The Game Player by Rafael Yglesias Read Free Book Online

position. I watched my teammates jog to their bases and begin warming up, not knowing what to do with myself until someone holding a notebook came up to me and asked, “Your name’s Howard?” I nodded. “I’m Paul,” he continued. “I was just checking for the scoresheet.” I looked over his shoulder while he marked my name in next to the statistic of my base hit. The notebook was printed on light green paper and divided into columns by thin red lines. “This is a pain in the ass,” he said after writing my name in. “But Brian’s a nut about it.”
    â€œYou want me to do it?” I asked.
    â€œYou know how?”
    â€œSure. I’m from New York. I used to score the Yankee games.”
    He handed me the notebook. “You must have needed a big scoresheet. Okay, Brian wants a record of play by play on this.” He showed me another page covered with the numbers of the fielding code. “And then you put each hitter’s statistic on this page.” He then turned to another section of the book, somewhere in the middle, that was marked with a strip of white paper sticking out on top. “And this is for Danny’s team. Same thing, play by play and then the hitters.”
    I took his pencil and, feeling justified about my presence, walked confidently to the almost empty bench of my team. I didn’t know about half of the players on each team but I had been told that Brian played first base and left the significant job of pitching to a tall, skinny, curly-haired boy with an odd, triangular head. I checked his name while watching him make practice throws. It was Stanley. He must have been nearly six feet tall and his motion was a confusion of arms and legs. Besides, he threw so hard that each throw was punctuated by the pop of its impact in the catcher’s mitt.
    I followed the game’s action enthusiastically. I was free to root hard and make demands of performance from the players because of my hit. It was also a good spectacle: fast, professional, and dramatic. Stanley struck out the first two batters he faced and then walked the next two. His throws seemed to become wilder with each pitch and what had been a mood of oppression on the enemy bench turned into a kind of malicious jubilance. Stanley, his fair skin reddening, threw two balls to the next hitter that, despite our catcher reaching them, were chaotic. Brian walked to the mound deliberately and I was sure that we had seen the last of Stanley. Brian looked so angry and merciless that I felt sorry for our misshapen pitcher. Brian stood astonishingly close to him, their mouths almost touching, and talked quickly for a minute. Then he stood to one side of Stanley and put his arm around his shoulder. Our opponents became restless over this break of their ascendancy and taunted Brian, accusing him of stalling. He ignored them and didn’t walk away from the mound until he had finished.
    I was surprised that Brian allowed Stanley to stay in. Not so much because I was convinced that he wouldn’t be able to throw a strike, but because I didn’t think that Brian had so much patience with incompetence. Stanley’s motion was altered when he threw again. Instead of immediately kicking his leg and hurling, he now started much more slowly, and only rushed his movements as he was releasing the ball, his face strained from the effort. His pitches were slower and more accurate. The batter fouled off the first one and completely missed the second. Up to this point, all of Stanley’s pitches had been fast balls and I was watching his motion lazily when I suddenly noticed, on the third pitch, that he had twisted his body in a different direction to throw sidearm. This was his first curve ball and the batter just watched it swing from in front of his body and cross the plate. Our umpire enjoyed his yell of strike three and my team ran off the field with quick shouts of triumph.
    As Brian and