Maddu(X) and the Crow Hop

Maddu(X) and the Crow Hop

By Kiyoshi Hirawa

When failed athletes become failed writers, they turn into passable high school English teachers, half-wit poets who can fool students with semantics, but not their curveball.

X is no different. His changeup is failing him, and with his curveball already AWOL and his splitter charged with desertion, there’s not much he can offer during high school batting practice. But his composition is hanging in there, still thinking it can escape the first and third jam called writer’s block.

Baseball did not choose America.  Rather, America chose baseball, plucking it from the pantheon of sports and cradling it all the way home from the Adoption Agency for National Athletics. What she saw amazed and delighted her.  A pitcher and a batter.  Action generated by a challenge from the former to the latter. An exercise in mutual defiance. If the split-second summit between bat and ball intrigued her, the home run made her fall in love. What’s more revered, more reverent in America than a home run? It’s like striking oil, discovering gold, or securing a patent. If you can strike a ball over the wall, you secure uncontested passage to home plate, success, wealth, and glory. The American Dream.

America embraced baseball.  Baseball shrugged and said, “Why not? Who knows when another up-and-coming country will happen by the orphanage?”

“Coach? Coach?”

The brief reverie shatters like a broken bat. X rediscovers himself atop the pitcher’s mound, a dusty hump rising from an infield so arid it sends fan mail to the Atacama. Sweat seeps from his armpits and threatens to flood the wasteland of his chest. Yet the temperature is only sixty-five. It doesn’t matter; X sweats doing laundry. His permeating sweat stains are favorite targets for his high school students’ jokes, suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous glandular secretions.

“Cock your right elbow up a little,” he advises Jaime Cervantes, the son of a naturalized immigrant from the Dominican Republic. Jaime betrays the stereotype which casts Dominicans as poor, persevering diamonds in the vast rough of undeveloped shortstops. Jaime is rich. No local newspaper will ever detail his perilous raft rides across the Caribbean…unless you count the raft of his father’s wealth and international connections.

His father once privately despaired to X that Jaime was a “blundering hopelessness.” X did not disagree. Jaime has struck out fifty-seven times this year, an astounding statistic considering Hamilton High has only played twenty-three games. 

But he’s also one of X’s favorite players. Jaime refuses to alter his swing or any part of his approach. Should a pitch drift into the no-fly zone over home plate, Jaime will assail the ball with all the force his helpless figure can muster. Yes, he’s struck out eighty-seven times this year.  But not once, not once, has he struck out looking. Watching Jaime in the dugout, X suspects he knows he’ll strike out every time–he dons his helmet with the same sufferance of a trench soldier.

Pitching from the stretch, X fires a belt-high pitch that splits the plate in half. Jaime cuts at the ball with the grace of a drunken lumberjack, but manages to only obliterate a few air molecules caught unaware. The surrounding molecules peer fearfully around and yell if anyone happened to catch the number of the hit-and-run fiend. Another perfect pitch, another mighty swing, and the air molecules are left shaking their atomic fists angrily.

Fifteen pitches later finds fifteen baseballs chatting amicably in the dirt near the end of the backstop.  When you’re an equally reluctant English teacher and baseball coach, batting practice bleeds into creative writing practice. Pitching strikes and plots. Conjuring curveballs and characters. And failed monologues that your ex was perpetually too embarrassed to critique.

What do baseballs talk about? Petroleum jelly brands? The humidity? Making it to the majors?  The size of a certain softball’s stitching just across the street? Or are they simply rehashing their near-hit experiences with the bat, recalling what might have been with grand hyperbole?

“Coach?”

X blinks and looks down the mound at Jaime. 

“Is that it?” Jaime shifts the bat to his left hand and adjusts his batting glove.

“Yeah, that’s it, Jaime. Good stuff today. Just remember to keep that elbow up, okay?” 

“Okay.” Jaime nods dutifully and lumbers out to right field. He’s not a bad kid, X knows, he just can’t hit. Or pitch. Or catch. Or steal bases. Or play infield. Right field has granted him asylum, but only because of recent pressure from Amnesty International.

“Trent, you’re up,” X calls to his star shortstop, while Nick, the backup catcher, collects the prattling baseballs and sets them in a bag on the edge of the mound. 

Trent trots to the dugout slower than Ozuna after a home run, grabs his batting gear, and performs a series of glove and helmet adjustments that would make Garciaparra blush. Finally, he steadies himself. The transition from fielder to batter has taken nearly five minutes.

“Ready when you are, Coach.”

X rolls his eyes. Trent has multiple scholarship offers and no incentive to perform, impress, or lead. The only question left on his high school resume is whether he’ll stay local and play for the local university or head for California or Florida.

And there’s absolutely no denying the boy can hit. In fact, the entire right side of the infield actually sits down. Ten years ago, such undisciplined behavior would have earned the entire team an endless string of wind sprints.  Legs and lungs would have suffered lactic acid’s poison for the brain’s indolence. But after three unpublished novels, a languishing teaching career, and back-to-back-to-back failed relationships, X simply shrugs and delivers a fastball low and outside the strike zone. 

But Trent, having scouted his coach’s pitch selection during the previous innumerable practices, crowds the plate, waiting.  When the expected pitch veers just beyond the plate’s outside corner, Trent steps slightly in and drives the ball to the opposite field.  The ball bounces twice and gleefully shoots through Jaime’s legs where it whoops like a joyriding teenager to the fence.  Once comfortably prone, the first and second basemen reluctantly rise and slap their mitts, at least feigning anticipation.

X nods affirmatively to Trent and steps back to begin his wind-up.  He spins a breaking ball towards the same corner only to have Trent promptly crush it over the left-field fence.  A fastball fired down low does its best cosmonaut impersonation as it arcs up and clears the center field wall.  High and inside receives marks for character, but is nonetheless expelled from the park to reunite with its predecessors. Low and outside streaks toward right field like a Fourth of July bottle rocket. 

The baseballs leave X’s hand as scruffed spheres laced with red stitching, nothing more, but accelerate from Trent’s bat as shooting stars.  Of the fourteen balls X pitches, eleven clear the fence.  The remaining three commiserate together in the outfield.

One ball left. X exhales as he retrieves the ball, debating over exactly what pitch to throw. He doesn’t have many options. True, he was named after Greg Maddux (his name was inadvertently shortened to a single consonant by a nurse misinterpreting the mumblings of his overly dosed mother who could only slur the final syllable of The Professor’s last name). However, when your coach tells you that you’re “Jamie Moyer…without the guile,” it means you’re destined for pitching purgatory–high school batting practice.

Part of X, driven purely by spite, wants to drill Trent in the ribs, just beside the sternum. But another part urges X to sling a fastball smack down the center of the plate, past Trent’s cocksure swing, and hear it thud against the wooden backstop.  X breathes deeply as he shakes his arm and summons strength for one final pitch. 

A quick monologue, X can’t help himself. Without preamble, without prefacing the pitch with an intimidating glare, without building the tension (and where exactly is tension built? On an assembly line in some plant in Flint, Michigan? In the Boston shipyards? Or do writers subcontract the building of tension to skyscraper construction workers? Is it even built? Perhaps it’s stitched together in a Malaysian sweatshop for thirty cents an hour), without evicting even the tiniest bit of saliva from his mouth, the pitcher burns a fastball toward home.

The pitch is absolutely perfect, faster than any Jamie Moyer fastball, which, as X reflects, is a little bit like boasting about being faster than Cecil Fielder.

But the swing is even better. Trent turns on X’s pitch and positively clobbers the ball (there’s just no other word; the thesaurus refused to yield, even after the third degree). The ball explodes off the aluminum barrel like a mortar and flips gravity the bird, unknowingly approaching its airborne apogee.  Then, poised upon the apex of its flight, the ball glances down and realizing its fate, seems to shrug in classic cartoon fashion.  Patiently vindictive, gravity sneers as the meteoric trajectory of the ball reluctantly ratifies Newton’s age-old arguments and begins its inevitable descent.

Beaming with the pride of a newly promoted Marine, the ball plunges toward the clique of home run balls lying beyond baseball’s hallowed border.  A gaggle of ebullience, the tattooed baseballs cheer the arrival of their brethren as Trent’s final blast touches down fifteen feet further than the rest.

“Is that it?” Trent sounds earnest, but X picks up undertones of sneering prickery.

Baseball’s unwritten rules permit the plunking of batters who show up pitchers, but those rules don’t apply to high school coaches throwing batting practice. There is, however, nothing prohibiting any pitcher of any age from displacing righteous anger onto an unrelated but equally deserving target.

Like an ex-girlfriend’s luxury car bought by her new boyfriend, parked stupidly close to the right field fence.

X dismisses Trent from the batter’s box, scans the field, and finds his left-handed patsy.

“Sam, you’re up,” he calls out, and the lanky senior trots in from center field.

Even-keeled and pleasant to the point of exasperation, Sam is the son he never had with the woman who never really wanted to be with him. Not when she could upgrade from a high school English teacher to a physics professor boasting a PhD, published articles, and a fat trust fund to buy Porsche 911s for each of them–one of which is sunbathing in a parking lot that X plans to turn into a bombing range.

“You ready?” he asks Sam.

Sam’s bat is nestled against his neck like a drowsy girlfriend. “Yep,” he smiles, and his cheerfulness coats the foul poles a second shade of yellow.

X warms him up with lower-speed fastballs. Sam’s easy swing peppers the outfield with pop flies that creep closer and closer to the warning track. Levi and James, the remaining outfielders, offer perfunctory effort. In fact, when Levi nabs a fly one-handed and casually chucks it back into the infield, missing the cut-off completely, X shouts at him, “Not just doing batting practice here–outfield practice, too; two hands, crow hop, hit the cut-off.”

Levi calls back, “Crow hop?”

Hamilton High struggles to field a baseball team each year, but X cannot believe that Levi has never been taught to crow hop.

“Crow hop,” he yells back. He tries to pantomime catching and throwing the ball in the same motion, but it looks like a scarecrow falling off a fence. Even Jaime looks away, embarrassed, and X decides to give up on everything except landing a meteor on the windshield of his ex’s Porsche. As he turns back to Sam, he catches Trent jogging out to right field, abandoning shortstop.

With a full outfield, X starts slinging pitches again. He starts working Sam top to bottom until the boy finally connects with one, sending it circling Mars before it zeroes in on the Porsche’s windshield. Except, when X shades his eyes to watch the impact, he sees Trent one-hopping to the top of the fence, his arm shooting out and snagging the ball like a snapping turtle.

“Not today,” Trent shouts as he chucks the ball past the cutoff, one-hopping it into X’s glove which had previously been covering his mouth, absorbing profanities.

But X knows something Trent doesn’t: Sam used to be part of the high school golf team before budget cuts claimed the program. The boy is a natural low-ball hitter, but he’ll need the right pitch to arc it over Trent, who now has back against the fence.

Low fastball. Low change-up. Low fastball again. Then, a low curveball that X intentionally leaves hanging across the fat part of the plate. Sam golf-swats the ball into orbit, and X watches Trent tense, gauging the path. When Trent’s glove reluctantly drops, X’s eyes flick to the sky, tracking the ball, savoring the flight, waiting for the tink of a broken windshield…until a fleshy slap heard all the way to the dugout murders X’s revenge fantasy.

A man standing next to a second Porsche has jumped into the center of the blast radius, barehanding and then hurling the ball back into the outfield with the most gorgeous crow-hop X has ever seen. Levi, previously agnostic about such baseball maneuvers, needs only raise his glove to his face before collecting and relaying the ball back to the infield.

The man waves and shouts, “That was close,” before X recognizes him as his ex-girlfriend’s new Porsche-buying professor boyfriend. And then X remembers something gleaned from his 2 a.m. cyberstalking self-pity sessions–the guy started in center field for some perennial SEC and College World Series contender before blowing out his knee and trading his planned MLB for a PhD.

And then suddenly, she’s there, too, standing next to Mr. Higgs Boson or whatever new subatomic particle that physicists believe has a God-complex. And they both wave to X from a distance that somehow further underscores how they’ve left X dwindling in the past. And then they get in their Porsches and glide out of the parking lot.

X watches them leave. The players watch X. Sam watches the players and says, “Coach? We done for today?”

X doesn’t want his pity, but he does want practice to end. “Yeah, we’re done. Get it packed up.”

The team clatters the bags into sleeves and dunks the baseballs into leather bags. The catcher’s gear worn by three generations is jammed in with the batting helmets. X is lugging a load of gear back toward the school gym when Trent runs up and hands him a couple of baseballs. The All-Star shortstop is still carrying his bat.

“Thanks.” X jams the balls back in the bag and cinches the cord.

“No problem.” Trent grabs the bag of batting helmets and slings it over his shoulder. “Hey, what was that back there?”

“What do you mean?” X knows that Trent knows, so he starts dragging the gear faster.

“Before Miss Quinlan came out, you were trying to hit her car. Like, you were pitching to Sam, trying to get him to hit her car.”

X shakes his head and grunts. “Nope. Just batting practice.”

Trent reaches out and touches X’s arm. “Hey.” X stops. “I wanted to tell you something. I’m not staying here to play baseball.”

“Where’re you going to play?”

“I don’t know, someplace warm. Not sure.”

“Why not here?”

Trent steps out in front of X so neither person has the sun in their eyes. “That’s what I wanted to tell you. I’m going to school out-of-state because of you.”

“Me? Why?”

“My mom says there are two types of people who motivate you: those that inspire you, and those that show you everything you never want to be.” X does not need to be told which one he is, but Trent does it anyway. “You’re a coach, but you do the same thing as everybody else around here–you just tear down, you never build up. I saw what happened back there. You can call it batting practice, but everybody knows you were bombing her car. We all know what happened between you guys. The whole school knows.”

X angles his body back towards the sun so he has to squint instead of meet Trent’s eyes.

“Look, it’s not just you,” Trent says. “I see my dad do it, too. And his dad. It’s just this…place. I just don’t want to end up here, tearing up other people’s success because I failed.”

Trent is right, but X has had enough. “Shut the fuck up. You’re eighteen years old, you don’t know shit. Come back in thirty years and we’ll talk—we’ll dissect all your failures and bad luck and then we’ll have some high school senior stand in front of you and lecture you. Get the fuck out of here.”

Trent has been hit over a hundred times in his young baseball career, twice in the face, thrice in the back of the head. A coach’s tongue-lashing does not faze him. Instead, he reaches into the brimming bag of baseballs, plucks out a thoroughly tarred ball, and tosses it into the air…then swings with the ferocity of a rabid Samurai. The ball screeches across the parking lot and line-drives itself through the rear passenger’s window of X’s car. Too old to run from the police, the ball holes up under the driver’s seat next to gum wrappers and an ice scraper.

“I bet I could come back in thirty days and your window would still be broken.” Trent points the bat in X’s face. “You can fix it or you can just keep driving with it.” He hands the bat to X. “Of course, you can always just break out everybody else’s windows, too.”

Trent walks off. X looks towards the gymnasium doors, then sets down the equipment bags. The cinch on the bag loosens and baseballs spill across the parking lot. Some congregate under cars, others charge toward the softball fields, and still others obey the rolling singularity of the parking lot grade, looping down towards the event horizon of the drain grates, gaps too small to escape through, too large to traverse, waiting for rain that will warp and render their hides utterly unrollable.

Kiyoshi Hirawa is a poet, writer, and former police officer who was wrongfully terminated after reporting sexual misconduct and rape committed by fellow police officers. Hirawa’s writing focuses on mental health, trauma, resiliency, hope, and providing a voice for the unheard, ignored, and overlooked. Hirawa still dreams of pitching alongside Glavine, Smoltz, and of course, Maddux.

Matt Lawrence is a Spanish/ESOL teacher in Baltimore, Maryland.  He is the father of two young men and has been deriving joy from making art for decades. You can check out some of his work on Instagram @Mattymarcador.

The Twin Bill is a nonprofit organization with 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status. You can support The Twin Bill by donating here.