Story #10: "The Knuckleball Artist" (Chapter 6)

What Cheer's town museum, an Etch A Sketch, a pinball machine, champagne on a racecar driver, Midwestern anger, Rule 5.09(b) 2, a three-legged puppy, a manhole cover, and the "O" in Cougars.

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Reginald and Phineas stood at home plate and looked out at the beaten up What Cheer Little League field.

“Well,” Phineas said, with a sigh so deep his baseball glove fell off. “It’s not Yankee Stadium.”

Reginald wasn’t so sure. When he felt down, he’d often sit in the stands staring at the field until the automatic field lights timed off. When things got particularly difficult, he stood on the pitching mound and looked at the empty backstop. When he grew outright desperate, he sat on home plate, looked out at the left-field scoreboard and tried to remember the past differently. So, the kid was wrong. It might not have been the Bronx, but it was certainly Yankee Stadium.

Other than the goose droppings that greased the base paths slicker than a roller rink, the field was in the general ballpark of Midwestern Sad. A wobbly wheel on the baseline chalk machine left the batter’s box looking like an Etch A Sketch. A center-field septic vent just poked up below the surface of the outfield hay. Half of What Cheer drove tractors to the game, but not one of them had the extra gas money to take a courtesy spin. To be honest, What Cheer’s people, mood, and economy were all hanging in there by a thread.

Every year on the eve of the season opener, somebody cut the bottom out of the backstop fencing with wire cutters. Any ball that skidded between a catcher’s legs shot right through the chain link hole, and headed out to the parking lot. Eventually, the Little League Board took a vote and decided to leave the slot open.

“Hullabaloo or no hullabaloo,” they agreed, “the catchers are going to need to focus and hunker down.”

The middle-schoolers called the field the “Pinball Machine.” The kids said it was almost the best part of Little League.

Almost.

Out in right, just over the fence, a broken-down house stood smack in the home run zone. A crazy, white-haired old man parked himself in a rocking chair on the broken-down back porch and watched the games. He sat in a vintage, beer-stained undershirt and dirty boxers, and as if that wasn’t enough to get a 6^th grader’s attention, he drank two beers from opposite sides of his mouth at the same time.

Pinball – the whole town called him Pinball – had the kind of messed-up hair you only get, how did they put it, “standing tall in a tornado.”

His birth name was Arthur Something-or-Other, and before he became so incredibly angry, he’d been a decades-long volunteer umpire, the most upright umpire the League had ever seen. Insofar as anyone took the time to rank umpires, he was far-and-away the “best.”

But his two decades as an upright umpire landed harder than a crop duster in fog. From 2003 on, it was nothing but small claims court and tough sledding between Pinball and the League Officials.

They called him Pinball because every time a ball slipped through the hole in the backstop, he shot up from his porch chair like a “firecracker gone off while napping.” Beer foam exploded around him like champagne over a racecar driver, and he’d cry out “Pinball” as loud and angry as a guy who had lost every fight of his life.

The kids agreed this, too, was also almost the best part of Little League.

Pinball crashed the crop duster at exactly 4:59 PM on July 31^st, the moment the Sleepmobile was burped out of the factory car wash. The baseball rule in question had something-or-other to do with players leaving the base paths and automatic outs. Pinball’s call ended the Championship Game, but not even the winning team agreed with it. What Cheer 2003 population 667 to Pinball 1.

The dispute ended up in a well-attended small claims court. “I get it, Arthur. You’ve been the best umpire we’ve ever seen, just or unjust, that’s my verdict. Also: you can never step onto the field again.” All the same, the judge felt Midwestern Terrible. “You can still come to the Banquet and pick up your Home Plate.”

Pinball did not attend the 2003 banquet to receive that year’s “Best Umpire Home Plate.”

Instead, he bought three things after leaving the courthouse: a three-legged greyhound runt, wire-cutters tough enough to tear apart backstop wire, and the run-down house behind the outfield fence in right.

You could argue each of those purchases backfired because every season, backstop by backstop, and game by game, he only got angrier and angrier. Eventually, he stopped petting the dog. He’d become an active volcano, and when a runner left the base paths like they had in the bottom of the 6th in the Championship game, he cried out in two-fisted rage.

“Rule 5.09(b) 2!”

“Pinball used to be able to see the future,” Phineas explained in what he assumed was a whisper, but a screen door momentarily slammed on a back porch out in right. He lowered his voice slightly in what he continued to assume was a whisper.

“He called balls and strikes before they even reached the plate, and he’d get them right, too. Kids tested him. He once threw out a bleacher full of visiting team parents before they even showed up.”

There were two back-to-back cracks of beer cans.

Reginald couldn’t help looking over, then wished he hadn’t. Pinball sat in his back porch rocking chair, sipping his beers and scowling straight at him.

Phineas paid him no mind, and for reasons Reginald couldn’t make sense of, Phineas went and removed home plate and carried it out to the center-field septic vent. The kid looked like he was carrying a four-hundred-pound manhole cover. Whatever he was doing, he’d done it before.

“He’s hungry. I must feed the beast,” Phineas called back, wheezing.

“Who’s hungry?”

“You’ll see.” Phineas stopped and turned. “Just admit you want to see.”

Reginald tried to say no, but it came out wrong:

“Yes,” he said.

“Now say go when I say go,” Phineas instructed.

He began to lean forward in anticipation like an Olympic hurdler. Reginald couldn’t help but say go, too, and Phineas shot off like he’d heard a starting gun. He proceeded to kick a baseball from the pitcher’s mound and dribble it with his non-dominant foot clear around Reginald then on towards the hole in the backstop fence.

“Are you ready?” Phineas yelled back over his shoulder.

Reginald tried not to, but he nodded yes. With the challenge of dribbling, the kid couldn’t take his eyes off his left foot to see, but somehow he knew the answer.

Phineas took a shot on goal with the baseball. It slipped straight under the fence and out into the parking lot towards the Sleepmobile.

This time, both Reginald and Phineas circled around towards the right field wall.

Pinball erupted and yelled out “Pinball,” beer spraying everywhere.

No news there.

But the second he cried “Pinball,” Tripod, Pinball’s three-legged greyhound, shot out through a doggie door in the middle of the “O” Pinball cut through the Cougars Volkswagen Dealership fence advertisement. He shot out of that “O” like a pinball kick hole, tore around the field like he was hitting pop bumpers, drop target bullseyes, and flippers.

With only three legs, Tripod couldn’t shoot out very fast, and he listed as you might imagine, but that old greyhound could still clear a goose-slicked field of Little Leaguers and their parents faster than you can say “Game Over.”

“And that’s not even the best part,” the players said.

The best part was that after players and parents were run out onto the gravel parking lot, Tripod retrieved all the baseball paraphernalia he could sink his teeth into. It didn’t matter what: bats, abandoned catcher’s mitts, batting gloves, batting donuts, even baseballs.

Then Tripod would drag the game’s quarry back through the “O” in Cougars.

Reginald was no exception to the general terror of Tripod, and our old Yankee hightailed it off the field to the safety of the dugout.

For reasons we’ll all need to speculate privately, Tripod didn’t leave Phineas quaking. The boy didn’t leave the field. Instead, he headed back out to center field where Tripod was straining mightily to drag the home plate manhole cover back to the doggy door.

Phineas picked up home plate for him and carried it towards the hole in Cougars and pushed it through the “O” himself. Dog and boy weren’t up to “pats and paws,” but Tripod limped around the boy with a faded memory of “throw the ball for me.” Or maybe no memory of that at all. Only Pinball really knew.

Phineas extended one of his legs in the air and shook it sideways like a dog finishing off a pee.

“See, Tripod, I have three legs, too.”

Tripod tilted his head in total confusion. There was no question this was a dog that could count to three, possibly to four.

Hunkered down by the juice cooler, Reginald heard Phineas laughing somewhere out in right. When he decided it was safe to look up, the kid was pretending to dribble an invisible ball back towards the indentation from home plate.

“Come out, come out wherever you are, Coach.”

Reginald emerged from behind the dugout fencing.

“He’s practically a puppy,” Phineas said, without looking back at Reginald.

“In the history of dogs no puppy ever got that angry .”

Phineas pointed out towards right. “Keep watching him.”

On his re-entry into the “O” – and this happened every last time – Tripod got stuck in the doggie flap.

It’s beyond me, but he could tuck a 38” baseball bat through it – which you’d think would be the tricky part for a three-legged dog – but he could never get that third back leg through. There was a trick to it he couldn’t remember, and every time he forgot, Pinball got extremely frustrated and had to prompt him.

“Tilt,” he shot up and yelled out, beer spilling all over his boxers.

But that was all the hint Tripod needed.

The three-legged greyhound angled down onto his non-dominant front left leg, tilted something like a Greyhound bus, then pogo-sticked through the "O” in Cougar’s. Don’t even try to imagine this.

Take it from the Little Leaguers: this was definitely the best part.

Pinball disappeared for a moment behind the fence. Moments later, Pinball mounted the home plate on the wall of his porch like a Banquet plate. The wall was crowded with two decades of trophies, one for every drained pinball.

You’d think there wouldn’t be room after all this time, but old Arthur Something-or-Other cleared a fresh angry spot on the nailed-up gun racks. You could hear him grunt. It was about as happy as the old guy ever got.

“That back porch wall is What Cheer’s only museum,” Phineas said.

Reginald looked at the field, then the kid, and the man, then the home plate, and the “O” in Cougars. It was dizzying, and he was struck with a sudden, overwhelming dread that his entire season was going to end up in that museum. He wanted to stretch the privacy sun blinds over Ú.Ú’s car windows and crawl into the Sleepmobile bedroom.

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