Matt grabbed his glove and jogged out to the field. Yesterday’s victory combined with a win today would sweep the Braves. The prospect of the sweep put everybody in a good mood.
But the Braves were a tough team. Their starting pitcher had pitched a no-hitter against the Mets the previous week, and their lead-off hitter was on a nineteen-game streak.
Playing a tough team upped Matt’s game. The sheer physicality of seeing another player make a near-impossible play revved him. It didn’t matter who the guy played for, but he preferred it to be the team he was on.
Sometimes he’d watch the plays of the week just for the jolt of inspiration, the flash of awe that zipped through him. He craved the rush, but there was more. He had a theory that the body had a mind of its own, that by seeing new patterns of movement—the nuances of a unique power swing or the angle and torque of a spectacular spinning catch and release—and holding them in the mind’s eye, those patterns laid down new possibilities, the way a spider could spin a web and then travel across it.
Sometimes he’d watch old footage of the greats from the past—Mays, Ruth, Aaron. Every generation had its marvels, its wisdom. With baseball, a player was always in competition with the past, no matter how he focused on his own game.
He wondered sometimes about the days before television, the days when baseball was only words on a page or voices on the radio and the strength of the imagination, the days before Internet and video and YouTube. Now you could play performances over and over if you wanted to, play them in slow motion, study them and marvel.
He’d learned early on that the key was always doing his personal best in the moment. But it was impossible not to measure his performance against great players, past and present.
There was always a measure in baseball. Stats were feedback, but you had to know how to read them.
Solid numbers—home runs, runs batted in—those numbers could pull a guy forward, lift him when he was doing well. Errors and strikeouts, those could fire a player up or sink the player who couldn’t adjust and get his focus back.
Matt crouched as Scotty threw in a perfect change-up. Hursh, the Braves’ slugger, managed to get a piece of it, and it careened foul into the stands.
Matt saw the fierce concentration in Hursh’s eyes. He knew that look, knew that level of focus.
Their catcher signaled for a low outside pitch, and Hursh watched it go by without flinching. He looked back at Scotty and nodded, as if to say nice try, meat.
Scotty wound up and threw. The sharp line drive split the hole between first and second. Hunter grabbed it before it shot down the line, but Hursh made it to first with time to spare.
Focus could be a wild mistress. Hursh evidently had her number.
Some guys just slipped into the zone and made focusing seem effortless.
But that kind of focus required far more than effort. That level of focus lived in a player’s body.
Some guys struggled and never really found the sweet spot, that zone where mind and body worked together with a mysterious power, a power that any guy who tapped into it craved and protected. During the rare times when his mind got in the way, his body wouldn’t cooperate and all he was left with were basics and no spark. Then it was time to shut down the chatter, to focus and visualize and move his body through the paces that he knew would bring him back into the flow. Practice and preparation, those were his tools for keeping open to the sweet spot; they rarely failed him.
He fingered the laces on his glove and watched the next Braves hitter step into the box.
There were plenty of temptations that could draw a guy off his game, waste energy, and then the game would suffer. When the game suffered, everybody noticed. Then it was time to deal. Players who couldn’t pull the stick back up fell into obsessions that eroded their game. Women, drugs, gambling—it almost didn’t matter what guys who were losing it did to fill the hole. It was a downward spiral.
He’d never be one of those guys.
Women had never been a distraction for him. Sure, before he married Liza he’d looked, sometimes acted, often fantasized—he’d been a testosterone-fueled twenty-year-old. After he married, he’d dammed all that up.
Until Alana.
She’d swept into his life and suddenly, like water freed from a dam, energy began to flow in him, some of it familiar, some of it stunningly new, all of it powerful and—if he didn’t take care—risky, given the tumultuous state of his life.
There wasn’t any practice, any discipline, that could’ve prepared him for the surprise of Alana.
Scotty wound up and threw. The hitter bunted, and Scotty snagged the ball, throwing the runner out at first.
The Braves manager called for time and made a lineup change. Gomez, the pinch hitter, took a couple of swings as he headed to the plate. The guy hit three for four off Scotty the last game he faced him. Matt recalled a similar situation the previous season when Gomez hit Scotty’s low-and-outside sinker through the hole between third and short. If Aderro, their veteran catcher, signaled for that pitch, Matt would be moving toward third.
Walsh walked to the mound and signaled for a pitching change. The playoffs loomed close and the Braves were on their heels for first place in the league. Scotty grumbled as he left the mound, but he knew better than to argue with Walsh’s calls. The guy knew the game.
The Giants’ lefty headed in from the bullpen. There was always a palpable change in the sound of the stadium during a pitching change. Matt could feel the focus withdraw from the field as fans rushed off to the bathrooms or grabbed beers or texted their friends. And then he heard the sound of Alana’s laugh, throaty and sweet, with music rising up under it.
He was losing his mind.
He caught Alex’s eye, and Alex nodded toward the stadium screen behind Matt.
He turned just in time to see a man in a tuxedo slide his hand down the two-story image of Alana’s barely clothed back. The man spun her and brushed a kiss to her ear as he whispered something no doubt decadent. Alana looked directly out at the field, her eyes sparkling with energy, tossed her hair and laughed. As the words advertising tickets for the San Francisco Symphony gala crawled across the screen, she looked like she was having the time of her life.
Alana’s laughing face started to fade out from the ad just as the umpire called for the pitch. But as Matt looked back toward home plate, her face and laugh still burned into his mind.
Aderro signaled for the inside sinker. Matt slid to his right, crouched and ready.
Gomez blasted a sharp two-hopper. Matt grabbed it. For a split second he wasn’t sure of the situation on the field. Then he hauled back his arm and fired the habitual long throw to first. The shock of disbelief in the crowd matched the look on Alex’s face as he caught Matt’s throw and tagged the runner out.
Matt stood stunned. He’d completely spaced Hursh on second, even though he’d have run right by Matt. Instead of making the easy out at third, he’d thrown out the runner at first. It wasn’t the right decision—Hursh stood safe at third, a sacrifice fly away from scoring.
He’d made a mental mistake.
He could count on one hand the number of those he’d made in all his years in the game. Physical mistakes were one thing; mental mistakes were in a whole other realm. It wasn’t a world he wanted to inhabit.