The Yips Pt. 02 by RobertaBob,RobertaBob

“Baseball is 90 per cent mental. The other half is physical.” -Yogi Berra

“Being with a woman all night never hurt no professional baseball player. It’s staying up all night looking for a woman that does him in.” -Casey Stengel

“They gave each other a smile with a future in it.” -Ring Lardner

“All acts of sex in the following fantasy are performed by and on persons over the age of 18 who should have known better.” -Hunter S. Thompson

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The Yips

Part 2

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Baseball demands that you keep your emotions in hand until the last strike of the last out of the last inning. Bryan had been in many games where his team was leading by five or more runs late in the game. When he was younger, it was understandable that his inexperience led him into the relaxed belief that the game was over. And to be fair, most of the time it was.

But there were the times that the other team refused to lie down and lose. They scratched a hit, stole a base, rattled your reliever — not your ace closer, who was relaxing and thinking about what he was going to have to eat later, because the game was all but over — and chased him off the mound. You finally sent in your stud bullpen guy to put out the blaze, but it was too late. The other team had the mo. They now believed in themselves like they hadn’t for eight innings. And your teammates began to doubt.

Bryan had faced these character-hardening tests in Little League, in high school, in the several levels of competition open to talented teens, then college, then in the minor leagues. Now he was a professional playing at the highest level, and he was able to disconnect his emotions and see the situation as it was. Not as he wished it to be.

And what it was: His darling wife, the woman he had chosen to spend his life with, the one he counted on to back him up, support and love him without reservation — this woman had betrayed his trust. Abandoned him. Spread her legs for another man. Given an outsider access to that most private possession which she had promised to Bryan alone. Her heart.

Friends didn’t do this to each other.

Mere women did this to mere men.

That was the saddest part of the whole situation to Bryan. It was obvious to him now that he and Lauren were not special. They were just as flawed as all the other humans who had ever lived. Mere fallible humans. He had foolishly hoped for better.

Bryan had one other trait that armored him against this sudden blow. He had started studying the classics in high school. He signed up for Mrs. Reichel’s Latin class because Megan was taking it. Over the summer, one of her friends had showed her the dirty parts of the movie Caligula and that had given Megan the notion that Latin made her horny. Even though the movie was in English. And the parts that Megan had watched over and over had virtually no dialog anyway. Bryan missed Megan. Latin really had made her horny. They would study together, but it was a tedious process that proceeded in literal spurts. After Bryan read aloud a few paragraphs from the day’s assignment, Megan would pounce him and they ended up naked and fucking like Romans. Luckily, Bryan recalled with a smile, Megan had the bedroom over the family garage with a sturdy door that locked from the inside.

They continued their classical and erotic education until that summer afternoon when Megan’s Latin adventure came to a sudden end.

Megan’s death did not still the passion Bryan had developed for ancient languages. He kept up with Latin and started to take Greek at the junior college. He signed up for online courses in Aramaic. He read and read. Herodotus, Euripides, Plato, lyric poetry, history, plays, philosophy.

He often wished that Megan could be there beside him still, her lust inflamed by words long discarded, her cunt dripping from the parsing of sentences no modern eavesdropper would understand.

He became a modern man who looked at the world through eyes sharpened by the experiences of millennia. His wife left for another man? Helen of Troy and countless others had done it before and the world went on.

Sometimes it comforted him to be able to take the long view. Sometimes it worried him that he might eventually come to think the passions he thought to be his alone were common and thus somehow lessened.

But he did see his life through the lens of that long view, so when he realized that Lauren had really left him, he mourned the loss of her for a time shorter that it might have otherwise been before mentally moving on to the next inning.

His ability had not prevented him from sobbing like a wounded child. He cried for himself, for all the lovers over the centuries, for every man and woman who had ever had this feeling called a broken heart. Most of all, he cried for Lauren. He had vowed to protect and comfort her and could not. Now she was alone to face the monsters.

When in Texas, Bryan often visited the small cemetery in Hondo. He would sit under the ash tree near Megan’s grave, wondering why the hell things happened the way they did. If he looked up, he could see the rectangle of wood he had lettered and nailed there a week after the graveyard workers had filled in her grave.

AD MUNDUM, MEA HIC SINE VITA JACET. MIHI VIVA MANEBIT IN AETERNUM.

His lips moved silently as he read his youthful imperfect translation:

TO THE WORLD, MY LOVE LIES HERE WITHOUT LIFE. TO ME SHE WILL REMAIN ALIVE FOREVER.

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So what? The Globe didn’t care. The local stations didn’t care. ESPN didn’t care. The fans didn’t care. Nobody cared that Bryan Monnic was sleeping alone in his big empty house and the garden in the back of it was brown and rotting.

They only cared that the Yankees were gaining ground.

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And just like that, Bryan returned. His face was fifty feet tall in full pixelated color on the Fenway centerfield scoreboard the night he set foot on his patch of dirt again. The sold-out crowd of 37,651 fans stood when he was introduced and joined in a vocalization of approval that filled the park and spilled out over the Green Monster, saturated Lansdowne, and crashed in gusts onto the Mass Pike to buffet passing tractor trailers.

He was home. He stood and doffed his cap. Damn, it felt good to engage in that ancient tradition. This was his center. He belonged here. He dug his cleats into the reddish dirt, knowing that the groundskeeping crew was giving him the evil eye.

He looked calm, prepared, in control. The truth was he was jumpy. His stomach felt like it was the reservoir for hot liquid shit that would come jetting from his ass with the slightest movement. It was pregame nerves, and it was the same before every game. Tonight it was intensified by his fear that his traitorous ankle would swell, that his balky hip would come apart. He rocked on the balls of his feet, watching the pitcher look in for the first sign.

When the ball was on its flight to the plate, Bryan’s attention sharpened to that moving white sphere and all other distractions vanished.

The Tigers went quietly in the top of the first. Bryan ran to the dugout and pulled on his batting gloves. The batboy held out Bryan’s new and favorite stick, a 33 1/2 inch perfect piece of birch weighing 31 ounces. Bryan swung it experimentally. Although he had already felt it, caressed it, hit ten dozen balls with it, his hands longed to get reacquainted with it each time.

It was still for him.

The leadoff batter worked a walk. It wasn’t much work — the Tiger’s starter was having problems locating his pitches. Four of five went up and in, not even close enough to entice an offer. Bryan stepped into the box, waggled his bat, bent his knees, and began his mental prep.

He went with the odds. The pitcher did not want to get behind another batter. He would take something off his fastball to find the zone. The book said that when this guy did not bear down the ball was left an inch or so higher than his target.

The pitcher rocked. Bryan began his system. He imagined his brain as a high-speed camera, one of those that can take thousands of frames per second, and he turned it on just as the pitcher’s arm came from behind his body. The ball approached the plate and his brain camera imaged it, slowed it down, gave his hips, shoulders, arms, hands time to find the volume of space where the processing center of his brain predicted that the swift sphere in its linear path would intersect with the arc described by the cylinder of his bat’s barrel.

Should batters decide to swing in reaction to the trajectory of the pitch, or do they decide in advance to commit to a swing and adjust the bat’s path to meet the ball? It is an age-old debate. Bryan found that for pitches that were at or above 96 mph, he needed to commit in advance to have a better chance to make the kind of solid contact needed to drive the ball. Below that velocity, or if the pitch moved, he waited that microsecond to allow his instincts to drive his muscles.

If a pitcher threw faster than 96 with movement, then he just fucking guessed.

This pitch was coming in a bit slow and a tad high. Outside, but it would catch the edge of the zone.

The Boston staff resolved to be aggressive in this situation. The third base coach had signaled for a run and hit. The runner took off with the pitch but not so fast that he could not put on the brakes and make it safely back to first. This signal gave Bryan the option to swing or not.

He swung.

The Detroit first baseman moved to his right, but not enough. Bryan drove the ball just behind the runner and down the line. The right fielder had been positioned too far to center, and Bryan’s drive shaved turf into the bizarre angles of the right field foul line, careened off the wall inches in fair territory, and ricocheted past the Tiger’s inexperienced outfielder. This unfortunate youth ran after where he thought the ball would be, which is a deadly mistake in the confounding angles of Fenway Park.

By the time the centerfielder sprinted over, grabbed the rolling ball, and pegged it to the cutoff man, the Red Sox leadoff man was crossing the plate and Bryan was sliding headfirst into third.

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