Prologue…
He rubs liniment into his shoulder and grimaces despite the fact his arm died back in Factoryville when something popped on a full count slider.
Now his dead arm is a numb stranger that sits beside him at dinner.
The ice machine in the dingy locker room crapped out so long ago it’s filled with debris from previous ghosts traveling through the independent Midwest Continental League, the last stop to nowhere on the train to baseball obscurity.
He cinches the laces on his dusty, worn spikes, looping up and over, never down and across, the lines in the cracked faded red leather every bit as deep as those on his face.
Time robbed him of youth, talent and promise leaving a husk, hollowed from the inside out, one walk, hit, homer and loss at a time.
The fly-spattered light bulb flickers like his career, the murmur of a thousand blue-collar fans filters through a clattering rusty fan–a spinning wheel of misfortune.
Other, younger teammates, hoping scouts came to see them instead of home run swatting phenom, Tony Blizzard, are already on the field.
If baseball is truth the Midwest Continental League is denial. He shuts his locker, walks up the muddy, mold covered, concrete steps towards a field that unravels beneath his feet like a green carpet to an inescapable conclusion.
It ends in a flash of popping bulbs when Blizzard wallops his best pitch, his last baseball memory, the frozen faces of a thousand beer-soaked fans pointing towards a homer in the gloam arcing over the centerfield bleachers…
by: E.M. Hardiman
(© 2005 Haydock Publishing LLP, all rights reserved, used by permission)
Ed Hardiman is a contributing editor at MoonDogSports.com and a contributing writer for FoxSports.com
