Pitch Perfect(17)

“Well, let’s hope we keep it a zero a little longer.” He gave her a wink, and a familiar warmth bloomed in her chest.

It should be illegal for a man to be that beautiful when he smiled. His one blue eye looked astonishingly bright in contrast to the chocolate brown of the other.

“How’s the arm feeling?” Keep it professional, Em.

Tucker rotated his shoulders loosely without moving his arms off the fence. “Feels good. Ready. Guess we’ll have to see, won’t we?”

Across the field in the bullpen, a collection of relief pitchers was tossing balls around with minimal focus, just getting their joints limber rather than worrying too much about accuracy.

“Are you excited?”

“I guess nerves counts as a form of excitement.”

Emmy knew better than to jinx a pitcher by telling him he’d have a good game. She shouldn’t even be talking to Tucker without knowing what his game-day superstitions were like. Every pitcher she’d ever met had a different way of dealing with their starting games. Some refused to speak to anyone; others needed a set routine. Tucker had initiated the conversation with her, so he obviously didn’t have any communication quirks.

“Do you need…anything?” She was trying to egg him into confessing whatever his brand of pitcher weirdness was.

He gave her a sidelong look then parted his lips and showed her a wad of purple gum between two rows of perfectly white teeth. Popping it back into his mouth, he winked. “Grape bubble gum. Always grape bubble gum.”

Emmy snorted. “Is it brand specific, or will any gum do?”

Tucker snapped a bubble at her. “I prefer Bubblicious, but in a pinch I’ll take what’s handy. So long as it smells like artificial fruit and tastes like Kool-Aid, we’re in good shape.”

“Noted.”

“Does that fall into the purview of an athletic trainer?”

“Anything that keeps you boys operational is all a part of the job description.”

“Anything?” He smiled again, and Emmy noted his blue eye had more of a devilish glint to it than the brown one.

Like clockwork the three outfielders and shortstop jogged up the stairs from the clubhouse, and Chet gave her a warm smile, bobbing his head in greeting. Jasper followed behind them, his Felons jacket undone and flapping as he ran.

“Duty calls,” she said, balking on Tucker’s comment. “Hamstrings won’t stretch themselves.”

“They certainly won’t.”





Tucker was having a hell of a time concentrating.

In the top of the fifth inning, his finger slipped while he was throwing, and he managed to bean the leadoff batter in the shoulder. Bad enough he’d hit someone, but it had to be one of the star batters in the whole damn league and a guy he personally knew would hold a grudge.

Tucker wasn’t a believer in intentionally hitting batters. There was an old-school opinion that said some guys had it coming, but it felt wrong somehow. You couldn’t teach a guy a lesson by hurling a 100 mph fastball at him. All that did was make someone angry, and the cycle never ended.

He knew old-timers from the Felons roster who still talked about nasty beanball hits they’d taken in their days, and half-joking that they’d love to give those pitchers what for even decades later.

When he’d been a younger man, before the surgery, Tucker had thrown a mean fastball, one of the hardest to hit in all of baseball. As his elbow started to wear down he found it harder and harder to maintain the velocity, so he switched it up and started using a knuckleball.

Knuckleballs were nasty because they were deceptively slow and wobbled like a son of a bitch. It was impossible for batters to track them, making them a pain to hit. A lot of opposing players considered them a cheat pitch, but only because of how nasty they were to hit.

Tucker threw a strong knuckleball, but it hadn’t become his signature pitch until his later years. He’d switched to it shortly before the doctor determined he needed the elbow surgery. Now that he was supposedly back in top condition, he was at odds with himself. The new, strong version of his arm wanted him to go back to throwing the fastballs and sliders he’d used most of his career.

His wary mind told him not to be showy and stick with the safer pitch.

Poor Alex, crouched behind home plate, didn’t know what to make of Tucker’s decisions. Whenever the catcher would suggest a different play, Tucker would shake him off with a quick side-to-side of his jaw. Alex would cycle through suggestions until Tucker accepted one and only one. The knuckleball.

After hitting the pitcher, though, Alex had plainly had enough of Tucker shaking him off and called a time-out. The shorter man prowled up to the mound, and Tucker instinctively placed a glove over his own mouth. Alex didn’t follow suit but turned sideways to avoid being seen by the opposing base coaches. As far as Tucker knew, no one in baseball was a trained lip-reader, yet it was a long-standing tradition to protect your secrets even when no one cared to know them.