Сказка про горшочек.

Stephen King

 

 

AUTHOR’s NOTE:

I am breaking in here, Constant Reader, to make you aware that this is not a story but an essay—almost a diary. It originally appeared in The New Yorker in the spring of 1990.

S.K.

 

Head down! Keep your head down!”

It is far from the most difficult feat in sports, but anyone who has ever tried to do it will tell you that it’s tough enough: using a round bat to hit a round ball squarely on the button. Tough enough so that the handful of men who do it well become rich, famous, and idolized: the Jose Cansecos, the Mike Greenwells, the Kevin Mitchells. For thousands of boys (and not a few girls), their faces, not the face of Axl Rose or Bobby Brown, are the ones that matter; their posters hold the positions of honor on bedroom walls and locker doors. Today Ron St. Pierre is teaching some of these boys—boys who will represent Bangor West Side in District 3 Little League tournament play—how to put the round bat on the round ball. Right now he’s working with a kid named Fred Moore while my son, Owen, stands nearby, watching closely. He’s due in St. Pierre’s hot seat next. Owen is broad-shouldered and heavily built, like his old man; Fred looks almost painfully slim in his bright green jersey. And he is not making good contact.

“Head down, Fred!” St. Pierre shouts. He is halfway between the mound and home plate at one of the two Little League fields behind the Coke plant in Bangor; Fred is almost all the way to the backstop. The day is a hot one, but if the heat bothers either Fred or St. Pierre it does not show.

They are intent on what they are doing.

“Keep it down!” St. Pierre shouts again, and unloads a fat pitch.

Fred chips under it. There is that chinky aluminum-on-cowhide sound—the sound of someone hitting a tin cup with a spoon. The ball hits the backstop, rebounds, almost bonks him on the helmet. Both of them laugh, and then St. Pierre gets another ball from the red plastic bucket beside him.

“Get ready, Freddy!” he yells. “Head down!”

Maine’s District 3 is so large that it is split in two. The Penobscot County teams make up half the division; the teams from Aroostook and Washington counties make up the other half. Ail-Star kids are selected by merit and drawn from all existing district Little League teams. The dozen teams in District 3 play in simultaneous tournaments. Near the end of July, the two teams left will play off, best two out of three, to decide the district champ. That team represents District 3

in State Championship play, and it has been a long time—eighteen years—since a Bangor team made it into the state tourney. This year, the State Championship games will be played in Old Town, where they make the canoes. Four of the five teams that play there will go back home. The fifth will go on to represent Maine in the Eastern Regional Tournament, this year to be held in Bristol, Connecticut. Beyond that, of course, is Williamsport, Pennsylvania, where the Little League World Series happens.

The Bangor West players rarely seem to think of such dizzy heights; they will be happy just to beat Millinocket, their first-round opponent in the Penobscot County race. Coaches, however, are allowed to dream—are, in fact, almost obligated to dream.

This time Fred, who is the team joker, does get his head down. He hits a weak grounder on the wrong side of the first-base line, foul by about six feet.

“Look,” St. Pierre says, taking another ball. He holds it up. It J is scuffed, dirty, and grassstained.

It is nevertheless a baseball, and Fred eyes it respectfully. “I’m going to show you a-trick.

Where’s the ball?”

“In your hand,” Fred says.

Saint, as Dave Mansfield, the team’s head coach, calls him, drops it into his glove. “Now?”

“In your glove.”

Saint turns sideways; his pitching hand creeps into his glove. “Now?”

“In your hand. I think.”

“You’re right. So watch my hand. Watch my hand, Fred Moore, and wait for the ball to come out in it. You’re looking for the ball. Nothing else. Just the ball. I should just be a blur to you.

Why would you want to see me, anyway? Do you care if I’m smiling? No. You’re waiting to see how I’ll come—sidearm or three-quarters or over the top. Are you waiting?'”

Fred nods.

“Are you watching?”

Fred nods again.

“O.K...” St. Pierre says, and goes into his short-arm batting-practice motion again.

This time Fred drives the ball with real authority: a hard sinking liner to right field.

“All right!” Saint cries. “That’s all right, Fred Moore!” He wipes sweat off his forehead. “Next batter!”

Dave Mansfield, a heavy, bearded man who comes to the park wearing aviator sunglasses and an open-neck College World Series shirt (it’s a good-luck charm), brings a paper sack to the Bangor West-Millinocket game. It contains sixteen pennants, in various colors. bangor, each one says, the word flanked by a lobster on one side and a pine tree on the other. As each Bangor West player is announced on loudspeakers that have been wired to the chain-link backstop, he takes a pennant from the bag Dave holds out, runs across the infield, and hands it to his opposite number.

Dave is a loud, restless man who happens to love baseball and the kids who play it at this level. He believes there are two purposes to All-Star Little League: to have fun and to win. Both are important, he says, but the most important thing is to keep them in the right order. The pennants are not a sly gambit to unnerve the opposition but just for fun. Dave knows that the boys on both teams will remember this game, and he wants each of the Millinocket kids to have a souvenir. It’s as simple as that.

The Millinocket players seem surprised by the gesture, and they don’t know exactly what to do with the pennants as someone’s tape player begins to warble out the Anita Bryant version of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The Millinocket catcher, almost buried beneath his gear, solves the problem in unique fashion: he holds his Bangor pennant over his heart.

With the amenities taken care of, Bangor West administers a brisk and thorough trouncing; the final score is Bangor West 18, Millinocket 7. The loss does not devalue the souvenirs, however; when Millinocket departs on the team bus, the visitors” dugout is empty save for a few Dixie cups and Popsicle sticks. The pennants—every single one of them—are gone.

“Cut two!” Neil Waterman, Bangor West’s field coach, shouts. “Cut two, cut two!”

It’s the day after the Millinocket game. Everyone on the team is still showing up for practice, but it’s early yet. Attrition will set in. That is a given: parents are not always willing to give up summer plans so their kids can play Little League after the regular, May-June season is over, and sometimes the kids themselves tire of the constant grind of practice. Some would rather be riding their bikes, trying to hang ten on their skateboards, or just hanging around the community pool and checking out the girls.

“Cut two!” Waterman yells. He is a small, compact man in khaki shorts and a Joe Coach crewcut. In real life he is a teacher and a college basketball coach, but this summer he is trying to teach these boys that baseball has more in common with chess than many would ever have believed. Know your play, he tells them over and over again. Know who it is you’re backing up.

Most important of all, know who your cut man is in every situation, and be able to hit him. He works patiently at showing them the truth that hides at the center of the game: that it is played more in the mind than with the body.

Ryan Larrobino, Bangor West’s center fielder, fires a bullet to Casey Kinney at second base.

Casey tags an invisible runner, pivots, and throws another bullet to home, where J. J. Fiddler takes the throw and tosses the ball back to Waterman.

“Double-play ball!” Waterman shouts, and hits one to Matt Kinney (not related to Casey). Matt is playing shortstop at practice today. The ball takes a funny hop and appears to be on its way to left center. Matt knocks it down, picks it up, and feeds to Casey at second; Casey pivots and throws to Mike Arnold, who is on first. Mike feeds it home to J.J.

“All right!” Waterman shouts. “Good job, Matt Kinney! Good job! One-two-one! You’re covering, Mike Pelkey!” The two names. Always the two names, to avoid confusion. The team is lousy with Matts, Mikes, and guys named Kinney.

The throws are executed flawlessly. Mike Pelkey, Bangor West’s number two pitcher, is right where he’s supposed to be, covering first. It’s a move he doesn’t always remember to make, but this time he does. He grins and trots back to the mound as Neil Waterman gets ready to hit the next combination.

“This is the best Little League All-Star team I’ve seen in years,” Dave Mansfield says some days after Bangor West’s trouncing of Millinocket. He dumps a load of sunflower seeds into his mouth and begins to chew them. He spits hulls casually as he talks. “I don’t think they can be beaten—at least not in this division.”

He pauses and watches as Mike Arnold breaks toward the plate from first, grabs a practice bunt, and whirls toward the bag. He cocks his arm back—then holds the ball. Mike Pelkey is still on the mound; this time he has forgotten that it is his job to cover, and the bag is undefended. He flashes Dave a quick guilty glance. Then he breaks into a sunny grin and gets ready to do it again. Next time he’ll do it right, but will he remember to do it right during a game? “Of course, we can beat ourselves,” Dave says. “That’s how it usually happens.” And, raising his voice, he bellows, “Where were you, Mike Pelkey? You’re s’posed to be covering first!”

Mike nods and trots over—better late than never.

“Brewer,” Dave says, and shakes his head. “Brewer at their field. That’ll be tough. Brewer’s always tough.”

Bangor West does not trounce Brewer, but they win their first “road game” without any real strain. Matt Kinney, the team’s number one pitcher, is in good form. He is far from overpowering, but his fastball has a sneaky, snaky little hop, and he also has a modest but effective breaking pitch. Ron St. Pierre is fond of saying that every Little League pitcher in America thinks he’s got a killer curveball. “What they think is a curve is usually this big lollipop change,” he says. “A batter with a little self-discipline can kill the poor thing.”

Matt Kinney’s curveball actually curves, however, and tonight he goes the distance and strikes out eight. Probably more important, he walks only four. Walks are the bane of a Little League coach’s existence. “They kill you,” Neil Waterman says. “The walks kill you every time.

Absolutely no exceptions. Sixty per cent of batters walked score in Little League games.” Not in this game: two of the batters Kinney walks are forced at second; the other two are stranded. Only one Brewer batter gets a hit: Denise Hewes, the center fielder, singles with one out in the fifth, but she is forced at second.

After the game is safely in the bag, Matt Kinney, a solemn and almost eerily self-possessed boy, flashes Dave a rare smile, revealing a set of neat braces. “she could hit!” he says, almost reverently.

“Wait until you see Hampden,” Dave says dryly. “They all hit.”

When the Hampden squad shows up at Bangor West’s field, behind the Coke plant, on July 17th, they quickly prove Dave right. Mike Pelkey has pretty good stuff and better control than he had against Millinocket, but he isn’t much of a mystery to the Hampden boys. Mike Tardif, a compact kid with an amazingly fast bat, rips Pelkey’s third pitch over the left-field fence, two hundred feet away, for a home run in the first inning. Hampden adds two more runs in the second, and leads Bangor West 3–0.

In the third, however, Bangor West breaks loose. Hampden’s pitching is good, Hampden’s hitting is awesome, but Hampden’s fielding, particularly infielding, leaves something to be desired. Bangor West puts three hits together with five errors and two walks to score seven runs.

This is how Little League is most often played, and seven runs should be enough, but they aren’t; the opposition chips stubbornly away, getting two in its half of the third and two more in the fifth. When Hampden comes up in the bottom of the sixth, it is trailing by only three, 10–7.

Kyle King, a twelve-year-old who started for Hampden this evening and then went to catcher in the fifth, leads off the bottom of the sixth with a double. Then Mike Pelkey strikes out Mike Tardif. Mike Wentworth, the new Hampden pitcher, singles to deep short. King and Wentworth advance on a passed ball, but are forced to hold when Jeff Carson grounds back to the pitcher.

This brings up Josh Jamieson, one of five Hampden home-run threats, with two on and two out.

He represents the tying run.

Mike, although clearly tired, finds a little extra and strikes him out on a one-two pitch. The game is over.

The kids line up and give each other the custom-ordained high fives, but it’s clear that Mike isn’t the only kid who is simply exhausted after the match; with their slumped shoulders and lowered heads, they all look like losers. Bangor West is now 3–0 in divisional play, but the win is a fluke, the kind of game that makes Little League such a nerve-racking experience for spectators, coaches, and the players themselves. Usually sure-handed in the field, Bangor West has tonight committed something like nine errors.

“I didn’t sleep all night,” Dave mutters at practice the next day. “damn, we were outplayed. We should have lost that game.”

Two nights later, he has something else to feel gloomy about. He and Ron St. Pierre make the six-mile trip to Hampden to watch Kyle King and his mates play Brewer. This is no scouting expedition; Bangor has played both clubs, and both men have copious notes. What they are really hoping to see, Dave admits, is Brewer getting lucky and putting Hampden out of the way.

It doesn’t happen; what they see isn’t a baseball game but gunnery practice.

Josh Jamieson, who struck out in the clutch against Mike Pelkey, clouts a home run over everything and into the Hampden practice field. Nor is Jamieson alone. Carson hits one,

Wentworth hits one, and Tardif hits a pair. The final score is Hampden 21, Brewer 9.

On the ride back to Bangor, Dave Mansfield chews a lot of sunflower seeds and says little. He rouses himself only once, as he wheels his old green Chevy into the rutted dirt parking lot beside the Coke plant. “We got lucky Tuesday night, and they know it,” he says. “When we go down there Thursday, they’ll be waiting for us.”

The diamonds, on which the teams of District 3 play out their six-inning dramas all have the same dimensions, give or take a foot here or an outfield gate there. The coaches all carry the rulebook in their back pockets, and they put it to frequent use. Dave likes to say that it never hurts to make sure. The infield is sixty feet on each side, a square standing on the point that is home plate. The backstop, according to the rulebook, must be at least twenty feet from home plate, giving both the catcher and a runner at third a fair chance on a passed ball. The fences are supposed to be 200 feet from the plate. At Bangor West’s field, it’s actually about 210 to dead center. And at Hampden, home of power hitters like Tardif and Jamieson, it’s more like 180.

The most inflexible measurement is also the most important: the distance between the pitcher’s rubber and the center of the plate. Forty-six feet—no more, no less. When it comes to this one, nobody ever says, “Aw, close enough for government work—let it go.” Most Little League teams live and die by what happens in the forty-six feet between those two points.

The fields of District 3 vary considerably in other ways, and a quick look is usually enough to tell you something about the feel any given community has for the game. The Bangor West field is in bad shape—a poor relation that the town regularly ignores in its recreation budget. The undersurface is a sterile clay that turns to soup when the weather is wet and to concrete when the weather is dry, as it has been this summer. Watering has kept most of the outfield reasonably green, but the infield is hopeless. Scruffy grass grows up the lines, but the area between the pitcher’s rubber and home plate is almost completely bald. The backstop is rusty; passed balls and wild pitches frequently squirt through a wide gap between the ground and the chain link.

Two large, hilly dunes run through short-right and center fields. These dunes have actually become a home-team advantage. Bangor West players learn to play the caroms off them, just as Red Sox left fielders learn to play caroms off the Green Monster. Visiting fielders, on the other hand, often find themselves chasing their mistakes all the way to the fence.

Brewer’s field, tucked behind the local IGA grocery and a Marden’s Discount Store, has to compete for space with what may be the oldest, rustiest playground equipment in New England; little brothers and sisters watch the game upside down from the swings, their heads down and their feet in the sky.

Bob Beal Field in Machias, with its pebble-pocked-skin infield, is probably the worst of the fields Bangor West will visit this year; Hampden, with its manicured outfield and neat composition infield, is probably the best. With its picnic area beyond the center-field fence and a rest-room-equipped snack bar, Hampden’s diamond, behind the local VFW hall, looks like a rich kids” field. But looks can be deceiving. This team is a combination of kids from Newburgh and Hampden, and Newburgh is still small farm and dairy country. Many of these kids ride to the games in old cars with primer paint around the headlights and mufflers held in place by chicken wire; they wear sunburns they got doing chores, not while they were hanging out at the countryclub swimming pool. Town kids and country kids. Once they’re in uniform, it doesn’t much matter which is which.

Dave is right: the Hampden-Newburgh fans are waiting. Bangor West last won the District 3 Little League title in 1971; Hampden has never won a title, and many local fans continue to hope that this will be the year, despite the earlier loss to Bangor West. For the first time, the Bangor team really feels it is on the road; it is faced with a large hometown rooting section.

Matt Kinney gets the start. Hampden counters with Kyle King, and the game quickly shapes up as that rarest and richest of Little League commodities, a genuine pitchers” duel. At the end of the third inning, the score is Hampden 0, Bangor West 0.

In the bottom of the fourth, Bangor scores two unearned runs when Hampden’s infield comes unglued once more. Owen King, Bangor West’s first baseman, comes to bat with two on and one out. The two Kings, Kyle on the Hampden team and Owen on the Bangor West team, are not related. You don’t need to be told; a single glance is enough. Kyle King is about five foot three.

At six foot two, Owen King towers over him. Size differences are so extreme in Little League that it’s easy to feel disoriented, the victim of hallucination.

Bangor’s King raps a ground ball to short. It’s a tailor-made double play, but the Hampden shortstop does not field it cleanly, and King, shucking his two hundred or so pounds down to first at top speed, beats the throw. Mike Pelkey and Mike Arnold scamper home.

Then, in the top of the fifth, Matt Kinney, who has been cruising, hits Chris Witcomb, number eight in Hampden’s order. Brett Johnson, the number nine hitter, scorches one at Casey Kinney,

Bangor West’s second baseman. Again, it’s a tailor-made double-play ball, but Casey gives up on it. His hands, which have been automatically dipping down, freeze about four inches off the ground, and Casey turns his face away to protect it from a possible bad hop. This is the most common of all Little League fielding errors, and the most easily understood; it is an act of naked self-preservation. The stricken look that Casey throws toward Dave and Neil as the ball squirts through into center field completes this part of the ballet.

“It’s O.K... Casey! Next time!” Dave bawls in his gravelly, self-assured Yankee voice.

“New batter!” Neil shouts, ignoring Casey’s look completely. “New batter! Know your play!

We’re still ahead! Get an out! Just concentrate on getting an out!”

Casey begins to relax, begins to get back into the game, and then, beyond the outfield fences, the Hampden Horns begin to blow. Some of them belong to late-model cars—Toyotas and Hondas and snappy little Dodge Colts with US OUT OF CENTRAL AMERICA and SPLIT WOOD NOT ATOMS stickers on the bumpers. But most of the Hampden Horns reside within older cars and pick-up trucks. Many of the pick-ups have rusty doors, FM converters wired up beneath the dashboards, and Leer camper caps built over the truck beds. Who is inside these vehicles, blowing the horns? No one seems to know—not for sure. They are not parents or relatives of the Hampden players; the parents and relatives (plus a generous complement of ice-creamsmeared little brothers and sisters) are filling the bleachers and lining the fence on the third-base side of the diamond, where the Hampden dugout is. They may be local guys just off work—guys who have stopped to watch some of the game before having a few brewskis at the VFW hall next door—or they may be the ghosts of Hampden Little Leaguers Past, hungry for that long-denied State Championship flag. It seems at least possible; there is something both eerie and inevitable about the Hampden Horns. They toot in harmony—high horns, low horns, a few foghorns powered by dying batteries. Several Bangor West players look uneasily back toward the sound.

Behind the backstop, a local TV crew is preparing to videotape a story for the sports final on the eleven o’clock news. This causes a stir among some of the spectators, but only a few of the players on the Hampden bench seem to notice it. Matt Kinney certainly doesn’t. He is totally intent on the next Hampden batter, Matt Knaide, who taps one turf shoe with his aluminum Worth bat and then steps into the batter’s box.

The Hampden Horns fall silent. Matt Kinney goes into his windup. Casey Kinney drops back into position just east of second, glove down. His face says it has no plans to turn away if the ball is hit to him again. The Hampden runners stand expectantly on first and second. (There is no leading away from the bag in Little League.) The spectators along the opposing arms of the diamond watch anxiously. Their conversations die out. Baseball at its best (and this is a very good game indeed, one you would pay money to see) is a game of restful pauses punctuated by short, sharp inhalations. The fans can now sense one of those inhalations coming. Matt Kinney winds and fires.

Knaide lines the first pitch over second for a base hit, and now the score is 2–1. Kyle King,

Hampden’s pitcher, steps to the plate and sends a low, screeching line drive straight back to the mound. It hits Matt Kinney on the right shin. He makes an instinctive effort to field the ball, which has already squiggled off toward the hole between third and short, before he realizes he is really hurt and folds up. Now the bases are loaded, but for the moment no one cares; the instant the umpire raises his hands, signaling time out, all the Bangor West players converge on Matt Kinney. Beyond center field, the Hampden Horns are blowing triumphantly.

Kinney is white-faced, clearly in pain. An ice pack is brought from the first-aid kit kept in the snack bar, and after a few minutes he is able to rise and limp off the field with his arms around Dave and Neil. The spectators applaud loudly and sympathetically.

Owen King, the erstwhile first baseman, becomes Bangor West’s new pitcher, and the first batter he must face is Mike Tardif. The Hampden Horns send up a brief, anticipatory blat as Tardif steps in. King’s third pitch goes wild to the backstop. Brett Johnson heads home; King breaks toward the plate from the mound, as he has been taught to do. In the Bangor West dugout,

Neil Waterman, his arm still around Matt Kinney’s shoulders, chants, “Cover-cover-COVER!”

Joe Wilcox, Bangor West’s starting catcher, is a foot shorter than King, but very quick. At the beginning of this All-Star season, he did not want to catch, and he still doesn’t like it, but he has learned to live with it and to get tough in a position where very few small players survive for long; even in Little League, most catchers resemble human Toby jugs. Earlier in this game he made an amazing one-handed stab of a foul ball. Now he lunges toward the backstop, flinging his mask aside with his bare hand at the same instant he catches the rebounding wild pitch. He turns toward the plate and tosses to King as the Hampden Horns chorus a wild—and premature, as it turns out—bray of triumph. Johnson has slowed down. On his face is an expression strikingly similar to that worn by Casey Kinney when Casey allowed Johnson’s hard-hit grounder to shoot through the hole. It is a look of extreme anxiety and trepidation, the face of a boy who suddenly wishes he were someplace else. Anyplace else. The new pitcher is blocking the plate.

Johnson starts a halfhearted slide. King takes the toss from Wilcox, pivots with surprising, winsome grace, and tags the hapless Johnson out easily. He walks back toward the mound, wiping sweat from his forehead, and prepares to face Tardif once more. Behind him, the Hampden Horns have fallen silent again.

Tardif loops one toward third. Kevin Rochefort, Bangor’s third baseman, takes a single step backward in response. It’s an easy play, but there is an awful look of dismay on his face, and it is only then, as Rochefort starts to freeze up on what is an easy pop fly, that one can see how badly the whole team has been shaken by Matt’s injury. The ball goes into Rochefort’s glove, and then pops out when Rochefort—dubbed Roach Clip first by Freddy Moore and then by the whole squad—fails to squeeze it. Knaide, who advanced to third while King and Wilcox were dealing with Johnson, has already broken for the plate. Rochefort could have doubled Knaide up easily if he had caught the ball, but here, as in the majors, baseball is a game of ifs and inches. Rochefort doesn’t catch the ball. He throws wild to first instead. Mike Arnold has taken over there, and he is one of the best fielders on the team, but no one issued him stilts. Tardif, meanwhile, steams into second. The pitchers” duel has become a typical Little League game, and now the Hampden Horns are a cacophony of joy. The home team has their thumping shoes on, and the final score is Hampden 9, Bangor West 2. Still, there are two good things to go home on: Matt Kinney is not seriously hurt, and when Casey Kinney got another tough chance in the late innings he refused to choke, and made the play.

After the final out is recorded, the Bangor West players trudge into their dugout and sit on the bench. This is their first loss, and most of them are not coping with it very gracefully. Some toss their gloves disgustedly between their dirty sneakers. Some are crying, others look close to tears, and no one is talking. Even Freddy, Bangor’s quipmaster general, has nothing to say on this, muggy Thursday evening in Hampden. Beyond the center-field fence, a few of the Hampden Horns are still tooting happily away.

Neil Waterman is the first person to speak. He tells the boys to get their heads up and look at him. Three of them already are: Owen King, Ryan Larrobino, and Matt Kinney. Now about half the squad manages to do as he’s asked. Several others, however—including Josh Stevens, who made the final out—continue to seem vastly interested in their footgear.

“Get your heads up,” Waterman says again. He speaks louder this time, but not unkindly, and now they all manage to look at him. “You played a pretty good game,” he says softly. “You got a little rattled, and they ended up on top. It happens. It doesn’t mean they’re better, though—that’s something we’re going to find out on Saturday. Tonight all you lost was a baseball game. The sun will still come up tomorrow.” They begin to stir around on the bench a little; this old homily has apparently not lost its power to comfort. “You gave what you had tonight, and that’s all we want. I’m proud of you, and you can be proud of yourselves. Nothing happened that you have to hang your heads about.”

He stands aside for Dave Mansfield, who surveys his team. When Dave speaks, his usually loud voice is even quieter than Waterman’s. “We knew when we came down here that they had to beat us, didn’t we?” he asks. He speaks reflectively, almost as if he were talking to himself. “If they didn’t, they’d be out. They’ll be coming to our field on Saturday. That’s when we have to beat them. Do you want to?” They are all looking up now.

“I want you to remember what Neil told you,” Dave says in that reflective voice, so unlike his practice-field bellow. “You are a team. That means you love each other. You love each other—win or lose—because you are a team.”

The first time anyone suggested to these boys that they must come to love each other while they were on the field, they laughed uneasily at the idea. Now they don’t laugh. After enduring the Hampden Horns together, they seem to understand, at least a little.

Dave surveys them again, and then nods. “O.K. Pick up the gear.”

They pick up bats, helmets, catching equipment, and stuff everything into canvas duffel bags.

By the time they’ve got it over to Dave’s old green pick-up truck, some of them are laughing again.

Dave laughs with them, but he doesn’t do any laughing on the ride home. Tonight the ride seems long. “I don’t know if we can beat them on Saturday,” he says on the way back. He is speaking in that same reflective tone of voice. “I want to, and they want to, but I just don’t know.

Hampden’s got mo on their side, now.”

Mo, of course, is momentum—that mythic force which shapes. not only single games but whole seasons. Baseball players are quirky and superstitious at every level of play, and for some reason the Bangor West players have adopted a small plastic sandal—a castoff of some young fan’s baby doll—as their mascot. They have named this absurd talisman Mo. They stick it in I the chain-link fence of the dugout at every game, and batters often touch it furtively before stepping into the on-deck circle. Nick Trzaskos, who ordinarily plays left field for Bangor West, has been entrusted with Mo between games. Tonight, for the first time, he forgot to bring the talisman.

“Nick better remember Mo on Saturday,” Dave says grimly. “But even if he remembers...” He shakes his head. “I just don’t know.”

There is no admission charge to Little League games; the charter expressly forbids it. Instead, a player takes around a hat during the fourth inning, soliciting donations for equipment and field maintenance. On Saturday, when Bangor West and Hampden square off in the year’s final Penobscot County Little League game, at Bangor, one can judge the growth of local interest in the team’s fortunes by a simple act of comparison. The collection taken up at the Bangor-

Millinocket contest was $15.45; when the hat finally comes back in the fifth inning of the Saturday-afternoon game against Hampden, it’s overflowing with change and crumpled dollar bills. The total take is $94.25. The bleachers are full; the fences are lined; the parking lot is full.

Little League has one thing in common with almost all American sports and business endeavors: nothing succeeds like success.

Things start off well for Bangor—they lead 7–3 at the end of three—and then everything falls apart. In the fourth inning, Hampden scores six runs, most of them honest. Bangor West doesn’t fold, as it did after Matt Kinney was hit in the game at Hampden—the players do not drop their heads, to use Neil Waterman’s phrase. But when they come to bat in the bottom of the sixth inning they are down by a score of 14–12. Elimination looks very close and very real. Mo is in its accustomed place, but Bangor West is still three cuts away from the end of its season.

One kid who did not need to be told to get his head up following Bangor West’s 9–2 loss was Ryan Larrobino. He went two for three in that game, played well, and trotted off the field knowing he had played well. He is a tall kid, quiet, with broad shoulders and a shock of dark-brown hair. He is one of two natural athletes on the Bangor West team. Matt Kinney is the other.

Although the two boys are physical opposites—Kinney slim and still fairly short, Larrobino tall and well muscled—they share a quality that is uncommon in boys their age: they trust their bodies. Most of the others on the Bangor West squad, no matter how talented, seem to regard feet, arms, and hands as spies and potential traitors.

Larrobino is one of those boys who seem somehow more there when they are dressed for some sort of competition. He is one of the few kids on either team who can don batting helmets and not look like nerds wearing their mothers” stewpots. When Matt Kinney stands on the mound and throws a baseball, he seems perfect in his place and time. And when Ryan Larrobino steps into the right-hand batter’s box and points the head of his bat out toward the pitcher for an instant before raising it to the cocked position, at his right shoulder, he also seems to be exactly where he belongs. He looks dug in even before he settles himself for the first pitch: you could draw a perfectly straight line from the ball of his shoulder to the ball of his hip and on down to the ball of his ankle. Matt Kinney was built to throw baseballs; Ryan Larrobino was built to hit them.

Last call for Bangor West. Jeff Carson, whose fourth-inning home run is really the difference in this game, and Mike Tardif, now replaces who earlier replaced Mike Wentworth on the mound for Hampden. He faces Owen King first. King goes three and two (swinging wildly for the fences at one pitch in the dirt), and then lays off a pitch just inside to work a walk. Roger Fisher follows him to the plate, pinch-hitting for the ever-gregarious Fred Moore. Roger is a small boy with Indian-dark eyes and hair. He looks like an easy out, but looks can be deceptive; Roger has good power. Today, however, he is overmatched. He strikes out.

In the field, the Hampden players shift around and look at each other. They are close, and they know it. The parking lot is too far away here for the Hampden Horns to be a factor; their fans settle for simply screaming encouragement. Two women wearing purple Hampden caps are standing behind the dugout, hugging each other joyfully. Several other fans look like track runners waiting for the starter’s gun; it is clear they mean to rush onto the field the moment their boys succeed in putting Bangor West away for good.

Joe Wilcox, who didn’t want to be a catcher and ended up doing the job anyway, rams a oneout single up the middle and into left-center field. King stops at second. Up steps Arthur Dorr, the Bangor right fielder, who wears the world’s oldest pair of high-top sneakers and has not had a hit all day. This time he rifles one, but right at the Hampden shortstop, who barely has to move.

The shortstop whips the ball to second, hoping to catch King off the bag, but he’s out of luck.

Nevertheless, there are two out.

The Hampden fans scream further encouragement. The women behind the dugout are jumping up and down. Now there are a few Hampden Horns tootling away someplace, but they are a little early, and all one has to do to know it is to look at Mike Tardif “s face as he wipes off his forehead and pounds the baseball into his glove.

Ryan Larrobino steps into the right-hand batter’s box. He has a fast, almost naturally perfect swing; even Ron St. Pierre will not fault him on it much.

Ryan swings through Tardif’s first pitch, his hardest of the day—it makes a rifle-shot sound as it hits Kyle King’s glove. Tardif then wastes one outside. King returns the ball; Tardif meditates briefly and then throws a low fastball. Ryan looks at it, and the umpire calls strike two.

It has caught the outside corner—maybe. The ump says it did, anyway, and that’s the end of it.

Now the fans on both sides have fallen quiet, and so have the coaches. They’re all out of it. It’s only Tardif and Larrobino now, balanced on the last strike of the last out of the last game one of these teams will play. Forty-six feet between these two faces. Only, Larrobino is not watching Tardif’s face. He is watching Tardif’s glove, and somewhere I can hear Ron St. Pierre telling Fred, You’re waiting to see how I’ll come—sidearm, three-quarters, or over the top.

Larrobino is waiting to see how Tardif will come. As Tardif moves to the set position, you can faintly hear the pock-pock, pock-pock of tennis balls on a nearby court, but here there is only silence and the crisp black shadows of the players, lying on the dirt like silhouettes cut from black construction paper, and Larrobino is waiting to see how Tardif will come.

He comes over the top. And suddenly Larrobino is in motion, both knees and the left shoulder dipping slightly, the aluminum bat a blur in the sunlight. That aluminum-on-cowhide sound—chink, like someone hitting a tin cup with a spoon—is different this time. A lot different. Not chink but crunch as Ryan connects, and then the ball is in the sky, tracking out to left field—a long shot that is clearly gone, high, wide, and handsome into the summer afternoon. The ball will later be recovered from beneath a car about 275 feet away from home plate.

The expression on twelve-year-old Mike Tardif’s face is stunned, thunderstruck disbelief. He takes one quick look into his glove, as if hoping to find the ball still there and discover that Larrobino’s dramatic two-strike, two-out shot was only a hideous momentary dream. The two women behind the backstop look at each other in total amazement. At first, no one makes a sound. In that moment before everyone begins to scream and the Bangor West players rush out of their dugout to await Ryan at home plate and mob him when he arrives, only two people are entirely sure that it did really happen. One is Ryan himself. As he rounds first, he raises both hands to his shoulders in a brief but emphatic gesture of triumph. And, as Owen King crosses the plate with the first of the three runs that will end Hampden’s Ail-Star season, Mike Tardif realizes. Standing on the pitcher’s rubber for the last time as a Little Leaguer, he bursts into tears.

“You gotta remember, they’re only twelve,” each of the three coaches says at one time or another, and each time one of them says it, the listener feels that he—Mansfield, Waterman, or St. Pierre—is really reminding himself.

“When you are on the field, we’ll love you and you will love each other,” Waterman tells the boys again and again, and in the wake of Bangor’s eleventh-hour, 15–14 win over Hampden, when they all did love each other, the boys no longer laugh at this. He continues, “From now on,

I’m going to be hard on you—very hard. When you’re playing, you’ll get nothing but unconditional love from me. But when we’re practicing on our home field some of you are going to find out how loud I can yell. If you’re goofing off, you’re going to sit down. If I tell you to do something and you don’t do it, you’re going to sit down. Recess is over, guys—everybody out of the pool. This is where the hard work starts.”

A few nights later, Waterman hits a shot to right during fielding practice. It almost amputates Arthur Dorr’s nose on the way by.

Arthur has been busy making sure his fly is zipped. Or inspecting the laces of his Keds. Or some damn thing.

“Arthur!” Neil Waterman bellows, and Arthur flinches more at the sound of that voice than he did at the close passage of the baseball. “Get in here! On the bench! Now!”

“But—” Arthur begins.

“In here!” Neil yells back. “You’re on the pine!”

Arthur trots sullenly in, head down, and J. J. Fiddler takes his place. A few nights later, Nick Trzaskos loses his chance to hit away when he fails to bunt two pitches in five tries or so. He sits on the bench by himself, cheeks flaming. Machias, the Aroostook County/Washington County winner, is next on the docket—a twoout-of-three series, and the winner will be District 3 champion. The first game is to be played at the Bangor field, behind the Coke plant, the second at Bob Beal Field in Machias. The last game, if needed, will be played on neutral ground between the two towns.

As Neil Waterman has promised, the coaching staff is all encouragement once the national anthem has been played and the first game starts.

“That’s all right, no damage!” Dave Mansfield cries as Arthur Dorr misjudges a long shot to right and the ball lands behind him. “Get an out, now! Belly play! Let’s just get an out!” No one seems to know exactly what “belly play” is, but since it seems to involve winning ball games, the boys are all for it.

No third game against Machias is necessary. Bangor West gets a strong pitching performance from Matt Kinney in the first one and wins 17–5. Winning the second game is a little tougher only because the weather does not cooperate: a drenching summer downpour washes out the first try, and it is necessary for Bangor West to make the 168-mile round trip to Machias twice in order to clinch the division. They finally get the game in, on the twenty-ninth of July. Mike Pelkey’s family has spirited Bangor West’s number two pitcher off to Disney World in Orlando, making Mike the third player to fade from the team, but Owen King steps quietly in and pitches a five-hitter, striking out eight before tiring and giving way to Mike Arnold in the sixth inning.

Bangor West wins, 12–2, and becomes District 3 Little League champ.

At moments like these, the pros retire to their air-conditioned locker rooms and pour champagne over each other’s heads. The Bangor West team goes out to Helen’s, the best (maybe the only) restaurant in Machias, to celebrate with hot dogs, hamburgers, gallons of Pepsi-Cola, and mountains of French fries. Looking at them as they laugh at each other, razz each other, and blow napkin pellets through their straws at each other, it is impossible not to be aware of how soon they will discover gaudier modes of celebration.

For now, however, this is perfectly O.K.—great, in fact. They are not overwhelmed by what they have done, but they seem tremendously pleased, tremendously content, and entirely here. If they have been touched with magic this summer, they do not know it, and no one has as yet been unkind enough to tell them that it may be so. For now they are allowed the deep-fried simplicities of Helen’s, and those simplicities are quite enough. They have won their division; the State Championship Tournament, where bigger and better teams from the more heavily populated regions downstate will probably blow them out, is still a week away.

Ryan Larrobino has changed back into his tank top. Arthur Donhas a rakish smear of ketchup on one cheek. And Owen King, who struck terror into the hearts of the Machias batters by coming at them with a powerful sidearm fastball on 0–2 counts, is burbling happily into his glass of Pepsi. Nick Trzaskos, who can look unhappier than any boy on earth when things don’t break his way, looks supremely happy tonight. And why not? Tonight they’re twelve and they’re winners.

Not that they don’t remind you themselves from time to time. Halfway back from Machias after the first trip, the rainout, J. J. Fiddler begins to wriggle around uneasily in the back seat of the car he is riding in. “I gotta go,” he says. He clutches at himself and adds ominously, “Man, I gotta go bad. I mean big time.”

“J.J.’s gonna do it!” Joe Wilcox cries gleefully. “Watch this! J.J.’s gonna flood the car!”

“Shut up, Joey,” J.J. says, and then begins to wriggle around again. He has waited until the worst possible moment to make his announcement. The eighty-fourmile trip between Machias and Bangor is, for the most part, an exercise in emptiness. There isn’t even a decent stand of trees into which J.J. can disappear for a few moments along this stretch of road—only mile after mile of open hayfields, with< Route 1A cutting a winding course through them.

Just as JJ.’s bladder is going to DEFCON-1, a providential gas station appears. The assistant coach swings in and tops up his tank while J.J. splits for the men’s room. “Boy!” he says, brushing his hair out of his eyes as he jogs back to the car.” That was close!”

“Got some on your pants, J.J...” Joe Wilcox says casually, and everyone goes into spasms of wild laughter as J.J. checks.

On the trip back to Machias the next day, Matt Kinney reveals one of the chief attractions People magazine holds for boys of Little League age. “I’m sure there’s one in here someplace,” he says, leafing slowly through an issue he has found on the back seat. “There almost always is.”

“What? What are you looking for?” third baseman Kevin Rochefort asks, peering over Matt’s shoulder as Matt leafs past the week’s celebs, barely giving them a look.

“The breast-examination ad,” Matt explains. “You can’t see everything, but you can see quite a lot. Here it is!” He holds the magazine up triumphantly.

Four other heads, each wearing a red Bangor West baseball cap, immediately cluster around the magazine. For a few minutes, at least, baseball is the furthest thing from these boys” minds.

The 1989 Maine State Little League Championship Tournament begins on August 3, just over four weeks after All-Star play began for the teams involved. The state is divided into five districts, and all five send teams to Old Town, where this year’s tourney is to be held. The participants are Yarmouth, Belfast, Lewiston, York, and Bangor West. All the teams but Belfast are bigger than the Bangor West All-Stars, and Belfast is supposed to have a secret weapon.

Their number one pitcher is this year’s tourney wunderkind.

The naming of the tourney wunderkind is a yearly ceremony, a small tumor that seems to defy all attempts to remove it. This boy, who is anointed Kid Baseball whether he wants the honor or not, finds himself in a heretofore unsuspected spotlight, the object of discussion, speculation, and, inevitably, wagering. He also finds himself in the unenviable position of having to live up to all sorts of pretournament hype. A Little League tournament is a pressure situation for any kid;

When you get to Tourney Town and discover you have somehow become an instant legend as well, it’s usually too much.

This year’s object of myth and discussion is Belfast’s southpaw Stanley Sturgis. In his two outings for Belfast he has chalked up thirty strikeouts—fourteen in his first game, sixteen in his second. Thirty K’s in two games is an impressive statistic in any league, but to fully understand Sturgis’s accomplishment one has to remember that Little League games consist of only six innings. That means that 83 per cent of the outs Belfast recorded with Sturgis on the hill came on strikeouts.

Then there is York. All the teams that come to the Knights of Columbus field in Old Town to compete in the tourney have excellent records, but York, which is undefeated, is the clear favorite to win a ticket to the Eastern Regionals. None of their players are giants, but several of them are over five-ten, and their best pitcher, Phil Tarbox, has a fastball that may top seventy miles an hour on some pitches—extravagant by Little League standards. Like Yarmouth and Belfast, the York players come dressed in special All-Star uniforms and matching turf shoes, which make them look like pros. Only Bangor West and Lewiston come wearing mufti—which is to say, shirts of many colors bearing the names of their regular-season team sponsors. Owen King wears Elks orange, Ryan Larrobino and Nick Trzaskos wear Bangor Hydro red, Roger Fisher and Fred Moore wear Lions green, and so on. The Lewiston team is dressed in similar fashion, but they have at least been provided with matching shoes and stirrups. Compared with Lewiston, the Bangor team, dressed in a variety of baggy gray sweatpants and nondescript street sneakers, looks eccentric. Next to the other teams, however, they look like out-and-out ragamuffins. No one, with the possible exception of the Bangor West coaches and the players themselves, takes them very seriously. In its first article on the tourney the local newspaper gives more coverage to Sturgis, of Belfast, than it does to the entire Bangor West team.

Dave, Neil, and Saint, the odd but surprisingly effective brain trust that has brought the team this far, watch Belfast take infield and batting practice without saying much. The Belfast kids are resplendent in their new purple-and-white uniforms—uniforms that have not worn so much as a speck of infield dirt until today. At last, Dave says, “Well, we finally got here again. We did that much. Nobody can take that away from us.”

Bangor West comes from the district in which the tournament is being held this year, and the team will not have to play until two of the five teams have been eliminated. This is called a firstround bye, and right now it’s the biggest, perhaps the only, advantage this team has. In their own district, they looked like champions (except for that one awful game against Hampden), but Dave, Neil, and Saint have been around long enough to know that they are now looking at an entirely different level of baseball. Their silence as they stand by the fence watching Belfast work out acknowledges this eloquently.

In contrast, York has already ordered District 4 pins. Trading pins is a tradition at the regional tournaments, and the fact that York has already laid in a supply tells an interesting tale. The pins say York means to play with the best of the East Coast, in Bristol. The pins say they don’t think Yarmouth can stop them; or Belfast, with its wunderkind southpaw; or Lewiston, which clawed its way to the Division 2 championship through the losers” bracket, after dropping their first game 15–12; or, least of all, fourteen badly dressed pipsqueaks from the west side of Bangor.

“At least we’ll get a chance to play,” Dave says, “and we’ll try to make them remember we were here.”

But first Belfast and Lewiston have their chance to play, and after the Boston Pops has steamed through a recorded version of the national anthem, and a local writer of some repute has tossed out the obligatory first pitch (it sails all the way to the backstop), they have at it.

Area sports reporters have spilled a lot of ink on the subject of Stanley Sturgis, but reporters are not allowed on the field once the game starts (a situation caused by a mistake in the rules as they were originally laid out, some of them seem to feel). Once the umpire has commanded the teams to play ball, Sturgis finds himself on his own. The writers, the pundits, and the entire Belfast hot-stove league are now all on the other side of the fence.

Baseball is a team sport, but there is only one player with a ball at the center of each diamond and only one player with a bat at the diamond’s lowest point. The man with the bat keeps changing, but the pitcher remains—unless he can no longer cut it, that is. Today is Stan Sturgis’s day to discover the hard truth of tourney play: sooner or later, every wunderkind meets his match.

Sturgis struck out thirty men in his last pair of games, but that was District 2. The team Belfast is playing today, a tough bunch of scrappers out of Lewiston’s Elliot Avenue League, is a different plate of beans altogether. They are not as big as the boys from York and don’t field as smoothly as the boys from Yarmouth, but they are pesky and persistent. The first batter, Carlton Gagnon, personifies the gnawing, clawing spirit of the team. He singles up the middle, steals second, is sacrificed to third, and then bolts home on a steal play sent in from the bench. In the third inning, with the score 1–0, Gagnon reaches base again, this time on a fielder’s choice.

Randy Gervais, who follows this pest in the lineup, strikes out, but before he does, Gagnon has gone to second on a passed ball and stolen third. He scores on a two-out base hit by Bill Paradis, the third baseman.

Belfast comes up with a run in the fourth, briefly making a game of it, but then Lewiston puts them, and Stanley Sturgis, away for good, scoring two in the fifth and four more in the sixth. The final tally is 9–1. Sturgis strikes out eleven, but he also gives up seven hits, while Carlton Gagnon, Lewiston’s pitcher, strikes out eight and allows only three hits. When Sturgis leaves the field at the end of the game, he looks both depressed and relieved. For him the hype and hoopla are over. He can quit being a newspaper sidebar and go back to being a kid again. His face suggests that he sees certain advantages in that.

Later, in a battle of the giants, tourney favorite York knocks off Yarmouth. Then everybody goes home (or, in the case of the visiting players, back to their motels or to the homes of their host families). Tomorrow, Friday, it will be Bangor West’s turn to play while York waits to meet the winner in the closer.

Friday comes in hot, foggy, and cloudy. Rain threatens from first light, and an hour or so before Bangor West and Lewiston are scheduled to square off the rain comes—a deluge of rain. When this sort of weather struck in Machias, the game was quickly cancelled. Not here. This is a different field—one with a grass infield instead of dirt—but that isn’t the only factor. The major one is TV. This year, for the first time, two stations have pooled their resources and will telecast the tournament final statewide on Saturday afternoon. If the semifinal between Bangor and Lewiston is postponed, it means trouble with the schedule, and even in Maine, even in this most amateur of amateur sports, the one thing you don’t jiggle is the media’s schedule.

So the Bangor West and Lewiston teams are not dismissed when they come to the field.

Instead, they sit in cars or cluster in little groups beneath the candy-striped canvas of the central concession booth. Then they wait for a break in the weather. And wait. And wait. Restlessness sets in, of course. Many of these kids will play in bigger games before their athletic careers end, but this is the biggest to date for all of them; they are pumped to the max.

Someone eventually has a brainstorm. After a few quick phone calls, two Old Town school buses, gleaming bright yellow in the drenching rain, pull up to the nearby Elks Club, and the players are whisked off on a tour of the Old Town Canoe Company factory and the local James River paper mill. (The James River Corporation is the prime buyer of ad time on the upcoming championship telecast.) None of the players look particularly happy as they climb aboard the buses; they don’t look much happier when they arrive back. Each player is carrying a small canoe paddle, about the right size for a well-built elf. Freebies from the canoe factory. None of the boys seem to know just what they should do with the paddles, but when I check later they’re all gone, just like the Bangor pennants after that first game against Millinocket. Free souvenirs—good deal.

And there will be a game after all, it seems. At some point—perhaps while the Little Leaguers were watching the fellows at the James River mill turn trees into toilet paper—the rain stopped. The field has drained well, the pitcher’s mound and the batters” boxes have been dusted with Quick-Dry, and now, at just past three in the afternoon, a watery sun takes its first peek through the clouds.

The Bangor West team has come back from the field trip flat and listless. No one has thrown a ball or swung a bat or run a single base so far today, but everybody already seems tired. The players walk toward the practice field without looking at each other; gloves dangle at the ends of arms. They walk like losers, and they talk like losers.

Instead of lecturing them, Dave lines them up and begins playing his version of pepper with them. Soon the Bangor players are razzing each other, catcalling, trying for circus catches, groaning and bitching when Dave calls an error and sends someone to the end of the line. Then, just before Dave is ready to call the workout off and take them over to Neil and Saint for batting practice, Roger Fisher steps out of the line and bends over with his glove against his belly. Dave goes to him at once, his smile becoming an expression of concern. He wants to know if Roger is all right.

“Yes,” Roger says. “I just wanted to get this.” He bends down a little farther, dark eyes intent, plucks something out of the grass, and hands it to Dave. It is a four-leaf clover.

In Little League tournament games, the home team is always decided by a coin toss. Dave has been extremely lucky at winning these, but today he loses, and Bangor West is designated the visiting team. Sometimes even bad luck turns out to be good, though, and this is one of those days. Nick Trzaskos is the reason.

The skills of all the players have improved during their six-week season, but in some cases attitudes have improved as well. Nick started deep on the bench, despite his proven skills as a defensive player and his potential as a hitter; his fear of failure made him unready to play. Little by little, he has begun to trust himself, and now Dave is ready to try starting him. “Nick finally figured out that the other guys weren’t going to give him a hard time if he dropped a ball or struck out,” St. Pierre says. “For a kid like Nick, that’s a big change.”

Today, Nick cranks the third pitch of the game to deep center field. It is a hard, rising line drive, over the fence and gone before the center fielder has a chance to turn and look, let alone cruise back and grab it. As Nick Trzaskos rounds second and slows down, breaking into the home-run trot all these boys know so well from TV, the fans behind the backstop are treated to a rare sight: Nick is grinning. As he crosses home plate and his surprised, happy teammates mob him, he actually begins to laugh. As he enters the dugout, Neil claps him on the back, and Dave Mansfield gives him a brief, hard hug.

Nick has also finished what Dave started with his game of pepper: the team is fully awake now, and ready to do some business. Matt Kinney gives up a lead-off single to Carl Gagnon, the pest who began the process of dismantling Stanley Sturgis. Gagnon goes to second on Ryan Stretton’s sacrifice, advances to third on a wild pitch, and scores on another wild pitch. It is an almost uncanny repetition of his first at bat against Belfast. Kinney’s control is not great this afternoon, but Gagnon’s is the only run the team from Lewiston can manage in the early going.

This is unfortunate for them, because Bangor comes up hitting in the top of the second.

Owen King leads off with a deep single; Arthur Dorr follows with another; Mike Arnold reaches when Lewiston’s catcher, Jason Auger, picks up Arnold’s bunt and throws wild to first base. King scores on the error, putting Bangor West back on top, 2–1. Joe Wilcox, Bangor’s catcher, scratches out an infield hit to load the bases. Nick Trzaskos strikes out his second time up, and that brings Ryan Larrobino to the plate. He struck out his first time up, but not now. He turns Matt Noyes’s first pitch into a grand-slam home run, and after an inning and a half the score is Bangor West 6, Lewiston 1.

Up to the sixth, it is an authentic four-leaf-clover day for Bangor West. When Lewiston comes to bat for what the Bangor fans hope will be the last time, they are down by a score of 9–1. The pest, Carlton Gagnon, leads off and reaches on an error. The next batter, Ryan Stretton, also reaches on an error. The Bangor fans, who have been cheering wildly, begin to look a little uneasy. It’s hard to choke when you’re eight runs ahead, but not impossible. These northern New Englanders are Red Sox fans. They have seen it happen many times.

Bill Paradis makes the jitters worse by singling sharply up the middle. Both Gagnon and Stretton come home. The score is now 9–3, runner on first, nobody out. The Bangor fans shuffle and look at each other uneasily. It can’t really get away from us this late in the game, can it? their looks ask. The answer is, Of course, you bet it can. In Little League, anything can and often does happen.

But not this time. Lewiston scores one more time, and that’s it. Noyes, who fanned three times against Sturgis, fans for the third time today, and there is finally one out. Auger, Lewiston’s catcher, hits the first pitch hard to the shortstop, Roger Fisher. Roger booted Carl Gagnon’s ball earlier in the inning to open the door, but he picks this one up easily and shovels it to Mike Arnold, who feeds it on to Owen King at first. Auger is slow, and King’s reach is long. The result is a game-ending 6–4-3 double play. You don’t often see around-the-horn d.p.s in the scaleddown world of Little League, where the base paths are only sixty feet long, but Roger found a four-leaf clover today. If you have to chalk it up to anything, it might as well be that. Whatever you chalk it up to, the boys from Bangor have won another one, 9–4.

Tomorrow, there are the giants from York.

It is August 5, 1989, and in the state of Maine only twenty-nine boys are still playing Little League ball—fourteen on the Bangor West squad and fifteen on York’s team. The day is an almost exact replica of the day before: hot, foggy, and threatening. The game is scheduled to begin promptly at 12:30, but the skies open once again, and by 11 it looks as though the game will be—must be—cancelled. The rain comes pouring down in buckets.

Dave, Neil, and Saint are taking no chances, however. None of them liked the flat mood the kids were in when they returned from their impromptu tour of the day before, and they have no intention of allowing a repeat. No one wants to end up counting on a game of pepper or a fourleaf clover today. If there is a game—and TV is a powerful motivator, no matter how murky the weather—it will be for all the marbles. The winners go on to Bristol; the losers go home.

So a makeshift cavalcade of vans and station wagons driven by coaches and parents is assembled at the field behind the Coke plant, and the team is ferried the ten miles up to the University of Maine field house, a barnlike indoor facility where Neil and Saint rally them through their paces until the boys are soaked with sweat. Dave has arranged for the York team to use the field house, too, and as the Bangor team exits into the overcast the York team, dressed in their natty blue uniforms, troops in.

The rain is down to isolated dribbles b