Switch Pitchers

by Norman German

  “How about the curve?”

  “You mean the hanging curve that almost crucified holy Harper on the fence?”

  “No,” Bobby said. “Just a curve. Without the hang.”

  “You ready to throw one?”

  “I don’t have a choice.”

  Chozen turned and waddled to the plate. Bobby threw the curve. It didn’t hang. Hockbarry topped it for a groundout to short. The next batter went down swinging.

  The game fell into a rhythm in the fourth. Three up, three down on routine grounders and fly balls. The score remained 1-0, Lunkers.

  In the bottom half of the fifth, it happened.

  Bobby’s fastball was heating up. He fanned Duke Spencer, the Roughnecks’ leadoff man, with two inside fastballs and an outside change.

  Chozen signaled for a fastball against Chuck Key-9, the first baseman. A Coushatta Indian with a bat he called the Big Potato, he had a bobcat’s yellow eyes set in an oversized head. His friends called him the Big Kahuna. Bobby remembered him from the West Texas–New Mexico League. He was playing left field for the Borger Oilers then, so Bobby guessed the years had taken a step or two from his Native American speed. Key-9 was a pull hitter who ate inside fastballs like a kid gobbling popcorn.

  Chozen tapped his left thigh. Inside fastball. The thought flickered through Bobby’s mind that he should wave it off. But his arm felt better than it had since he had risen to Double-A three years ago. The extra day’s rest from the Cubans’ arrival had put some zip back in his fastball.

  His last thought before winding up was, If you’re not ready to challenge a rusty old hitter from the bush leagues, you need to hang up your spikes and go fishing.

  When Bobby released the ball with a sharp downward snap, he remembered the feeling. He hadn’t felt it in five years. He fell toward home with an easy stride. When he planted his foot, he felt the forward motion of his body stop, then all the strength of his legs travel up through his torso. He drove his upper body down, trailing his arm and, farther back, his hand. His body’s torque whipped his arm around, transferring all of its speed to his fingertips. When he released, he felt the pop. The controlled violence of his body exploded through his fingertips into the ball.

  The fastball ran in on Key-9’s fists and jammed his swing. Bobby heard the shattering contact. When his trail leg came around and squared him in fielding position, he raised both hands to protect himself from the projectile rocketing at him. With his glove, he swatted the barrel of the broken bat away and stepped through a shower of white splinters to look for the baseball.

  Chozen scrambled for the ball and grabbed it before it rolled foul down the third-base line. After throwing Key-9 out, Chozen passed in front of the mound and hit his chest protector to adjust it after the throw.

  “Did you see that,” Bobby demanded.

  Chozen didn’t have to ask. He knew what Bobby meant. Chozen nodded. “That was almost Little Rock.”

  “Almost, my ass. That was Little Rock.”

  Chozen chuckled. “Maybe so, Bobby. Maybe so. That fireballing Cuban’s got my radar scrambled.”

  * * *

  When Bobby came in from the inning, Ricardo was all over him like a sleepy Chihuahua jump-started by a lightning bolt.

  “Mr. Bobby, that was the fastest fasbol I have ever seed.”

  Ricardo acted out the shattering of the bat and Bobby’s reaction as he protected himself from the splinters. Amused, Bobby sat on the bench and watched the show. He was pleased with the throw itself. The broken bat was nothing to him and he tried to explain to Ricardo what had really happened.

  “It wasn’t the speed of the ball that broke the Big Potato. It was the ball riding in on the neck of the bat and jamming the Big Papoose’s swing.”

  Ricardo’s eyes enlarged. “Don’t joo believe that. That is the fastest ever I have seed a pitcher t’row.”

  “That was nowhere near the speed your brother throws,” Cyrus said.

  “Have joo ever that fast t’rowed, Mr. Peanut Butter?”

  “I’m not a fastball pitcher,” Cyrus said. “I’m a nibbler.”

  “Then joo don’t know the difficality of that pitch, how hard it is to t’row.”

  Cyrus returned to his original point. “You think Bobby throws faster than your brother?”

  “That I would not know. I have not seed him t’row since he was fifteen.”

  “Or since you were fifteen,” Cyrus joked.

  Ricardo frowned. “It is all the same.”

  “All right, men,” Chozen called. “Listen up! We’ve got eight hits and one run, and even Dickie knows what that means.” He turned to his son.

  Dickie Chozen hung his head in shame, shaking it as if the fault were his own. “We’re leaving too many ducks on the pond.”

  “That’s right. We’re getting plenty of wood on the ball. Now let’s see if we can move around the bases a little better.”

  Lamar Cagle led off the inning with a standup double. Scoop hit a smart grounder to the shortstop, who bobbled the ball, checked the Big Chief at second, and barely beat Scoop to first with the late throw.

  Bobby came to the plate with one out and an insurance run on second. As a left-handed batter, he was two steps closer to first than right-handers. Leo Tycer signaled bunt. Bobby was never confident about the drag bunt and decided he would try to poke the ball between first and second with an old-fashioned swinging bunt. The maneuver reminded him of golfing—an easy swing to lay the ball up on the green. On an 0-and-2 pitch, he slow-swung and met the ball in front of the plate. It rolled between first and second, pulling basemen off their positions. Wiseman ran to cover first.

  The second baseman one-handed the slow roller and flipped it to his pitcher. Wiseman, who outweighed Bobby by fifty pounds, hit him like a fullback busting through the line, sprawling the lesser southpaw in the dust.

  Ricardo went berserk in the dugout. With cleats and fingers, he stuck himself to the fence like a monkey, shaking the links against the metal posts.

  “Don’t joo do that to Lucky Strikes, hijo de puta! I kick joo in the ass.”

  Bobby picked himself up. While looking out to third to make sure he had advanced Cagle, he leaned to one side to work his ribs back in place.

  Wiseman shot Ricardo a scornful look. “Where’d j’all pick up the cheerleader, German?” Wiseman spit a stream of tobacco juice in the dust. “Shit, teach him to dance to an organ grinder, you could sell him to the circus.”

  Bobby forced a laugh, reminding himself that the season ran through September.

  As Zig Emory made his long adjustment in the batter’s box, the players started placing low-voiced bets, no money, on how many times the home-plate umpire would hitch up his pants. Some said five, others seven to ten. Dickie Chozen eased down to the other side of the dugout. Bobby stretched and took deep breaths. Since he had nothing to lose, Bill German bet on twelve hitches, hoping for a long at-bat.

  Mr. Five-by-Five hitched up twice while Ziggy was settling in, and there was a quick argument about whether those should count or not. As it turned out, Emory swung at the first pitch, the center fielder caught the third out, and nobody won the sterile bet.

  Throwing his warm-up pitches, Bobby checked the on-deck circle. Schroeder would be the toughest batter, followed by Hickenberry. Or Hockenbury. Then Sadaris. The little weasel, Bobby thought. DP Sadaris, they called him, for his tendency to hit into double plays. He had Class C talent, at best, so Bobby thought he must have come from a rich family with connections.

  Bobby was careful with Schroeder, working the corners for anything Five-by-Five would give him. Making good location pitches with his curve and slider, he finally worked the count full and hoped his fastball was up to speed again. It wasn’t. But it had enough movement on it to draw an easy pop fly that Cagle glided under in left center.

  Hockbarry stepped to the plate. He hits outside fastballs, Bobby reminded himself.

  Bobby’s mind was always racing on the mound. He carr
ied on a silent dialogue with himself while pitching. The fans saw Bobby hitch his shoulders several times in a peculiar manner. The few who gave it any thought wrote it off as another crazy pitching ritual. What Bobby was doing was hiccupping. Inside his head, he said, “Hickenberry, hic, hic,” and jerked his shoulders.

  Chozen signaled fastball, low outside corner; fastball, low inside corner; and fastball so low a midget couldn’t hit it. Bobby threw the first two for strikes but waved off the last. He wanted to let go with another rising fastball high in the strike zone. He wanted to go to Little Rock again.

  Chozen gave him the ticket, and the ball was in Chozen’s glove by the time the batter started his swing.

  There is no feeling like that, Bobby said to himself, his eyes tearing up as a chill tightened his scalp.

  He loved the feeling of the explosive force racing from the toe of his plant foot up his leg and through his torso, then down his arm as it whipped around. All that remained was the lazy follow-through of his trail leg coming alongside him of its own will, like a stranger sidling up next to him at a bus stop.

  Bobby received the ball from Chozen and gripped it in his left hand, squeezing it as tight as a lover. He turned to make his short journey up the hill and raised his glove to cover his mouth. He had to laugh, but it was not in his nature to show anybody up, so he coughed into his glove to mask his boiling-over laughter.

  What happened to him when he threw the Little Rock Express, as he had already labeled the returned lover, had nothing to do with anyone else—not the batter he threw it by, not Chozen who caught it, nor the fans who could never know the explosive pop of that broken speed barrier.

  Bobby’s heart felt like it did when he saw an attractive woman and she returned the look and he knew they would be together before the night was over. He turned toward Chozen and saw the absurd Sadaris shaking his bat like he was King Kong. Bobby could not keep his head from wagging side to side as his mind said, You silly little fake wannabe weasel nobody.

  Bobby threw him three straight fastballs, literally praying before each windup that he could visit Little Rock one more time, one more time, one more time.

  The first was just a regular fastball, but it was way more than Sadaris could handle. The second fastball took Bobby to Little Rock. Sadaris swung at it like a Girl Scout with a broken arm. He couldn’t believe he was this lucky, not after five years, and he wondered how long the Express would stay with him. His mind said, Not long enough, so I’m gonna throw it every chance I get and I don’t give a rat’s ass whether someone catches up to it and hits it to Pocatello, Idaho, because it feels like Bill coming home when I thought we had lost him, his name right there in black and white under “Presumed Dead.”

  He stalled for as long as he could before the next pitch, trying to let his arm recharge. He played with the rosin bag for a while, then worked the mound into shape, using his front cleats like a hoe, then bending over and grooming the dirt with his hand, which he never did, but he wanted that feeling just one more time before his arm tired, and he could already feel it running out of gas.

  The third was another Little Rock fastball, but it sailed over Chozen’s head, out of reach by three feet. The baseball was still rising when it hit high on the backstop, where it stuck in the fencing. Nothing could have made Bobby happier than the wild pitch because it gave him a chance to laugh out loud—loud and long. The fans and the players, his teammates and opponents, thought he was laughing at himself. They laughed along with him and that was fine with him.

  He composed himself while rubbing up the new ball. Before he turned around, he knew what he was going to do. Sadaris looked pathetic. “Pitiful,” Bobby said to himself, “shaking like a boy who broke his father’s pocketknife throwing at a tree, waiting for the old man to come home. Well, here comes the old man.”

  Bobby rocked back, raised both hands over his head, gave a ferocious high-leg kick, and threw Sadaris the most frightening changeup he would ever see. By the time Sadaris had finished his mighty swing, the ball was just arriving.

  Walking off the mound, Bobby couldn’t keep himself from laughing, but he had the grace not to look at Sadaris, and his glove covered up everything but his nearly closed, twinkling eyes.

  Keith Wiseman went quickly through the bottom of the Lunkers’ order, and Bobby was back on the mound where he wanted to be. He wanted to be there for two reasons. One was the Little Rock fastball. The other was Wiseman. Bobby wanted to make sure Wiseman would never intentionally hit or hurt him or any other Lunker for the rest of the season. He was still warm from the previous inning and decided to open with the Little Rock Express.

  The first one came into the station right under Wiseman’s chin. As a pitcher himself, Wiseman knew the throw could have been intentional. Or the result of late-inning wildness. The next pitch zipped behind his knees, folding him like an accordion in the dust.

  Bobby threw the third fastball for a knee-high strike over the inside black of the plate. Bobby fought back a grin, not because God had given him another Little Rock fastball but because Five-by-Five had given him the call.

  Wiseman tried to salvage what he could of his dignity by choking up. He had seen Sadaris and didn’t want to look like that fool even if, as a pitcher, not much was expected of him at the plate. Smiling inside, Bobby said to himself, “Wiseman, standing that far back in the box, you couldn’t reach this next pitch with a bedpost.”

  Bobby threw another Express on the outside corner. Five-by-Five didn’t have to give him that one because Wiseman swiped at it like a toddler taking his first lick with a plastic bat.

  Bobby was having so much fun he had forgotten the count. He looked at the umpire with a questioning movement of his head. Five-by-Five held up a pair of deuces and Bobby smiled inside. He tried to throw another Little Rock fastball at Wiseman’s chin, but it sailed high and wide and Bobby knew he would not see Little Rock again until his next outing.

  The count was 3-and-2. Both pitchers knew Bobby had to deliver, but only one knew he didn’t have the hard fastball. When Wiseman saw the white bullet coming right at his head, he bailed out like a storm trooper from a burning bomber, and the ball curved in for strike three.

  Bobby let the momentum of his follow-through carry him off the mound and toward home in one unbroken movement. As Bobby took the short throw from Chozen, he made sure Wiseman caught his eye. When he did, Bobby nodded once. End of discussion.

  Bobby made easy work of the number-nine batter, using him to check his changeup because he would need it in the final two innings.

  The Roughnecks’ leadoff man, Duke Spencer, was up next. When the count was 1-and-2, Chozen called for a slider. Bobby thought, “You read my mind.” If Five-by-Five wouldn’t give him the call, he figured there was no harm done.

  He threw it. The umpire hesitated for a split second, then called strike three.

  Duke Spencer came unglued. He screamed at the umpire, accusing him of changing the strike zone he had established early in the game. The ump let him wind down, then said, “Strike zone’s the same for every batter, every time.” Spencer said something no one could hear because the players were running onto or off the field. The umpire pulled a notepad out of his back pocket. “It might be a good idea to take your position.”

  When Bobby retreated to his usual place near the back of the dugout, a quartet composed of Lamb Daniels, Scoop, Bill, and Big Chief Cagle was crooning a low chorus.

  Mister Five-by-Five,

  Got fifteen chins and a line of jive.

  He’s a mellow old cat, a real hep fat,

  He be Mister Five-by-Five.

  Bobby was tired and a bit worried about the next inning, but he couldn’t resist. In his best Harry Chozen voice, he said, “All right. You boys cut that stuff out. You know that kind of talk always comes back on you.” The quartet responded by fading on the chorus.

  He don’t measure no mo’ from head to toe

  Than he do from side to side, from side to side, f
rom side to side….

  Near the end of the inning, the Lake Charles Lunkers had two ducks on the pond. The one on first was quacking with Chuck Key-9, the gabby Indian and crafty veteran. Lulled into a false sense of security, the runner stepped off the bag as the pitcher approached the rubber. The Indian pulled the hidden-ball trick and shot down the sitting duck for the third out.

  Back in the dugout, remembering what their manager had said about leaving too many ducks on the pond, the players silently prepared to take the field. They didn’t say anything to Chozen. What could they have said to the sitting duck that had just been mortally wounded?

  After the long half inning, Bobby’s rested arm struck out Key-9. Then Schroeder worked him for a deep count and he walked him on a fastball that got away. Hockbarry singled. Somebody he had never seen replaced Sadaris. He didn’t look like much. A skinny kid on his way up. Bobby served him a curve that he grounded to short. Scoop threw to third for the fielder’s choice.