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.
The crowd went off like a bomb, pummeling the air in the tiny stadium with a sustained barrage of excited decibels. Bryan held a hand to get time, jumped up, and brushed away the sandy layer his uniform had accreted during his belly landing.
His hip felt great. He felt great. He was back.
**********
Well, in the end they lost to the Tigers. The Red Sox starter lasted four innings, then gave up three walks and a double. The bullpen got lit up, and the final was 8 to 3. Bryan was unhappy with the L, but quietly ecstatic at his own performance. He had gone 2 for 4 with two RBIs and handled every fielding chance cleanly. He got a massage and heat treatment post game and felt no pain in any of his insulted joints.
Long after the game was over, he sat in front of his locker holding his new bat and thinking. He was in no rush to return to the desolate house that only reminded him of Lauren. If this were the Cape, he would have wandered into the crowd of persistent tailgaters and looked for a female fan who desired some personal instruction. Hell, he thought. Maybe he would hit the Boston nightlife. Within a quarter mile of the park were nightclubs, bowling alleys, pool halls, all with possible temporary companions.
But he couldn’t get himself to move. That was a kid’s game. That’s how your face ends up on social media, and no good could come of that.
Instead, he dug a sharpie out of his locker and wrote on the barrel of his bat: KERAUNOS. The thunderbolt of Zeus. Antipodal to that he wrote: MEGAN.
He thought about that for a second and then added a heart after her name. He felt somewhat like a 12-year-old girl doing that, but fuck it.
Tonight’s loss had been part of the swoon, the skid, the slump. El Foldo. It could be felt in the clubhouse, like the humidity and falling barometric pressure of a storm approaching. The team tried invoking all the old superstitions and invented some new ones, but they continued to invent new ways to lose the kind of games they had found ways to win just weeks before.
Bryan walked through the deserted player’s parking lot, got alone into his Jeep, and drove slowly back to the empty house he had once thought of as home.
**********
The team took a short road trip to Baltimore and Tampa Bay and continued to play like they were under a Biblical curse. They dropped two of three to the Orioles and repeated the debacle against the Rays. In any other year they would have been dead meat, road kill with a trident stuck in them, but the Yankees mysteriously failed to take advantage. The Pinstripes got swept in a two game homestand by the A’s and lost two of four to the Royals.
No matter that. Bryan and his teammates deplaned at Logan in a foul mood.
**********
The Yankees were three games back.
*********
On the off-day after travel, Bryan drove to Cambridgeport and squeezed his Jeep into a space in front of a big rambling house near the MIT campus. Before he could even touch the button on the highly complex box which he assumed was the front door bell, Brie shot out onto the porch and enveloped him in a breath-stopping embrace.
“It’s so good to see you, bro!” She dragged him inside and began to introduce him to the young men and women of her living group. Bryan could tell that they were somewhat starstruck, but they did not know it was really he who was amazed by them. He knew what kind of hard work and smarts it took to get to where they were, attributes he regarded as much more desirable and useful than the ability to hit a baseball.
He left with Brie and her friend Camila, a tall Eurasian girl with wild curly dark hair and a gap between her two front teeth that made her look sexy as hell.
“Camila is my girlfriend,” Brie said as they were buckling in.
“I sensed that.” Bryan said. “As I am a warlock. Is she a witch? Camila, are you a witch?”
Camila giggled like a ten-year-old. A ten-year-old genius. “No, I’m premed.”
He took them to the Museum of Fine Art where they spent an hour poking around the general collection and another hour in a Turner exhibition, then they went to lunch at a deli in Brookline.
He dropped them off. Camila thanked him, kissed him on the cheek, and disappeared into the house. Brie took his hand.
“How are you coping?” She asked, suddenly very concerned.
“I’m doing okay,” he said. “I miss her.”