Right Field: a short story in three voices at one Little League game, and the habit of mine it measured

Kaufmann Park, Field 3. Tuesday, 6:30.

I had the plate for the six-thirty, which is the 9-10 division, six innings or an hour and forty-five, whichever comes first, and it is almost always the hour and forty-five.

Forty-one years I have done this. I walk the field before a game. Not for show. There is a soft place on the third-base line at Kaufmann that takes a foot every spring and I want to know where it is before somebody’s kid finds it. I check the fence line for glass. I check that both dugout gates swing, because a gate that sticks is how a coach ends up standing in the runway hollering at me sideways, and a coach who has to holler sideways will holler longer.

Then I set the indicator. Four buttons, balls and strikes and outs and innings, and I have carried the same one since 1994. Roll it to zeros. Say the zeros out loud. In forty-one years I have been right against that indicator exactly twice, meaning twice I knew the count and the indicator did not, and I went with me. Both times I was correct. I remember them the way other men remember cars they used to own.

Ellery Cardinals in the gray. Sanborn Auto in the blue. Sanborn had eleven and the Cardinals had ten, so both teams could field, which is not a thing you can count on in June.

Seventeen. That is how many I have been to, and I counted them on the way over, in the car, at the light by the Culver’s, because I wanted the number to be higher than I was afraid it was. Seventeen out of, what, twenty-two? Twenty-three, if you count the one that got rained out before it started, which I do not think you should, but I did drive there.

Here is what I know, and I want to be honest about the size of it. There are four bases. One of them is not a base, it is a plate, and it is a different shape, and I do not know why, and I have decided that not knowing why is fine. The man in the mask is not on either team. The boys wear helmets to hit and take them off to stand around. There are three chances and then you sit down. Some of the standing around is important and some of it is not, and the parents around me can tell the difference instantly and I cannot.

So I watch them. That is my system. I do not watch the ball, I watch the row, and when eleven adults inhale at the same time I look up and try to catch the end of whatever it was. It is like learning a language from people laughing at jokes in it. You get the shape. You do not get the joke.

Tonight I am going to say one accurate thing to him in the car. Not good game. Not you looked great out there, which I said in May and he said I didn’t do anything, which was not a complaint, he was correcting the record, he is nine and he corrects the record. One true sentence about a thing that actually happened. That is the whole project.

I sit at the far end of the third row. Rhonda sits in the middle and Rhonda played softball through college and Rhonda would tell me anything I asked. I do not sit by Rhonda.

The grass in right field goes the other way than the grass in the infield and you can feel it through your shoes if you drag your foot, and if you drag it toward the fence it is smooth and if you drag it back toward the pitcher it pushes against you a little, and I do that about nine times when we go out there because the mower goes in stripes and I am standing in a light stripe.

There is a soft spot out by the line where the water sits after it rains and it is soft for about four days and then it is hard again and it is soft tonight, so it rained Sunday, which it did.

Behind the fence in right there is a ditch with cattails and a shopping cart in it that has been there longer than the shoe. The shoe is a men’s shoe, brown, one shoe, and it has been in the ditch since the first game in April and nobody has taken it. In April it was on the near bank and now it is farther down where the water goes and it is more tan than brown because of the mud. I have four theories. One is that a man lost it, which is the boring one. One is that a man threw it, which is better. One is that there was never a man and it came down the ditch from somewhere else, from the culvert under Prairie, and could have come from miles. The one I like is that somebody put it there on purpose, one shoe, to see how long it would stay, and that they come back and check it, and that they have never once come while I was out here.

Coach Petrey says the words heads up to me about every third batter. He does not say them to Wyatt in center. I know what it means and it does not bother me the way it used to.

Sanborn hit first. Their leadoff was a left-handed kid with a real swing and I gave him a strike on the outside corner at the knees and he stepped out and looked at me. Nine years old and he looked at me. I said nothing. You say nothing. You call the next one the same way and he learns the zone or he does not, and either way he learns it from consistency and not from me explaining myself.

That is the whole job, and people think the job is being right. The job is being the same. A zone two inches wide in the wrong place, called identically for six innings, is a better night for those kids than a perfect zone that moves. I have watched umpires who could not be argued with give a boy a strike in the first and a ball on the same pitch in the fourth because the game got close, and every child on that field learned something false about the world.

He grounded to short. Two hops, fielded clean, and the throw beat him by a stride and a half. Nobody clapped for the shortstop. They clapped for the batter, for hustling. That is 9-10 ball.

The people in my row made a small noise, low, not the big one, and it went down at the end instead of up, and I have learned that means it was fine but it did not go our way. Somebody’s father said that’s alright, that’s alright. Somebody’s mother said he’s fast though.

I looked out at right field and Emmett was standing with his glove hanging off his hand at the end of his arm like a bag he was carrying home. He was looking at the fence. He looks at the fence for a lot of the game.

I want to write down what I actually think about that, because I have not said it to anybody, including Ken, especially Ken.

I think they put him out there because he is not good, and I have thought that since about the fourth game, and I have never asked, because the asking would make it true in a way it is not yet. Every boy on that team plays every position sometime. Except two. Wyatt, who plays the middle of everything, and Emmett, who has stood in that one spot in that one corner since the last week of April.

And here is the part I cannot get anybody to understand, including myself. He is happy out there. He comes off that field at the end of an inning talking. Not about the inning. About a bird, one time. He is having, as far as I can tell, the best possible time in the worst possible place, and I do not know whether the thing I am supposed to feel about that is sadness, and I do not want to feel a thing about my son’s Tuesday that he does not feel about it himself.

The other team’s third guy hit one foul and it came out to me on one bounce and rolled and stopped about ten feet away in the light grass and I did not go get it.

I did not go get it because there is a rule that you do not go get a foul ball if it is going to keep going into the ditch, which it was not, but also because a foul ball is dead and dead means it does not count and if it does not count I did not think you were supposed to touch it. Coach Petrey yelled Emmett get the ball and then he yelled it again with my whole name and I went and got it, and when I picked it up the seams were wet from the soft spot, and I threw it back in and it went about two thirds of the way and Kellen came out to get it and did not say anything to me and did not look mad.

The ball was cold. They were cold the first inning and by the fifth they are warm from being in the pitcher’s hand and everybody’s hands and I like the fifth-inning ones better.

We went to the bottom half and I got a good look at the Ellery boys coming out of the dugout. There is a thing you learn to see and it is not talent. It is whether a boy looks at where he is going. Most of them look at their coach or at their shoes. The one who plays center for Ellery looks at the outfield before he gets to it, checks the sun, checks the fence, and that boy will be playing this in high school.

The right fielder is a small kid with a glove too big for him. He was already out past the line before the pitcher had the ball, first one out there every inning, and every inning he stands about four steps deeper and four steps closer to the line than a coach would put him, and he never drifts back in. Four steps is nothing. Nobody has said anything to him about it. I noticed it in the second because I notice where everybody stands, which is a habit and not a virtue.

He is looking at the fence. He looked at the fence between every pitch of the second inning and I counted, because that is also a habit.

Second inning is when the light towers buzz but do not come on. They buzz for a long time before, sometimes a whole inning, and it is a low sound and then a higher sound underneath it that comes and goes and you can hear it better if you turn your head sideways, and if you close one eye it does not change anything but I try it every time.

The shoe was still there. It has rained twice since I last got to check it up close, which was when Marcus overthrew first in the third game and I helped look for the ball, and I got to the fence and it was there in the mud with the tongue folded over and the laces gone. The laces went sometime in May. I do not know if somebody took them or if they just went.

There is a nest under the scoreboard on the back side where you cannot see it from the bleachers and only from right field and only when the wind moves the flag rope, and there is something in it, and I have not seen what.

Two things happened in the third that I am still working on.

One. There was a play where a boy on our team caught a ball while running and then stopped and everybody stood up and yelled and it was clearly good, and I stood and yelled too, one beat behind, which I always am, because I am reading the row and the row is reading the field. It is a half second. I have measured it. My hands come up half a second after every other pair of hands in that bleacher, every single time, for seventeen games.

Two. The man in the mask, who I have decided is called the umpire, is the same one from the last four games at least, and he does something I only just noticed. Before every single pitch he touches the metal thing in his left hand with his thumb. Not sometimes. Every one. He was doing it in April and he was doing it tonight and nobody else in this park has watched him do it, and I found I did not want to look away.

I think what I am doing here is looking for something I am allowed to be sure about. Everyone in this row is sure about the game and I am not, and it turns out I am extremely sure about that man’s thumb.

Ellery got two in the third on a walk and a double, and Sanborn got one back in the fourth, and if you want the shape of it, it was the kind of game where both benches were still up on the fence and neither coach had started subbing anybody out early.

My knees were fine. I say that because they were, and because at some point in the last four or five years I stopped taking that as the baseline and started taking it as a report. Fine at 6:30, fine at 7:15. I get down on the inside knee now instead of the scissor. I made that change in maybe 2019 and I did not tell anybody I was making it and I do not think one person has noticed in six years.

The Ellery coach asked me for time at the end of the fourth so his catcher could get his shin guard fixed. His name is Petrey. He is decent. He yells at his right fielder in a voice that is trying to be encouraging and lands about four feet short of it, which is not a crime, and which I have heard from a hundred coaches and been guilty of with my own son, who is forty now and lives in Tempe.

Top of the fifth. Two out. The Sanborn kid who bats fourth got into one.

I want to say what it actually looked like from behind the plate, because nobody in the bleachers sees this and I have never had anybody to tell. When a nine-year-old squares one up, the sound arrives at me before I see the ball leave, and there is a piece of a second where I have the sound and no ball, and then it is out over the second baseman’s head and going to right on a line and dropping the whole way, which is what a line drive does that adults forget.

The runner from second was going on contact because Sanborn’s coach has them going on contact all season. He was around third before the ball came down.

The ball came down about fifteen feet in front of the right fielder and to his left, in the soft part by the line. Took a low bounce off the wet and got past him by two steps, and he turned and ran it down toward the corner, and he had it in his glove maybe eight or nine seconds after the crack, which for that division is not bad. What happens next is nothing, ninety-five times out of a hundred. What happens next is the boy heaves it toward home plate, forty feet short, on a bounce, and by then the batter is standing on second having taken the extra base off the bad throw.

He did not throw it home. He turned and threw it to the second baseman, who had come out into short right with his hands over his head, and it was not a good throw, it was low and it took a hop, but it went to the right person and it went there fast, and the batter stopped at first and stayed there.

Nobody in that park made a sound about it. The run scored, so the Sanborn side cheered the run, and the Ellery side did the noise you make when a run scores against you. The coach said nothing to him. His own second baseman said nothing to him. It went in the book as a single and an RBI.

I have been doing this for forty-one years, and that is the play I will still have on the drive home. Not because it was hard. Because it was a nine-year-old boy in right field who hit the cutoff man in a game where seven adults were watching the ball and one of them was watching the boy.

I did not know it was coming to me. I want to be exact about that.

I had my head turned because the flag rope was moving and the wind had come up out of the south, the way it does around seven when the ground lets go of the day, and I was watching the flag rope because the flag rope is how you can maybe see the nest, and I heard the ping, which comes late, it always comes late, you learn that in right field, the ping gets to you after the ball is already partway to you if it is coming.

So the ping got to me and I turned back around and the ball was already in the air and dropping and I ran in and to my left and it hit in the soft spot and did the thing balls do in the soft spot, which is not bounce right, and it went by my foot, and I turned and ran the other way and it was slowing down because of the wet grass and I got it about six steps from the fence.

And when I turned around Ronan was standing out in the grass in front of me with his arms up making a sound. Not a word. A sound like hey hey hey hey. And he was the closest thing to me by a lot, and my arm was not going to make it anywhere else anyway, so I threw it to him.

Then I looked at the fence for a second because I was already right there, closer than I ever get during a play, and the shoe was there and there was a can beside it that was not there in April, a green one, and I was going to think about whether that meant somebody had been down in the ditch, but Coach Petrey yelled good job Emmett in the voice, and I went back out to my spot and dragged my foot toward the fence four times because I was standing in a light stripe again.

There was a play at the end of the fifth and it happened all the way out on the far side and I lost it completely.

Here is what I had. A crack, which I heard, so I already know it went somewhere. The whole row up on its feet including me, one beat late. Ken’s brother saying oh twice, the first one going up and the second one going down. A man behind me saying he’s got no arm, he’s got no arm. Then everybody sat and nobody said anything else at all, and the scoreboard changed by one on the top line, which is theirs.

That is the entire record. I have gone over it four times since.

I know Emmett was involved because I saw him running and because he was the one holding the ball at the end of it, and I know that the thing that happened was not bad, or somebody would have said that’s alright, and it was not good, or Rhonda would have made the high noise. It was the third kind. It was the kind where nobody says anything, which I used to think meant nothing had happened, and I have started to suspect means something happened that only some people in this bleacher can see.

So my one true sentence for the car is gone. Whatever I was going to say about that play, I do not have it. I have he’s got no arm, he’s got no arm, which is not mine to repeat and which I would not repeat.

And then I sat there in the fifth inning with my hands in my sleeves and I thought, all right, so ask Rhonda.

I have not asked Rhonda in seventeen games. I have run it a hundred ways and it always comes out the same, which is that a woman who has to ask what her own son just did did not see it, and I do not want that to be a fact about me that Rhonda knows.

Sixth. Hour and thirty-eight when the last out went down, which meant they got the whole six, which they do not always. Ellery 6, Sanborn 4.

Both coaches shook. The boys did the line. I got my gear off at the truck, which takes me eleven or twelve minutes now and used to take four, and the towers were on by then and the bugs were up in them.

The Ellery right fielder came off the field last. He was walking backwards for the first part of it, looking at the fence.

I do not know that boy’s name and I will not learn it. That is not a sad thing, it is just the arrangement. I work about forty of these a year and have for forty-one years and if I kept them all I would not have room for anything else. What I keep is plays. I have maybe two hundred of them, from all of it, and most of them are from games nobody would think to remember, and I have never once told a single one of them to anybody, because there is no one to tell. You cannot say to a man at a counter, in 1997 a kid in Warrenville tagged up from second on a foul pop and nobody in the park knew what he had done but me. It does not go anywhere.

Tonight I got one. A boy who does not look at the ball and does look at the fence, in the worst spot on the field, with no arm at all, turned around and threw to the cutoff man.

I will have that on Route 25 with the window down, and then I will have it Thursday when I am doing the eight o’clock at Larkin, and then it will go where the rest of them go.

In the car I asked him what he did out there tonight and he said nothing, and he was not being short with me, he says it like the weather.

So I did not ask again. I said the sentence I had been building since the second inning, which was the only one I had left, and which was not about the play.

I said, you stand in a different place than the coach puts you. Four steps back and four steps toward the line. You have done it every inning of every game and you never drift.

And he sat up. He got all the way up off the seat back and he said because of the fence, and then he said it again with more of it, that from the deep spot you can see behind the scoreboard when the rope moves, and that from where they put him you cannot, and that there is a nest back there.

And I said, what’s in it.

And he said he did not know yet.

There is a can in the ditch now, green, on the near side of the shoe by about a foot, and it was not there Thursday. Two things it could be. Somebody walked down in the ditch, or it came from the culvert under Prairie like the shoe maybe did.

If somebody walked down there they would have stepped on the bank where it is soft, and the bank was soft tonight because it rained Sunday, so there would be a print, and I could see a print from the fence if I got out there before Coach Petrey does the warmups on Thursday because we are at Kaufmann again Thursday. I would need about a minute. It is right by the gate.

The other thing is that the water came up Sunday when it rained and moved the can down and moved the shoe down too, and the shoe is farther than it was, I know it is farther, and if they both moved the same amount then it was the water and there is no man.

Mom asked me what was in the nest and I said I did not know and she said huh and then she said it again in a different way like she was putting it somewhere.

The towers were still on behind us going out and they stay on for a while after everybody leaves. They go off by themselves. I have never seen it because we are always gone.