Knuckle-curve

Mike gripped the baseball and paced the mound. The ball was scuffed and dirty, six-and-a-half innings old. They only rubbed down four baseballs before the game for Michigan high school games. He paused long enough to bring Vanderkolb, the big senior first baseman, out to the mound.

"Wassup, hoss?"

Vanderkolb was a football player slumming in the spring with the baseball team for kicks. He was a tall and powerful quarterback who had gone un-defeated in his two years as a starter for South Christian High School.

"I'm fine," Mike said. He wasn't fine. He was upset. He looked over at the bench and saw Coach Kooiker with his foot on the top step, examining his star pitcher with squinted eyes.

"You tired or what, hoss?" Vanderkolb asked.

Mike didn't enjoy being called "hoss." He never wanted to be a jock for South. He wasn't a wide receiver or a linebacker or a tackle like so many of his teammates. His catcher, DeKonig, was a tackle who would play for Eastern Michigan in the fall. Eddings, the burly third baseman, was a linebacker and would join Vanderkolb at Michigan State. Williams and VanderKodde, his speedy outfielders, were underclass speedsters who had caught so many of Vanderkolb's bullets for scores. South Christian was a football school—winning four of the last eight state championships—that used its football talent to power the baseball team on the side. Mike never played football. He was a pitcher, not a gorilla.

Mike scowled at Vanderkolb, a scowl born more from personal animus than competitive fire. "Get out of here." He was tired of being bossed around by the pimply quarterback who took it upon himself to be everyone's leader. He disliked Vanderkolb—and most of the rest of his teammates, for that matter. He often sat in the dugout on days he didn't pitch, hoping the team would lose. On more than one occasion he found himself wishing for a serious injury to befall Vanderkolb. Something in his throwing shoulder maybe.

Vanderkolb took Mike's scowl as a good sign and bounded back to his position.

Mike had an 8-1 lead going into the bottom of the seventh and final inning. He had already struck out thirteen Wayland hitters, a typically dominant performance for him. The only run was unearned, thanks to an uncharacteristic throwing error by Jim DeKuiper at short. He toed the rubber and looked in. Steve McNeese, Wayland's sophomore center fielder, was up. He had struck McNeese out twice already. Fastball sign.

Mike went into his windup and snapped off a heater at McNeese's knees. That one felt great. He knew the scouts sitting behind the backstop with their portable radar guns would see that he was throwing harder in the later innings than in the early innings, getting stronger as the game wore on. Two more fastballs at the letters and McNeese sat down, completely outmatched.

Pitching against Wayland meant that Mike would be trying to retire his close friends. He grew up in Wayland, going to Steeby Elementary and the Pearl Street middle school with half the players on the other side of the field. However, like so many of Wayland's promising male athletes, he attended South Christian, fifteen miles north of Wayland in Cutlerville, a Grand Rapids suburb.

Preston Brown stepped to the plate. Mike had known Preston since first grade. Until ninth grade Mike, Preston, and Kevin Sessler had played ball together every summer, three Indian boys with talent and baseball flowing through their veins every day of the year. They had lost only two or three games in seven years, dominating Allegan County grade school summer baseball. In eighth grade they were the student managers for Coach Pokagon's 1986 varsity team, which had reached the regional finals, the state's final eight. The rest of that summer they played American Legion ball and talked about winning a state championship for Wayland.

Instead, Mike's dad forced him north to a sports-fanatical parochial school with no hot lunches and no...