Hitting into the Wind by William Meissner

Author:William Meissner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Hitting Into the Wind
ISBN: 9781938604126
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Published: 1994-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Roger looks at a road sign and sees that it’s another hundred miles to his home. He checks his wristwatch—it’s ten o’clock. If he hurries and keeps it at seventy, he’ll be there by eleven-thirty. He’ll surprise his wife, and maybe tell her a little about the game. Or maybe he’ll talk to her about that play his first year as an ump when he was so indecisive. He’ll tell her he won’t let that happen again. He knows she hates it when he’s indecisive and can’t make up his mind. He’ll tell her he’s changed. Or maybe he won’t talk to her, just wake her gently from sleep by rubbing her shoulder, bare beneath the strap of her red nightgown. Then he’ll slide his arms around her and kiss her. Maybe he won’t talk to her at all, just kiss her, and make love to her, and that’ll be enough.

He stares at the blinking lines in the road and thinks about how, his first year of umping, after that play at the plate, he went to the library and got all the rule books he could and studied them, memorizing every situation possible in a game, just so he’d be ready. He didn’t want anything like that to happen to him again in his career: that feeling of being frozen, like a man caught inside the ice of a glacier. During his research, he read that the difference between a major leaguer and a minor leaguer is a hundredth of a second. Whether it be fielding or batting, that little difference separates the pros from the scrubs. You have the reflexes down right, and you’ve got it all. Whether you swing the bat or lunge for a ball at short, that’s all it takes. And for umps, it’s different, but, in a way, the same. It’s the tiniest distances, the tiniest of moments that count the most. It’s a hundredth of an inch. It’s a hundredth of a second when a runner’s foot is about to touch first base and the throw from third’s an inch from the fielder’s mitt. And you have to be on the right side of that hundredth of an inch or hundredth of a second. You’ve got to be accurate, or you might as well forget it. You have to be fair. In control. You have to have your perceptions filed sharp to a point.

Things are so close, after all. He worries about it. Worries whether or not his reactions are starting to die now that he’s almost forty. Though you wouldn’t know it from his stocky build and the way his gray polyester pants seem tighter around the waist each day, he’s still young. He doesn’t want those reactions to die, doesn’t want to start blinking at the moment the pitch comes across the plate. He met a fellow in the River League who, one afternoon over a few beers, told him about the time he was hit in the throat with a foul tip.

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