A Position

A Position

By Seth Kaplan

One of the advantages (maybe the only) I had as an athlete was my competitiveness and desire to compete. Skilled for sure, but no one wanted to win more than me. I battled with searing intensity. I was one of those players.

In the classroom, they are called brownnosers and try-hards. In sports, they are called grinders or dirtbags—terms of respect, not insults. Ballfields of all sorts were my temples. For the glory of the game. Play until after dark. Late for dinner be damned. Twisted ankles, ripped bloody knees, shoulders sore. Burn. Win. Compete. Repeat. That’s peace and serenity. I’m uncertain why or how this became my identifying trait; I’ve never really thought about it too deeply. I’m just glad I have it because that kind of attitude can get you places. Places you want to go, and places you don’t.

***

As a kid, I was a pretty good pitcher. I even threw some no-hitters. One game in a high school summer league I was really mowing ‘em down. We were up 2–0 and I was looking for a complete game shutout, or, even better, a perfect game. My fastball was pumping. My slider was sharp. My change disappeared in thin air. I was no major league prospect on the hill, but on that summer afternoon, I was unhittable, and I knew it.

I was locked in, a phrase no one used back then. Locked in. The holy grail of the athletic experience. Athletes work for these moments in time when everything slows down and the pieces all fall into place. Miles pass with ease. Shots find the bottom of the net from anywhere and everywhere. Everything can be seen, heard, felt—in slow motion. For most (and obviously for me) these instances are rare. Elite athletes discuss these out-of-body states of mind they find themselves in, and the tireless work they do to arrive, stay and return there. They meditate, visualize and study, all in an effort to find that place.

The magic of athletics is that you don’t have to be elite to feel that, too. You know when it’s there. It grabs hold and tells you, “This is the moment you’ve been working for,” and that’s what keeps you coming back. You are one step ahead of your foe. Sometimes more. Your opponent’s job is to disrupt, and you must fight to maintain. That’s what the great ones do.

That’s the place I was that summer evening. We were the visiting team, and it was the bottom of the last inning. I took my warm-up pitches. Everything was humming. On the first pitch, the leadoff batter grounded out weakly to second. I struck out the next batter, who looked at all three pitches. Nasty stuff. I turned away from the plate while my teammates sent the ball around the horn. Simultaneously, I felt relaxed while my blood pumped hard and my heart beat in my eardrums and my neck. I breathed the sticky summer air in through my nose and blew it out my mouth. Repeat. I focused on the scoreboard down the third base line; little white dots of light that barely registered through the sunshine. Home 0, Visitor 2.

Beyond the scoreboard was a mostly empty parking lot. Our team bus waited there for me to board as the winning pitcher, the author of a perfect game. I envisioned it. I turned back towards the infield and snapped my mitt to grab the throw in from the third baseman, who whipped it extra hard, saying, “Finish this,” without speaking. I climbed the mound and raised my gaze to face my next victim, but the batter’s box was empty.

I heard the other team’s coach call timeout from the third base dugout. I watched him approach the umpire. Then, before I knew it, he was walking out toward me, the opposing coach to my mound, with his head down. What in the hell? I was pitching a perfect game. Do you know how rare that is, a perfect game? In 154 years of professional baseball, over 230,000 games, there have been 24 perfect games. Twenty-four!

The coach stopped in front of me and his gaze rose to meet mine. I remained on the mound, but he was taller than me still. He had his cap pulled down real far, and he tugged down on it with both hands. He seemed afraid to look at me. He had gray stubble on his face and a crunched-up nose that looked like it had been broken more than once. He lifted his chin, and then he darted his eyes once in each direction before speaking.

“You’re pitching a helluva game, Pal.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “This next player coming to bat, y’know, is our student manager. He’s a little, slow, y’know?”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Even at age 16 I was keenly aware of the unwritten code of conduct in combat. As a sports fan and competitor, these rules and mores are learned young. You don’t steal bases when you’re winning big late in the game, no drop shots when the result of the match is secure, no more first downs as the clock winds down—you take a knee. Even in real combat, there are rules. Why would sport be any different? On that mound, on that evening in 1987, rules were being broken.

I looked past the coach and at the boy who had finally made his way to the plate. He wore thick glasses and had acne around his puffy thick red lips. His helmet was cockeyed, and it barely fit his huge head. He stared in our direction.

“I don’t let him bat much, but since you’re in total control, maybe you could take it easy on him? Maybe just walk him and go get the next guy? It would make his season. His parents are here and everything.”

The coach gestured over to the bleachers, like I wanted to look at this kid’s parents or anyone else witnessing this spectacle. Like I could do anything now other than stare into my own soul and try to comprehend what I was hearing, to understand the impossible burden being placed on me in front of all these people. I didn’t want to hear any more, but I couldn’t walk away.

“He struck out every time he’s batted the season, Pal. Every time.”

The umpire came out to break up the meeting and the coach returned, head down, to the dugout, leaving me alone on the bump. And alone I truly was. Baseball is the only team sport where on every single play, the precursor to the action begins the same way: the ball in the hand of the pitcher. The pitcher, who stands, encircled by his own team, the opposing team, the umpires, and fans who wait for the play to begin. The action can start no other way, with no other player. Eyes and expectations were on me.

The boy dug in. I looked at him as he waved the bat, and just for what the coach said and for the kid letting him say it, my first instinct was to ride one high and tight and knock him on his ass, if he could even get out of the way. How’s that for rules of combat? Then I’d strike him out on the next three pitches while he was shaking in shoes. That’s what I’d do. One, two, three. If I was him, I wouldn’t want any favors.

But the coach must’ve seen something in me I couldn’t.

I overthrew the first pitch and grunted when I did.

Ball one.

The game was moving faster now, not slower.

The second pitch sailed past the catcher’s outstretched mitt to the backstop.

Ball two.

The crowd cheered. Their dugout, previously demoralized, started to come alive. I could now hear all the noise.

I took a breath and tried to refocus, but I couldn’t. I walked around the mound. I stared at the sky, pounded my fist into my mitt.  I looked at him up there waving his bat as if he could actually use it. I heard the chatter from my team. Come on, 11. You got this Kap. Easy heat.

I tried to whiff him, but neither of the next two were strikes. A four-pitch walk.

I watched that kid run to first base, his left foot kind of dragging the whole way. People were clapping, yelling, finger-in-the-mouth whistling. He made it to the first base and jumped on it with two feet. The coach called time out and put a pinch-runner in for him, probably because the kid didn’t even know how to get to second. His teammates cheered, then congratulated him heartily at the bench, as if he’d actually done something.

Rattled, I walked the next batter, too. Then I threw a wild pitch, and the next batter nearly spun my cap with a line drive single up the middle. The perfect game was gone, and now the no-hitter. Another wild pitch followed by a clean double to left center on a get-me-over fastball that cleared the bases. That was the game. Home 3, Visitor 2.

I threw my glove down with fury. I kicked at the dirt. My teammates, who I had played ball with since I was in grade school, tried to console me with the truth—that was bullshit— and more, but I wasn’t having it. Plus, they didn’t even know. My moment and the history that accompanied it was extinguished without a care, a cigarette ground into the sidewalk with a heeled boot, a bug squashed with a stomp. That coach swindled me. I snatched my dusty mitt off the ground and buried my face in it, wet it with my tears. The other team went wild and picked the kid up on their shoulders and paraded him around, chanting his name, which I think was Sean. We waited patiently for the celebration to end and we shook hands with the other guys because we had to. Those were the rules. I was still crying. I said nice game nice game nice game without lifting my head.

Their coach pulled me aside after the handshake line and said I’d done a good thing, I’d made the kid’s season, maybe his life.

“Look at that kid,” he said to me. “Look at that kid smiling, Pal.”

Look at me, I wanted to say. Look at me.

The coach clapped me on the shoulder again and jogged away to join the celebration.

What a position to be put in.

***

That day is still acid in my mouth. Trust me, I derive no pleasure there. It hurts, saying that. I hope that Sean remembers. I hope it was, indeed, the best day of his life. But I’m still angry. So angry. What that coach did could ruin a kid. That coach and his unknowing accomplices robbed me in plain sight, right on that mound, encircled by my teammates, friends, coaches and parents. Robbed me at knifepoint of a moment that I’ll never get back. And I do not forgive them. And I cannot forget.

***

Things have been taken from me in my life, and I’ve reconciled, or am working on, reconciling them all. That is, all but this one. I have never told this story to my wife, my kids, not to anyone, really. I’ve just never been sure anyone would understand. What’s the big deal, they would say? Or worse, just let it go. 

But, as I disentangle the many threads of child I was then and the person I am now, a knot sits on that sun drenched ballfield. A knot that’s pulled tight, complex and solid. And it hurts. That knot, unfortunately, is not going anywhere. And while it may seem silly—this rumination over a high school baseball game’s largely irrelevant outcome—that’s the point.

The moment was so far from irrelevant to me. That moment was me. And whether or not that coach knew or not, he devalued all of me that day, breaking rules along the way. And there is some part of me that it did ruin, because after that day, I never pitched well again, that’s true. I completely lost my feel for the zone, and I never got it back.

“A Position” won honorable mention for the Jackie Mitchell Creative Nonfiction Prize.

Seth Kaplan (“A Position”) is a writer and attorney in Evanston, Illinois, whose work has appeared in Write or Die, Points in Case, WordSwell, and elsewhere. He has work upcoming in Hobart. When not lawyering and writing, Seth is learning to empty nest with his wife, Elizabeth, while coaching baseball, practicing yoga, and raising tomatoes. He is at work on a to-be-named essay collection. See more of his work and give him a follow on Instagram @sethkaplanwriter.

Jason David Córdova lives in Puerto Rico as an illustrator and painter. Some of his art can be seen on Instagram at @jasoni72. You can visit his shop on Red Bubble.

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