Story #10: "The Knuckleball Artist" (Chapter 23)

A prayer circle, Brother Phineas, Gene Hackman, the Almighty, "Bud" Selig, an ice cream cone and a gum bubble.

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This was one of the hardest chapters to get right. Lots coming together now. Thanks for hanging in there with me.

CHAPTER 23

4:59 PM, June 3rd, 2024

In a pre-game prayer circle assembled around the Iowa state flag pole, the Cougars lined up by batting average, and, well, the size of them! They were Canadian lumberjacks. Stand them up toe-to-head and they’d grown an extra player since they’d fallen out of first place.

Coming so close to prom night, they were all a little shy to kick off the pre-game prayer. So it was decided that it fell to the player with the worst batting average. All eyes turned to Phineas, who was batting .000.

“We don’t have all day. Go, loser. Start.”

The team captain said this softly so the Almighty wouldn’t hear.

Phineas cleared his throat. The awesome responsibility made him want to giggle. Since everyone’s eyes were tightly shut, he danced a quick hokey pokey for the Almighty.

He began.

“Heavenly Father, we know you’ve had your hands full with the Misfits this season, but if it’s not too big a miracle, can you just be a fan?”

The lumberjacks had no idea what all that was about.

After that, the prayers cycled up through the batting order.

“I’m sorry about Saturday, if you were there, and I know you can be everywhere sometimes, I sure hope you weren’t in the back of the pickup.”

“Our record surpasses all understanding. Look at them over there, Father.”

“Please bat Brother Phineas at the bottom of the order.”

“You better be listening, Phineas. If he doesn’t do it, then I will,” the biggest, meanest lumberjack said.

The whole team crossed themselves for the guaranteed win and stared up at the Iowa State flag to pray for the State Capitol.

Amens and high fives.

The Almighty had his work cut out.

*

But the Almighty didn’t hear a word of it. He was sitting quietly on the bench in Misfit Tailoring’s dugout.

Because there were a lot of different religions on the Misfits—as is often the case on shorter teams: the fewer inches, the greater the denominations.

Their coach had them “Pray the Hoosiers.” That’s what he called it.

All the hands shot up.

“I can start,” said the boy who slept under the underpass. “Forget about the crowds, the size of the school, their fancy uniforms, and remember what got you here.”

“We don't care what the scoreboard says at the end of the game—in our book, we're gonna be winners,” said the fat twins with the candy-stuffed waist belts.

Brother Philip in the red dress called out, “How far is it from the free throw line to the basket?”

Little Abhishek responded, “I believe you'll find it's the exact same measurements as our gym back in Hickory.”

Together they sang, “Fifteen feet.”

And that was that. Anyone who’d seen a single baseball movie could tell you Cougars Volkswagen didn’t stand a chance against Misfit Tailoring.

And Amen to that.

“Play ball,” said the Lord.

*

This is where my memory gets a bit dim. As these things do, for the first five innings or so, the game see-sawed back and forth, mostly on account of the usual miracles and mischief: somebody spiked the wrong water cooler. The heart of the Misfits’ lineup squatted so far down their strike zones were the height of coiled-up caterpillars.

Big Dottie’s father finally showed up at the game sober. She hit the go-ahead homer and gave everyone the finger to stick it to them. It broke your heart in the best way.

Top of the sixth, “Too Tall,” the asthmatic boy who always swung with his eyes closed, well he finally made contact. The whole thing was “goosebump beautiful,” as they say in Iowa.

*

In the bottom of the sixth, the outfield clock approached 4:59 PM on June 3^rd, 2024, twenty-one years to the minute from The Greatest Pitch in the History of Baseball.

There were two outs.

The count was “O” and two.

The best pitcher in the history of What Cheer stood on the mound for the Cougars. He was the meanest, cheatingest, ugliest thirteen-year-old lumberjack ever to throw a hundred-mile-an hour Little League fastball.

As for Coach Phineas, he hadn’t had a wrong move in him the entire game. There was no Misfit Amen big enough to take it away from him.

He couldn’t take it watching from the bench, so the whole game, Reginald had sat in the driver’s seat of The Sleepmobile. He couldn’t make out the scoreboard from his angle after the second inning, so he had to listen to the cheering from one set of stands to the other and back again.

Reginald heard a Cougar parent cry out, somewhat prematurely, “We’ve won.”

So the season and The Sleepmobile’s twenty-one-year fate hung in the balance of a single strike. A single pitch. If you’ve ever had to throw a single pitch, then you know it is the toughest kind to throw.

Reginald rubbed the worn leather stitching on the steering wheel. It had been a long road together for the two of them.

But something wasn’t right, and he knew it down to the bottom of his baseball heart.

“This might be goodbye, Ú.Ú., and if it is I’m sorry, but I need to do what I’m about to do.” Maybe he was expecting her to answer somehow, but she held her tongue. Reginald patted her dashboard—slowly, then slower still. He said his own small prayer, a good Iowa man’s prayer, and he got his big long legs out of the old car, as awkward as ever.

When he stepped down into the dugout, there was only Phineas.

The boy turned and looked at Reginald.

The count was three and two.

“You’re going to see it, coach! The Sleepmobile is yours. I’m winning it for you,” the boy said.

Reginald nodded in an “I hate to break it to you” way. He stepped up on the dugout stairs and looked out at the town of What Cheer, Iowa. Both bleachers turned to watch The Yipper in the dugout.

He looked back at them.

Somebody called out, “The Yipper!”

Out in right behind the wall, Pinball got up slowly from his chair. He went to the wall of his porch museum, reached all the way up to the top for one particular baseball, looked at it, then threw it out onto the field as angry as ever.

Pinball had a good arm.

It skidded past the second baseman, landed on the pitching rubber, looked like it was going to come to a rest there—but then didn’t. It gathered steam again, rolled down the other side of the mound, continued into the dugout, on down the concrete steps, and settled directly below Reginald’s dominant right foot, where he pinned it to a complete stop.

Reginald knew what ball it was before he even picked it up, but he took the moment to look all the same.

On one side it read “Official Major League Baseball.” It was signed by the 2003 commissioner Allan “Bud” Selig.

It was the ball he’d thrown for the Greatest Pitch in the History of Baseball, the same ball he’d set on the mound the night he arrived on the Greyhound bus from the Yankees and said goodbye to baseball. It had been thrown exactly once.

The former Yankee spun the ball in his hand until he found the imprint of four fingernail grooves. He matched his fingernails to the grooves. They were a perfect fit.

Reginald took a long moment, snow-coning the ball in and out of his long fingers, before letting it come to a stop in a perfect knuckleball grip. And then he knew, even if he knew all along.

It was the game or it was the boy.

“Phineas,” Reginald said, still staring at the ball. “You’re pitching.”

“No, I’m not,” Phineas responded. He looked beyond terrified. “I’ve already been in, and I’m the coach.”

“I’m the general manager. You’re fired.”

The kid started searching for his misplaced glove. Reginald stopped him.

“Give me your hand, son.”

Reginald took Phineas’ hand and set the grip of the ball, guiding his fingernails to the grooves where he’d held the ball before that miraculous first pitch.

“You’re our closer, son,” Reginald said quietly.

“I can’t,” Phineas said.

“Then go out there and don’t. You’re my closer.”

It was so quiet you could hear the cotton candy.

There was silence in the stands as Phineas headed to the mound. When he stumbled on the grass verge on the third-base line, the Misfits bench gasped. Phineas had never seemed shorter, partly because Reginald had patted his curly hair down in a brief display of go-get-’em affection, but mostly because the boy was anxious and slouching, like any ordinary 4’ 6” sixth grader would be with his own team throwing their mitts on the ground. In the Misfits’ dugout they were hopping up and down like they were at a 4-H Fair sack race.

Phineas ignored them all. A big sigh shuddered through him. For a moment, he was going to take a bow, but not this time, and not doing that felt different.

Instead, he removed his grimy glasses and cleaned them very slowly, holding them to the sun. When he was done, he tucked his shirt tail back in and cinched his belt as tight as he could get it.

Somewhere Pinball cracked two beers.

Phineas took his place at the pitching rubber and looked out at the stands with his goldfish eyes. He wiped his mouth with his shoulder and rotated his neck. He rubbed up the baseball. He took his sweet time. He looked at the stands, and the feeling grew.

Reginald called out from some faraway place a million miles from the pitcher’s mound, “You’ve got this.”

Phineas slotted his fingernails into the grooves of the ball thrown for the Greatest Pitch in the History of Baseball.

And for reasons I will never be able to explain, when the boy closed his eyes, he heard Yankee Stadium.

He was announced by a booming public address system. A great rolling wave circled the stadium. The hot lights of the scoreboards lit the perfect infield. The baseline chalk was fresh. The stadium was one—every fan was a Yankee fan.

At full roar.

When Phineas reopened his eyes, Yankee Stadium was gone. The boy stood on a beat-up Little League field in What Cheer, Iowa, in a town that hadn’t paid its outfield mower bill in twenty-one years.

You could hear a scoop of ice cream slipping off its cone.

But Phineas had never felt more confident in his life.

The world was easy. Not having friends was easy. Baseball was easy. Even his father was easy now, and the harder he dug his nails into the ancient grooves of that major league baseball, the simpler and clearer his life became. He was afloat on the River of Mastery.

Phineas’ windup was motion of balletic grace. He crisply snapped up his short left leg. His pitching arm strained back and deep, the arrow drawn, his face grimacing with the exertion of a 4’ 6” kid’s equivalent of a 100-mph fastball.

He knew exactly who he was—in front of the only world he’d ever known.

He was Phineas.

“Come on, kid. Come on. Come on. Come on,” Reginald whispered to himself.

Reginald heard his old manager Yankee whisper.

“I’ve seen everything I’m ever going to see, but I haven’t seen this.”

*

Of course, it wasn’t a hundred-mile-an-hour fastball he threw. It wasn’t a curve ball or a slider or a changeup. It wasn’t a splitter or a forkball or a screwball. It was, as the 6’ 4” coach would momentarily witness, the Greatest Pitch in the History of Little League Baseball.

That young man let it slip from his fingers like he was shooting a three-pointer with a child’s balloon. It slid up the NASCAR wall and shot down the straightaway. It ping-ponged to the left, skipped like a stone to the right, cartwheeled through the air, shimmied high and shrugged low. The batter’s caterpillar knees toppled. The umpire threw himself to the dirt from terror, but the catcher let that little bee drop into its tulip.

Dust drifted out of the catcher’s mitt like a puff of pollen.

It was 4:59 PM on June 3^rd, 2024, twenty one years to the second since Reginald Perry had thrown his own Greatest Pitch in the History of Baseball.

Reginald looked on from the dugout steps. He was leaning over onto one knee. The one-time Yankee couldn’t have moved any less, but if you were right up close, you would have seen the tiniest squint and shake of his head.

The kid had done it, and the only world that mattered in the boy’s whole world had seen it. What Cheer, Iowa knew.

“Yes,” he whispered to himself.

*

“No,” came a response from behind him.

When Reginald turned, The Boil was standing at the door of the dugout, holding the overhead bar.

The two adversaries stared at each other for what felt like twenty-one years.

It was Reginald “The Yipper” Perry who broke the silence. For once, Reginald thought of the right thing to say.

“Out of my dugout, Triple-A. No minor leaguers in here.”

It turns out being mean to the right person can be a bit satisfying.

The Boil did a pull-up on the doorway bar.

“Sure, Yipper.” The Boil smirked at him, which wasn’t at all what Reginald expected.

“Change in the deal now, effective immediately, Yipper.”

“What are you talking about?”

“What’s our deal, Yipper?” The Boil said.

“I don’t remember.” Reginald was getting awfully confused again. Somewhere a million miles away, they were cheering for the boy out on the field.

“Our deal,” The Boil said, pulling himself up again. “Our deal was I can always make the deal easier for you.”

Reginald wished the Boil would stop doing pull ups. Something was terrible. Why was something terrible? Everything had just been rotten from the start.

“All you have to do now is lose the game, Bigs.” The Boil dismounted and stuck the landing with a laugh. “I’m betting you can’t even lose when you need to.”

From Reginald’s face, anyone could see he didn’t know if he could either. Somehow, he could never just shine. It had always been like that with The Boil.

Out of the corner of his eye Phineas was taking a bow.

“The Big Yipper! The Little Yipper!” What Cheer cried. There was the best kind of laughter.

But Reginald didn’t hear it.

And The Boil didn’t hear it.

“Your Sleepmobile’s gone, friend. Time to get you out of that old car. Fix your life up, Yipper.” The Boil dusted his hands off. “Come on over here, Bigs. How many pull-ups do you still got in you?”

The Boil did not wait to find out. “You’ve got this,” he said.

Out in the parking lot, one of the Sleepmobile’s tires went as soft as a gum bubble.

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