Deep Right

by Joe Broadmeadow

Author’s note: The following is sort of a true story with the names changed to protect no one. While I may not have spent my entire baseball career in right field, I had a pretty good run as a shortstop; my nickname on the team, “Turtle,” was a pretty fair indication of my long-term prospects.

Such is life.

---

The field sat behind the Cumberland Lincoln Boys Club, and beyond the low fence in right field stood the old mill, which had made cloth for the Lonsdale Company for eighty years and nothing at all since before the war.

If you played right field for the Tigers, you played with your back to a wall of dead windows. Denny Fallon had counted them. Two hundred and eleven, not including the ones on the tower, which he couldn’t see from his position and had decided not to count on principle.

He had a lot of time out there.

Right field in 1967 was not a position so much as a verdict. Coach never said it out loud. He didn’t have to. He had a clipboard and a system, and the system was this: the boys who could catch went to center, the boys who could throw went to left, and the boys whose mothers had signed them up went to right.

Denny’s mother had signed him up.

She sat along the third-base line in a folding aluminum chair she brought from home because she said sitting on the ground due to the lack of other options made her spine feel like a xylophone.

Her appreciation for the actual skills of baseball was limited. She cheered at things that were not, technically, plays.

“Nice hustle, Denny!” she would call, when he jogged out to his position.

There was no hustle. There was only the jog. But he loved her for it, in the embarrassed, sideways way an eleven-year-old loves anybody.

The thing about right field is that nothing happens there, and then it does, and the switch between those two states is instantaneous and merciless. To kill time, you develop rituals. Denny had several. He pounded his glove—his father’s glove, a Rawlings from the Eisenhower administration, oiled so many times it smelled like a garage—in the rhythm of the Batman theme, which he could not stop doing once he had started. He picked the dandelions that grew in the low spot where the drainage was bad and lined them up on the chalk in order of size. He narrated.

The narration was the best part. He did it under his breath, in the voice of Ned Martin on WHDH, who could make a routine grounder sound like a hinge in history.

Fallon out in right, playing the wind. He’s had a quiet game. But this kid has a nose for the ball.

He did not have a nose for the ball. In four seasons he had caught eleven fly balls, and he knew the number because he kept it in a spiral notebook under his bed along with a list of every player who had ever hit forty home runs and a drawing of a stadium he intended to design when he was older, which had a swimming pool behind the center-field fence for reasons he could no longer reconstruct.

That spring the Sox were doing something nobody in the state could explain. They had finished ninth the year before. Now Yastrzemski was hitting like a rumor and Tony C was twenty-two years old and beautiful and hit a ball in April that Denny’s uncle claimed was still going.

In the parking lot after Mass men stood around with the doors of their Ramblers open and the radio on and did not go home. Something was coming loose in the world that summer. Denny felt it out in right field the way you feel weather in a knee.

* * *

The sixth inning came in on a June evening thick as syrup, mosquitoes rising off the drainage ditch, the light going long and gold across the mill bricks the way it does about an hour before it quits. They were down six to two to the Orioles, who had Ronnie Ouellette.

Everybody had a Ronnie Ouellette. Denny understood this later, when he was grown, that every league in every town had one boy who was simply made from different material, and that the rest of them were there to give him someone to play against. Ronnie was eleven, same as Denny, born nine days apart at the same hospital in Woonsocket, and he had a mustache. Not a real one. A rumor of one. But it was there, and it was doing more than anything on Denny’s face had ever attempted.

Ronnie came up with two on.

“Back up! Back up!” Coach waved both arms like a man landing a plane, and Denny backed up, and backed up, and backed up until the outfield stopped being outfield and became just a field, and he could hear the traffic going up Mendon Road, and the infield looked like something happening on television.

Ronnie swung.

Denny heard it before he saw anything. That was the first strange thing. The sound off Ronnie’s bat was not the sound the rest of them made. It was lower and it was final, like a door in a big house. And then the ball was up there against all that gold light, higher than a ball had any business being, and it was coming to right field.

It was coming to him.

He ran. He would remember running for the rest of his life—not the catch, the running—the feeling of his sneakers going through the wet spot and the glove up and his hat coming off and the absolute conviction, arriving from nowhere, that he was going to get there. He got there. He got there and the ball came down into the webbing of his father’s ancient glove with a sound like a book closing, and the force of it sat him down hard in the dandelions.

For a second there was no noise at all.

Then his mother was up out of her aluminum chair, and Coach Sabatino was shouting a word he’d get a letter about, and even some of the Orioles parents were clapping, because it was June and everybody was somebody’s kid.

Denny sat in the wet grass with the ball in his glove and his heart going like a bird in a box, and he understood.

He couldn’t have said it in words then. The words came later, decades later, standing in a different outfield watching a different boy. But he understood it complete and all at once, the way you understand cold water.

That was the best I will ever do.

Not the best of the season. Not the best of the year. The best. He had reached up and touched the ceiling of the whole thing, and the ceiling was a catch in right field in a six-to-two game behind a dead mill, and there was nothing above it, and there never would be. Ronnie Ouellette was already standing on second base with his hands on his hips, annoyed, and Ronnie’s ceiling was somewhere over the treeline, out past Mendon Road, out past everything.

Denny got up. He brushed the dandelion heads off his pants. He threw the ball back in, and it was a bad throw, a rainbow, and the shortstop had to come out twenty feet to get it, and that was fine.

Fallon, he said, under his breath, to nobody. Robs Ouellette. And the crowd, ladies and gentlemen, is on its feet.

* * *

They lost. They went to Chelo’s, which is what you did whether you won or lost, and Denny had a coffee cabinet and did not tell anybody anything.

His mother folded the aluminum chair into the back of the wagon and said, “That was a heck of a catch, sweetheart.”

“Yeah,” he said.

And he meant it. That was the thing he’d carry, the small strange grace of it — that he was not sad. He’d found out he wasn’t going to be anybody’s Ronnie Ouellette, and the news had come to him gently, in the one moment of his baseball life when he was flying, and it had cost him nothing at all except everything he’d been planning since he was six.

He rode home with the window down and his father’s glove on his lap, smelling like a garage, and the radio was on low because the Sox were out in Anaheim and the game wouldn’t end until he was asleep. The mill went by dark and enormous. Somewhere behind it the field was just a field again in the dark, with the dandelions closed up for the night.

He was eleven. He had, he figured, about a hundred more games in him before the whole thing ran out.

He decided he would count those too.