Bases loaded. Two outs. Three balls, two strikes. A walk ties it. A hit: they win. I am Daryl Henderson. I am catching. It’s the third game in the best-of-three series for the International League championship. Capacity crowd (over 10,000) at the park roars for the home team, rattling my pitcher, Gil Chesterton.

Yes, that Gil Chesterton, the best closer in Major League Baseball today. But this happens seven years ago and he’s just another wannabe like me; a hot prospect trying to get to the show.

So, Gil Chesterton shakes me off twice. He doesn’t want to throw his curve. I don’t care. I want him to throw that curve. He will throw that frigging curve. Maybe he is rattled. Just look at him. Slumped shoulders, beaten eyes. No swag in the tank.

“Time, ump!” I say.

“Time!” he yells, stepping out and making the safe sign. Tells me, “Be quick about it, Henderson.”

I pull my facemask up and trot out to the mound to shanghai Chesterton. Did I mention we’re talking the Gil Chesterton?

He’s famous now. I’m not. Know why athletes go superstitious? I once punched my reflection in a mirror in a bathroom at a bar, cracking it because I cheated on my girlfriend. Again.

I’m becoming something I never wanted to be. My father. I need to get her back.

That old song looped through a sleepless night. (I never did get her back.)

The next day — and I mean 13 hours later — I crash my motorcycle. Broken leg, shattered rotator cuff. A half-dozen operations, but nothing ever really healed right.

Goodbye baseball.

I now sell cars, and I’ve learned over the years to hide the fact that I hate people. That’s not necessarily a bad thing in my job because I never feel guilty about ripping off some sap and doing it with a smile.

Nobody knew whether I smiled or not in that meeting on the mound in that championship game. Because I put my glove over my mouth and Gil does the same. We don’t want any lipreaders in their dugout or on the bases to see what we’re saying.

“OK, dawg, take a deep breath,” I say.

“I’m good,” he says.

I say, “You got this. But you need to throw the curve.”

Now in the majors, Gil throws that breaking ball with freakish giddyap to go with his straight-up heat. Then, he’d just been tinkering with the curve.

I tell him, “Be a soldier.”

He goes weird on me.

He says, “The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”

Because of the gloves, we’re just eyeball to eyeball. He doesn’t blink. I can’t tell if he’s joking. He must know I’m confused because I’m squinting as if I’m about to unclog a toilet.

“Well,” I remind him, “you’ve been in hot water before, and you got out of it.”

He says, “I believe in getting into hot water; it keeps you clean.”

Gil’s always been a little, let’s say, original, reading books — and I mean that’s all he does on the bus — and coming out with wacked shit. I shrug it off. Did I say a lot of players are superstitious? Well, pitchers take it to a whole other level.

“I don’t know what to say,” I tell him.

“A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying,” goes Gil.

Got me. I have no idea what I’m not saying.

“We’re making history, no matter what happens,” I say. True. No other team in this league ever climbed from so deep in the cellar to first place like we’d done this season.

“People who make history know nothing about history,” says Gil. “You can see that in the sort of history they make.”

Shit!

I am not getting through.

“Yo Henderson!”

It’s the ump, he’s walking toward us. I lower my glove, tell him, “In a minute.”

He stops, taps his wrist.

Tick-tock.

The glove goes back over my face.

“Well,” says I, “it’s been one hell of a ride.”

“An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered,” says Gil. “An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.”

I give up.

“Just throw the curve,” I say, thumping him in the chest with my glove.

As I start trotting to the plate, he calls, “The most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen.”

I squat, the ump bends over my shoulder, Gil goes into his windup. It’s on YouTube, what happens next. Gil indeed throws the curve. Dude strikes out; we win. Let the celebration begin!

It’s Triple A, not the bigs, right? But the city where we play this game has a population of about 125,000. They’ve got a daily newspaper. A couple of TV stations.

So, it’s not anything like the swarms of reporters that follow MLB, but about a dozen show up. They all want a piece of Gil. With the year he had? With him surely going to be called up to the mother ship next season?

I drift to the outskirts of the presser and Gil answers questions the way a kid in Triple A should answer. A lot of “you knows” and “ums” and “ers” mixed up with the usual phrases. “Tough team.” “We never gave up.” “My teammates came through.”

Later, after most of the players have gone to the Rusty Repository to celebrate, I congratulate Gil for coming through big.

“Treasure this,” I say, thinking that he’ll respond with an “oh yeah!” or “church!” or “straight up!”

He just smiles at the floor.

I say, “We won, and nobody thought at the beginning of this season that we’d be here.”

And he says, “The one perfectly divine thing, the one glimpse of God’s paradise given on earth, is to fight a losing battle — and not lose it.”

I say, “Are you quoting somebody?”

***

Frank Diamond’s short stories have appeared in RavensPerch, the Examined Life Journal, Lost Lake Folk Opera, Wordrunner eChapbook, Dulcet, Thriller Magazine, the Fredericksburg Literary & Art Review, and Stepping Stones Literary Journal, among many other publications. Frank’s poetry has been published in many magazines and journals, and his poem, “Labor Day,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize award. Frank lives in Langhorne, PA.