Story #10: "The Knuckleball Artist" (Chapter 8)

Licking your shoelaces. A quarter-a-mile-per-hour skid. A runaway lawn sprinkler. Three sweaters at the same time. A baseball cemetery. A barnyard owl. And the first time in two decades.

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Previous Chapter: Weighed down by memories, failed pitches, and visions of grocery store lobsters, Reginald retreated to the bleachers and hid his face, but Phineas’s reminder that he was a Yankee offered a glimmer of hope.

Reginald’s head was so far buried between his knees, he could have licked his shoelaces. In a surprise development, Phineas was doing his middle-school best to encourage his coach.

“Why don’t you throw the ball underhand? Wouldn’t that solve the problem? You won’t really be playing baseball, so you should be fine.”

Somewhere on the porch out in right field, two beers cracked open.

The kid made an interesting point. Everybody knows throwing underhand isn’t baseball, not unless you’re playing softball, and softball doesn’t count. Every boy who’s ever thrown a hardball thinks they know this.

Reginald extended his hand without looking up and wiggled his fingers for the ball to be placed in his palm. This continued longer than he would have liked. It was interrupting the clear signals he was sending of complete despair.

“Use your words,” the little brat said.

“I’m not going to use my words.”

The kid placed the ball onto his palm.

Despite himself, Reginald needed to test out the it’s-not-baseball-if-it’s-underhand theory. Without looking up, Reginald underhanded the ball so hard and so high there was time to stretch and sing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”

Reginald’s throw carried out to the pitching mound where it came to a hard stop on the pitching rubber. Sure enough, when it wasn’t baseball, he could throw, and if you can throw, even if it’s underhand, you can keep your coaching job.

From the moment Reginald buried his head between his knees, the Sleepmobile had been drifting down the gravel parking lot entrance road. But with the successful underhand throw, the Sleepmobile’s emergency brake caught, and she came to a dramatic, quarter-a-mile-per-hour skid inches short of drifting into traffic like an iceberg.

The skid took something out of her. Two of her hubcaps popped free, rolled like frisbees towards the treeline and wobbled into the poison ivy. Somewhere they clattered together.

That might have been it for them.

The Yankee burrowed back between his knees so he could dab his eyes with his shoelaces.

“You’re welcome. Your pitching problem is solved. That was easy,” Phineas headed to the mound and stumbled on the verge of grass to the infield. “Also, there are no practices on Sunday morning. Nobody is coming. Let’s begin my knuckleball lessons.”

Reginald owed him that.

“Alright, let’s see this knuckleball.” Reginald crouched down at home plate like he was getting into bed in the back of the Sleepmobile. “Whatever you’ve got.”

Phineas’s windup wasn’t pretty. He looked like he was taking off three sweaters at the same time. The first pitch landed in the dugout. The second clanged against the foul pole. Phineas sprayed the next thirty-seven pitches around the baseball field like a runaway lawn sprinkler.

Reg stretched his back. This was worse than sleeping in the back of a 2003 Volkswagen Beetle.

Phineas looked into the bucket, but he’d had enough. Phineas toppled the last ball out of the lobster tank, hurled his glove into the outfield like his three sweaters had finally come free. He began sprinting around the field kicking shots on goal like he was on a timer. Reginald had to duck like he was being attacked by a pitching machine.

The last baseball kicked off the home plate indentation at an impossible angle. As tall as he was, Reginald couldn’t quite reach the ball. If baseball gloves had fingernails, then those fingernails sent the ball ricocheting under Pinball’s wire-fence ball gutter.

Uh-oh…

Reginald and Phineas froze and stared smack at each other. Even if you are forty years old and you’re only coaching a twelve-year-old baseball player, it is impossible not to stare at someone when you’re both thinking the same thing at the same time.

Bonus pinball round and free game for the umpire… wait for it… thunder after lightning…

Other than two bored crows on the roof of small claims court, the only thing you could hear in the entire state of Iowa was that baseball ping-ponging its way through the parking lot.

One-one hundred… two-one hundred…

Ping pong, ping pong…

This was the furthest a baseball had traveled the entire morning.

At five-one hundred, the ball gave up the ghost and clanged against a hubcap.

Reginald and Phineas couldn’t help it: Their heads turned in slow motion to the right field wall.

Pinball sat there staring back at the two of them, sipping his two beers from opposite corners of his mouth. He looked like an angry walrus.

They both felt like they were in the principal’s office.

“Go get it, kid,” Reginald said under his breath.

“You poked it under. You get it,” Phineas said, not quite as far under his breath.

Reginald was so quiet, Phineas got the message. He sighed like a teenage girl who’d been grounded until college, and for the forty-seventh time that morning, he threw his glove straight up in the air. Neither of them had any difficulty throwing vertically.

Possibly overdoing it, Phineas walked smack into the fencing behind the plate like a blind man driving a bumper car. Out of the corner of his eye, Reginald saw Tripod peeking out from the bottom of the “O” in Cougars.

At last, Phineas broke free of the chain fence and tumbled out towards the parking lot and down the hill like he was running against a gale. Could he ever just walk from one place to another? Was he running in slow motion?

When Phineas reached the tree line, he cried out like a grandmother. “Oh, dear! I can’t find the ball! Oh, dear!!”

It took everything Reginald had not to turn to Pinball to see if he thought this kid was as outrageous as he did.

By the time Phineas returned to the field empty-handed. Reginald had almost finished collecting baseballs and tossing them into his bucket.

“It went into the poison ivy baseball cemetery. I’m not going in there. Nobody goes in there. It’s where broken bats go to die. Busted gloves. You definitely should be careful not to go over there. We’ll never see you again.”

The words hit Reginald like a brush-back fastball.

Out in right, the porch chair creaking ground to a halt.

The “O” in Cougars banged shut.

Oops.

Too strong.

If the kid’s welding glasses hadn’t been so greasy, and Reginald hadn’t turned away so quickly, he would have seen Phineas blinking like a barnyard owl.

When Reginald banged the last angry little baseball measle into his bucket, it bounced right back out.

That was his last straw.

Imitating the kid, he kicked that ball so hard it shot in a line-drive out to left field and punched a hole through the “O” in the Misfit Tailoring fence advertisement.

When Reginald got down to the car, Phineas was already waiting for him, sitting straight up and wearing his seatbelt. He looked ready to behave for the rest of his life. That might have made things worse. Reginald threw his bucket of baseballs in the back of the car and they spilled all over the dining room.

While Reginald was reverse bump-starting the car, Phineas made a peace offering. “What if you start calling me Lance? Everybody at school does. I’m Lance the Boil.”

“I’m not calling you Lance the Boil. No more talking for the rest of the season.”

Phineas bit his lip.

Watching all of this from his right field porch, Pinball tossed his empty beer cans somewhere behind his rocking chair. For the first time in over two decades, Pinball dropped his hand and wiggled his fingers for Tripod to come over for a scratch. Clearly, there was more to him than Rule 5.09(b)(2).

After the Sleepmobile disappeared behind the town’s steepest drainage culvert, the old volunteer umpire whispered “pinball” to Tripod.

Tripod pogo-sticked out of the “O” in Cougars, disappeared past the tree line, made his way through the poison ivy, and retrieved the ball from the baseball cemetery. The three-legged greyhound pogo-sticked back through the “O” in Cougars.

Neither the angry man nor the three-legged dog noticed that Pinball didn’t even need to say, ‘Tilt.’

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