When I lick my index finger, it briefly clings to the tongue’s surface like weak Velcro. I imagine a pale print, stamped in an inkpad of sunscreen and rosin, blooming across pink papillae. It’s bitter and dry.
Stultz signals for a mound visit and bounds up the clay keyhole path, a dated topological quirk signifying the park’s long-standing presence in the Great Lakes region. He steps in the divot at the foot of the mound and flips back his catcher’s mask.
“You alright?” he asks. My botched cutter was the third pitch to hit the backstop this inning. He glances down at my elbow. “Is it tight again?”
“Nothing hurts, really,” I say.
A pause.
“Actually, could I be candid with you?”
Stultz squints. “Like, now? Bet, I guess.”
I didn’t need an invitation to start rambling. I thought it might be nice to ask, though.
I confess that I can’t stop thinking about what I might look like from his view behind the plate. Embarrassing as it is to admit, I religiously watch the little abridged recaps of our games on YouTube when we’re back at the hotel. I feel this desperate need to hold a rotating, posable 3D render of myself in my mind, but I’m only ever able to see my side profile from the rear. I really can’t accept that’s what I look like. To anyone.
I hold up two mirrored L shapes with my thumbs and forefingers between our faces. The gesture wakes him up—he sharply inhales and his pupils constrict.
“That framing between the wire of your mask, from this angle, I’d imagine I look pretty imposing,” I continue, urgently enough to plow through any potential response. “But I just hate that the default broadcast angle has to be this unnatural view from behind. It’s nauseating to know they’re collecting hours of footage of me standing here, perpendicular to the camera’s field of vision, disclosing just how out of shape I’ve become to any loser bored enough to tune into a class AA baseball livestream while pretending to work. The video games always let you view it all from the catcher’s POV. Why can’t we switch it up sometimes, keep the audience guessing?”
Stultz says that if it makes me feel any better, he’s always felt that there’s something Rubenesque about a chubby pitcher: That your David Wellses and CC Sabathias of the world are, at least in his semi-qualified opinion, the position’s platonic ideal, well-suited to half-falling down a dirt slope toward a fixed target.
“They peaked at their heaviest,” he says, angling his right shoulder back toward home, hoping to steer the conversation toward an abrupt end. “Maybe just slow down on the post-game Uncrustables if it bothers you that much.”
Lacking the sensation of reassurance I required to throw another pitch, I yank the shoulder back so it’s once again parallel with my own. The confession didn’t take—I have to go deeper. I can tell Stultz is feigning eye contact, staring at the dark halo of batter’s eye behind me, projecting a vague sense of pity and confusion. He’s the one shaking off my signs now. I vie to regain control.
“Well, actually, the real real reason I’ve been so wild today is that I’ve been, like, totally consumed by terror since I stepped out of the bullpen. And it’s not nerves; not the yips. It’s a raw, creeping emptiness.
“First,” I explain, letting go, pace of speech quickening, “a chill spreads upward through my legs, then out through the arms before eclipsing the torso and head. Then, I can feel my heart pump this boiling heat through the arteries: It isn’t warmth, but a sharp, cleansing fire that seems to burn the fear away.”
I’m frenetic, gesturing to various body parts. The incidental noise in the park quiets, then abruptly goes silent.
“Damn, that’s crazy,” says Stultz, deploying a timeworn stock response. His eyes dart back and forth, looking for a way out of the exchange. An unsettling calm envelops the park. Nothing’s coming between us. Nothing’s coming between each thought, which chases the last like a handkerchief in the chain wrenched from a magician’s throat. An entr’acte might allow time to flow, things to happen. But nothing breaks.
I was trying to will myself through some at-bats as all of this is taking place inside me, I tell an unresponsive, unflinching Stultz, but that’s the trouble with baseball: you can’t run out the clock. As a pitcher, the flow of time starts and stops at your command, and if you’re ass enough, in theory, this could all go on for eternity as you fuel a perpetuum mobile around the diamond. One base-on-balls begets another. And today, I admit, after I walked batters one through three in quick succession, surrounded by the fruit of my futility, I could feel my humanness start to slough off the bone. I’m cooked. I’m nothing! I’m a floating presence in the center of a world. It all slows to a halt until I push off the rubber.
The ball, stitched tight, is a weightless roll in a bread basket. My hand is a glove within a glove.
*
We ride buses to hotels, sleeping head to foot on the floor, strapped into heating pads, massagers, and ice packs. Electric rental scooters take us to the park on road trips, six days a week. I down a flat white with an extra shot each morning and I pace around the room until workouts, ripping digital trading card packs on my phone as my nerve endings tremor. I’m so tired yet awake that all hairs on my body stand at attention like antennae, attuned to potential stimulation. I need my heart to beat faster until I’m submerged in the mindlessness of movement. The familiar ache in my shoulder is a comforting reminder of the life I lead. I’d panic if it wasn’t there.
My roommates and I vivisect DoorDashed McDoubles and form chimeric burgers with five to six patties each. Discarded buns pile up on the desk. The shortstops need their calories. Stultz stands barefoot on a large ribbed foam roller and rocks back and forth.
The collective restlessness is palpable in the mornings. If hotel rooms are liminal spaces, the minor league is a network of liminality. Our egos slowly dissolve over six months spent in a near-constant state of waiting. We putter around our two-bed suites before the park opens, when we burrow into the weight room until it’s time to come up for air. I join the relievers, corralled into the bullpen in our matching jackets, and ride the pine for three hours, keyed up on Red Bull and dip. Maybe I’ll be called in to throw fifteen pitches.
A benchful of knees bounces with anticipation. Perform well enough, and maybe you’ll earn the right to continue waiting in AAA, enjoying marginally cushier amenities while still vying for a chance at a September call-up. If that never happens (and it most likely won’t), well…I don’t know. Even when I’m in a spiraling mood, my train of thought stops there.
*
The index finger locks its neighbor’s flesh into a seam. I cycle grips between curve and cutter, fist nested in leather.
Stultz and I could have been marooned here at the center of the world for two minutes or two hours. It all feels the same: time has completely stalled. I’m pacing from one end of the rubber to the other, two steps from toe to heel. If I stop talking, I might phase out of existence. Stultz is a human microphone, still and absorbent before me, lips pursed as if he could respond at any moment. He does not. He cannot.
Lipscombe stepped out of the box after I brushed him off the plate with the passed ball from earlier. He called for time and he got it. His left cleat is still fixed en pointe, stuck halfway through tracing a line in the dirt, a tic he often performs between pitches. His outstretched palm signals a pause to the umpire and his left hand presses his bat into the earth, frozen in place. Like, literally frozen in place.
He has a Wikipedia page. When it’s too warm in the suite to sleep, I scroll through the articles of organizations’ AA affiliates and see whose names have hyperlinks. Lipscombe, (born Sept. 4, 2003), was drafted 52nd overall out of college, where he excelled as a middle infielder with a plus speed tool and an average swing with good upside. Bats right; throws right. He was a shortstop at Arizona State but has played more second base since signing, as his arm leaves something to be desired. His .726 OPS is merely fine at this point in time, but for a guy his age, he seems to be on a fast track to the majors. He’ll grow into his body.
Lipscombe received a $1.3 million signing bonus upon joining the org.
My name in the collapsible box under the team’s article is just unclickable black text. I’m lucky to even exist on a Baseball Reference page, with a pasty headshot next to my name. I wish I hadn’t felt compelled to smile when they took my photo. Since I landed in AA a year ago, my severed head’s been fixed in this “aw shucks, just happy to be here” ass expression. Totally auraless. I’ve never been happy to be here! Is anyone?
I, (Born Nov. 22, 1999), am 25. I was drafted in the 17th round, 518th overall.
So far this year, I’ve logged a 5.38 ERA with a WHIP that eclipses 1.4. I’ve already felt stagnant here in AA, and my performance this year has dampened my hopes of ever getting out. Recent scouting reports have noted a drop in command (evident in today’s poor showing) and decreased spin rate across my arsenal, which can be attributed to the elbow tightness I’ve been experiencing. I’m not so much in a rut as I am coming to terms with my own limits.
Researching myself only intensifies my lingering premonition of doom. I try to avoid that whenever possible.
Despite it all, here I am perched on the peak, staring through the Stultz-body into a motionless crowd, without focus.
Empty seats, elderly couples in bucket hats who fill out scorecards to whittle away time; sunburnt scouts aiming radar guns in my direction; kids clutching sundae helmets and the large holographic drink cups emblazoned with a bat-wielding squirrel distributed at the gate for the day’s promotional giveaway. They all become pointillist daubs on a canvas stretching around me in a horseshoe shape. But each individual is also held rigid in place by some unseen force, stuck mid-bite, mid-jot, mid-phrase.
As a kid, when I ripped a pack of Upper Deck cards on rides home from Wal-Mart, I was fascinated by the blurred backdrop of each photo, blotting out masses of bodies in the stands. Colors formed shapes. Shapes formed messages.
The first time I felt a premonition of my death, I was ten years old, sitting next to my mother at church, pushing the heels of my palms into my closed eyes. The world became static. The static flattened out into four planes: beneath me; beside me; above me. I was seated in a waiting room, facing a door I didn’t dare open.
The wet funk of hot dogs boiled en masse hangs in place, not a whiff but a presence I continually perceive. I think I’m hungry.
*
sno-ball
leather lump in my hand
white coconut flake
licking whipped shortening
from a strip of cardboard
the laces scrape my tongue
*
Brady owns an Android, and his Snaps are often pixelated and poorly lit.
I open his latest message and can barely detect the contours of his face in a pane of dark digital globules.
“streaks,” reads its caption.
I point my phone over the back of my bus seat and reply with a blurred photo of the varsity team: “streaks.”
Emily’s pic is next in the queue.
“your gonna kill it as usual babe u got this!!!!!”
She wears a cybernetic crown of flowers in her curls, and a translucent purple haze washes over the backdrop of lockers. In grade school, Emily tells me, her classmates voted for her to crown the statue of Mary in the courtyard with a wreath of flowers for Mother’s Day. My mother tells me that she’s quite pretty, and that we make an adorable couple.
I can recognize beauty when I see it, though it often scares me too much to appreciate.
{During our eighth grade trip to a Youth Orchestra performance, I found myself racing to the restroom during the second movement of Tchaikovsky’s “Symphony No. 5,” so moved by the fluttering interplay between oboe and brass that I began to panic. As I stumbled between rows of folded chairs, legs quivering in an attempt to steady myself, time began to fold in on itself. I noticed a crumpled Wint-O-Green Life Savers wrapper by my left foot, when suddenly, I heard someone whisper my name. I turned, and Kieran waved me down from six rows back, then flipped his eyelids inside out. This did little to calm my nerves. I charged forward a few steps, before noticing the same piece of green debris on the floor, a few strides ahead. As soon as I became aware that this was indeed the same litter I’d spotted a second earlier, I was powerless to do anything but look back when I heard my name yet again. Same Kieran; same facial contortion. Over the next fifty to sixty cycles of the same looped experience, I began to wonder whether I’d been divinely assumed into some penal colony of perception. After all, over the past year, I’d compulsively scrawled “FUCK” in 48 times in 12 symmetrical columns in the back cover of my Language Arts textbook, swiped my mom’s credit card to purchase $9.99 in Farmville currency, and couldn’t stop beating off to the softcore cosplay pinups I’d discovered on the “Lifestyle” section of a gaming magazine’s website, and I’d neither confessed to nor repented of any of these grave-and-or-mortal sins during our monthly trips to the chapel. By the hundredth time I gazed into the backlit flesh of Kieran’s pink inner eyelid, counted like a rosary bead, I screamed at God to please please please let me go on living. Or, at least have the mercy to strike me dead. Non-existence would be preferable to whatever this was. A bolt of static entered my right temple, first as a barely perceptible zap, but eventually, a warm vibration that permeated my entire body. As the ripples reached my toes, I noticed that I was standing at the sink, splashing water on my raw, salty cheeks. Overwhelmed with gratitude for the gift of sequentiality, I dried my hands with a brown paper towel and noticed a poster that read “Buster Posey Says: Keep All Your Bases Covered! Redeem Your ‘Straight A’ Report Card For Free Regular Season Tickets!” For years, I had begrudgingly acknowledged my precocious talent for pitching, joining the travel team for weeklong tournaments over the summers and enduring after-school instruction at the pitching tunnel with some washed up semi-pro hurler. But it was then, basking in the grace of San Francisco’s baby-faced backstop, that I knew I was called to the sporting life.
After my experience at the symphony, I’d committed every evening to hurling pitches at the mesh screen in our backyard until I could hit all of its nine segmented strike zone targets with each of my pitches on command. I’d cut sugar from my diet and worked my core and shoulders at the gym to the point of agony. At times, it was difficult for me to lift a fork at dinner. By the time I’d tried out for the team in my freshman year, I had filled out and improved enough to surprise not only myself, but the school’s coaching staff. At fourteen, I was already starting—and excelling—on the varsity team, and my velocity and spin rate was even catching the attention of scouts. The recognition bled out into my school life as well. Suddenly, I was noticeable in a way I’d never been. Teachers and classmates I’d never spoken to somehow knew my name. Like most kids, I’d often wished for popularity, but suddenly attaining it felt like resigning to a life under surveillance. A whole parish’s prism of unfulfilled ambitions were continually projected onto me at once. The light was blinding.}
My relationship with Emily simply materialized out of thin air that year. It was the sort of deal where you receive a text from a mutual acquaintance that their friend likes you likes you, and the next moment you’re expected to suck their face behind a strategically opened locker door and carry their textbooks to class. Her friends will spectate from around the corner. Later, in those months after graduation, you’ll run into them at CVS, and they’ll tease you about the way you’d hook your arms around her shoulders when you embraced, as if preparing to lift a Doberman. While these developments were no doubt exciting for a still-pubescent boy, any sense of affection I felt was undergirded by fear. My parents were happy for us. Adults looked at us with an approving nod. Our monthly anniversary selfies garnered sizeable engagement across social media platforms. Lying awake at night, I’d be overcome with nausea: a sensation that somehow translated to a certainty that if I fucked things up, I’d be pulled back into the time trap, crushed by waves of stillness and the urge to masturbate while imagining walls of bare, anonymous thighs pocked with keratosis and razor bumps.
Her Snap can go unanswered for the time being. I close my eyes and lie back against the bus seat, torn pleather poking shoulder blades. The window is slightly cracked, spitting plosives on my forehead. My seatmate Whelan, first base, is solid and wide and can’t help it that he’s pinning me to the wall, elbow digging into a sore spot on my slack bicep flesh. It feels nice. Someone who’d leave their girlfriend on read while stuck on the bus deserves to squirm. I cycle in and out of half-sleep while my subconscious mind replayed lossy footage of a first-base coach being struck in the temple by a foul ball. I’d first seen the clip on a morning SportsCenter broadcast while eating a toasted English muffin with poorly-stirred “natural” Smuckers chunky peanut butter, which dripped oil on to my wrist as the skipper clutched his skull, motionless on the turf, only to be loaded onto a stretcher.
Pitchers are called to martyrdom. Your team’s bats can be alive; everything can go right; but if your miserable day on the mound outweighs your teammates’ success, the blame squarely falls on you for lobbing a meatball to the opposing team’s cleanup man. You are futility itself.
During Confirmation, I chose St. Sebastian as my patron; I’d been handed a holy card during mass that depicted him tied to a tree by his forearms. Two arrows pierced the skin of his torso, which was muscled, yet soft and unblemished. His wounds were bloodless, his lips plump and pink with life. Nobody this beautiful could ever truly die. The Baroque reproduction, though tiny enough to fit in my palm, was one of the most striking works of art I’d ever seen. Just looking at it made my heart race. I carried it in the back pocket of my pinstripe sliding pants during games: Each run I allowed would be shot in my ribs.
The ideal pitcher is self-sacrificing. He gives himself willingly to the enemy, and does not show emotion when he fails. Though he sets time in motion, he is not a decision-maker. It is his catcher who sets his strategies, analyzing the batter’s psychological profile and converting it into a hand signal, dangled in front of his crotch as he squats behind the plate. Curve down and away. Fastball up and in. Slider in the dirt.
Much of my time on the mound over the past year and a half has been spent looking into the white striped expanse between Christopher’s legs. In this space, I receive oracular visions, translating combinations of digits and gestures into arcs, dips and rotations. Two fingers. A pat on the left inner thigh. These details are important.
As Christopher stares intently at his phone across the aisle from me, I continue to silently observe. He’s a senior, and though he’s shorter than me, he seems much more grown. Even with the extra muscle I’d put on in recent months, I feel like a scarecrow mounted on my little dirt hill. I’m gangly and awkward, and a strong gust of wind could blow me over. Christopher is solid: anchored to the earth. I put my full trust in his guidance: In return, I’ll take the arrows.
*
A new bus. Considerably larger. Considerably more cramped. I offer to sleep on the tread at Stultz, but he refuses. I don’t protest. Our relationship is endearingly paternalistic: At least, it is the way I see it. Even at 6’5”, I fancy myself fragile, gobbling spat larvae from the maw of whatever bird will take me in. He silently passes a crinkling bag of Corn Nuts up from below, and I shake a few into my palm. Trips can pass without so much as a word. No need to expend the energy. We communicate in shrugs and gestures. A scapular twitch through the half-neck pillow pressed against my shin says, “I need you to lay off the slider tonight; your ground ball rate’s slipping.” Someone spills a bottle of chewable Pepto-Bismol, and pink orbs traverse the aisle, collecting at Stultz’s knees. He is unfazed. I open a StreamEast link on my phone and quickly close two pop-up tabs with contents that’d put de Sade to shame. Skenes shoves in the lagging window. Are we surprised? I admire the tunneling.
“Split, down and away,” Stultz mutters aloud, face covered by an empty Jansport.
Skenes nips the corner with a splitter and DeJong chases. Three up, three down.
Commercial break in progress.
Speedway coffee burns the roof of my mouth. A lift in my stomach. I can feel each follicle puncture the scalp. It’s therapeutic.
*
“Pretend you’re pulling off a tight headband. Let your forehead be smooth. An invisible liquid with the consistency of honey is melting on your scalp.”
Jaw; shoulders; biceps; stomach; calves. According to my trainer, this is supposed to help transition into deep sleep. Acknowledge the feeling of a clenched muscle and let it go. Imagine that your body has never existed. Boxed into an office park’s Days Inn, it’s not that hard to do. Only the post-nasal drip pooling in the back of my throat reminds me that I am, indeed, material. The room overlooks a sludge pond and a sad excuse for a picnic table.
According to the unit beneath the window, it’s 67.7 degrees in here. If it were up to me, I’d drop the temperature even lower.
I roll off the edge of the mattress and pad over to the side of the neighboring bed, where Stultz is totally zonked out. He never snores. Watching him in this state reminds me how to sleep when I forget. I envy catchers. Their heads are so full of data, yet so clear. His eyebrows are like caterpillars, which headbutt at the crest of each breath. I’d like to jar them and keep them as pets until they knit chrysalides. I yawn, then crawl back into bed. There are butterflies in my dream.
*
When I decide to eat the baseball, it doesn’t taste as bad as I’d expect. This was a fresh one, to be fair, tossed over fresh and unspoiled by the umpire after my last wild pitch. It’s bitter and pure and clean. It could be an acquired taste. I’m gnawing on what fits in my mouth, but the leather doesn’t give. The tooth marks I leave behind don’t last much longer than a second or two. Mucus and saliva drip down my lower lip as I keep clamping down in an attempt to tear the flesh away.
I drop to the ground in pain and I feel the wind on the back of my neck: a miracle.
An incisor chips. I cry out, wipe my chin, and there’s blood dripping through my fingers. The flow of time comes crashing in like a surprise downpour. The ambient chirping of insects; the voltaic hum of the video scoreboard with dead pixels; the collective murmur of the crowd; the incidental Morgan Wallen piped in through a trebly P.A.; the dropped bat clattering against dugout concrete—I’d never realized the sheer volume it all added up to until these factors were removed.
Stultz is running toward me, begging me to stop. He covers his ears and falls to his knees at my side.
“I don’t understand,” he sputters.
I look up and smile, bloodied and broken. The crowd screams in confusion. Trainers and infielders rush to the scene.
I rest my head in Stultz’s lap. He strokes my hair, instinct kicking in.
For the first time in my life, I’m happy.
