Story #10: "The Knuckleball Artist" (Chapter 24)

A slow clap, a railroad spike, an AM radio, a mushroom cloud, scrap metal, a fib and a beep-beep. Everyone's at the field now.

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CHAPTER 24

The Boil

2003.

June 3.

4:59 PM.

The Bronx.

Pitching mound.

Reginald Perry, the Yankee rookie from the Wilkes-Barre AAA RailRiders, had just thrown the Greatest Pitch in the History of Baseball.

Funny the things you don’t remember even at the center of them. The stadium erupted after that pitch. Scoreboard bulbs popped. The veteran umpire fell in the dirt from terror right after Reginald’s pitch dropped into the NASCAR straightaway. The Yankees’ old manager trotted to home plate to save the pitch as a souvenir for the kid.

Reginald didn’t remember any of that.

He didn’t hear the skipper ask the umpire if he was okay. He didn’t see the Yankee manager juggling the ball like a schoolboy who’d caught a big league foul. He didn’t remember the old guy dropping it and leaving a dirt scuff.

What he did remember was that everyone rose up behind the home plate fence to cheer for him.

Everyone except one man. The man had a team jacket and a Wilkes-B…