Waiting on Deck
by Jay Lesandrini
I’m kneeling in the on-deck circle with two outs in the ninth, and we’re losing again. Losing by a lot, and all I want is one more at bat. Eighteen years of playing baseball is coming down to this — one more chance to stand in the batter’s box. The sun is dipping behind the trees in left field, and what had been a warm Sunday afternoon in late April has become something much colder. If I were sitting in the dugout with two or three guys waiting ahead of me to hit, I’d already be past this. I’d be thinking about getting back to my off-campus apartment and drinking a cold beer, or I’d be thinking that I still have to read The American for my Lit final next week. I’ve been putting it off all semester. I hate Henry James.
Instead, I’m here in the on-deck circle and I reach down, grab the pine-tar rag, tacky the bat handle with optimism. The batter takes ball one. I shout at him. Tell him to make the pitcher work. Suggest to him that the pitcher’s getting tired. Urge him to make sure it’s a strike before he swings. But I know he’s not listening. And I’m not really talking to him, anyway. I’m talking to the pitcher. I want to get inside this guy’s head. I want him to be thinking about me instead of the batter. He knows the game is over. He knows he’s got a long bus ride home and wants to get started as soon as possible.
He throws a breaking ball that freezes the batter, and looks low and away to me. The umpire calls a strike. It’s getting cold out here for him too.
I look into the visitor’s dugout and they are all laughing at the call. They start to bag up their equipment. Everyone wants the game to end except for me — and the guy in the batter’s box. The pitcher reaches back and brings the high hard stuff, and I can see the batter’s eyes turn into saucers. There’s something about a high fastball that makes you want to take a bite of that grapefruit as it dances up to the plate.
A swing and a miss. The count is one and two, and I know that the pitcher’s coming back with another high fastball. I give the batter the benefit of my wisdom, but he still isn’t listening. The pitch is head high, right down central and I see that moment of hesitation in the batter’s knees right before his bat comes forward. I’m already walking back toward the dugout when I hear the slight ping of cowhide glancing off aluminum, and the hopeful chink of the ball hitting the fence behind us. There’s still a chance for one more at bat.
I pick up the pine tar rag and stand there wringing it in my hands like a widow at a wake. I think about the afternoon when I was four years old and my mother stood behind me and shaped my fingers onto a bat handle for the first time. I think about the first game I played in the 12-year-old league when I was only nine, and how I was so scared that I bunted with the bases loaded. I think about all the nights after practice in high school waiting for the city bus to take me home, while my friend’s parents picked them up. I think about passing up the opportunity to go to Marquette because they didn’t have a baseball team, and about the day my high school coach told me that Butler University was offering me a scholarship. It all comes down to this.
It comes down to me waiting in the on-deck circle, hoping the guy at the plate, a junior who still has another year to play, will find his way on base and give me one last opportunity to hit a baseball. There is nothing in the balance. No record to be set. No game to be won to extend a season. This is it.
Eighteen years of playing baseball and I could never hit a slider. I could never pick up that tight rotation of the seams in time to recognize the pitch… until now. I see the ball leave the pitcher’s hand and watch the batter swing at a pitch that would strike me out.
The instant that the ball comes off his bat, I imagine the pitcher being undressed like Charlie Brown as the ball whizzes by his head. Then I hear the snap of cowhide on leather. Charlie Brown isn’t pitching today.
I feel the weight of 18 years of baseball drop in my stomach, and I kneel down to catch my breath, using the bat as a cane to keep me upright. On his way to the dugout the batter pats me on the back and tells me that he’s sorry, and I know that he really means it.
As I think back now, 20 some years later, I don’t remember what happened during the last at bat of my baseball career, I only remember waiting in the on deck circle hoping that it would never end.
Jay Lesandrini holds an MFA in creating writing from Butler University. His publications include Bluestem, Booth, Caesura, Mythic Indy, Punchnel’s, and Sport Literate. His essay “Waiting on Deck,” won our 2010 essay contest and was also named a notable essay in the Best American Sports Writing 2011. He lives in Carmel, Indiana, and is the Director of Communications and Marketing at Indiana University-Purdue University Columbus, where he also teaches writing.