The Quad Cities manager spat into the dirt at Edward Everett’s feet. “It’s fucked-up.” He was maybe thirty, still in playing shape. “I don’t know if this field is regulation.”
“Relax, Pete,” the field umpire said. “We measured it; we talked to the league. It may look like shit but it’s by the book.” He scanned the diamond. “Barely.”
One day, years ago, Edward Everett had calculated how many professional games he’d been part of. At the time, he was sitting in a bar, five or six beers deep into a reunion with Danny Matthias, his onetime roommate at double-A. Matthias by then was ten years out of baseball after hanging on for eight seasons in the majors as a second- and third-string catcher and sometime first baseman; he was “into real estate,” he said, but that meant he had invested in apartment complexes and then moved into commercial space, owning more buildings than he could count. As a player, he’d been squat, but by the time he and Edward Everett met for drinks when Matthias came to Lansing, where Edward Everett was that season, he had let himself go to fat, and he reclined more than sat in the chair across the table from Edward Everett. “You know what,” he said at one point, his eyes little more than slits because of the alcohol, “I miss it.” He asked Edward Everett how many games he’d seen from the inside and Edward Everett had asked their waitress for a pen and then made calculations on an unfolded napkin. The figure came to four thousand six hundred and something. Both he and Matthias sat back in awe of the staggering number, the more than ten thousand hours those games would have consumed. “Wow!” Matthias exclaimed. “You are one lucky son of a bitch.”
Edward Everett had never repeated the exercise but as he sat on the sagging bench behind first base at the decaying high school field, the thought struck him that he had most likely climbed near to six thousand games by now, maybe fifteen thousand hours of watching men pitch a roughly three-inch-diameter ball, spinning, dipping, tailing, to other men, who were trying to hit the hell out of it. When he was younger, the thought struck him often, “Someone is paying me to be here, playing ball,” and regularly something occurred that took his breath away: a teammate digging his spikes into a padded outfield wall, willing to sacrifice everything to catch what otherwise would have been a home run; a teammate getting the sweet spot of the bat on a ninety-five-mile-an-hour fastball and launching it into the upper deck.
By now, the capacity for the game to surprise him had diminished. But on that ordinary Monday night in late June in a dying town in the middle of Iowa, with roughly ten dozen people on hand, Sandford surprised Edward Everett, as if the pitcher had decided that he was going to remind them all that it wasn’t the park or the ambience or the size of the crowd that mattered, but what happened between the foul lines—specifically, what happened in the narrow, sixty-and-a-half-foot corridor that ran between the mound and home plate. For two and a half hours, it was enough that Edward Everett forgot that his career was tenuous, that his wife had left him, that one of his crazy former players had gone missing.
From Sandford’s first pitch, Edward Everett could tell that he was on. It was a fastball with movement on it, slicing the barest edge of the outside of the plate. The umpire missed it, called it “ball one,” but Edward Everett didn’t complain: there was no point in grousing about one pitch. The umpire did not miss the next, another snake-in-the-water fastball, this one on the inside edge, knee-high: strike one. The third pitch—a curve with a wicked, twelve-o’clock-to-six break—the hitter topped back to Sandford, who tossed it to Turner at first for the out. Four pitches later, the inning was over: another ground ball, this one to Rausch at second, and a foul pop fly to the third baseman.
Perabo City scored in their half of the first, three runs, two of them coming on a fly ball by Mraz that the Quad Cities right fielder misjudged and then, when he realized he could not catch it, waited back on it for the hop, which never came. Instead, the ball settled into the thick mown grass, cradled gently as an