Joel came jogging out. It looked like they were going to rely on him to get six outs tonight. The eighth inning, and then the ninth.
As he warmed up on the mound, I thought about our fight in the hotel room after game one. It had been easy to forget about—since I was, you know, focused on the World freaking Series—but now that he was out there I couldn’t help but think about it. I missed Joel dearly. The easy way he made me smile, and how he could make light of the most serious situations to lighten the mood. We could have used some of that in the dugout right now. Tension was high.
Above all else, I wished he wasn’t on the other side right now. If we won this game, it would crush him. If the Dodgers won, then it would crush Darryl and Rafael. And me, of course. All of this would have been easier to stomach if we were on the same team. Not opponents. Then we wouldn’t have had our fight, and we would be able to comfort each other, and we would be able to celebrate together when this was done. Instead, someone was going to have their heart broken. And I feared it wouldn’t just be because of the outcome of the game.
Joel threw the first pitch of the inning, a cutter.
And then I saw something that made me gasp.
43
Darryl
The game was a non-stop adrenaline rush. The pressure on both sides was unbelievable. It threatened to overwhelm me, and I was a veteran. I couldn’t imagine how it was for some of the younger guys playing on this stage. Knowing that we were one run away from amazing victory… or soul-crushing defeat.
“You’re a monster,” I told Rafael in the dugout. I gave him a bro-hug, careful to avoid squeezing his iced-up arm. “That outing will go down in history.”
Rafael smirked and shrugged. He never liked accepting praise, and especially disliked boasting. “It was pretty good.”
“Pretty good? Pretty good? You threw seven shutout innings—seven hitless innings—in game seven of the World Series. And with a gimp arm. What was the most you hit on the gun? Eighty-nine? This is like Schilling’s bloody sock.”
“It won’t be remembered unless we win,” Rafael said.
I gave him a fist-bump. “Working on it.”
Joel was coming into the game early. The way things were going I would probably have an at-bat in the ninth inning, so I sat down with the hitting coach and reviewed Joel’s stuff. Fastball and cutter, just like he had thrown when he was on the Rangers. His cutter was deadly. It looked just like a fastball, but then darted inward toward your hands. It was the kind of pitch that you ended up hitting low on the bat, shattering the wood and filling the air with splinters.
“Look for the fastball,” the hitting coach told me. “You don’t want any part of the cutter unless he leaves it out over the middle.”
“Got it.”
Up near the railing, Natalie’s face had gone white. She stared out at the mound with wide, intense eyes.
“You okay, Coach?”
She flinched when I spoke to her. “Yeah. I’m fine. Everything’s fine.”
“You sure?”
“Yep.”
Something was bothering her. Probably the fight she and Joel had in the hotel. That had messed her up pretty badly. I didn’t want to bother her with it now. Especially since I had my own part of the game to focus on.
Joel pitched a one-two-three eighth inning, and then we took the field for the ninth. Cortez, our closer, came in to pitch. Everything held extra importance. A routine ground ball was hit to the shortstop, but it didn’t feel routine as I covered first base and caught the throw for the out. We had to be perfect. One defensive mistake could cost us the World Series. The pressure was crippling.
Cortez looked rattled by it. The next batter crushed a line drive, but he hit it directly at the right fielder for an out. The next batter crushed two balls foul before striking out. Cortez walked off the mound with sweat on his forehead.
It was now the bottom of the ninth. None of us wanted to go into extra innings again, especially with a bullpen that was already depleted from last night. We needed to end it now. I was up fourth in the lineup, meaning I would get a chance to bat if someone ahead of me got on base.
I stood on the top step and watched Joel return to