Jono (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} jonod) wrote,@ 2005-09-12 00:05:00 |
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Pool Hall, Knuckleball
The other day, an interview with Paul Newman. The interviewer brings up a line from a movie I never saw ("The Hustler").
[Fast Eddie is bothered because Bert called him a born loser]
Fast Eddie: Cause, ya see, twice, Sarah... once at Ames with Minnesota Fats and then again at Arthur's, in that cheap, crummy pool room, now why'd I do it, Sarah? Why'd I do it? I coulda beat that guy, coulda beat 'im cold, he never woulda known. But I just hadda show 'im. Just hadda show those creeps and those punks what the game is like when it's great, when it's REALLY great. You know, like anything can be great, anything can be great. I don't care, BRICKLAYING can be great, if a guy knows. If he knows what he's doing and why and if he can make it come off. When I'm goin', I mean, when I'm REALLY goin' I feel like a... like a jockey must feel. He's sittin' on his horse, he's got all that speed and that power underneath him... he's comin' into the stretch, the pressure's on 'im, and he KNOWS... just feels... when to let it go and how much. Cause he's got everything workin' for 'im, timing touch... it's a great feeling, boy, it's a real great feeling when you're right and you KNOW you're right. It's like all of a sudden I got oil in my arm. The pool cue's part of me. You know, it's uh - pool cue, it's got nerves in it. It's a piece of wood, it's got nerves in it. Feel the roll of those balls, you don't have to look, you just KNOW. You make shots that nobody's ever made before. I can play that game the way... NOBODY'S ever played it before.
Sarah Packard: You're not a loser, Eddie, you're a winner. Some men never get to feel that way about anything.
I've heard the idea before. Everyone has - it feels good when you're "in the zone," when you're doing really well at anything, right? When I heard the line, I immediately flashed back to this book that I read in a crazy little Eastern Philosophies class in my crazy little high school - Musashi's Book of the Five Rings. Essentially, a samurai sort-of-guy explains how you can achieve enlightment by being extremely good at anything, using his own amazing skill at combat as an example. By devoting his life to beating the shit out of people, he learned to beat the shit out of people so effectively that he immersed himself completely into the activity, and the conscious mind whose cravings and insanities make us miserable fades away - we are mindless in action, one with the world, enlightened. Like the Hustler, he believed that anyone could do it with anything - through combat, art, bricklaying, anything - if you devoted yourself to it so that you existed as an extension of that. Through any activity, we can achieve a state of grace.
And I think that I've felt that, a few times, in flashes. Sometimes, writing flows out of me and it's an ecstatic experience, but painfully rarely. I've felt flashes of it a few times in a range of things: performing, laughing, working, flipping burgers. I can't devote my life to flipping burgers (career-wise, anyway), and I let the opportunity to pursue performing vanish unfulfilled rather than risk failure (a waste, a waste, and i'm trying to let that drive me now - "Better to live in hope than to never have lived at all"), so the most socially acceptable pursuit is writing. But then again, for every minute of writing in which I've experienced sheer joy, I've also experienced ten minutes (an hour, a year) of gut-wrenching fear and pain. Is it worth it? If I've spent these last few months knowing that writing could be my ticket out - that which makes me feel fulfilled (and were the girls a distraction from that gap?) - and wanting to make something of myself - but being too lazy or afraid to do actually do something, am I really cut out for it? Is it worth it? Would it work?
And I know that I won't be happy unless I try it and do it, but let's see when I actually write something new. She gave me a picture of a closed door when I graduated - and I know that I will always regret not trying to tear that motherfucker open if I don't follow through with this - and yet, and yet, and yet.
Anyway, here's another story. I wrote it before I really knew much about baseball, so there are things that I really regret about it now, to the point of writing this namby-pamby disclaimer - and yet, and yet, and yet. Forgive it, forgive me.
Knuckleball
Fall 2004
6/17/05: Miller – IP:0.0 H:0 R:0 BB:0 SO:0 (Pregame)
“You’re real lucky, son,” the man said, even though he wasn’t my father and I wasn’t feeling very lucky at all. “I don’t care how much you hurt yourself. You’re the luckiest ballplayer here.”
“You’re lucky to have a choice,” my manager said. “Most of the time we’d just tell somebody that they’d either do it or they’re cut from the team and out of the organization. We shouldn’t be showing you any mercy. You didn’t tell us that you were tired and you blew out your arm. You’re a pitcher who can’t pitch. We should just fire you, but we’ll give you a choice. Fastball, knuckleball, or quit. When your arm strength returns, we could use you as a fastball reliever, but it’s clear that you don’t have the stamina to ever be a fastball starter. You probably wouldn’t go much past here with that, but you’d have a job. We’ve been told that you’ve got a good knuckleball. I know that nobody wants to be a knuckleballer, but we need one. With some work, you could probably start, and you might be able to go somewhere from there. Then again, you could always quit.”
He waited like I might say something to that, but I wasn’t going to say one goddamn thing about quitting and he knew it.
“You stay here in the bullpen for a few days and think about it,” he said.
He paused again, but I gave him nothing.
“You can save the talk for later,” he said. “Enjoy the game!”
“Thanks, sir.” I didn’t watch him leave.
I sat in the bullpen and thought about it. The knuckleball killed my father, and now it was coming for me.
When I was nine years old, we went to the ballpark. Dad and Mom were still Mom and Dad. He took us to see the Ithaca College Bombers’ Saturday doubleheader against the Clarkson Golden Knights because I was finally old enough to sit and watch the whole thing. He told me that baseball was completely different in person, but that was just talk. I knew that things would be louder and faster, and that you could feel the bat hitting the ball, but I couldn’t imagine how fast the pitchers threw until I was there to feel each fastball slam into the catcher’s mitt with the same thump that I’ve now witnessed thousands of times without ever tiring of the sound or its impact. I don’t remember who won on that Saturday, but I haven’t forgotten the foul ball that I lost towards the end of the first game. I watched it fly back into the grass behind our bleachers, and when Dad told me that I could go get it to take it home, I didn’t hesitate to jump down to the dirt from the edge of our row. I saw exactly where it had settled in the weeds, but I didn’t see the other boy running towards it until he passed me. He wasn’t any bigger than me and I was running as fast as I could, but he beat me to it anyway. He only looked at me for a second as he walked back, carrying my ball.
Mom squeezed my arm as I passed by her on the way back to my seat. “Don’t worry about it, Willy. He was probably just lucky enough to see it first.”
“He must have wanted it more,” Dad told me. He said that there would probably be another ball that would land nearby in the second game, but none came, and the balls I’d get later only felt like second-string replacements.
6/17/05: Miller – IP:0.0 H:0 R:0 BB:0 SO:0 (1st Inning)
They gave my start to Keith Washington even though there was no way that he wanted it more than I did. Keith was just another pitcher. He wasn’t here because they thought that he could develop into a star or anything, he was just here to back up the guys who could go places. He was a pitcher without much of a future beyond being another name on the minor-league roster. It didn’t matter now. He was on my mound. It was his game to win or lose, but everybody knew that Bill Miller had already lost the game. If Keith failed, it would be my fault for not being able to make my start. If he won, maybe they didn’t need me anymore. Management knew that I knew that. They knew that I felt it every second that I sat out here with the other pitchers, dressed like I could go out and pitch when I couldn’t. They wanted me to watch him. They wanted me to want it without being able to have it. They wanted to force me to believe in the knuckleball.
Back when I was eleven years old, we all still lived on South Hill. Dad was finishing his third year with the insurance office. I still didn’t understand exactly what he did there. When I asked him, he told me that he basically worked to protect people from risk. Back then, he seemed like the kind of guy that could do it. After school I did as much of my homework as I could do before he’d come back from work. That got easier when Dad started to get back later. On this Thursday, I finished my homework and waited by the window. Mom told me that he’d probably be late, but I tossed my baseball and watched the road in case he came back early.
“He’s busier now,” she said. “Even if he says that he’ll be back early, you don’t need to wait for him. The office closes at four, but you know that he’ll be there until six or seven. Just go. Go play with other boys. You don’t need him anymore.” Mom had started working mornings again at the ad agency by then, and she’d start doing afternoons soon. The work made my parents move more slowly in the evenings, so that the inside of my house made me feel quieter than I ever had before. I always felt better when I was outside.
Dad didn’t get home until after dinner. “John’s son came into the office today to take John’s things,” he told Mom as he came into the house, and then he didn’t say anything else for a while.
He wanted to eat when he got back home, but he still came outside when I asked him to play catch afterwards. I didn’t want to rush him because we could still play under the new streetlamp, but I’d been waiting, so I had his glove ready when he put down his fork. We’d practice the fastball for a while. He’d set his glove in the different locations within the strike zone. I still liked to get it so he wouldn’t have to move his glove, and then I liked to feel his pitch land in mine.
“Are you tired?” He hadn’t had much to say to me that night, and I knew that work was long, but he never admitted to being tired himself. He’d just get inside and shuffle around slowly.
“No,” I said. “I’m still feeling good.” My arm was getting a little tight, but this was still mostly true.
“Okay,” he said. This was the part of the night when he’d switch to the knuckleball. Dad twisted his grip on the ball so he clamped down on it with his fingernails, and then threw it sidearm without flicking his wrist so that he’d release the ball without spinning it. The knuckleball came towards me slower than the fastball, but I never knew where it would land. It could change directions in midair like it was shaking up and down or wobbling side to side. I’d try to get my glove in front of it and it might suddenly drop down or rise up before I could react. If I missed the catch, it might land somewhere in the grass behind me. If I wasn’t quick enough, it could smack me anywhere between my feet and my face. Every time that we played, I tried to be as fast as I could, but the game always ended when too many hits on my body and misses into the grass slowed me down enough that I’d have to admit that I had to go inside. He’d look at me to ask me if I was sure. When I was, he’d go inside to read. Afterwards, I’d go into my room to lie on my back so I wouldn’t feel the bruises on my front.
As time passed, he started throwing more knuckleballs than fastballs. I’d get tired sooner and we’d finish faster. Sometimes, he was inside reading before dark. But while I got tired faster, he didn’t seem to have to work at all to throw the knuckleballs that I couldn’t consistently catch. Dad would make small talk while we threw the fastball, but he wouldn’t speak when he switched to the knuckler. Instead, he’d watch me and wait for me to recover the ball so that I could get it back to him so we could go again.
Today, he threw the knuckler and started talking.
“You remember John, right? The man that worked next to me?”
A knuckleball dove into the grass.
“Your mother didn’t want me to tell you that anything happened to him but you should know. You should know about it. . John was on vacation at Lake Champlain a few weeks ago. He was 57, but he was in good shape. He ran. He loved to run. It kept him in shape. He was on vacation and he was running. His wife was in the cabin waiting for him. He was perfectly healthy. Was anything wrong with a man like that taking a run?”
A knuckleball broke away, and then darted back towards my glove.
“He didn’t come back to the house. She was waiting for him and he didn’t come back. He had a heart attack. He was in great shape and he had a heart attack and now he’s dead. He was running, staying in shape, doing everything right, and now he’s goddamn dead.”
A knuckleball rose past my glove and flew over my head.
“He was in good shape. He ate right, he exercised, and today his son came to clean out his things. He did everything right and he’s dead. Willy, it doesn’t matter how many times this kind of thing happens, it never burns me any less. He did everything right and he’s dead. There’s no way to understand it. There’s no order to it. Your mother doesn’t want you to know, but it’s true. Sometimes, no matter what you do, all you can hope to be is lucky enough that your body doesn’t betray you.”
A knuckleball suddenly curved into my throwing elbow. It hurt so much that I couldn’t throw the ball back. He knew that I couldn’t catch the knuckleball. He knew that it tired me out. When he threw the knuckleball, did it mean that he sick of playing catch with me? What did it mean? I couldn’t return the ball or stop crying.
“Why? What are you – why – how are you doing that?” I didn’t want to stand up. I wished that he couldn’t see me in the streetlight.
I heard the low, full noise that my father made when he exhaled. “I was waiting for you to ask. There’s no reason to pretend that you can handle everything when you can’t. It’s stupid, Willy, and I was going to keep on doing it until you learned to quit. If you want to know how the knuckleball works, you ask me. Your mother doesn’t want you to know, but it turns out that the knuckleball is the way of the world.”
“How does it work?” My elbow throbbed.
He showed me the grip and explained that a ball thrown without spin is more susceptible to the natural turbulence in the air because the seams of the ball do not cut through the air but instead push off of its random currents and eddies. Depending on the smallest movements of weather and the pitcher’s ability to release the ball without spinning it, the knuckleball could either be completely unhittable or as hittable as a slow fastball. He fit my hand to the ball and showed me the motion, and after several tries, I threw one without spin. He’d caught all of the ones that spun, but this one curved away from him at the last minute. He told me that it must have danced on the currents of the air. My elbow didn’t hurt anymore, but the tears didn’t stop.
“Was there anything that you did? You weren’t controlling them at all, were you? Did you have anything?”
“No,” my father said. “Anybody can throw a knuckleball. It’s nothing special.”
They officially reassigned most of John’s duties to Dad. He got even busier. As time went on, Mom told me that he’d be too tired to play catch, and she was right. I stopped waiting for him to come back from work. He didn’t come looking for me, either. Soon, he signed me up for Kiwanis baseball. He didn’t tell me about it. I found out from a team assignment letter that came in the mail.
6/17/05: Miller – IP:0.0 H:0 R:0 BB:0 SO:0 (3rd Inning)
Keith wasn’t fooling anybody. He didn’t have a fastball that could overpower someone who saw it coming, and they were beginning to stop swinging at the junk that they couldn’t hit before. They weren’t hitting it very hard yet, but they were making some contact and it was only the third inning. Most of the relief pitchers went yesterday, so if they had wanted to get Keith out of the game early, they would have had to use the good relievers again, which would burned them out even more for what could be a competitive game tomorrow. They left Keith in to get knocked around for a while. Our hitters weren’t taking very long to get out, so he didn’t get much rest on the bench.
“I’m sorry,” I said to nobody in particular. The other guys in the bullpen hadn’t said anything since Keith got in trouble and they apparently didn’t want to mess with the streak. I didn’t blame them. I hadn’t been thinking at all, really. It was my fault. When I exhausted my arm, I put him there. When I didn’t say anything about how it felt and went out to try to pitch again, I trapped him there. I knew that it was my fault, and I knew what I did wrong, but who could guarantee that a knuckleballer would do any better?
When I was fourteen, a neighbor told us that the old transmission plant up the hill never bothered to mop up the solvent that they used on the parts. They’d been using the solvent for decades, and we’d been living downhill for fifteen years. Solvents can seep into the ground pretty effectively, and they can run down the plates of the hill in imperceptibly flowing currents. The currents can then get caught in the plates’ pockmarks to form eddies and pools, where the trichoryletheline can diffuse upwards so its particles leave the ground to join the air. My parents didn’t know anything about the fluid dynamics of solvents when they got the house, but that didn’t stop them from managing to find a home that was directly above a toxic underwater pool.
After the neighbor left and Dad had gone upstairs, Mom told me how they found the house. Before I was born, they came to the neighborhood and found rows of available identical prefabricated houses. One of Dad’s friends had the connection to let them pick one before other people could, but when they saw all those houses that looked exactly the same, they couldn’t decide which one they wanted. Without any better idea, they stood between the two rows of houses at the end of the development. Closing their eyes, they embraced each other and began to spin counter-clockwise. After they counted to thirty, my father pointed with his right hand and they stopped. They opened their eyes and saw their house. At that point, I learned not only that my parents were people that relied on luck, but also that their luck was terrible.
Before long, we moved out of our poisonous house, but only Mom and I moved into the apartment on West Hill. They didn’t have anything else to say to each other, I guess. Dad found a place that was up the hill from the plant. I didn’t visit him until after he got the diagnosis. Mom and I spent far more time above the solvent pools and we were fine, but Dad had developed a rare throat cancer just from the nights and weekends that he was home from work. Then again, there was too much cancer in his family to even be sure that he could blame the toxins. Was he just lucky enough to develop it on his own? I got onto the high school varsity baseball team during the next year as a pitcher. Dad had lost his sense of taste, some of his saliva glands, a bit of flesh, and most of his energy, but he wasn’t dead.
When I visited him after the diagnosis, he told me a baseball story. It’s my favorite one. “It doesn’t really matter who it’s about or when it happened,” he said, “because it could be any pitcher at any time, but let’s say that it’s Sandy Koufax in the World Series against the Yankees. He had a great fastball and the best curveball in baseball. Unfortunately, it was cold that day, he was more than slightly injured, and for whatever other reasons he couldn’t get the right grip on his curve. He tried to work it out and he ended up walking a couple guys in the top of the first inning. His catcher was a little disturbed, obviously, and he walked up to talk it over with his pitcher.
‘”Sandy? Sandy, what the hell is going on with the curve, man? What do you want to do?” The catcher tried to stay cool so the other guys wouldn’t get too worried, but he was pretty shaken, and he looked towards Sandy for some kind of answer.
“I don’t know,” Sandy said. They stood there for a second, just staring at each other, in the middle of the World Series without a curveball.
When the umpire started to come up to break up their conference, Sandy spoke up. “Aw, fuck it,” he said. “Let’s just blow it by them.”
The catcher agreed and they went with the fastball all afternoon, and of course they won.” It was a nice story, but he didn’t tell any others like that after chemo started. He didn’t tell me any stories for a while.
It didn’t matter that I only heard it once, because that story got me through high school. Every spring and fall, I didn’t worry about anything but blowing it by whoever was up there. They’d figure out that fastballs were all I was going to throw pretty quickly, but that didn’t mean that they could do much with them. I wanted to win more than they did. I always wanted it more. There were a few guys that could hit me, but there weren’t too many in any one game, so I’d get along okay. I’d go until I was out of gas for the day, then I’d rest until the next week and I’d do it all again until the winter or the summer came, when I’d recharge. Unlike life, I told myself, baseball was an essentially simple game if you had the stuff. If you wanted enough, you had it. If you had enough, you lived through the game. If you didn’t, you were done.
6/17/05: Miller – IP:0.0 H:0 R:0 BB:0 SO:0 (6th Inning)
Keith didn’t have it, but they left him in to save the other guys. We were down by six runs, so they had to leave him in through the seventh inning if they could, which meant that he was still two innings away. Nobody cheered for him. In between pitches, he bent over and let his throwing arm hang limp from his shoulders. When he shook his arm to stretch it out, sweat splashed in the dirt below his fingers. He brought the arm back up, shoved himself back into his pitching motion, then threw and hoped that somebody would catch the ball. Sometimes they did and his routine would perk up again when he felt rest coming. Sometimes they didn’t. If he was anything like I was, he didn’t know the score anymore. All he knew was the number of outs remaining.
When I was sixteen, Dad was going into his second year of being too sick to go to work. They helped with the medical bills, but what could they do for a man who knew that he was beaten? During one Thursday evening, I remembered what we’d done before, but I saw that he would now be too tired for catch. He agreed with me, sat silently for a minute, and then told me to find a chair and a wall. From a folding chair I set up by a streetlight, my father watched me throw fastballs against the wall of his building. The baseball bounced back towards my chest at first, and then gradually began to fall shorter as the outer layers of leather, twine, and cork fell apart. We found a rhythm in which I’d set my motion during his tentative inhales, then throw and recover the ball on the exhales. After a while, my dad started talking.
“Stay with the fastball because it’ll never betray you. It’ll never surprise you. If you control the fastball, it goes exactly where you want it to go until you’re too tired to throw it anymore.”
Fastballs hit the wall. The outside had fallen off some time ago, revealing fraying twine and cracking cork.
“That knuckleball I taught you was just fucking luck. Throw the fastball and your man might be good enough to beat you, but at least you didn’t lose for no goddamn reason.”
Fastballs hit the wall. The twine gave up and fell off.
“Don’t rely on luck because our luck is shit. Luck is shit. We were good people and we picked a house that looked like all the others and it poisoned me, and it still may have poisoned you. Luck is shit. Throw it harder.”
Fastballs hit the wall. The cork finally cracked apart. I looked at him and tore the rest of it off. In my hand, I held the rubber core.
“Blow it by them.”
A fastball hit the wall. It ricocheted off faster than any had before, and I didn’t know where it went until I head the sound of it hitting my Dad’s bald, poisoned head. He yelled as he crumpled in his seat so that his forehead crashed against his right knee, bounced once, and rested there. His pained moans didn’t fade until he ran out of breath. He didn’t move. I couldn’t move.
For a moment, that’s how we were – still and silent- until he wheezingly inhaled and began to pull himself back up. Clutching the spot on the back of his head where the ball hit him, a braying sound crackled through his shaking body that I soon recognized as teary laughter. After everything that he’d said, I didn’t understand what was so fucking funny.
On the way back to his house, I pretended that I hadn’t already heard the story about the pitcher who lost his curve. He died a few days later.
I was sixteen when I found the fastball that got me through high school and nineteen when I lost it. In between, I entered the first-year draft and was picked up in the thirty-eighth round by Boston. My mother followed me down to their development facility in Ft. Myers, Florida. Every five days, she saw me give them the fastball and she saw too many of them hit it. Every five days, I felt the games get longer as I tried to throw harder. Each time, I started with less and less.
When I was nineteen, on a Saturday afternoon, I went to the ballpark and warmed up even though my fastball wasn’t ready. I didn’t tell Keith while he caught for me in the bullpen. I didn’t tell anyone. Instead, I threw him the knuckleball. He laughed until it hit his neck, then he set me loose.
I stood on the mound and watched the hitter settle into his box. When he was set, he locked his eyes on mine so I would know that he was ready. He’d seen me before. He wanted the fastball that I didn’t have. I had a knuckleball that had never seen a hitter before, but could I make it be a strike? Before I threw, I blinked and saw a knuckleball float, wobble, then straighten out immediately before he hit it right back to me. I saw the shadow of another knuckleball dodge away the last second, and I heard it hit the glove. I saw another shoot past me to be dropped by my shortstop. I saw another fouled away towards the grasses behind the bleachers. I saw another miss his bat and find my catcher’s mask. I saw another disappear for a home run. I saw another miss the plate entirely. Finally, I found the grip, started the motion, and released. With no spin, the ball danced in the air and slowly spiraled towards the plate. At the second to last second, the ball began to break low and away. The batter flailed out of what must have been surprise and desperation. At the last second, the ball suddenly broke back towards the plate, where it hit his swinging bat. With a crack, the ball shot past me and bounced by the right fielder for a triple. I had inherited my father’s luck. Had the house poisoned me, too? My catcher came to visit.
“What the fuck was that? Where’s the fastball?”
“I don’t know. I’ll blow it by them.” I still wanted to win. I was a good man, and that should have been enough.
“Do it,” he said.
I didn’t want to see the next hitter, but he came anyway. I focused my mind, my legs, my chest, and my back on the next fastball, but there wasn’t much left in the arm. After the next few fastballs, my catcher didn’t bother with visiting anymore because the manager had figured it out. I’d always been tired, and I hadn’t told anybody. I’d blown myself out. They left me in to think about what I’d done.
6/17/05: Miller – IP:0.0 H:0 R:0 BB:0 SO:0 (7th Inning)
Keith got the first out in the seventh inning. He’d told them about the knuckleballs in the warm-up. Later, the manager came to me in the bullpen and told me to think it over.
Keith gave up a hit. He bent down to let his arm flop down from his shoulder to where his fingers almost scraped against the dirt. He hung there for a moment, and then gathered his body to work towards the second out. As I watched him pull himself up - slowly, painfully – I didn’t feel my arm at all. All of the fatigue that I’d put there, all of the strength that I’d built up, all of the earth’s poison was gone. For a moment, I could imagine myself at twenty. I would dig my nails into the ball’s hide so that I could almost feel its rubber core. As I dropped my arm back, I would see nothing in my mind before I released the ball to float on indistinct currents. The ball might find a bat. The ball might find the ground. The ball might also find a glove, where it would begin to return to me. Keith recorded his final out.
The other day, an interview with Paul Newman. The interviewer brings up a line from a movie I never saw ("The Hustler").
[Fast Eddie is bothered because Bert called him a born loser]
Fast Eddie: Cause, ya see, twice, Sarah... once at Ames with Minnesota Fats and then again at Arthur's, in that cheap, crummy pool room, now why'd I do it, Sarah? Why'd I do it? I coulda beat that guy, coulda beat 'im cold, he never woulda known. But I just hadda show 'im. Just hadda show those creeps and those punks what the game is like when it's great, when it's REALLY great. You know, like anything can be great, anything can be great. I don't care, BRICKLAYING can be great, if a guy knows. If he knows what he's doing and why and if he can make it come off. When I'm goin', I mean, when I'm REALLY goin' I feel like a... like a jockey must feel. He's sittin' on his horse, he's got all that speed and that power underneath him... he's comin' into the stretch, the pressure's on 'im, and he KNOWS... just feels... when to let it go and how much. Cause he's got everything workin' for 'im, timing touch... it's a great feeling, boy, it's a real great feeling when you're right and you KNOW you're right. It's like all of a sudden I got oil in my arm. The pool cue's part of me. You know, it's uh - pool cue, it's got nerves in it. It's a piece of wood, it's got nerves in it. Feel the roll of those balls, you don't have to look, you just KNOW. You make shots that nobody's ever made before. I can play that game the way... NOBODY'S ever played it before.
Sarah Packard: You're not a loser, Eddie, you're a winner. Some men never get to feel that way about anything.
I've heard the idea before. Everyone has - it feels good when you're "in the zone," when you're doing really well at anything, right? When I heard the line, I immediately flashed back to this book that I read in a crazy little Eastern Philosophies class in my crazy little high school - Musashi's Book of the Five Rings. Essentially, a samurai sort-of-guy explains how you can achieve enlightment by being extremely good at anything, using his own amazing skill at combat as an example. By devoting his life to beating the shit out of people, he learned to beat the shit out of people so effectively that he immersed himself completely into the activity, and the conscious mind whose cravings and insanities make us miserable fades away - we are mindless in action, one with the world, enlightened. Like the Hustler, he believed that anyone could do it with anything - through combat, art, bricklaying, anything - if you devoted yourself to it so that you existed as an extension of that. Through any activity, we can achieve a state of grace.
And I think that I've felt that, a few times, in flashes. Sometimes, writing flows out of me and it's an ecstatic experience, but painfully rarely. I've felt flashes of it a few times in a range of things: performing, laughing, working, flipping burgers. I can't devote my life to flipping burgers (career-wise, anyway), and I let the opportunity to pursue performing vanish unfulfilled rather than risk failure (a waste, a waste, and i'm trying to let that drive me now - "Better to live in hope than to never have lived at all"), so the most socially acceptable pursuit is writing. But then again, for every minute of writing in which I've experienced sheer joy, I've also experienced ten minutes (an hour, a year) of gut-wrenching fear and pain. Is it worth it? If I've spent these last few months knowing that writing could be my ticket out - that which makes me feel fulfilled (and were the girls a distraction from that gap?) - and wanting to make something of myself - but being too lazy or afraid to do actually do something, am I really cut out for it? Is it worth it? Would it work?
And I know that I won't be happy unless I try it and do it, but let's see when I actually write something new. She gave me a picture of a closed door when I graduated - and I know that I will always regret not trying to tear that motherfucker open if I don't follow through with this - and yet, and yet, and yet.
Anyway, here's another story. I wrote it before I really knew much about baseball, so there are things that I really regret about it now, to the point of writing this namby-pamby disclaimer - and yet, and yet, and yet. Forgive it, forgive me.
Knuckleball
Fall 2004
6/17/05: Miller – IP:0.0 H:0 R:0 BB:0 SO:0 (Pregame)
“You’re real lucky, son,” the man said, even though he wasn’t my father and I wasn’t feeling very lucky at all. “I don’t care how much you hurt yourself. You’re the luckiest ballplayer here.”
“You’re lucky to have a choice,” my manager said. “Most of the time we’d just tell somebody that they’d either do it or they’re cut from the team and out of the organization. We shouldn’t be showing you any mercy. You didn’t tell us that you were tired and you blew out your arm. You’re a pitcher who can’t pitch. We should just fire you, but we’ll give you a choice. Fastball, knuckleball, or quit. When your arm strength returns, we could use you as a fastball reliever, but it’s clear that you don’t have the stamina to ever be a fastball starter. You probably wouldn’t go much past here with that, but you’d have a job. We’ve been told that you’ve got a good knuckleball. I know that nobody wants to be a knuckleballer, but we need one. With some work, you could probably start, and you might be able to go somewhere from there. Then again, you could always quit.”
He waited like I might say something to that, but I wasn’t going to say one goddamn thing about quitting and he knew it.
“You stay here in the bullpen for a few days and think about it,” he said.
He paused again, but I gave him nothing.
“You can save the talk for later,” he said. “Enjoy the game!”
“Thanks, sir.” I didn’t watch him leave.
I sat in the bullpen and thought about it. The knuckleball killed my father, and now it was coming for me.
When I was nine years old, we went to the ballpark. Dad and Mom were still Mom and Dad. He took us to see the Ithaca College Bombers’ Saturday doubleheader against the Clarkson Golden Knights because I was finally old enough to sit and watch the whole thing. He told me that baseball was completely different in person, but that was just talk. I knew that things would be louder and faster, and that you could feel the bat hitting the ball, but I couldn’t imagine how fast the pitchers threw until I was there to feel each fastball slam into the catcher’s mitt with the same thump that I’ve now witnessed thousands of times without ever tiring of the sound or its impact. I don’t remember who won on that Saturday, but I haven’t forgotten the foul ball that I lost towards the end of the first game. I watched it fly back into the grass behind our bleachers, and when Dad told me that I could go get it to take it home, I didn’t hesitate to jump down to the dirt from the edge of our row. I saw exactly where it had settled in the weeds, but I didn’t see the other boy running towards it until he passed me. He wasn’t any bigger than me and I was running as fast as I could, but he beat me to it anyway. He only looked at me for a second as he walked back, carrying my ball.
Mom squeezed my arm as I passed by her on the way back to my seat. “Don’t worry about it, Willy. He was probably just lucky enough to see it first.”
“He must have wanted it more,” Dad told me. He said that there would probably be another ball that would land nearby in the second game, but none came, and the balls I’d get later only felt like second-string replacements.
6/17/05: Miller – IP:0.0 H:0 R:0 BB:0 SO:0 (1st Inning)
They gave my start to Keith Washington even though there was no way that he wanted it more than I did. Keith was just another pitcher. He wasn’t here because they thought that he could develop into a star or anything, he was just here to back up the guys who could go places. He was a pitcher without much of a future beyond being another name on the minor-league roster. It didn’t matter now. He was on my mound. It was his game to win or lose, but everybody knew that Bill Miller had already lost the game. If Keith failed, it would be my fault for not being able to make my start. If he won, maybe they didn’t need me anymore. Management knew that I knew that. They knew that I felt it every second that I sat out here with the other pitchers, dressed like I could go out and pitch when I couldn’t. They wanted me to watch him. They wanted me to want it without being able to have it. They wanted to force me to believe in the knuckleball.
Back when I was eleven years old, we all still lived on South Hill. Dad was finishing his third year with the insurance office. I still didn’t understand exactly what he did there. When I asked him, he told me that he basically worked to protect people from risk. Back then, he seemed like the kind of guy that could do it. After school I did as much of my homework as I could do before he’d come back from work. That got easier when Dad started to get back later. On this Thursday, I finished my homework and waited by the window. Mom told me that he’d probably be late, but I tossed my baseball and watched the road in case he came back early.
“He’s busier now,” she said. “Even if he says that he’ll be back early, you don’t need to wait for him. The office closes at four, but you know that he’ll be there until six or seven. Just go. Go play with other boys. You don’t need him anymore.” Mom had started working mornings again at the ad agency by then, and she’d start doing afternoons soon. The work made my parents move more slowly in the evenings, so that the inside of my house made me feel quieter than I ever had before. I always felt better when I was outside.
Dad didn’t get home until after dinner. “John’s son came into the office today to take John’s things,” he told Mom as he came into the house, and then he didn’t say anything else for a while.
He wanted to eat when he got back home, but he still came outside when I asked him to play catch afterwards. I didn’t want to rush him because we could still play under the new streetlamp, but I’d been waiting, so I had his glove ready when he put down his fork. We’d practice the fastball for a while. He’d set his glove in the different locations within the strike zone. I still liked to get it so he wouldn’t have to move his glove, and then I liked to feel his pitch land in mine.
“Are you tired?” He hadn’t had much to say to me that night, and I knew that work was long, but he never admitted to being tired himself. He’d just get inside and shuffle around slowly.
“No,” I said. “I’m still feeling good.” My arm was getting a little tight, but this was still mostly true.
“Okay,” he said. This was the part of the night when he’d switch to the knuckleball. Dad twisted his grip on the ball so he clamped down on it with his fingernails, and then threw it sidearm without flicking his wrist so that he’d release the ball without spinning it. The knuckleball came towards me slower than the fastball, but I never knew where it would land. It could change directions in midair like it was shaking up and down or wobbling side to side. I’d try to get my glove in front of it and it might suddenly drop down or rise up before I could react. If I missed the catch, it might land somewhere in the grass behind me. If I wasn’t quick enough, it could smack me anywhere between my feet and my face. Every time that we played, I tried to be as fast as I could, but the game always ended when too many hits on my body and misses into the grass slowed me down enough that I’d have to admit that I had to go inside. He’d look at me to ask me if I was sure. When I was, he’d go inside to read. Afterwards, I’d go into my room to lie on my back so I wouldn’t feel the bruises on my front.
As time passed, he started throwing more knuckleballs than fastballs. I’d get tired sooner and we’d finish faster. Sometimes, he was inside reading before dark. But while I got tired faster, he didn’t seem to have to work at all to throw the knuckleballs that I couldn’t consistently catch. Dad would make small talk while we threw the fastball, but he wouldn’t speak when he switched to the knuckler. Instead, he’d watch me and wait for me to recover the ball so that I could get it back to him so we could go again.
Today, he threw the knuckler and started talking.
“You remember John, right? The man that worked next to me?”
A knuckleball dove into the grass.
“Your mother didn’t want me to tell you that anything happened to him but you should know. You should know about it. . John was on vacation at Lake Champlain a few weeks ago. He was 57, but he was in good shape. He ran. He loved to run. It kept him in shape. He was on vacation and he was running. His wife was in the cabin waiting for him. He was perfectly healthy. Was anything wrong with a man like that taking a run?”
A knuckleball broke away, and then darted back towards my glove.
“He didn’t come back to the house. She was waiting for him and he didn’t come back. He had a heart attack. He was in great shape and he had a heart attack and now he’s dead. He was running, staying in shape, doing everything right, and now he’s goddamn dead.”
A knuckleball rose past my glove and flew over my head.
“He was in good shape. He ate right, he exercised, and today his son came to clean out his things. He did everything right and he’s dead. Willy, it doesn’t matter how many times this kind of thing happens, it never burns me any less. He did everything right and he’s dead. There’s no way to understand it. There’s no order to it. Your mother doesn’t want you to know, but it’s true. Sometimes, no matter what you do, all you can hope to be is lucky enough that your body doesn’t betray you.”
A knuckleball suddenly curved into my throwing elbow. It hurt so much that I couldn’t throw the ball back. He knew that I couldn’t catch the knuckleball. He knew that it tired me out. When he threw the knuckleball, did it mean that he sick of playing catch with me? What did it mean? I couldn’t return the ball or stop crying.
“Why? What are you – why – how are you doing that?” I didn’t want to stand up. I wished that he couldn’t see me in the streetlight.
I heard the low, full noise that my father made when he exhaled. “I was waiting for you to ask. There’s no reason to pretend that you can handle everything when you can’t. It’s stupid, Willy, and I was going to keep on doing it until you learned to quit. If you want to know how the knuckleball works, you ask me. Your mother doesn’t want you to know, but it turns out that the knuckleball is the way of the world.”
“How does it work?” My elbow throbbed.
He showed me the grip and explained that a ball thrown without spin is more susceptible to the natural turbulence in the air because the seams of the ball do not cut through the air but instead push off of its random currents and eddies. Depending on the smallest movements of weather and the pitcher’s ability to release the ball without spinning it, the knuckleball could either be completely unhittable or as hittable as a slow fastball. He fit my hand to the ball and showed me the motion, and after several tries, I threw one without spin. He’d caught all of the ones that spun, but this one curved away from him at the last minute. He told me that it must have danced on the currents of the air. My elbow didn’t hurt anymore, but the tears didn’t stop.
“Was there anything that you did? You weren’t controlling them at all, were you? Did you have anything?”
“No,” my father said. “Anybody can throw a knuckleball. It’s nothing special.”
They officially reassigned most of John’s duties to Dad. He got even busier. As time went on, Mom told me that he’d be too tired to play catch, and she was right. I stopped waiting for him to come back from work. He didn’t come looking for me, either. Soon, he signed me up for Kiwanis baseball. He didn’t tell me about it. I found out from a team assignment letter that came in the mail.
6/17/05: Miller – IP:0.0 H:0 R:0 BB:0 SO:0 (3rd Inning)
Keith wasn’t fooling anybody. He didn’t have a fastball that could overpower someone who saw it coming, and they were beginning to stop swinging at the junk that they couldn’t hit before. They weren’t hitting it very hard yet, but they were making some contact and it was only the third inning. Most of the relief pitchers went yesterday, so if they had wanted to get Keith out of the game early, they would have had to use the good relievers again, which would burned them out even more for what could be a competitive game tomorrow. They left Keith in to get knocked around for a while. Our hitters weren’t taking very long to get out, so he didn’t get much rest on the bench.
“I’m sorry,” I said to nobody in particular. The other guys in the bullpen hadn’t said anything since Keith got in trouble and they apparently didn’t want to mess with the streak. I didn’t blame them. I hadn’t been thinking at all, really. It was my fault. When I exhausted my arm, I put him there. When I didn’t say anything about how it felt and went out to try to pitch again, I trapped him there. I knew that it was my fault, and I knew what I did wrong, but who could guarantee that a knuckleballer would do any better?
When I was fourteen, a neighbor told us that the old transmission plant up the hill never bothered to mop up the solvent that they used on the parts. They’d been using the solvent for decades, and we’d been living downhill for fifteen years. Solvents can seep into the ground pretty effectively, and they can run down the plates of the hill in imperceptibly flowing currents. The currents can then get caught in the plates’ pockmarks to form eddies and pools, where the trichoryletheline can diffuse upwards so its particles leave the ground to join the air. My parents didn’t know anything about the fluid dynamics of solvents when they got the house, but that didn’t stop them from managing to find a home that was directly above a toxic underwater pool.
After the neighbor left and Dad had gone upstairs, Mom told me how they found the house. Before I was born, they came to the neighborhood and found rows of available identical prefabricated houses. One of Dad’s friends had the connection to let them pick one before other people could, but when they saw all those houses that looked exactly the same, they couldn’t decide which one they wanted. Without any better idea, they stood between the two rows of houses at the end of the development. Closing their eyes, they embraced each other and began to spin counter-clockwise. After they counted to thirty, my father pointed with his right hand and they stopped. They opened their eyes and saw their house. At that point, I learned not only that my parents were people that relied on luck, but also that their luck was terrible.
Before long, we moved out of our poisonous house, but only Mom and I moved into the apartment on West Hill. They didn’t have anything else to say to each other, I guess. Dad found a place that was up the hill from the plant. I didn’t visit him until after he got the diagnosis. Mom and I spent far more time above the solvent pools and we were fine, but Dad had developed a rare throat cancer just from the nights and weekends that he was home from work. Then again, there was too much cancer in his family to even be sure that he could blame the toxins. Was he just lucky enough to develop it on his own? I got onto the high school varsity baseball team during the next year as a pitcher. Dad had lost his sense of taste, some of his saliva glands, a bit of flesh, and most of his energy, but he wasn’t dead.
When I visited him after the diagnosis, he told me a baseball story. It’s my favorite one. “It doesn’t really matter who it’s about or when it happened,” he said, “because it could be any pitcher at any time, but let’s say that it’s Sandy Koufax in the World Series against the Yankees. He had a great fastball and the best curveball in baseball. Unfortunately, it was cold that day, he was more than slightly injured, and for whatever other reasons he couldn’t get the right grip on his curve. He tried to work it out and he ended up walking a couple guys in the top of the first inning. His catcher was a little disturbed, obviously, and he walked up to talk it over with his pitcher.
‘”Sandy? Sandy, what the hell is going on with the curve, man? What do you want to do?” The catcher tried to stay cool so the other guys wouldn’t get too worried, but he was pretty shaken, and he looked towards Sandy for some kind of answer.
“I don’t know,” Sandy said. They stood there for a second, just staring at each other, in the middle of the World Series without a curveball.
When the umpire started to come up to break up their conference, Sandy spoke up. “Aw, fuck it,” he said. “Let’s just blow it by them.”
The catcher agreed and they went with the fastball all afternoon, and of course they won.” It was a nice story, but he didn’t tell any others like that after chemo started. He didn’t tell me any stories for a while.
It didn’t matter that I only heard it once, because that story got me through high school. Every spring and fall, I didn’t worry about anything but blowing it by whoever was up there. They’d figure out that fastballs were all I was going to throw pretty quickly, but that didn’t mean that they could do much with them. I wanted to win more than they did. I always wanted it more. There were a few guys that could hit me, but there weren’t too many in any one game, so I’d get along okay. I’d go until I was out of gas for the day, then I’d rest until the next week and I’d do it all again until the winter or the summer came, when I’d recharge. Unlike life, I told myself, baseball was an essentially simple game if you had the stuff. If you wanted enough, you had it. If you had enough, you lived through the game. If you didn’t, you were done.
6/17/05: Miller – IP:0.0 H:0 R:0 BB:0 SO:0 (6th Inning)
Keith didn’t have it, but they left him in to save the other guys. We were down by six runs, so they had to leave him in through the seventh inning if they could, which meant that he was still two innings away. Nobody cheered for him. In between pitches, he bent over and let his throwing arm hang limp from his shoulders. When he shook his arm to stretch it out, sweat splashed in the dirt below his fingers. He brought the arm back up, shoved himself back into his pitching motion, then threw and hoped that somebody would catch the ball. Sometimes they did and his routine would perk up again when he felt rest coming. Sometimes they didn’t. If he was anything like I was, he didn’t know the score anymore. All he knew was the number of outs remaining.
When I was sixteen, Dad was going into his second year of being too sick to go to work. They helped with the medical bills, but what could they do for a man who knew that he was beaten? During one Thursday evening, I remembered what we’d done before, but I saw that he would now be too tired for catch. He agreed with me, sat silently for a minute, and then told me to find a chair and a wall. From a folding chair I set up by a streetlight, my father watched me throw fastballs against the wall of his building. The baseball bounced back towards my chest at first, and then gradually began to fall shorter as the outer layers of leather, twine, and cork fell apart. We found a rhythm in which I’d set my motion during his tentative inhales, then throw and recover the ball on the exhales. After a while, my dad started talking.
“Stay with the fastball because it’ll never betray you. It’ll never surprise you. If you control the fastball, it goes exactly where you want it to go until you’re too tired to throw it anymore.”
Fastballs hit the wall. The outside had fallen off some time ago, revealing fraying twine and cracking cork.
“That knuckleball I taught you was just fucking luck. Throw the fastball and your man might be good enough to beat you, but at least you didn’t lose for no goddamn reason.”
Fastballs hit the wall. The twine gave up and fell off.
“Don’t rely on luck because our luck is shit. Luck is shit. We were good people and we picked a house that looked like all the others and it poisoned me, and it still may have poisoned you. Luck is shit. Throw it harder.”
Fastballs hit the wall. The cork finally cracked apart. I looked at him and tore the rest of it off. In my hand, I held the rubber core.
“Blow it by them.”
A fastball hit the wall. It ricocheted off faster than any had before, and I didn’t know where it went until I head the sound of it hitting my Dad’s bald, poisoned head. He yelled as he crumpled in his seat so that his forehead crashed against his right knee, bounced once, and rested there. His pained moans didn’t fade until he ran out of breath. He didn’t move. I couldn’t move.
For a moment, that’s how we were – still and silent- until he wheezingly inhaled and began to pull himself back up. Clutching the spot on the back of his head where the ball hit him, a braying sound crackled through his shaking body that I soon recognized as teary laughter. After everything that he’d said, I didn’t understand what was so fucking funny.
On the way back to his house, I pretended that I hadn’t already heard the story about the pitcher who lost his curve. He died a few days later.
I was sixteen when I found the fastball that got me through high school and nineteen when I lost it. In between, I entered the first-year draft and was picked up in the thirty-eighth round by Boston. My mother followed me down to their development facility in Ft. Myers, Florida. Every five days, she saw me give them the fastball and she saw too many of them hit it. Every five days, I felt the games get longer as I tried to throw harder. Each time, I started with less and less.
When I was nineteen, on a Saturday afternoon, I went to the ballpark and warmed up even though my fastball wasn’t ready. I didn’t tell Keith while he caught for me in the bullpen. I didn’t tell anyone. Instead, I threw him the knuckleball. He laughed until it hit his neck, then he set me loose.
I stood on the mound and watched the hitter settle into his box. When he was set, he locked his eyes on mine so I would know that he was ready. He’d seen me before. He wanted the fastball that I didn’t have. I had a knuckleball that had never seen a hitter before, but could I make it be a strike? Before I threw, I blinked and saw a knuckleball float, wobble, then straighten out immediately before he hit it right back to me. I saw the shadow of another knuckleball dodge away the last second, and I heard it hit the glove. I saw another shoot past me to be dropped by my shortstop. I saw another fouled away towards the grasses behind the bleachers. I saw another miss his bat and find my catcher’s mask. I saw another disappear for a home run. I saw another miss the plate entirely. Finally, I found the grip, started the motion, and released. With no spin, the ball danced in the air and slowly spiraled towards the plate. At the second to last second, the ball began to break low and away. The batter flailed out of what must have been surprise and desperation. At the last second, the ball suddenly broke back towards the plate, where it hit his swinging bat. With a crack, the ball shot past me and bounced by the right fielder for a triple. I had inherited my father’s luck. Had the house poisoned me, too? My catcher came to visit.
“What the fuck was that? Where’s the fastball?”
“I don’t know. I’ll blow it by them.” I still wanted to win. I was a good man, and that should have been enough.
“Do it,” he said.
I didn’t want to see the next hitter, but he came anyway. I focused my mind, my legs, my chest, and my back on the next fastball, but there wasn’t much left in the arm. After the next few fastballs, my catcher didn’t bother with visiting anymore because the manager had figured it out. I’d always been tired, and I hadn’t told anybody. I’d blown myself out. They left me in to think about what I’d done.
6/17/05: Miller – IP:0.0 H:0 R:0 BB:0 SO:0 (7th Inning)
Keith got the first out in the seventh inning. He’d told them about the knuckleballs in the warm-up. Later, the manager came to me in the bullpen and told me to think it over.
Keith gave up a hit. He bent down to let his arm flop down from his shoulder to where his fingers almost scraped against the dirt. He hung there for a moment, and then gathered his body to work towards the second out. As I watched him pull himself up - slowly, painfully – I didn’t feel my arm at all. All of the fatigue that I’d put there, all of the strength that I’d built up, all of the earth’s poison was gone. For a moment, I could imagine myself at twenty. I would dig my nails into the ball’s hide so that I could almost feel its rubber core. As I dropped my arm back, I would see nothing in my mind before I released the ball to float on indistinct currents. The ball might find a bat. The ball might find the ground. The ball might also find a glove, where it would begin to return to me. Keith recorded his final out.
