Story #10: "The Knuckleball Artist" (Chapter 26)
A seized combine piston, a pinball flipper, a clean-and-jerk, and a hijacked school bus.
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CHAPTER 26
The Legendary 5.09(b)(2)
Reginald looked on at Phineas shaking off pitch after pitch — then thankfully getting settled on one he wanted.
The boy went into his wind-up.
Maybe it was more of a pitcher’s grimace, but at the barbershop, Al still stops trimming and takes a moment to remember: it was the nicest grimace ever to light up a young face in What Cheer, Iowa.
Curly-haired kid.
Short.
The pitch was what the small claims judge—volunteering at the plate that night—now calls the Legendary 5.09(b)(2).
*
The 5.09(b)(2) surpassed all understanding from the first moment.
Mid-windup, Phineas’ leg stopped short at its peak and froze up like a seized combine piston. The boy held the baseball in his outstretched arm, wrinkled his nose, and dropped it like a rotten banana peel.
The ball puffed harmlessly into the mound dirt right smack on its Yankee Stadium scuff mark.
But just as the “Bud Selig 2003 Major League Baseball” was about to shiver to a stop, Phineas kicked it towards home plate with the instep of his non-dominant left foot.
“Oh, no! I’m kicking it. Oh, dear!” Phineas cried out helplessly to the heavens.
Little Abhishek flapped his bat back and forth over home plate like an electrocuted pinball flipper.
Now just because Reginald had been freed from all the winning and losing nonsense, it didn’t mean he didn’t lean in and scratch his head.
But when he did stop scratching, a vision practically stepped out of a cornfield.
Reginald found himself looking out from the home dugout at Yankee Stadium.
*
The former Yankee watched Number 21 dribble the ball through the infield grass. His young soccer player was wearing pinstripes.
52,314 fans and not one of them made a peep. You could hear hot dog vendors making change.
“Oh, dear! Oh, dear!” the boy cried, overdramatically, even for the occasion.
Reginald watched the boy pulling his hair out for the benefit of 52,314 people. The Yankees fans were so gobsmacked they leaned forward like they were shooting off the ski jump over at Seven Oaks Recreation in Boone.
Somewhere up in the television booth, the play-by-play announcer repeated the boy. “Oh, dear.”
“Oh, dear, is right!” said the color man.
Phineas’ baseball did not go in a straight line. Balls never did when Phineas kicked them, not with his non-dominant left foot, anyway. So it was quite the back-and-forth journey.
Eventually, the Bud Selig 2003 Major League Baseball slid up a grassy NASCAR wall, then shot down the pitcher’s lane straightaway. It ping-ponged to the left off old What Cheer mine gravel no one had swept up for weeks, skipped like a stone to the right off the first base lime chalk line, cartwheeled off a misplaced stack of aluminum bats the kids had been warned about. It shimmied high off a sixteen-pound batting donut and shrugged low after putting a solid dent into the Everlast Pitching Machine, a contraption that hadn’t burped out a ball for twenty-one years.
*
Other than Abhishek flailing away at his Louisville Slugger Pinball Flipper, everyone in the Bronx and What Cheer knew where that ball was headed.
That baseball was headed for Pinball’s Slot.
After the shimmy high and the shrug low, Phineas had one last soccer kick left in him, and he took his time about it.
He switched over to his dominant southpaw kicking leg, curled and uncurled his toes inside his shoe to relax them, then closed his eyes and took his shot on goal.
You could hear that boy’s toe knuckles crack from What Cheer, Iowa to her sister city of the Bronx, New York.
*
From Reginald’s point of view back in Yankee Stadium, a surprise hole popped open underneath a backstop car insurance advertisement. It was like that hole had been waiting to tear open for twenty-one years.
Reginald saw his soccer player take off his smeared glasses, get down on his hands and knees like a golfer, and get ready to blow on that ball to push it through, if need be.
Just before it passed into Pinball’s Slot, What Cheer saw that baseball pull itself up on the highest pebble for one last pump of clean-and-jerk energy. The whole stadium went up on its toes. The Bud Selig 2003 Major League Baseball passed under the wire at the speed of an exhausted hitchhiker and rolled off toward the Sleepmobile in the parking lot.
There was a great stillness in What Cheer.
And in the Yankee Stadium dugout, Reginald could have sworn he heard his old manager whisper to him.
He might have even felt a pat on his back.
“Exactly like ‘03, son. Never forget it. That little bee of yours pulling out its landing gear and dropping into a tulip like that.”
No, it was definitely a pat on the back.
*
Back in What Cheer, the town took its eyes off the bee and the tulip and those heads rotated over to Pinball’s fence the speed of a weathervane.
It was like watching an Iowa tornado rolling in over the Nebraska state line. There was such a long pause before the Pinball Explosion that murmurs started to grow that maybe the old man wasn’t home.
Well, he was home.
The tornado started with the warning creak of a rocking chair. By then, it was long past time to run for cover.
“PINBALL!”
The angry old volunteer umpire shot up rigid and raged like he’d never raged before. The man crushed the unopened beer cans in his hands and sprayed those two beers like a Roman fountain. He hit the summit of Mount Cardiac.
Terror swept through the field like an electric current. Everyone in What Cheer knew what came next, and their eyes shot dropped down to the “O” in Cougars.
Pinball stood there with his arms up in a Biblical “Y,” waiting for it, waiting for it, waiting for it.
Tripod, the terrifying three-legged greyhound, would shoot out of the “O” in Cougars at any second.
Any second.
Any second.
And then that Iowa tornado spun into What Cheer.
The flap in the “O” in Cougars began to wiggle, and it began to waggle, then the most terrifying, ferocious, mean, unforgiving, brown little wet nose you’ve ever seen poked out from the blackest of black darkness behind the flap of the “O” in Cougars.
Well, the town couldn’t clear out of there fast enough.
Parents grabbed their youngest. Siblings raced towards the fastest tractor in the parking lot.
It was a decathlon. There were high vaults over the fencing and human javelins through the concession takeaway window. Eight lumberjack Cougars hurtled the left center scoreboard wall faster than an Olympics photo finish.
And off they went.
Out went Mary. Out went Myrtle. Out went the Liquor, Pancakes and Pharmacy kids.
Crazy Frank dropped his six-month Christmas tree.
The old folks from Final Sunset stood up and charged out of their wheelchairs and into the three-wheeled Greyhound. That bus took off like a hijacked school bus.
In the Misfits dugout, there was nothing left but a crunched-up lineup card and an asthma inhaler.
Cracker Jack everywhere.
*
In the end, not a player was left on the field or in the parking lot. There was no one and nothing to record what happened next.
Well—there was—but we’re coming to him.
Yes, indeed.
We’re coming to him.
👉🏻 “The Knuckleball Artist” continues tomorrow.
Reginald sees a mirage of Yankee Stadium, a vision, or maybe he was dreaming while awake .
“You could hear hot dog vendors making change.”
“Cracker Jack everywhere.”
The best description of a rolling ball in the history of, well, any one writing about a rolling ball. Seriously, even the greatest play-play announcer, could not hold a candle to this. And just an incredibly descriptive scene in What Cheer stadium. What a fun read . But wait! I knew the Sleepmobile has one last performance of her lifetime.
Jolly old toe cracking fun, Adam!
"Cracker Jack everywhere"!!!