egg. He plucked it out of the straw and threw home, but too late to catch Tanner, sliding across ahead of the tag. The dust rose in a cloud, drifting across the left field bench and bleachers.
When the inning ended, the Quad Cities manager complained to the umpire about the condition of the outfield, but there was nothing in the rules that said the mown grass had to be raked away.
In the second, Sandford struck out the first hitter on three pitches, the third strike on a curve that seemed to start out head-high and then broke down over the plate as if the ball had just remembered it was subject to gravity. The next two hitters went down on one pitch each, a pop foul that Vila caught and a gentle liner to Rojas at short.
That was when Edward Everett realized that Sandford was doing something special that night; on the mound he seemed oblivious to everything except the ball and where Vila wanted him to throw it. The third, fourth and fifth innings echoed the first two, Sandford pitching what seemed effortlessly, the Quad Cities hitters compliant—four more strikeouts, nothing hard hit.
Edward Everett began watching the sixth inning standing behind the fencing in front of the Perabo City bench, his fingers laced through the links, and then, without realizing it, he drifted down the line until he was behind the backstop, from over the umpire’s left shoulder watching Sandford work. Sandford seemed in a trance, not in a game at all, but present in the nano-second of each individual moment flowing into the nano-second of the next: his eyes registering Vila’s signals, Sandford’s windup and pitch, his movement fluid, his face blank and inscrutable. It was only when the plate umpire turned and saw Edward Everett, yelling, “Hey, get the fuck out from behind there,” that he realized where he was and went back to sit on the bench. By the top of the ninth, with Perabo City up by five–nothing, Quad Cities still had not had a base runner—no hits, no walks, no Perabo City errors. In five thousand however-many-hundred games that Edward Everett had seen from the field, from the bench, from the coach’s box at first base or third, he had never seen a perfect game, twenty-seven men up, twenty-seven men down. He wondered if Sandford realized what he was doing, but on the mound, as he threw his last warm-up pitch and then stepped aside so Vila could throw the ball to second base to start the pre-inning around-the-horn, his face still seemed blank, a man without a conscious mind. The first hitter for Quad Cities took strike one, and then as Sandford released the second pitch, the hitter shortened up, tried to punch a bunt trickling toward third base. A few fans in the bleachers booed; Sandford stumbled slightly going after the ball, recovered, took it up in his bare hand and threw to first, nailing the runner by two steps. One out. Edward Everett glanced at the crowd—no, it wasn’t a crowd, a few score of die-hard baseball fans who had come out for the game and not the radio-controlled car races between innings, nor the Owl mascot, whom Collier had also not sent, nor the college girls in hot pants and belly shirts (also not there). As Sandford stood on the backside of the mound, rubbing the baseball between his two large palms, they were all intent, leaning forward. One held his iPhone in front of his face, shooting video; another had a camera. The Perabo City players not on the field were all standing behind the fence separating them from the field, their fingers laced through the chain links, still and expectant.
The second hitter went to two balls and two strikes—had Sandford even allowed as many as two balls to any hitter that night until then? Edward Everett would have to check Vincent’s pitching chart but he couldn’t remember anyone—and then hit a hard line drive to center field. Edward Everett groaned but Mraz had picked it up as soon as the ball came off the bat and dashed into deep center, catching the ball over his left shoulder like the tight end he’d been in high school would have caught a pass.
Then it was over. The third hitter swung at the first pitch and popped it up to the infield. Rausch came in, windmilling his arms to call off the other fielders, yelling, “I got it. I got it.