The Ninth Inning

by A. J. Stewart

“Yeah, I’m gonna show you something. But first I’m gonna tell you something.” I grabbed him by the wrist and held up his hand with the ball in it. “You don’t pitch with this.” I dropped his wrist and tapped his forehead with my finger. “You pitch with this.”

  The kid recoiled from being tapped on the head, and his frown deepened. “I don’t need no Zen crap,” he said. He shook his head. “You got nothing.”

  “All right, Koufax, show me how you hold your fastball.”

  The kid gripped the ball across all four seams like it was a hand grenade. I could see the tendons stretching in his fingers.

  “Okay, kid, relax. Didn’t anyone ever tell you the ball is an egg?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said.

  “Well, it’s true. You want to throw a good heater, you’ve got to hold it like it’s fine China, like it might break just from you looking at it.” I grabbed another ball from the ball bag and showed him. I put my pointer and middle fingers across the seams but held the ball near the tips.

  “Nice and loose, like this. When it comes out, you generate the speed from the snap of your wrist and your fingers. The two-seam fastball can move a little, but if you want real heat, a flat scorcher, the four seam is your ball. But you gotta hold it right. Show me one.”

  Travis moved to the end of the cage and wound up and threw a decent pitch, nice and straight, right over the plate. It was all shoulder, relying on his long limbs and muscles that were yet to be up to the job.

  “Decent,” I said. “But you gotta keep your wrist straight, your fingers up. If you’re off even just a little bit, you’ll lose speed, and you’ll get smacked. You feel me?”

  “Did you just say you feel me?”

  “Whatever. Show me again. This time, focus. Wrist, fingers, egg.”

  Travis jogged down and grabbed the ball from where it had fallen after hitting the mat and then jogged back. He got in position once more, but this time took a little bit longer about it. He was thinking, and in the practice cage, thinking was good. Out on the mound in a game, not so much. He wound up, and I watched him hold his wrist and his fingers to the sky, and he let a fastball rip. It hit the mat at the other end with an almighty thud that drew the attention of the kids and coaches in the nearby cages. Travis finished his follow-through and turned around to me with a look on his face that said, What the heck just happened?

  “Better,” I said. “Grab the ball.”

  He retrieved the ball and came back to me without a word. Some of the affected disinterest had dissipated. Not all of it, but some.

  “What’s your variation?”

  “I’m trying to throw the curve,” he said. “But it’s not quite right.”

  “I’ve seen you pitch, kid. It ain’t right in any way, shape, or form.”

  The kid frowned.

  “The curve isn’t just about your hand, how you hold it. It’s about your body, how closed you are. It’s all in the arm action. But let me show you a couple of better options.”

  “Better options?”

  “Yeah. The curve is well worth having and you should learn it, but it will bend you all out of shape, and guys get all kinds of back injuries if they rely on it too much. It messes up your shoulder and even your elbow. I got a pitch that uses more or less the same action as your fastball. Makes it hard to pick and harder to hit.”

  “If it’s so great why doesn’t everyone do it?”

  “Because it’s hard to throw, genius. But if you can get it right, this is the stuff of Cy Young Awards,” I said, watching the glint in the kid’s eye at the mention of pitching’s highest award.

  “This one’s called the knuckleball,” I said. “You throw this exactly like your fastball, and when I say exactly, I mean it. Everything is the same, except how you hold it.” I took my ball and held the fastball grip in the tips of my fingers. “Here’s the heater,” I said. “Remember, position of wrist and finger snap.” I curved two fingers in behind the ball so my knuckles were against the seam. “This is your knuckleball. Because of the grip it’s not going to come out with any kind of speed, and it has a habit of doing some funky stuff that drives batters crazy. You show me.”

  The kid got into his position, slipped his two fingers in behind the ball so his knuckles were on the seam. He looked down the cage and seemed to hold his breath, then he wound up and let it go.

  The ball fizzed and hit the dirt about halfway to the plate. The kids who had been watching after hearing the fastball hit home with a thud now giggled. Travis finished his follow-through and then glared at me with hatred in his eyes. He was embarrassed and angry, the guy with the fancy fastball having thrown his next pitch into the dirt.

  “That’s not quite it,” I said.

  “You don’t know squat, man.”

  “Get the ball.”

  Travis stood in place for a moment, partly in defiance at being told what to do, partly in embarrassment at only having to walk halfway to the plate to retrieve the ball. I stared him down. He tried to match me, but once again I knew I’d win. He growled and spun around and kicked the dirt with his feet, then he retrieved the ball and walked back to me.

  “Do you know why most guys don’t throw a knuckleball?” I asked.

  “Because it’s trash?”

  “No. Most guys don’t throw it because they stink at it. Because the thing is, at first, everyone stinks at it. Everyone throws it in the dirt, just like you did.”

  The kid turned his head away from me as if I’d just thrown a punch.

  “Every single pitcher in history stinks at it at first. Every single World Series winner, every Cy Young recipient. They stink at it because it’s hard and it’s unnatural. But the great ones find the pitch that works for their body, and they suck up their embarrassment and keep at it. All the talent in the world won’t give you a good knuckleball, or a decent change-up, for that matter. The heater comes from natural talent. Everything else has to be worked at.”

  Travis kept his head pointed away from me, but his eyes drifted sideways back in my direction.

  “But you know the really big mistake guys make with it?” I watched the kid’s eyebrow lift, and I knew I had his attention. “You don’t bring it out in a game until you’ve thrown it at least ten thousand times in practice.”

  Travis turned back to me. “Ten thousand times? I ain’t waiting until I’m an old man.”

  “You won’t be an old man,” I said. “But it won’t be tomorrow, either. It might take a year or even two. You can’t rush it, and you can’t quit. If you rush it, you’ll never get it and you’ll kill your fingers and your arm, but if you quit, you’ll keep walking those batters like you’re a traffic warden.”

  I got the frown again. It was like an emotional roller coaster, watching the constantly changing expressions on the kid’s face.

  “So you do your ten thousand. The first couple thousand will probably stink, and half will miss the plate by a zip code. The other half will land in the dirt. These kids over here,” I said, nodding my head at the other cages, “they’ll giggle and laugh and have their jokes. And you’ll want to quit because you think it’s embarrassing, that you’re failing. But you’re not. You’re learning.”

  I took my ball in the knuckleball grip and held it out to the kid. “See right there where my knuckles are on the seam? Your hands are gonna bleed there, and then they’re gonna heal, and then they’re gonna bleed again. And that’s when the second lot of guys will quit. Because their little hands hurt. But if you get through that? You’ll develop calluses right there, and those calluses will be your friends. Those are man hands, and only hands like that throw a good knuckleball.”

  Travis said nothing. He seemed to be studying the grip I had on the ball. I stayed silent for a moment, until Travis’s eyes drifted up to mine.

  “You’ll think you’ve got it after a couple thousand more, and then you’ll get cocky and you’ll try it in a game, and you’ll do what you did today. You’ll throw a ton of balls or get smacked out of
the park, and you’ll get scared and revert back to your fastball. That’s game pressure. You can’t practice that, you can’t simulate it. So you’ll want to quit again. But don’t. Do your ten thousand. See, you’ve got a decent fastball, and that’ll get you through high school good enough. But eventually you’ll get better, and so will the guys with the bats in their hands, and you’ll reach a point where everybody’s looking for the heat, and their reflexes will be fast enough to hit it. But the guys who go further? Sure, they have great fastballs. But they have other stuff, too. Ungodly stuff. This is that ungodly stuff. You get this right, you’ll go far.”

  Travis was watching me, then he shifted his gaze to the ball in my hand and then back up to me. “If you know so much, if it’s so good, let’s see you do it.”

  “Let me tell you something, kid. Some of the best coaches I ever had couldn’t do the things that I could do. See, great players aren’t necessarily great coaches. It’s a different skill set. So don’t go blowing off good advice, Travis, just because the guy telling it didn’t pitch in the World Series. Question it, sure, but don’t blow it off.”

  “So you’re saying you can’t do it?”

  What I had said about coaches was right on the money. I had met guys who understood the mechanics of pitching, who studied so much video they knew exactly where your hand needed to be in order to throw a perfect curve. But they didn’t have whatever it was they needed in order to do it for themselves. Success is talent plus applied knowledge. Some people had the knowledge but not the gifts to apply it. But if those people were good communicators, good managers, then they could become top-flight coaches. I’d been lucky enough to be trained by a number of guys like that. But I also had to admit to myself, I had in no way drunk the Kool-Aid when I was a kid. Sometimes you needed to see something to believe it.

  I knew it was like the kid was calling me chicken, like I was being suckered into a stupid game, the kind of thing that brainless young men like to do. I knew that despite all my talk about man hands and such, I hadn’t thrown a pitch in anger in years. So I knew that what I was about to do was going to hurt my fingers just as much as it was going to hurt my shoulder. Fingers now, shoulder tomorrow.

  I didn’t have to go far looking for volunteers, since every eye in all of the practice cages was on us. I asked who the best batter was, man or boy. One of the coaches stepped forward and said he was decent enough. I could see from the nodding among the rest of the group that he spoke the truth. I walked over to the cage where he was coaching, and the kid who was at bat scurried out of the cage like a frightened rodent. The coach looked like he knew how to handle himself. He was fit and trim, in a tight T-shirt and shorts just a little too short for my liking. He tossed me a pitcher’s mitt and put on a helmet and some gloves, selected a bat, and headed down to the other end of the cage. The coach took a few swings like he was standing in the on-deck circle at Yankee Stadium, then he spat into the dirt, dug his feet in, and faced me.

  “A few warm-ups,” I said. “If that’s okay?”

  The coach at bat nodded but didn’t move away from the plate. I lobbed a pitch in his direction, and he let it float on by, hitting the wire at the end of the cage and causing the whole structure to rattle. I threw another with a little more oomph into the wire again. Then a third, a touch faster, and then I nodded to the batter that I was ready.

  He dug his feet in all over again, swung the bat around like it was Gene Kelly’s umbrella, and then he faced me.

  I turned to see all of the kids and the other coach watching from beyond the cage, and I spoke ostensibly to Travis, but loud enough for them to hear, and loud enough for my voice to just carry to the batter at the other end.

  “Remember, kid, the change-up is your friend.”

  I stepped to the small mound at the end of the cage and got myself into position. I had spent six years in the crucible of minor-league baseball. I knew for a fact that it was a big step up to the majors, but I also knew it was a big step down to playing with a bunch of kids in the park. And I knew that it wasn’t a question of skill. Progression through the levels of baseball was based on talent but was driven by work ethic and the mind. In my experience, mostly the mind. So I knew that the guy at the other end had heard me and would be sweating on the change-up. I rocked back on my right foot, and the muscle memory clicked into place, like a cosmonaut remembering how to walk on Earth.

  I threw the heater. Not as fast as I ever had, and not as fast as I probably could, but fast enough. I still wanted to ensure some level of accuracy, and I did. The pitch whizzed by the guy’s waist and hit the back of the cage before he’d even had a chance to think about it.

  The batter’s eyes went wide, and he offered me a tight grin and a nod. Then I noted him scuffing his shoes, digging back into the dirt, ready for the next one.

  The challenge had been laid down. It wasn’t my intention to embarrass the guy, and there was a decent chance that it would go the other way and I would be left looking like the fool. But I had a point to make, and it wasn’t to the grown man standing over the plate at the other end of the batting cage.

  A kid tossed me a new ball, and then I got into my position on the mound once more. I held the ball like an egg in my fingertips, as gently as could be. Then I covered my hand with my mitt and paused at the beginning of my action. Under the cover of my mitt, I slipped my two fingers behind the seams of the ball and then wound up and threw again like I was trying to pitch a missile.

  The batter was ready and waiting for the fastball. He didn’t get it. The ball wobbled and fizzled and for about half its journey looked like a ripe fastball for the taking. Then it slowed and wobbled some more, and then it began to dip. The guy swung hard, but he was about three days early and missed the ball by about two feet. He went so hard at it that the bat ended up pointing skyward like a flagpole as he lost his footing and dropped to his backside in the clay.

  I heard the kids behind me murmuring in amazement. It had been a decent knuckleball, even for me. The thing about a knuckleball is that you never can tell what it’s going to do. Sure, it’s going to be off pace, but some days it dips a mile, and some days just a bit. Some days it floats and wobbles like a balloon, and some days it holds its trajectory.

  I put my hand up in a wordless apology to the batter, and he again gave me the wry smile and the nod. Then I turned to Travis.

  “You see? You get it right, it can be unhittable. You get it wrong, it’s like getting a gentle pitch from your mama. The key with the knuckleball is to make sure that it doesn’t spin. Nothing more than one rotation. You get it like that and it has a mind of its own. You rotate it even a little too much and you’ll get slammed. That’s why it’s so hard to hit, because it’s so hard to throw.”

  I tossed the mitt I had been given to the other coach and turned back to Travis.

  “One hundred pitches a workout, broken up into fifteen-throw sessions, twice a week, every week, two years. If you’ve got the work ethic to do that, you’ll end up with a college-level knuckleball.”

  “College level?” Travis frowned. “I want to play in the pros.”

  “Then don’t stop. Not ever. The better you get, the further you’ll go. The further you go, the better the batters will be. So you can’t stop. You can’t stop practicing, and you can’t stop improving. But if baseball is really in your blood, you won’t want to. And if it’s not in your blood, quit now, and go find something that is.”

  The coach came out of the batting cage and slapped me on the back and said, “Nice pitch.” I gave him a gentle shrug, like it had all been good luck, and then he directed the kids to get back in the cage. I moved to the side with Travis, and we watched the practice resume. I took a card from my wallet and handed it to him.

  “Those are my details,” I said. “If you ever need a refresher, or a kick up the pants, email or call me.”

  “You on Snapchat?”

  “Not today.”

  The kid looked down at my card, and I
saw him frown for the thousandth time since I’d met him. “You live in Florida?”

  “That’s right.”

  “So you’re really not after my mom?”

  I shook my head. “No. I’ve got someone of my own.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  I left Travis and the other kids and the coaches to their training and walked back toward my moving truck. I passed by the snack bar that was, sadly, closed. I couldn’t help but think that hot dogs were like shooting stars. You had to take them when they were there for the taking. As I walked through the parking lot of the school, I took out my phone and called Captain Smith, the pilot, and told him that I would be ready to leave whenever he was. He didn’t seem surprised by the duration of my trip, but I supposed that pilots who flew corporate jets hung around for one-off business meetings before turning around and going home on a regular basis.

  I drove back to the North Las Vegas airport and left the truck in the exact same slot where I’d picked it up. I hadn’t put any gas in the tank, but I had gone so little distance there was no movement in the needle. I wandered into the terminal and returned the keys to the guy in the cheap but well-pressed suit. He asked if there was a problem with the truck, and when I told him no, he asked if I wanted to replace it with a sedan that was now ready.

  “I’m outta here,” I told him.

  I sat in one of the chairs in the quiet terminal building that felt like I was waiting in one of those conglomerate doctors’ offices that seemed to have sprouted everywhere in Florida. The pilot appeared with his copilot shortly after, and he walked over to me as the copilot headed out toward the plane.

  “Fruitful trip?” he asked.

  I stood in lieu of a shrug. “Hard to know. Did you even leave the airport?”

  “No. They have a pilots’ room here. We just got some lunch and watched baseball.”

  It seemed like we had pretty much done the same thing. We walked out to the jet, and Captain Smith again gestured for me to get on board first. I took the same seat and watched them go through the same checks, then he stepped out and asked me, as he had on the last trip, if I would like coffee or soda. This time I took a Diet Coke and asked him if there was any food. He told me that catering hadn’t been requested, but he had bags of chips or microwave Hot Pockets. The latter didn’t sound like any kind of food at all, so I went with a bag of corn chips and was munching away as we left the tarmac and turned south toward Phoenix.