Old Time Family Baseball

Reft was drifting, heading toward that familiar sixth inning feeling, when he heard the phone ring. There were steps and a grunt when the bullpen coach answered. Reft heard the coach call his name. The single sharp syllable sent a jolt through his mind and down into the notched machinery of his nerves and limbs, and he rose to start his warm-up tosses.

He stood on the rubber, staring down at the dirt expanse below, and waited a minute or two before he thought the bullpen catcher would be in place. Around him, the noise of the crowd was uniform, accentuated every few minutes by the slurred exclamations of various fans incensed by the score or a player or the umpire’s call on a pitch 450 feet away. He pushed through his sloppy warm-up tosses, caught the catcher shake his head a few times.

Reft slouched through the seasons with three decent pitches. He’d been told that he even looked like a long reliever, though he’d failed to compartmentalize that, hadn’t been able to find the corresponding features in his own ability the away an paleontologist brushes away thousands of years of dust to reveal a full skeleton. Each scout had a different language for each player he came across.

At some point it became inconsequential, and he bounced between teams and seasons like a ball that’s bobbled and kicked around the infield. And he didn’t mind that because after all, what was it to be part of the game? Even if it was the same game, the same numbers year after year. The headlines were all the same (“BeReft of relief”).  It wasn’t the money. Or maybe it was, but the money had long ago become a constant in the equation he used to project what it would feel like to play another year. More money than he could ever spend, thought you wouldn’t have known it compared to the cash that followed some of the big name players from city to city. It didn’t matter, but there was a time when it did, a time when he had a Midas touch. When every ball he gripped turned into a sharp slider that fell so far out of the zone it was like he had never even thrown it or a two-seamer that came in so hard at the hands it would have hurt your knuckles just to stand up there and take the called strike.

And then he was standing at the bullpen door, listening to the tense hum of the crowd. There was a stop on the shoulder, and he pushed through, loping across the outfield toward three bases full of white and grey uniforms. The afternoon light came in at skewed angles, so that the infield was shrouded in darkness, and when he stepped over the lip of the grass and onto the dirt, between second and first, something shifted inside him.

He made it to the mound and kicked the dust of the rubber, and as he bent to slap around the rosin bag he caught a glimpse of the scoreboard, and the three-run lead rattled him like it was his first time.

Will Hall is a Boston-based public relations professional. He’s not really a guest - you can find him every Wednesday night blogging at Old Time Family Baseball. His writing has appeared in various Word documents on his computer.

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