Brittle Innings

At third Curriden gave an egg-sucking grin. “My pecker’s about that color when it gets angry.”

“And you wish it was that big,” Du

A bit more hoohah over my imported timber before Mister JayMac snarled, “Batter up!”

I dug in against Darius with a catch in my heartbeat. My first pitch in my first at-bat as a hired pro. It came out of Darius’s shoulder-dipping windup so hard I hardly even saw it. I just heard it go thwaap! in Du

“Strike one, Mr Boles,” Mister JayMac said.

Hoey and the other infielders chattered away, badmouthing me: “You couldn’t hit the floor if you fell off a stepladder, Boles!” “Cmon, Dumbo, make like the Dorsey brothers and swing!” “Whassa madder, rookie? All the blood in you go into that stupid bat!”

Darius got me on four pitches, two quick strikes (the second one swinging), a teaser high for a ball, and a peppy slider on the outside corner I lunged at like a begi

The jeering stopped: I was history.

Junior and Dobbs went down too, Junior on an excuse-me nibbler back to Darius, Ski

“Pingless wonders,” Muscles said, trotting in from left after tossing his glove down. “Way to go, Darius.”

Philip Ankers took the mound for us, the B squad. A fifteen-year-old hurling against good journeymen players and cagey retreads. Nobody on A squad was less than thirty but Knowles, a twenty-something 4-F with the same million-dollar problem that’d kept both Mariani and Frank “I’ll Never Smile Again” Sinatra out of the Army, a punctured eardrum. But Ankers looked older than Knowles, with his greasy beard and the body of a pit bull.

In his first time out, Ankers had to face Hoey, Charlie Snow, and Muscles. He looked to have just two pitches: a fastball and a fadeaway. Today you’d call a fadeaway a screwball or a scroogie, and it’s not usually a pitch high schoolers master. Somehow, Ankers had. He’d start it off like a speedball, but finger-lip it. Just as it got to a righthand hitter it jerked in and dropped away. With that pitch, he made Hoey and Snow look like amateur-night contestants. They both rolled out to the infield. Musselwhite, though, muscled one to the right-field wall for a triple because Ankers slipped up and threw him a fastball low and inside. Muscles batted left, and that was the perfect pitch for him to cream. Ankers learned from his mistake. From then on, he threw nothing but fadeaways and teaser fastballs.

Jumbo was batting cleanup, but Jumbo couldn’t clean Muscles off third. Ankers kamikazied him with dipsy-doodle junk, mostly fadeaway variations. Jumbo took a couple, fouled off a couple, and ended up missing a pitch-like Muscles, he batted left-that tailed away to the outside corner. This swing dumped him on his rear, a fall that seemed to shake the whole infield. I thought it might take a crane to hoist him up again, but he rolled over to all fours and got slowly to his feet.

The game went on like that. Darius made us B-squad boys look like stooges; Ankers wriggled out of every potential trap with a killer fadeaway. In fact, by the fourth i

Goose eggs stacked up. Noon yawned like an oven. Each time Ankers escaped another A-squad wrecking crew with his shutout unblemished, Mister JayMac waved his regulars onto the field and yelled “Batter up!” at us scrubs. He looked to be steam-cleaning his gear from the inside out.

“We won’t git no rest,” Norm Sudikoff griped, “till the bastid has him a five-alawm heat stroke.”

I wondered about that. Should a rookie like Ankers pitch more than five hard-throwing i

Now I felt semipanicked. Guessing what Darius pla

“It’s the old red-stick wagger,” Hoey welcomed me. “Wave that baton, maestro. Conduct yourself back to the bench.”

I dug in. Darius threw me some chin music for a ball, but the pitch did what he wanted, moved me off the plate. Next, a curve on the outside corner, just beyond my swing, for a called strike. I edged up a little. The next pitch jammed me, a hundred-mile-an-hour bullet. I swung in self-defense. The ball hit my bat handle and nubbed out between Hoey and Curriden on a half dozen skittering hops.

Contact! On my follow-through, the bat’s barrel had splintered like kindling, helicoptered into the outfield, and landed on the grass. My broken bat had gone farther than the ball. I ran with five inches of bat handle in my fist. My hands and forearms stung from the vibes. Hoey made a grab in the hole and threw off-balance to Jumbo. Parris, umpiring at first, signaled me safe, and not one A-squad player yelped, not even Hoey.

Darius came down off the mound and ambled over to take Jumbo’s flip-back. “Danl,” he said, about twenty feet away, “I reckon you could outrun the word God.”

It took me a minute, standing there winded, to realize he’d complimented me.

But not much happened after my scratch hit. Junior struck out, and Dobbs blooped one to Knowles at second.

Sudikoff came up. He had bulk, but Darius owned him. If I wanted to get around the bases, I’d have to shove myself along and hope a passed ball, a wild pitch, or an error on an infield grounder assisted me. But despite his praise, Darius didn’t seem to think I’d steal. He pitched from a full wind-up, not a stretch. It worked because, after his second pitch to Junior, he whipped the return throw from Du

On his first pitch to Sudikoff, though, I got a decent lead and broke for second the moment Darius twisted into his wind-up. Bless his heart, Sudikoff lunged at an obvious ball, missing it by a foot or better, to help me out, and I did a quick down-and-up slide into second, where Hoey knelt for a throw that never came.

I’d stolen on Darius, not Du

“Like I say,” he said.

On his next offering to Sudikoff, I edged off second and darted for third as soon as his motion home committed him to throw. I barreled. Sudikoff laid off a low fastball-he’d already swung at one for me-and Du

All my B-squad teammates popped up from our bench to watch me slide. The peg from home had me nailed, but my toe hooking the corner of the base got under Curriden’s tag.

Nutter, coaching third, gave the safe sign. Mister JayMac, out from behind the plate, agreed. A cheer went up from the B-squad bench, the A-squad boys groaned.

Darius sashayed over, loosy-goosy, to get the ball from Reese Curriden. He gave me a smirk. The smirk didn’t seem to be at me, though, but for me. “G, O, D,” Darius said. From then on, he pitched from the stretch. I’d’ve been nuts to try to steal home on him, or on a catcher as smart as Du

Sudikoff flung his bat away. “Pesky damned nigger.”