Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

Pepper Foxwell was up next, and he ran the count to three and two, fouled off five or six pitches, and finally got one he liked. He’s our leadoff batter and doesn’t usually hit for power, but this time he swung hard and got all of it, and just like that Tommy had a two-run cushion.

I watched the ball go out, and as soon as it cleared the fence I looked over at Tommy. Everybody else was off the bench with the crack of the bat, climbing up the dugout steps to watch and then to cheer, but Tommy never moved. I don’t even know if he saw what was happening, or paid any attention to it.

He was in a zone, and he might as well have been in a bubble. Between innings, nobody sat down next to him and nobody talked to him. That’s part of not mentioning a no-hitter. You just leave the pitcher alone, you let him stay in his own space, and I guess that’s where he was.

The next man up hit a long fly, and it looked for a minute like it was going out, too, but their center fielder gathered it in at the track, and that was the third out.

Wade Bemis ledoff the top of the eighth. He had a funny look on his face, not what you expect of someone whose team’s getting shut out. Like there was a joke and he was in on it.

“Hey, Willis,” he called out. “You’re almost perfect.”

Now I’d say the whole park went silent, but it pretty much already was. Because everybody in the stadium knew Tommy Willis was six outs away from putting a perfect game in the record book, and if that won’t quiet a crowd down I don’t know what will.

Quiet as it was, Bemis’s words rang out loud and clear, and what followed them was a whole lot of silence. I was truly shocked, and the first thing I did was look at Tommy, but if his face showed any expression I couldn’t read it.

In an undertone, so nobody but Bemis could hear it, I said, “Man, that was really bush.”

He must have heard me, but he didn’t react. “Just like Colleen,” he said, loud and clear. “She’s pretty close to perfect herself, Willis.”

Now Tommy reacted, but not like you’d expect. He got this big grin on his face. He stood up there on the mound while Wade Bemis knocked the dirt out of his spikes and got into his stance. Bemis crowded the plate, the way he always did, but this time he was closer than ever. I called for a fastball on the inside corner and Tommy delivered it belt-high. It was a strike and Ev Kalman called it a strike, but at the same time it was almost the end of Tommy’s perfect game, because it was that close to brushing Wade Bemis’s uniform. It was over the plate, but even so it almost hit him. In fact I wasn’t sure it didn’t touch the cloth, and if it had that would have put him on first, even if it was in the strike zone.

Everything would have been different. The box score would have been the same, if you think about it, but everything would have been different.

As close as the pitch was, Bemis didn’t turn a hair. He didn’t make a remark, either. He stepped out of the box, picked up some dirt, gave his batting helmet a tug, and stepped in again. If anything, he was crowding the plate more than ever.

I called for a curve outside. It would break in toward a right-handed batter like Bemis, and if it worked right it would just catch the outside corner. It would be a tougher pitch for him to handle if Tommy could first move him off the plate by throwing high and tight, but I was afraid another inside pitch would get a piece of his uniform and he’d be on first and Tommy’s perfect game would be out the window. I set up low, figuring if Tommy kept the ball down it would be a tough pitch for Bemis to handle, even if he was just about standing on the plate.

Well, everybody in the world saw the pitch Tommy threw. They showed it over and over on every news program in the country. I try not to look at it, but I still guess I must have seen it a hundred times, with Tommy going into his windup and throwing his fastball straight at Wade Bemis’s head. Except it wasn’t right at his head, it was behind his head, so that when Bemis saw it coming and tried to get away from it he just pulled right back into it.

Somebody had a radar gun clocking the pitch — somebody always does, these days — and the ball was going 102 miles an hour when it hit Bemis. Tommy threw it at his head and there was nothing the matter with his control. It got Bemis just above the ear, and I’ll never forget the sound it made.

I suppose they could hear it in Cooperstown.

Bemis was wearing a batting helmet. You have to, and I think they even wear them in slo-pitch softball nowadays, and there’s no question that they prevent a lot of injuries. But so do seat belts, and what good are they if your plane flies into the side of a mountain?

Everybody saw the pitch, and everybody saw what happened next, with Wade Bemis falling flat and lying still, and a whole stadium full of people catching their breath. And then, the next thing anybody knew, there were a dozen cops out on the field, all of them heading for the pitcher’s mound. My first thought was that they were there to protect Tommy, to keep the Bobcats from taking a shot at him, but the Bobcats were in the same state we were, too shocked and stunned to do anything much but stand around. And the cops weren’t protecting Tommy. What they were doing was putting cuffs on him and taking him into custody.

Wade Bemis left first. An ambulance drove in from the bullpen entrance and drove right across the infield, and they got him on a stretcher and loaded him on the ambulance and drove out the way they came, siren blazing away. They didn’t need the siren, as it turned out, and they didn’t even need the ambulance, because Bemis was dead on arrival at the hospital, and he was most likely dead when he hit the ground.

Just about everybody watched the ambulance leave, and most of the crowd missed Tommy’s exit. He left in handcuffs, escorted by ten or a dozen cops, and they took him out through the dugout and the locker room so nobody really knew what was happening.

And then we finished the game.

There was some criticism later about that, some people arguing that the game should have been called on the spot, but how could you do that? For one thing, I think you’d have had a riot on your hands. You don’t call off a game every time a batter gets hit by a pitch.

Some rookie, a skinny guy named Hector Ruiz, was announced as a pinch runner, and he was awarded first base. And our closer, Freddie Olendorff, came on in relief. He took his warmup throws, and I got a hunch and called for a pitchout on the first pitch, and sure enough, Hector Ruiz was off and running. I threw down to Pepper Foxwell at second and we had him out by four feet.

The next two batters grounded out, and that was it for the Bobcats in the top of the eighth. They brought in a new pitcher in the bottom of the ninth and he walked the bases loaded, and we scored two more runs before they managed to stop the bleeding. Then Freddie went out there and shut down the Bobcats one two three, on a pair of ground balls and a foul pop that I caught for the last out.

We were in the locker room and the crowd was out of the stadium and halfway home before we found out what had actually happened that afternoon. That Bemis was dead, which was what we were all afraid of, of course, but didn’t know for a fact, not until the word filtered through to us. And that Tommy Willis was in a jail cell, charged with murder.

That was hard to believe. I think everybody knew it wasn’t an accident, that he’d thrown that ball at Wade Bemis on purpose. And some of us knew he hadn’t been trying to just brush him back, but that he meant to hit him.

And I knew just how intentional it was, because I knew what pitch I’d called and where I’d set up. And Tommy didn’t even bother to shake off my sign. He nodded and went into his windup and threw the ball straight at Bemis.