EQMM, June 2010 by Dell Magazine Authors

Author:Dell Magazine Authors
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dell Magazines

Department of First Stories: THE HIDDEN BALL TRICK by Patrick Glendon McCullough

Twenty-four-year-old Patrick McCullough was brought up in Oklahoma, moved to Brooklyn four years ago, and recently retreated to Callicoon, a tiny hamlet on the Delaware River in upstate New York—in pursuit, he says, of a place that would make for better fishing than the East River. When not writing, he tells us, he likes to read Graham Greene and brew beer. Readers of his debut story may wonder at his not mentioning baseball as another of his enthusiasms.

Being only a few seconds this side of dead, I find my thoughts turn to religion. And like any decent sportswriter who drinks most of his paycheck, religion for me is baseball.

The annals of its history form a story that beats any other holy book the world has ever produced. One which provides an answer and precedent to everything. Dying, for example.

You look at someone like John Wayne Gacy, the serial killer who wound up getting executed. Clear strikeout.

Abe Lincoln: sacrifice fly.

Or you take most of the folks who work and raise a family and all that stuff and get to live to be old and die without much pain. Amounts to a respectable single. Maybe a double, depending on how your wife looks.

Finally, you've got the home runs and the grand slams. Take a retired sportswriter I knew who had worked at the Daily News. Decades before my time, but I'd run into him at games now and then. He died in a hot tub at his ninetieth birthday party with a glass of cheap rye in one hand and a girl in the other who was young enough to have been some evolved, Darwinian descendent of his own rare species.

When I was a kid, I always kind of hoped I'd go out like that. If not a grand slam, then a triple. Heart attack in box seats at Yankee Stadium, with Boston down thirty to nothing in the first inning, my credit card bill still largely unpaid.

But things surprise you. One day every beer seems colder than the one before it and you think that life is a pretty lucky break and the next you're looking down and seeing your insides getting their first peek at the world outside of your belly.

I'm not speaking poetically. That gruesome latter scenario is my present situation. Sounds like a clear strikeout, right? Maybe an easy pop fly that gets caught in right field?

Nope. Even worse.

May 30, 1973. The shortstop for the Yankees, Gene Michael, quietly catches the ball thrown back in from the outfield following an out. Vic Harris, playing for the Rangers, is standing on second, not paying attention to anything. So he misses that Michael doesn't toss the ball to the pitcher, but instead innocently wanders toward second base. Assuming the ball is with the pitcher, Harris leads off and Michael tags him.

The hidden ball trick.

It doesn't happen often, but there's no more shameful way to make an exit.

I should know. It's what did me in.

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