In the beginning there was only Speed. Then, for a while there when I was a kid, there was only Baseball. Speed & Baseball. I was an All-Star pitcher in the making, Coach’s Southpaw Protégé, enjoying his Where’d-This-Kid-Come-From season. All I ever did before that was ride. I rode everywhere. So when Coach drafted me into the league a year early I started riding to practice, and sometimes to the games too, with my cleats tied over the top bar of my bike’s frame and my glove skewered onto the handlebars. I racked up K’s, W’s, and Saves at the ballpark all summer long and if I wasn’t at practice or at work on the mound I was out racking up miles on my bike, riding. There was only Speed & Baseball. The other coaches called me a “natural” or some such. My coach, Coach Merrill, called me a freak of Nature but listed me on the roster as a Reliever. No one knew me which made my job so easy when it was my job to be misunderstood. Then, one day late in the season, in the fifth inning of a tightening game with two strikes, two balls, two out and a damned runner on third, sex showed up in the shade of an umbrella on a lawn chair behind home plate. Sex & Speed. …And Baseball, dammit, I had a tidy shutout going and I had to concentrate. Placement and rhythm are key when pitching a monster like this one. Keep it outside, Coach said, just out of bat’s reach, work over the lefties’ batter’s box if you have to… where Michelle’s smooth, freckled legs were unfolding under a magazine… Oh no, suntan lotion, Panama Jack… Get back to work, Kid. Focus, my third baseman’s teeth depend on it. They’ve enjoyed a good season playing up close on the grass and giving some of the best chatter. Coach always says if I can’t blow it by ‘em then throw something they can’t touch with a telephone pole. But I only had one more ball to spare before the count went full and just beyond the strike zone, low and outside, where the sun was setting, getting just low enough to light her umbrella from underneath… If ever there were a golden beam of sunshine alight an angel’s flaxen hair, that was it right there. Sunshine wanted to dance behind the backstop… Stop it! Concentrate. Focus, dammit. Think. I decided I was going to throw a sunbeam of a fastball with a smoke trail —-why not?, my arm is hot; but for the error leaning off third base the game is playing out to my rhythm; and I can conjure just about anything from atop The Hill with a whole team chanting my names—- right at the brute’s throat because no one would ever expect it, not even moi as I suddenly felt like showing off just how far out whence it is I may come if I dig deep enough into my back pocket’s repertoire of 2-2-count-2-men-out-one-on-third rhythm pitches pickpocketed from Nowhere. I shook off all my catcher’s signals; No, No, Nope, until I got the one for a cutting fastball/inside. Yep, I was locked on the throat. With the next pitch he’d either be bruised and stewing on first for a while where he could neither hit nor say a thing or if I missed then at least we’d be going to a full count together with mutual respect. This is my shutout. It may have been the first time I ever lost control of my rhythm on the mound. I thought I could summon the solar winds of Nolan Ryan then take Michelle with the team for ice cream. But I overthrew it.
It was my first wild pitch. I got lucky. Our catcher, Big Mike, got enough leather on it to slow it down, corral it up, and flip it back from somewhere beyond the abyss near the backstop all smoldering with blonde hair and brown freckles and rounding breasts in a backlit halter top and shiny thighs pouring from fraying short-shorts and stuff… Somehow he got it out of there and a baseball emerged from that dusky cloud and I snatched it to tag out the runner coming Home in a violent collision. For a split-moment there I swear it smelt of coconuts and I saw more than stars in a tropical sky but I hung onto to it and tossed a smoking baseball back to the ump as my proof.
Third out. Phew… Only half an inning to go now with the fifth goose egg being hung on the scoreboard. That monster will be back to the plate with a fresh count in the bottom of the sixth but that’s okay because I’ll be back to work on the mound with a brand new rhythm and deeper pockets. On the way back to our dugout I was preparing my apology to Coach for darn near blowing a shutout, but he met me first with a proud look and, “Where’d that come from, Kid?”