Big Leaguer

Big Leaguer

Jonathan Danielson

After Lewis checked his wallet and made sure he had his insurance card, he told his wife he was heading out for “some me time” and she told him to quit being gross. From the bedroom, she said, I already had my uterus scraped. The least you can do is go in for the easiest exam a man can ever take.

At his doctor’s office, Lewis didn’t make eye contact with the front desk staff as they took his ID and gave him forms to fill out. In the waiting room, he stared at his feet while people came and went for bloodwork, yearly physicals, worrisome growths on their backs. Finally, a nurse called his name and led him to an examination room in the back. Lewis had been a patient of this doctor for nearly five years and had no idea the room existed. Inside was a leather recliner, the seat frayed. Next to the recliner was an end table with a gallon-sized pump bottle of petroleum jelly.

“And you can adjust the brightness for mood lighting,” the nurse said as she showed Lewis the halogen lamp in the corner. She turned the knob to demonstrate how.

“Thank you,” Lewis said.

The nurse ripped off a sheet of sanitation paper and placed it over the recliner’s sagging cushion. She wrote his name on a cup. “Our internet password’s here,” she said, and handed him a business card with numbers and letters. “But keep in mind we track every site you visit.”

“Thank you,” Lewis said.

“And remember, you’re only allowed 25 minutes. After that, we have to kick you out.”

The nurse pulled an egg timer from underneath the sink. She cranked the dial and it started ticking. “Any questions?”

Lewis adjusted the timer so he could see it from the recliner.

“Thank you so much.”

Once the nurse left, Lewis sat in darkness. He couldn’t help but think of his wife and all the tests she had undergone for two years. Hormone tests, transvaginal ultrasounds, radioactive dye shot into her cervix to make sure her fallopian tubes were open. Biopsies and hysteroscopies, then more biopsies, more radioactive dye, ultrasounds, hormone tests. He had intentionally postponed his appointment more than once because he had hoped his wife’s doctors would’ve found the issue. That things would’ve been solved from there. For two whole years, he hadn’t wanted to admit the problem might be his.

Lewis turned the halogen lamp up all the way. On the wall across the tiny room was a poster of a cartoon baseball player leaning against his bat. The ballplayer was drawn in the sharp, angular style which Lewis could only describe as something akin to communist propaganda posters from a hundred years earlier. Underneath the player were the words BIG LEAGUE SLUGGER. Lewis turned the lamp off.

In darkness, the timer ticked away five minutes before Lewis stood and undid his belt. Another three as he folded his pants and draped them over the recliner. Seven as he sat with the sanitation paper against his rear end doing nothing, nothing at all, his underwear bunched at his ankles, his brain a blank slate, no memory or fantasy or hypothetical situation within his grasp.

“You can’t force it, Champ,” a voice said from somewhere in the darkness. “You gotta meet the ball where it’s at.”

Lewis lifted his head from his hands. He raised the dial for the halogen lamp. Across the room, the cartoon ballplayer was mid-swing.

“Hello?” Lewis said. “Is someone there?”

When no one answered, Lewis leaned back into the recliner and the smell of old leather and body odor.

“You just got to keep your swing level, Bud,” the voice said. “That’s the only way to get some wood on the ball.”

When Lewis looked up, the ballplayer was frozen mid-slide into home. Lewis blinked, and the ballplayer was near the bleachers signing a ball for a similarly angular cartoon kid. “It’s not always about hitting the long ball, Chief. Sometimes, you just got to get on base. Keep the line moving, you know?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Lewis said.

“I’m doing the best I can here, Big Guy,” the ballplayer said. “But I’m sorta limited to your conceptual understanding of masculine expectations and old-timey slang. It’d also help if you actually liked baseball.”

Lewis sank into the seat.

“I never played,” he said. “My dad never even taught me how to throw.”

With the timer ticking away, Lewis remembered those afternoons tossing a tennis ball against their fence until he inevitably threw it into the neighbor’s yard and had to wait for his parents to get home so he could go next door and ask for it. “I guess I dwell on that a lot, don’t I?” he said. “But how am I not supposed to dwell? I don’t know these things. I don’t even mow our own yard, I pay somebody to do it. I call a plumber when the toilet’s clogged. What happens when the day comes somebody asks me to play catch? I was always stuck playing with myself.”

“Well, Ace, that’s sort of why you’re here now, isn’t it?” the ballplayer said. He stood shirtless in a locker room with a towel around his square, blocky waist. “But you just got to keep your eye on the ball and not worry so much. Hall of Fame careers have been built by less.”

The egg timer dinged.

In a panic, Lewis stood. He tried resetting the timer back two, six, ten minutes, but there was a knock at the door.

“Listen, Champ, there’ve been plenty of at-bats I wish I could get back,” the ballplayer said. He sat at a bar in a suit, a martini in hand. Two similarly geometric women sat on either side of him, their blocky arms around his shoulders, their hands on his pointy knees. “But the only pitch that matters is the one that’s coming right at you. Or something. Honestly, that’s the end of our baseball knowledge. My point is, stop focusing on missed pitches and worry about the ones still to come.”

The nurse kept knocking. With his underwear at his ankles, Lewis pulled the recliner across the room.

“Sir?” the nurse said. On the other side of the door, keys jingled. The lock clicked, but the door wouldn’t open. The nurse, then nurses, tried shoving against it, but the recliner barricaded it shut. “Sir?” they insisted. “Sir, open this door right now. Sir!”

The chair shook. Lewis looked over his shoulder to make sure the recliner was holding its ground—oh, he knew this one, like blocking a base path! He pumped a dollop of jelly onto his palm.

On the wall behind him, the ballplayer had his martini raised in a toast.

Jonathan Danielson is a Writer-at-Large for The Feathertale Review, and his stories have appeared in Gulf Coast, HAD, Stanchion, Juked, Superstition Review, and elsewhere. His debut collection, THE LOWEST BASIN: ARIZONA STORIES, was published by Cowboy Jamboree Press in April 2025. He holds a PhD in English Literature from Arizona State University and an MFA from the University of San Francisco. His scholarly work focuses on Creative Writing, the Western, and Arizona literary regionalism.

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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