“Lot of people here for a Wednesday night softball game,” I say.
“Well, in the interest of what they call full disclosure, I may have put the word out that old 109 himself might be in attendance tonight,” he says.
“You sneaky son of a bitch.”
“Well,” Vince Tarplay says, giving me a whack to my good shoulder. “You got me there.”
As we walk in near the first-base dugout, I hear the biggest cheer I’ve heard in a good long while.
Since I really was still 109.
THIRTY-THREE
I RECOGNIZE A few guys on both teams from high school ball, and even a couple I played against all the way back in Little League. There are also a couple of photographers present—“Thanks again,pal,” I say sarcastically to Vince—and a young woman reporter from theGazette,along with one TV cameraman.
When the reporter comes over, reaching out with her tiny tape recorder and asking me how my recovery is going, I just say, “All I could ask for at this point.”
“Heard you might play tonight,” she says. “Is that true?”
“Fake news.”
She smiles and asks, “Is that even still a thing?”
“In this case it is.”
Vince, who’s able to talk me into things the way Gideon Garland could, persuades me to throw out a ceremonial first pitch—which he says would really be the first one like it in the history of the league—just because of the way the crowd has turned out to see me. I reluctantly agree but still feel funny doing it, and even funnier throwing the ball underhanded.
But I earn myself another cheer, even more behind it than the first one, when I deliver a perfect damn strike.
Then I wave to the crowd, walk over to the bench and take a seat next to Vince, his team’s left fielder, and ask if this is a big game for them tonight.
“It’s like you told me one time,” he says. “There aren’t any small ones.”
Between innings I try to be a good sport and pose for selfies with some of the players from both teams, some of them holding up cans of Lonerider and Big Boss and Green Man, all Carolina beers, because this isn’t just a fast-pitch league, it’s a beer league, too.
But the game I watch being played out in front of me is fairly high caliber for a beer league, and after just a couple of innings, it’s like any contest I’ve ever watched, in any sport:
I’ve already identified who the best players are.
In extra innings, the game still tied at 5–5, Vince makes a diving/sliding catch behind shortstop, lands hard, and comes up limping, and badly. It’s the last out for Rocky’s Ace Hardware, and right here the game turns into the old baseball cliché, the one about how the guy who makes the great play in the field always ends up leading off the next inning.
That guy is supposed to be Vince.
But he’s already back on the bench next to me, an ice pack on his bad knee, grimacing with pain and saying, “I’m done, dawg.”
Then he turns to me and says, “Go up there and hit for me.”
“It’s like I told you on our way here,” I say. “Not a chance in hell. The last time I swung a bat was in high school, and even if I was considering it, which I’m not, you know my right shoulder is shit these days.”
“Come on, man,” Vince says. “Even one-handed, you’re better than anybody else we can put up there.”
Suddenly I hear Taylor’s voice behind me. Somehow she’s shownup again when I least expect her to do that, sneaking up on me a little bit this time.
“You’ve never let a team down in your life,” she says.
“Yeah,” I say. “When it’s my team.” I shake my head. “This isn’t fair. From either one of you.”
“Hey,” Taylor says. “You’re the one who always told me that nobody ever passed a law saying that sports had to be fair.”
