Chapter 8

I didn’t see much of Leah at all for much of the next week, and what I did see of her was covered up to an unusual extent, especially for the desert heat of mid-July. No more cutoff jean short-shorts that exposed parts of her ass and the usual scanty tank tops stayed put for the duration in her dresser. It was regular jean shorts now paired with full sized T’s, usually in some solid color that wasn’t see-through. Maybe she was still bra-less, but I never got close enough to her to check.

My chapter of her life remained very definitely shut and sealed closed.

Unable to sleep most nights that week, tossing about like a rotisserie chicken every evening in bed trying to figure some new and revised plan for my life that wouldn’t kill my baseball dreams, be likely to get me killed, or hurt either of the women who used to be in my life. This was a complete fucking clusterfuck of a situation with no clear obvious solution to be found no matter how I considered the problem.

Sleepless and tired beyond any ability to conduct rational thought, I slunk off to the pitching shed to just throw the old horsehide in utter privacy for an hour or two in the very wee hours, just me and the pitch scanning radar hooked into the computer. My plan was to just throw the ball until either my arm started to hurt or until I thought that I would be too tired to think, and thus able to get some sleep. Neither eventuality happened. The results though of my private session, throwing all alone and then clearing the computer reports afterwards, just gave me even more things to worry about.

I thought that tossing a mid-90’s fastball once, down in Mexico was an aberration, but sadly it wasn’t. A pitch I threw tonight of about that same intensity clocked here and now at 94 mph. Then the next one hit 96 and then 98, and so forth and I began to get a bit angry and bore down a bit harder. The fastest ‘officially clocked’ fastball thrown was about 108, thrown by Nolan Ryan, who said in an interview later that he didn’t quite have his very best stuff that night, and he could have done better. Well, I recorded, extremely unofficially, a pitch that hit 116 on Randy’s expensive computer equipment. I’d chucked it downrange pretty hard ... but I couldn’t pretend that it was at maximum effort. Worse, my arm and shoulder didn’t twinge a bit. Throwing heat for really the first time in my entire life ... and I could fire them off one after the other without even a hint of discomfort. This just shouldn’t be possible!

Then another night, I tried going for quantity over quality, and threw something like 120+ plus pitches in succession, which would exhaust any ace starting pitcher’s arm. Hell, I wasn’t even tired yet, so I threw another twenty and then another, then finally yet another twenty until I thought I felt a slight twinge that perhaps my arm had had enough fun for one night. Tired enough though to actually be able to sleep!

I expected to wake up to the usual sort of sore arm, shoulder and elbow pain that I’d dealt with most of my professional career, but nope. Maybe my arm was just a fraction more tender than usual and perhaps the skin was a little warm to the touch ... but no stiffness, no tendonitis, and definitely no pain. After a light workout that afternoon there was not even a hint of discomfort, and by evening it was as if I’d had three or more days off, and was all rested and ready to go again. Good, I suppose, since I was scheduled to pitch my next minor league game in two days.

What the fuck had they (or someone) done to me?

Superior strength ... unusually sharp reaction times ... super-regenerative healing ability? What the fuck? I could even swing the bat like an all-star now, crushing anything the pitching machine could throw at me in the batting cage. Late, late at night still of course. I’d never been a good hitter, or even a marginally competent one, even back in college. My batting skills alone would never have gotten me past rookie level ball! My last AA team in Cedar City usually used the designated hitter rule for our league games, so I only rarely hefted a bat when it mattered. Mendoza (of the famous low batting average) looked good in comparison to me. Now, with my rather new ability to concentrate and focus on incoming pitches, the pitched balls just looked slow and huge coming towards me. I almost couldn’t miss. I could hit, in batting practice, for power, field location or just pure average, stroking out solid singles one after the other, for an hour or more in the cage. Power? Yep, I had it now in spades, mostly due to a stupidly fast bat swing speed. Earnest, the batting guru, had a machine that could measure that scientifically too and I was sure that my swing speed recordings would be top of the chart ... so I made sure to erase those results from the system memory too. I already had too many other complications in my career without also turning into a young Babe Ruth prospect, with best in league hitting and pitching!

Yep, like that sort of talent in a pitcher wouldn’t get me noticed by all thirty-two major ballclubs – and Roberta’s insane brother Gordon, along with his MiB friends? Nope ... it was all quite totally preposterous! Someone, somehow, had given me a gift that was going to get my ass quickly and utterly killed, the minute I actually tried to go all out and just tried to do my very best. Fuuuuuuck that! The only way I was ever going to be ‘unexceptional’ was if I cheated constantly to play worse ... or I just gave it all up to go sell insurance or sporting goods ... which was looking like the smarter play, more and more.

The bible talks somewhere about hiding your light under a bushel (a bushel of what, I’m not sure) and that’s what I decided I’d need to do from now on, and learn more than a bushel’s worth of humility too in the process!

After our short mid-season break was over I was the #2 pitcher in the starting rotation and got our second game off to a roaring start by delivering the very first pitch I threw right over the heart of the plate where it was crushed. I think that ball was launched into low-earth orbit as I never saw it land.

I couldn’t believe it! My knuckleball hadn’t knuckled at all – it had just hung there motionless the entire way to the plate. I’d never seen that ever happen before, so I just bit my lip and decided to stick with a diet of number two, throwing mostly my curveball all night instead. The first curve I threw almost didn’t break at all and turned into a sloppy pseudo-sinker instead. Fine ... that produced an easy ground out to second base. I could do that all night long, I thought, so my next pitch to the third batter was another curve, which didn’t curve at all and became a long fly ball out right to the end of warning track, 380 feet away. That was living much too dangerously and not what I had in mind!

Now I faced the #4 hitter with two outs and no confidence in anything that I could throw that would work tonight as intended. I got lucky with a mid-80’s change that I precision painted to the bottom outside edge of the zone for a called first strike but even my catcher Dumb Shit knew better than to go that well again ... so we tried another knuckler, to see if it would cooperate this time. It didn’t. The batter was waiting for it, but just a little too eagerly, and he got a bit too in front of it and crushed 400+ yards ... foul. A miracle, I thought. When a knuckleball doesn’t knuckle, it usually then becomes at least a double.

I then wasted a couple of pitches outside of the zone, just praying that he’d bite on them, but he was too disciplined, so the count went full on me 3 balls - 2 strikes. Then Wade signalled for me to throw a slider (that didn’t slide) and he lined that one foul also. Still full count.

Desperate times call for desperate measures ... so I now tried a pitch that I really hadn’t thrown since A-level ball – the screwball. As thrown by a lefthander, the screwball looks like a curve that’s running outside and very likely to miss the strike zone wide of a right handed hitter, so he sat on it and held his swing until it was too late. It then ran down and inside and just barely caught the edge of the strike zone for a called third strike. And like that I was out of the jam, the inning over with.

“Ok, Space,” what’s wrong with you tonight?” Randy asked me, the moment I returned to the dugout.

“Fuck if I know... nothing is breaking. No idea why, I’ve never seen this happen. Everything feels good in my hand as I’m releasing, but the ball isn’t getting traction or any movement.”

“I’ll give you a clue,” he laughed, “take a look at the flagpole out in center field.” The flag was doing nothing. It was not only limp but dead limp without even the slightly trickle of movement anywhere. I’d noticed that there was no wind earlier, when doing my warm-ups, but hadn’t realized how utterly dead the air was.

“Some weird desert thing then,” I asked, “with very low humidity and atmospheric pressure plus zero air movement? Fuck ... that means I’ve got to exclusively serve up #1 most of the night. I’m going to be fucked!”

“That’s it!” he agreed, “Fortunately, we don’t see this sort of condition here very often, usually just a game or two a year usually in the later summer at one of the parks up north in the higher desert, usually just before some front hits. Nope, knucklers aren’t going to knuckle and curves, won’t ... so forget them tonight. Try and work extra fast, below twenty seconds or even fifteen if you can manage it and NIBBLE everything on the edges. You can do that, even on a bad night! Pretend you’re Greg Maddox and just paint the edges and never give them anything they can really hit. The plate ump tonight knows that you’ve got much better than average control and almost never walk anyone, so go play paint by numbers and by the fifth inning he’ll be giving you at least an additional three to six inches of strike zone ... especially if you’re working fast.”

That made sense. It would also drive the collection of scouts in the bleachers behind home plate absolutely postal! Just ‘throwing strikes’ is utterly counterintuitive to how most scouts view success today. It’s diametrically opposed to a game that seems to hunger for velocity and power because finesse and success are greater bedfellows in rhyme than truth, in their scouting books! Today scouts seem to only be looking for the kids that can bring the heavy artillery, so there’s almost no room for the cavalry. Power has become the name of the game and they’re looking for dudes who are going to come in throwing 95+ and just power their way through a game – and screw learning how to actually finesse their way instead.

That’s what the old school scouts and coaches used to call ‘Throwers vs Pitchers’. The guy who strikes out 8+ batters in six innings, but also walks four to six batters, is always sexier to the scouts than the finesse guy who might only strike out two to three guys but walk even fewer each outing.