Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

I’d heard the rumors, see. I guess everybody heard the rumors. But you hear stuff like that all the time. You don’t pay any attention to it, or at least you try not to.

Once Bemis wasout of the way, it only took us four pitches to get out of the inning. Tommy used three of them to strike out the number five hitter, two fastballs that he swung at and missed and a curve he held off on. It was right on the corner, and this time we got the call. Then the next Bobcat batter fouled off the first pitch and our first baseman made a nice running catch at the stands. Three up and three down.

And that was when it first hit me that what I’d just seen was fifteen up and fifteen down, that we’d played five innings without a single Bobcat making it to first base. No runs, no hits, no errors, no bases on balls, no nothing. Tommy Willis, who’d started out shaky, like he might walk the bases loaded, was past the halfway mark of throwing a perfect game.

That’s what it was, but you have to keep in mind that it sounds like more than it is. Being halfway to a perfect game (or an ordinary no-hitter, for that matter, if there can be such a thing as an ordinary no-hitter) is a little like being ninety years old and saying you’re halfway to a hundred and eighty. It’s not as though you’re an even-money shot to get there.

No-hitters are a funny thing. Some of the winningest pitchers in baseball have never had one, or even come close. They get out the guys they have to get out, they shut things down when they’ve got men in scoring position, and game after game they scatter a handful of hits and come out on top.

But to throw a no-hitter you have to be on top of every batter you face. And you need to be lucky, too, because you can have the best stuff in the world and some lifetime .220 hitter can lunge at the ball and knock a flute into shallow left. A no-hitter’s like a soap bubble, it doesn’t take much to burst it.

And a perfect game’s all that and more, because not only can a lucky swing beat you, but a batter can get lucky by not swinging, and your too-close-to-take curveball turns out to be ball four. Your outfielder can misjudge what should have been a routine fly ball, your shortstop can bobble a grounder and then throw it into the stands. Not your fault, but there goes your perfect game.

There’s a million superstitions in baseball, plus the private rituals some players go through. Maybe it’s because there’s so much in the game you can’t control, so you try to get a handle on it by fastening and unfastening the snaps on your batting glove, or keeping a hitting streak alive by not shaving, or pounding your glove a certain number of times between pitches. No one could follow all the baseball superstitions, especially since some of them contradict each other, and anyway there’s too many of them to remember. But one that just about everybody follows is what you do when a guy’s throwing a no-hitter, and that’s that you don’t do anything. And what you especially don’t do is mention it.

It used to be that radio and TV announcers wouldn’t mention it, and some of them still won’t, but plenty of them seem to figure that they’re too far away to jinx it, and their viewers would have a fit if they wound up watching a no-hitter without realizing it.

But you don’t mention it in the dugout or on the field. You sure as hell don’t say a word to the pitcher, but you don’t say anything to anybody else, either. And here’s something interesting — if you’re on the other team, doing everything you can to keep from having a no-hitter pitched against you, you still don’t say a word about it.

I don’t know why that is. There’s no limit to what ballplayers’ll say, trying to get a rise out of each other. You’ll hear comments about a player’s wife, or even his mother. But you won’t hear anything about the no-hitter he’s so many outs away from throwing. I thought it might be like countries at war not using poison gas, because if they do the other side might use it right back at them, but how would that work in baseball? The other team couldn’t mention your no-hitter until you had one going, and it might be forever before that happened.

I guess it’s just a feeling that mentioning it would be bush. Looking bush is something a ballplayer’ll do a lot in order not to.

But the point is Tommy was twelve outs away from a perfect game, which is miles and miles away, but close enough to be aware of. And I wasn’t saying anything, and neither was anybody else, but I would look around and catch another player’s eye and I’d know he knew what was going on, and he’d know the same about me. And pretty soon everybody knew, and nobody said a word.

Except the one person I wasn’t sure about was Tommy. I tried not to stare, but of course I was looking at him when he was out there and I was behind the plate, because how could I catch him properly without taking a lot of long looks at him? And when it was our turn at bat I couldn’t help sneaking peeks at him, and it seemed to me he was just looking straight ahead and not seeing anything. He was in a zone, all right. He was off somewhere with his own private thoughts, and what those thoughts might be or where they were headed was something I didn’t have a clue about. Maybe he was seeing the whole game, past and future, pitch by pitch, or maybe he was off in some world where there was no such thing as baseball. I could stare at him all I wanted and it wouldn’t matter. He wouldn’t know I was staring, and I wouldn’t be able to tell what was going on in his head.

Tommy struck outthe side in the top of the sixth.

Justo walked to lead off our half of the inning, and I laid down a bunt that was good enough to get him to second. But that was as far as he got. A pop-up and a ground ball and the inning was over.

In the top of the seventh, Tommy went to three and two on the leadoff batter. Then he shook off my signs until I called for a curveball that I didn’t really want him to throw, and he hung it. The batter got all of it, and I thought it was gone, and it was, but it hooked at the last minute and was foul by a couple of feet.

The whole ballpark held its breath, and when the ball went out and the umpire called it foul, everybody in the place sighed at once. And there were cheers, real cheers, and as far as I know it’s the first time anybody drew cheers for hitting a foul ball. The batter had only got a few steps toward first base, since he and everybody else knew right away it was either a home run or a foul ball, so there was no need to set any records getting down the line. He trotted back and picked up his bat and struck out on the next pitch.

The next batter tapped a grounder to first, and the inning ended with a foul pop. It was high enough so that I could imagine a hundred things going wrong in the time it took to come down, but it plopped in my mitt and stayed there, and we were out of the inning. Twenty-one up and twenty-one down, and six to go.

We scored tworuns in the bottom of the seventh, and I’d say it was about time. The thing is, no matter how good a pitcher is, he can’t win a game without runs. There was even a case once of a pitcher throwing nine no-hit innings and losing in extra innings. People don’t believe it could happen, but it’s right there in the book.

Anyway, with one out, Darnell Weeks doubled down the line, and Tommy was next in the order. Ordinarily that would have meant a pinch hitter, because Tommy’s batting average is a lot less than his playing weight. He takes a decent cut at the ball, but more often than not he fans.

So, with the game on the line, he’d have been gone. And that would have been true even if we already had a lot of runs on the board. Tommy would hardly ever stay in for a whole nine innings. If we were behind he’d come out for a pinch hitter, and if we were ahead we’d have Freddie Olendorff close things out. But you don’t lift a guy who’s six outs away from a no-hitter, let alone a perfect game. Tommy picked up a bat and struck out on three pitches.