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

A shaving cream commercial, a slugger in a red dress, the Iowa Speedway, peeing under pressure, the dandelion plains of right field and Babe Ruth pointing out to the scoreboard in left.

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CHAPTER 10

SIX DEFENSIVE OUTS AND ONE AT BAT

The following Tuesday Reginald met the full team at practice, and he didn’t know what hit him. The size of them! He lined up his Cougars on the third base line and told them to sing the national anthem. He needed to catch his breath and take a minute to stare. Not counting Phineas, who looked like a missing tooth in the middle of these boy-beasts, every one of them could have starred in a shaving cream commercial.

From the moment he’d accepted the bet with The Boil to save the Sleepmobile, Reginald imagined he’d be coaching a ragtag band of misfits: a pitcher that sucks his thumb, twins that bat at the same time, the slugger who sleeps below the overpass in a red dress. He took it for granted it would be nearly impossible to win with whatever team The Boil tricked him into coaching. But this! This was too good to be true.

And of course it was too good to be true. An internal voice, no louder than the volume of a yip, observed that these were the teams that lost the last game of the season like clockwork. If you know the slightest thing about real life, then you know that no amount of corked bats, stolen signs, or mean fathers in the bleachers could save these furniture movers from a tomboy with a 12-6 curveball. In the final game, it’s the misfits that end up jumping up and down on home plate.

In the meantime, so much went right over the next three weeks, Reginald’s chances of winning the championship and hanging on to the Sleepmobile were “astro-stellar,” according to Phineas. Other than gentle course corrections on all the trash-talking of the opposing team’s parents, Reginald didn’t even need to coach them. They were baseball robots.

All great players are the same, they say. It’s the terrible players that are terrible in their own ways. If there was a nagging question mark on Reginald winning the Championship, it was the firm Little League requirement to play Phineas for six defensive outs and a single at bat.

Putting Phineas in the game kept it close. Even in the barren, dandelion plains of Little League right field, a player like Phineas can do a lot of damage over the span of six defensive outs.

Phineas pleaded with Reginald not to send him out.

“Please don’t put me in. It could still rain. They could call it in the sixth.”

“A rule is a rule, kid. You’re playing. When we start losing, I’ll rethink everything, including all this trash-talking.”

To put it Iowa Polite, the problem was that Phineas tried.

No matter how much he promised not to try when he stepped up to the plate or stumbled bravely onto the field, when a baseball left a bat he couldn’t help chasing it. The smallest Texas League popup in his direction cleared the bases.

“Phineas, you run around right field like you’re chasing pigeons.”

At the plate, he had the opposite problem. He couldn’t bring himself to swing the bat.

“Don’t even worry about hitting it, Phineas. Close your eyes and swing. Accidents happen.”

But no matter how much he nodded like a dashboard bobblehead, the bat remained glued to his shoulder. Phineas watched helplessly as pitch after pitch blew past him. He might as well have been trackside at the Iowa Speedway.

And still the Cougars won.

By the time the Cougars hit 5-0, the word was out, and weeknights half the town showed up to see Phineas. They were as split down the middle as an Iowa caucus. The right half of the town rooted. The wrong half mocked. Some switched sides between innings. Iowans are just like that.

Whatever camp they were in, they all yelled out the same thing when the ball was in play. All the way down to the sporting goods store you could hear cries of “catch it” and the crying through laughter.

“Catch it! Catch it!”

Plop.

“It’s right in front of you! It’s in front of you!” they howled.

And yet…

It amazed Reginald that not a single at-bat went by when the kid didn’t step up to the plate like Babe Ruth and point out to the scoreboard in left. In his mysterious way, he always had a “game face” when he jogged out of the dugout.

In Game 7, the other team’s coach – a mom, no surprise – called for him to be deliberately hit-by-pitch so he could get on base at least once that season.

Well, Phineas slow-walked that HBP with his arms held up so high in the air you’d think he’d hit a walk off grand slam. Half of the town cheered for him. The right half, anyway.

For all the unfolding disaster, none of it stopped Phineas from jogging off the field and waving to the opposing team’s parents cheering him on.

“No autographs today, my friends.”

His brave face didn’t last in the shadows of the dugout. Between innings Phineas always ended up hiding his head under a towel with the same coach-player back-and-forth.

“You need to stop trying, Phineas.”

“I tried not to try!”

“There’s no trying in baseball!”

When the sniffling subsided and Phineas stopped blowing his nose through the towel over his head, it always ended the same.

“I need to pee.”

By Game 6, Reginald started to piece the peeing together. Under pressure, the kid couldn’t hold his water.

“Alright. Go pee, but hurry we still need to get through another three outs in right.”

Phineas would wander out to the poison ivy baseball cemetery to pee. Looking at him out there at the tree line, Reginald decided it was a small consolation The Boil never came to his son’s games or saw the kid peeing with a towel over his head.

So you can imagine the drive back to the house with Reginald and little Babe Ruth was mostly quiet.

Mostly.

“Alright, kid. It’s safe. You can take the towel off now,” the kid’s Little League coach said.

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