James glanced over his right shoulder
at the man standing several feet from second base. The runner
was a Latin American kid whose name James did not know.
Now the runner turned to check on the second baseman's position
and James could see the name stitched to the back of the
kid's uniform -- Olvares. Olvares was a rookie in his first
major league game on the first day of the season.
James was not responsible for the runner
being at second base, and not for the one at first base,
either. The starting pitcher had put them there with two
consecutive walks after inducing two outs to begin the
ninth inning. Then he'd lost control, one out from victory
- and he'd thrown a brilliant game. The score was 1 to
0. Now there was trouble - and that's why James stood
on the pitching mound on a warm April afternoon in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, with 50,000 spectators waiting for him to
get this last batter out - so they could all go home happy
on opening day.
James' eyes drifted back to home plate.
The catcher gave him the sign for his first pitch. One
finger, followed by a fist, two fingers, and back to one
finger. Only the fist meant something. The rest of the
signs were decoys, so that the kid Olvares looking in
from second base couldn't steal the sign and flash it
to the batter in the seconds before the ball was thrown.
A fist meant a curve ball. The batter,
a big black man, last year's leading hitter in the National
League, liked curve balls. Therefore, he would be looking
for a fastball. So James and his catcher were going to
throw him a curve.
Baseball was a game with a lot of psychology.
James put his hand in this glove and
gripped the ball. He exhaled. He waited and let the moment
linger. He didn't know how many more moments like this
there might be.
It was another year, he thought. His
fifteenth. He was thirty-eight years old. Some people
said too old. During spring training, the sportswriters
put out rumors that he would not make the team - management
wanted younger arms, stronger and faster. But by April,
it was James on the plane to Pittsburgh. A man could learn
a lot of things by the time he got to be James' age. A
thirty-eight year old relief pitcher had made all the
mistakes a baseball player could make. He wasn't likely
to make them again.
James brought the ball and glove to his
chest. He gave one more quick glance to the runner at
second base. Young Olvares edged toward third, dancing
on his toes like a nervous thoroughbred race horse. The
kid looked fast. A base hit and he would score easily.
Where do they get these fast children, James wondered
- right out of the Caribbean cane fields? They ran faster
every year.
James' eyes locked on the catcher's glove.
His left arm went forward, his right back. His left leg
thrust out, followed by the right arm whipping through,
wrist snapping, and he released the first pitch of his
fifteenth season.
It was a slow curve ball that caught
a glint of sun, then dangled briefly at the batter's left
elbow before breaking a foot and a half down across the
plate. Strike one.
The pitch embodied what was meant by
the phrase "major league curve ball." The batter hadn't
moved - he was frozen by the arc of the ball, dangerously
close to his body, only to realize at the last instant
that the pitch was curving down, down, right over the
outside corner - but already past. Damn.
James saw the curse on the lips of the
big black man, but the voice was lost in a roar that resounded
in the stadium.
As James straightened at the bottom of
the mound, the catcher jumped up and threw the ball back
to him, yelling something encouraging. James stepped back
on the mound and positioned himself in front of the pitching
rubber. The batter gave him a cold stare.
James turned away toward centerfield.
Olvares had returned to second base, waiting to lead off
before the next pitch began. James looked past him - to
the scoreboard above the upper deck centerfield seats.
A clock there read 3:15. Scores from east coast opening
day games were posted. Next to the scores an American
flag on a pole hung straight down.
James rubbed the ball in his right hand.
He noticed he was squeezing it hard. Even an experienced
player such as he was not immune to pressure. No one in
sports faced the pressure that came to a relief pitcher
every time he appeared at the end of a game. And only
two endings were possible: the relief pitcher was going
to be a hero or a bum.
James returned his attention to home
plate. The black man waved his bat back and forth. The
umpire shifted the weight of his protective chest pad.
Sitting now on his heels, the catcher gave the sign: another
curve ball. He knew the batter would stake his life on
the fact that James would not dare throw him another one
of those floating curves.
Nodding, James accepted the sign. A drop
of sweat trickled from under the bill of his hat. He thought
suddenly of the woman to whom he used to be married. Over
the years, during games, when the tension was bad, he
liked to think of her. When her image came to his mind,
he always felt a peacefulness, the comfort he had experienced
so many times lying next to her at night, her arms around
his waist.
Her name was Katie, and today, the first
day of the baseball season, was her birthday.
James checked on Olvares again. The kid
twitched in the dust, feinting another step further toward
third. Olvares had a big lead. James noted how thin his
calves were - thin and tight, another allusion to a race
horse.
Uncoiling, James let go the second curve
ball. This time it began its flight too far away from
the batter so that the ball "hung" directly over the plate
before breaking down.
As his motion carried him off the mound,
James saw the big black man swing. There was a loud crack
and the ball traveled 400 feet into the left field stands.
Foul Ball. Strike two.
The spectators made that sudden transitory
sound unique to sporting crowds; a collective rising shriek
that diminished in the shortest instant to an agonized
mutter. The umpire tossed a new ball out to the mound
and James turned around, standing on the infield grass
not far from second base.
After checking the ball to see if it
felt right, if it had any imperfections in the stitching,
he removed his hat and wiped his forehead on his shirt
sleeve. He fixed his gaze on Olvares, but didn't really
see him. Instead, James remembered Katie earlier in the
day and the flowers he had given her for her birthday,
and how pretty she had looked. There had always been a
purity in her face; a truth that dispelled in him the
worst of thoughts. This truth had endured in his remembrance
of her, in all the days and nights since their time together.
James put his hat back on and moved to
the top of the mound. Kicking dirt with his spikes, he
recalled how Katie's birthday and the start of the baseball
season always coincided. Two beginnings. She'd spent at
least three birthdays out of the five they'd been married
in a box seat not far from where James now stood. On two
of those occasions he had been called into the game. Those
moments had been some of his happiest, seeing her in the
crowd, the sun on her dark hair, her smile for him. He'd
never pitched better.
After the divorce, she didn't come to
the games anymore. Still, he always saw her on her birthday
or called her if the team had begun the season on a road
trip. They visited each other frequently and spoke on
the phone several times a week despite the fact that it
had been two years since they'd lived together.
James looked into the dugout where the
manager and some of his teammates shouted support at him.
Many of those players and a few behind him in the field,
though they were his friends, thought that he and Katie
were not "getting on with their lives," that they were
dragging out their breakup. Their friends could not understand
his continued closeness to Katie and her attachment to
him. It was unwise. It was not what divorced people were
supposed to do.
James did not agree. Something remained
for him and Katie and always would in one form or another.
To allow this connection to live on, to preserve at least
some of the beauty that had once been theirs - even though
he would certainly find another woman, another life -
was for James a kind of victory - a triumph over the power
of destructiveness that followed so many of the failed
relationships he had witnessed. Giving in to prolonged
anger, resentment, pain - denying the good that had existed
- meant that you had been defeated by emotions everyone
else accepted and condoned.
And James hated defeat. He loved, instead
to win.
The sun fell across the front of the
pitcher's mound. James waited for the catcher's sign.
Fastball, as he expected. He threw it out of the strike
zone, then threw another one out there, too, closer to
the corner of the plate, hoping to entice the batter into
swinging at a bad pitch. But James knew the black man
would not fall for the ploy. Batting champions seldom
did.
Two balls, two strikes, and James had
to throw a strike this time. If he made another pitch
for a ball, the count would be 3 and 2, and with two outs
the runners would be off on the next pitch, another advantage
for his opponents. But throwing a strike now, to the best
hitter in the league, when that hitter and everybody else
knew it was not going to be a curve ball, invited disaster.
Getting through this scenario was, however, the reason
they paid James and other top relief pitchers so much
money.
James fiddled with his hat again, wiped
his lip, spit, tossed the ball into his glove and dug
his right foot into the mound under the pitching rubber.
Katie's dark eyes appeared in front of
him once more and all the strain went out of him. He was
happy to be a relief pitcher. Yes, all of them were neurotic,
subject to bouts of sullen intensity, terrified of failure,
But they were the most creative of players. They had to
create a masterpiece fast, with the fewest stokes, with
an air of confidence and certainty - whether this image
was real or not. Perhaps Katie had recognized this artifice
when she'd said to him once - "you're so strong for someone
so afraid."
The catcher wanted a fastball. The pitch
was going to say a lot about the rest of the year, about
the rest of James' career. Was his fastball still good
enough to get the hitters out? Could the hitters wait
through those still fantastic curves to get at a thirty-eight
year old's weakening fastball?
Funny, James thought, that such a test
had to come on the very first day of the season with 50,000
people watching, with a general manager in the owner's
box waiting to tell his pitching coach, "I told you so,
the guy doesn't have it any more."
James went into his stretch. The stadium
began to reverberate noise. He looked at young Olvares
and his big lead off second base. The kid's teeth were
exposed, startlingly white against his dark skin.
Then, with a subtle movement that only
the aficionado might detect, James turned his head to
look at his second baseman - a man who'd been his teammate
for eight years - and very slightly raised his right elbow
up and down. The second baseman punched his glove, acknowledging
James' signal.
A moment passed. James turned to home
plate and in one smooth motion spun back around to his
left and threw the ball as hard as any pitch directly
at the second base bag.
As his vision cleared from the spin,
James saw the convergence of three men, a perfect moving
geometry - the second base umpire, the second baseman,
Olvares - all closing on a white cloth bag, and a white
sphere rocketing toward them. The sphere angled down and
was caught clean in the glove of the second baseman just
above the ground - to coincide with the desperate fingers
of Olvares who was sliding face down in a cloud of dirt,
vainly attempting a return to the bag. The fingers were
brushed delicately by the glove. The second baseman vaulted
over the kid's prone shape and the umpire swung up his
arm in the out sign.
The game was over. The rookie had been
picked off second base.
James shot his fist into the air. Then
he walked off the mound. He saw the big black man standing
in the batter's box, shaking his head in disgust. The
black man smiled at James. On this day, the leagues best
hitter wasn't going to get a swing at the thirty-eight
year old's fastball.
James reached out to grasp the extended
hand of his excited catcher. Behind him he heard the shouts
of his teammates running in from the field. His manager
approached, nodding vigorously, but with a crooked grin
because later he was going to ask James why in hell he'd
tried a second base pick-off, one of the riskiest plays
possible, with the game on the goddamn line.
As James felt hands slap him on the back,
and heard the screams of the crowd, he smiled to himself,
remembering something he'd once told Katie: sometimes the
best way to win is by doing what you're not supposed to
do.
Story
Index
