audience and my loyal band of faithful readers will be able to experience the next "chapter" very soon.  Fingers crossed.

And finally... for this edition anyway...  check out "A Fire in August", the abandoned oddity I mentioned in an earlier post.  It's up and waiting to be read over on the Creator and the Catalyst forum now!  Think there's two or three fragments from an attempted fantasy novel posted out there as well.  Truly, one discovers all kinds of things out in the desert.

Out in the desert now...

Out in the desert now...

Chasing the "ghost train" at night, searching for food and water all day.

In between, there are mirages, visions and often, quite vivid dreams.

This one inspired by an Ansel Adams photograph...

Still, such fitful slumber hardly qualifies as rest.

The train's coming.  Not long now.  Hold on tightly.  I hear...   something...  in the distance....