It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over
It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over
Benjamin Gibbons
One day, two teams will play the last baseball game.
At the end of baseball, a closer, or a mop-up guy if the last game is a blowout, or an ace starter if the last game is a vintage pitchers’ duel, but somebody somewhere will twist into a windup and rear back and throw the last pitch. The last pitch might be a fastball that rips the air like a bullet, or a changeup that soothes with false promises, or a slider that dives toward the ground while shrapnel flies overhead, or a looping curveball that freezes the batter in place while the sun burns holes in the vault of Earth’s atmosphere. The last pitch might come traveling right down the chute in plain sight and the batter might miss it anyway.
The last pitch might pop like a financial bubble into the palm of the catcher’s mitt.
The last pitch might be ball four with the bases loaded and the runner on third might, with no alternative, be forced to go home, and home might be washed away, leaving no place appropriate for celebration.
The last pitch might find itself interrupted on its way to the catcher by a swung bat and arc parabolic through the air, mimicking the flight path of a nuclear rocket, and be inhaled by the reddening sky and choked upon and spat back out for the last time to settle into an outfielder’s glove, and the outfielder might pump his fist like a strongman shouting Revenge at a podium and converge with his fellow outfielders in center field and leap into the air and collide in a mass of golden retriever joy summoned for the last time. When they come back down, the earth might split open and drop them to its molten core. Maybe they’ll flee into space and never come down.
The last batted ball might not be caught by a player, but by a child in the bleachers, right field, center field, stretching her glove amidst a selfsame cluster which then wilts together like a bouquet of blighted flowers and leaves the child, the last child to catch a baseball, with glove still outstretched, a bloom of leather among dry emptiness, the last living bloom. The child might turn to show her parents her prize and find her parents gone and lower the glove and start to cry, the last tears shed over a mass grave.
And the batter, the last batter to hit the last home run, might sprint around the diamond like the Devil’s after him and each base is a station of the cross, even if the Devil is a tidal wave or a missile or a blanketing fire, something more powerful than prayer, and as he rounds third he might see a cluster of his teammates, his family, waiting for him, faces bathed ecstatic in metal halide glow, like the light of an alabaster mushroom cloud, and arrive, finally, at home, the last arrival, and be welcomed to the other side.
However the last baseball game ends, it will end. The stadium lights will cut out, the players will leave, exchanging their last fist bumps and high-fives and hugs, and the groundskeeper, maybe a person, maybe an arid wind, maybe the engorged sea itself, will pull the bases from their moorings, the end of first, the end of second, the end of third, the end of home, and the white painted lines that defined all order will fade over time and leave only dry grass and the echo of a crowd. And baseball, lingering somewhere in the firmament, will call out to indeterminate ears:
Come back.
Look around.
Isn’t it a beautiful day?
Let’s run in circles again.
Benjamin Gibbons is a Pittsburgh-based writer. His fiction has been published in Fourteen Hills, Puerto Del Sol, Pithead Chapel, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere, and he covers local music for the Pittsburgh Independent newspaper and for his website, Bored In Pittsburgh. He received a Press Club of Western Pennsylvania Golden Quill Award in 2025 for his music criticism.
Caitlin McPhee is an illustrator and Blue Jays fan based in Calgary, Alberta. Special thanks are owed to the Foothills Major Baseball Association for their influence on this work. See more markers @onewarmline on Instagram.
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