Chapter 5

“Pitch everyone low and outside”

– Sal Maglie (Jim Bouton - Ball 4)

Well ... there is was, a beautiful knuckleball low and outside that just painted the corner crossing the plate. A perfect pitch (well from my viewpoint); so, what does he do with it? He casually lines it right down the first base line with a brief flick of his wrists – f0ul. Just like the previous six pitches. Fuck me!

The score was still 3-2, with a man still on second. I still had a one run lead in the bottom of the seventh inning, the final inning of this exhibition game ... and what the fuck was I supposed to serve up now? Frankly, I was entirely at my wit’s end, enough so that I was letting ‘fuckface’, Wade my catcher, calling the shots ... and mostly not even bothering to argue when he dropped the ‘one’ finger.

Now, as a whole, I’d have to admit that Wade had called a half-way decent game tonight – and his judgement (usually questionable at best) had actually improved, significantly (truth be told), during our three-week long Mexican League road trip through the back-assed parts of nowhere. Or perhaps, equally likely, perhaps I’d fallen in with his brilliant scheme of calling absolutely random pitch calls to wildly disparate portions of the plate. If his intent and goal was to make the opposing team’s plan of charting my pitch/location proclivities nearly impossible (or at least highly unlikely), well ... I had to admit that he’d utterly succeeded – perhaps far beyond his original intend. Hell ... even I didn’t know what I’d be throwing next!

Well, yes ... tequila was definitely involved, indirectly ... We’d all had a bit too much drinking after dinner last night. This was the last final game of our long-ass desert road trip and getting off this damned field sometime soon this evening couldn’t happen fast enough! I wasn’t even supposed to be pitching this evening, but even with a six-man starting rotation, everyone was over-tired and over-worked. During warmups, our scheduled starter felt a bit of soreness and he was pulled from the lineup as a precaution. No one wants to get a strain or pull a muscle in an exhibition game that’s utterly meaningless, especially with no scouts watching us here.

I’d pitched last three days ago, but only for about five innings. I felt fine to go and Randy just told me take it easy and throw mostly knucklers, stuff that wouldn’t cause me any extra arm strain while taking the harness again with a too-short rest.

Hell, this game wasn’t even on our official schedule anyway! It had been added, almost as an afterthought, right after our last ‘scheduled’ game at noontime today. But on this tour circuit, extra add-on games were far from unusual. Randy and Ernest were getting cuts of the gate receipts to help pay our travel expenses, and any extra games that the local promoter or owner of the stadium could announce, and collect admission pesos for, meant a delay in the next long bus road trip, maybe a slightly nicer hotel room for our extended stay, and invariably the famed Banzai Brothers buying us an extra occasional round of drinks after dinner. Last night it was several ... but we all thought our asses would be back on our tour bus heading home by this time.

Our formal game schedule had us stopping in each city or town to play a three game series with the local Mexican League official and semi-pro teams, most of which were about in our skill zone, quality ranging usually from the A to AA level. We’d win some, we’d lose some, and usually neither of us would sweep the other in a short series, winning every game. Our players could continue to develop playing against pretty equal levels of talent and everyone would make a few pesos, win-win. Then, again at the whims of the local owner of the ball field, or the town politicos, we’d be ‘invited’ to also take on perhaps the local star high school or college teams, and sometimes also an assortment of the local amateur All-Stars in a late morning, afternoon or even late evening exhibition game, if there was any chance of squeezing in another game before we had to be elsewhere.

That was the sort of game we were playing now, an evening exhibition match against a group of ‘local businessmen’. Hell ... there wasn’t a single player on their team that wasn’t covered head to toe with tats and their buddies seating out in the home section of the stands all seemed to have guns. This was the local drug gang that we were now playing, and their boss was also the owner of this small but quite modernized ballpark. I’d played in far worse dumps in my own minor league career. The local crime lord apparently loved baseball and had his own local league, and now we were playing against his group of All Stars ... and they were damn near kicking all of our asses!

Facing me now, sixty feet and six inches away, was the kingpin himself ... and frankly he was a fucking stud! He played third base, adequately, and batted third, more than adequately. Back in the first inning, he crushed batting right-handed the first curve ball I pitched to him over the left field fence. Then in the third inning he absolutely destroyed a changeup/weak sauce fastball batting as a leftie, out and over the right field stands. Now he was looking do it all over again and I was out there on the mound sweating in near stark terror. If that drug lord handled a gun the way he danced with a baseball bat, he could rule this entire Mexican state ... and maybe he already did.

Fuckface laid down two fingers crossed together and swished them towards his right knee before setting to receive the pitch. This meant backdoor screwball that would start its trip to the plate looking like a ball thrown just outside the plate wide, but would then suddenly run inwards just before crossing the strike zone. Not a bad choice, actually! This sort of pitch was great for suckering batters that had better than average awareness of the strike zone. It was a favorite of mine to use against top of the order batters if there was a full 3-2 count. Smart batters tended to sit it out, sure the pitch would be called a third strike and at worst, the overly aggressive hitters that never saw a pitch they didn’t want to swing at (lots of those sorts in the low minors, everywhere) usually would swing too early and miss, or if they swung too late, would harmlessly foul the pitch off.

Donnie the Drug Lord (actually his jersey, which was nicer than mine, said Delacruz on the back) calmly waited for the ball to start spinning in towards him and with an all-to casual flick of his wrists, he railed that ball like a laser right down the right field foul line. For a horrible moment I thought it would just stay fair, but the spin on it eventually pushed it just foul, probably by less than two feet. For another dreadful moment or two afterwards I thought the 1^st base umpire, who had to be one of Donnie’s lackeys, would signal for a home run anyway, but he played it fair and signaled out with just a moment of hesitation. Donnie wasn’t pissed in the slightest; he was rather enjoying his extended session of batting practice against me and was dead certain that he was going to eat my lunch yet again and tie up the score in this last inning.

Fuckface gave a single crooked finger signal, which suggested that I was on my own ... he was out of fucking ideas that would sit this behemoth back down on the bench, so we could then get the last guy out ... and get our asses out of here and on the way back home!

I fidgeted for a moment with my cap and then patted the baseball into my glove a few more times that was usually necessary for me to get ready for a pitch, and then idly scratched my sweaty nose with my glove before starting my wind-up. The nose scratch was a signal to Wade that I was done screwing around and was going to get this shit over with.

Since I was getting pissed, I then decided to feed the bastard a real fastball, something he hadn’t seen from me all evening. Not the lame ass thing in the low-mid 80’s that I usually used as a change-up alternative to a steady diet of breaking stuff, but a proper heater. No one had a JUGS radar gun out so I don’t know what speed it popped at, but it was mid to high 90’s ... for sure. I hadn’t thrown a heater this juiced since probably class A ball, about when my trials with ongoing tendonitis began. Come to think of it, I’d never thrown a mid-90’s fastball, then or back in junior college either.

And the bastard caught up with it and crushed the ball for over 400 yards ... fortunately once again foul. Donnie raised up one eyebrow in surprise and then gave me a big shit eating smirk and took a leisurely stretch outside of the batter’s box for just a moment to flex his pythons. His face then began to turn serious, with a distinct ‘let’s get this shit over with’ look. I nodded my head slightly to him in respect and proceeded at last to give him his wish.

Batters like Donnie have a tendency to get macho, when it comes to fastballs. If they get served up a heater that they can’t quite connect on, some gear clicks in the head and they instinctively look for that next fastball to be thrown just a bit faster. Maximum heat. Pitcher’s whose best pitch is the heater tend to fall readily into that mindset too. You might have gotten around on my 92 mph pitch ... but can you do the same for its bigger faster brother in the high 90’s?

It’s a sort of batter/pitcher matchup I must have watched hundreds, if not thousands of times. If you live by the fastball, sometimes you’ll die by the fastball.

Assuming that just maybe, some alien babe, or an even prettier gal, had helpfully dosed me with something from a top secret government lab, and my arm and shoulder were back to as-new, or far better, condition, I probably could have uncorked a heater that would have done Nolan Ryan proud ... and I did think about it for a quarter of a second.

Instead, being a wily leftie, I grunted loudly while unleashing a slow changeup straight down the fucking middle of the plate that almost certainly wasn’t fast enough to even break Interstate highway vehicle speed limits. Donnie whiffed it, so badly that as he swung around hitting nothing but air, that he darn near spun completely around and fell flat onto his ass, there in the batter’s box.

Suddenly, the entire ballpark when silent, and I swear I saw out of the corners of my eyes, some of the nastier looking cholos starting to reach for their handguns. Instead their boss straightened himself and tipped his cap to me, before retreating back to the dugout. The drama all over with.

One out left to go. Their #4 hitter, their right fielder, looked like a clone of Jose Canseco, a gorilla of a hombre nearly as scary looking as his boss. He’d been a tough up this evening, every time he’d come up to bat, and his talents would have been adequate for most AA rosters. He was a pure power hitter and now, being potentially the last man at bat, he was eager to tie the game up again with just one swing. He was going to swing for the fences, and even Fuckface had a serviceable plan ready for that sort of masher. Down went two fingers, split into an inverted V. Easy enough.

The functional differences been the forkball and the split-fingered fastball are really not worth debating, at least in my opinion. I’d thrown variations of these for a couple of years, going back to my Low A-ball days. Some pitching coaches believe that the slightly wider finger gap split on the split-finger is more inherently stressful on the arm and shoulder ... but fell that the almost identical grip of the forkball is just fine. Randy approved of my using either of them and didn’t think that either pitch was inherently safe or more dangerous to throw. It’s all about conditioning and mechanics ... and he’s probably right. Nominally, according to the acknowledged master of this pitch, Mike Scott, of 1980’s Astros fame, the splittie does give usually provided more downward break movement, but at the cost of just a bit of control. If it breaks too much, the pitch might just bounce off of the ground before it reaches the plate, and sometimes that’s a risk you can’t afford. The forkball then, which has less movement, but more control, can be the safer option. Right here and now, ‘safe’ wasn’t an issue.