So my softball team participated in a playoff game last night. We lost a heart-breaker, up by three runs going into the bottom of the final frame to the team that finished in first place. Don’t get me started.
Anyway, I bring this up in conjunction with Stephen King’s baseball novella. A passage from this review on ArtVoice.com caught my eye:
A player whose entire major league career was wiped from the record books for reasons which come to light late in the story, [Blockade Billy] Blakely was a last-minute addition to the Titans roster after their two regular catchers were hurt just before opening day.
Why that passage? I am the regular catcher on my team, but sometimes I’ll rotate with one of our two pitchers if he’s not on the mound for a particular game. In this particular game, he was being held out as a potential pinch hitter, in case our starter faltered. Although the rules are fairly relaxed in this league — Did I mention it’s a 50-and-over league? No? Hmm, senior moment, I guess — his entering the game as he did was the source of a potentially disastrous situation which could have resulted in automatic outs, tsunamis, and the end of civilization as we know it. In other words, the game could have forfeited and the records expunged. It’s as if Stephen King knew what would happen to us and wrote about it in a fictionalized fashion.
Now that‘s scary.
I'm standing, fifth from the left, hiding lest the authorities see the picture and figure out my whereabouts.
is available on Amazon.com,
{ 2 comments }
I wonder if Blockade Billy, with his metaphysical talents, can be called up to help the Boston Red Sox…life certainly does imitate art.
Approve.
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Ron Kaplan’s Baseball Bookshelf
“If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.”
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