Page 19 of Wild Pitch
“Are you? Secretly freaking out, I mean?” He narrows his all-seeing eyes at me and gives me the same studious look as Beau.
“No.” I blink real slow. “It’s game one of Spring Training, there’s no reason to panic. Besides…” I lift my glove to cover the lower half of my face. “No offense to the Sacramento Badgers, but they’re not necessarily the hardest team to play.”
Kim hums from deep in his throat and gives me a side eye. “I like this even less. I’d rather see you nervous than underestimating your opponent.”
I tip my head toward the the home plate. “I’d love to keep chatting about our feelings but the umpire’s giving us the stink eye.”
“Get more tense, Cowboy. The last thing I want is for you to give this game away to one of the weakest teams in the league.”
“Me?” I gasp in mock outrage.
“Yeah,you. Don’t forget that we’re starting you because we’re shit out of luck.”
I bob my head. “True, now that the great Ben Williams is gone we don’t have a superstar pitcher. But guess what?”
“Don’t say it.” His expression tightens.
I still say it. “We have a Starr now.”
“I hate you.” Kim turns around and stalks away to home.
I hide the grin on my face behind my glove, not just because I don’t want the Badgers to see that I’m not too concerned about them, but because I probably look like a possum baring its teeth.
Kim exchanges a few words with the umpire before lowering his mask on his face. The leadoff batter walks up to the plate and the umpire shouts, “Play ball!”
The crowd gets a bit rowdy and it makes my limbs tingle. It’s really hard to feel tense or worried when I’m bursting at the seams with happiness. This is my freaking dream come true, to be a starting pitcher for the team. This is what I’ve been working for since the moment my middle school teachers figured out the only thing I was good for was playing baseball.
Kim signals for an easy fastball and I nod. There’s no point in overthinking the very first pitch of game one, and the pitching clock is ticking. I make the kind of windup I’m most comfortable with, big and flashy, hiding my pitching hand behind my head, and release the ball right at the last second.
“Strike!”
The batter goes through the motions of sweeping the dirt with his cleat and Kim returns the ball to me with a bit morestrength than necessary. I can feel it convey a ‘don’t you get complacent’ message as it thuds against the palm of my glove. What he doesn’t know is that I’m giving him the middle finger inside my glove. Just keeping it PG for the little fans out there in the stands.
This time when he crouches, he calls for an easy curve that should fool no one. I guess we want to give some action to the infielders, and that’s cool by me when we have no runners. The Badgers aren’t known for power hitting either, so I nod once and position the ball in my glove for a run off the mill 12-6.
“Strike!”
That fell perfectly at the bottom of the strike zone, where the batter could’ve at least swung. He didn’t even try, so either the guy is paralyzed by fear, or… the Badgers are just watching me.
Bleh, so this is why I can’t do cutters.
A third strike is called after another curveball and I lift my index finger so everyone in the field can see we have one out.
“C’mon, give me some sugar,” Rivera calls out from close to third base.
From first base, Miller says, “Give me something to justify my salary.”
Even the guys in the outfield make some noise, urging the game to be more interesting than this. But the inning ends just like that, three outs and no runners on base. The stands are fairly quiet as we head over to the dugout.
“Good job,” says Larry Socci, the pitching coach. “Looking good out there, Starr.”
“It’s just the new pants,” I joke as I walk by him, producing a snort in reward. I grab the nearest free iPad I can find and before I can even fire it up, a big paw snatches it from me.
One obnoxious catcher drops right next to me. He taps at the iPad not to look at my pitching form, like I intended, but to zoom in on the batters. A crease appears between Kim’s eyebrows fora moment until it finally clears. He tosses the device at me and I catch it in the air.
“What?” I ask.
“They’re not studying you. They’re just bad.” He leans back against the wall and folds his arms.
