GoSox

In baseball, as in life, there are moments, and then there is THE MOMENT. Daniel Bard, two outs away from preserving a one-to-nothing lead over the New York Yankees in this, game seven, of the 2011 ALCS, harbored no misconceptions: This was “IT." Events leading up to this one - Pappelbon’s getting one out before walking the bases jacked, he himself striking out Posada on a 99 MPH high fastball, he himself getting two nasty strikes on Derek Jeter, just before getting squeezed, (Joe Fucking WEST) and throwing balls one, two,and three. He’d taken a little stroll around the pitcher’s mound then, to clear his head. He was still walking around when he saw the girl. His back was turned to home plate, and the girl was up there at the bottom of the bleachers, in the “batter’s eye” section of the grandstand. Daniel looked past her, spacing out and trying to clear his head, but then felt compelled to focus in. She looked familiar. He was a good two hundred feet away, and there was absolute pandemonium in the stands with cups flying, profanity, fights, and praying. Even so, Daniel Bard found his eyes stuck on the girl. She was wearing jeans and a green T-shirt, her hair was an earthy blonde/brown. Blue eyes, definitely, and he could see them being blue even as far away as he was. She was looking right at him, and bent slightly at the waist. He saw the discreet swell of her perfect curves, pressing and massaging at the green t-shirt. His mind began turning cartwheels.

He let his gaze slip, tried to reclaim the moment, get his breath back. He walked back around to face the plate, and West was yelling at him:

Mr. Bard…Play ball Bard!

He toed the rubber once again, and the crowd was on him in collective concentration. Bard felt the brilliant weight of their thoughts. Somebody yelled:

DANIEL FUCKING BAAAAAAARD!!!!!

Then he was staring back in, Jeter getting set. Bard saw Varitek drop a sign, but he wasn’t even close. He stood up.

Time, blue!

West just beamed at him. His stupid eyes opened .12 gauge like to crawl right out of them, slip out to the bump, and strangle Bard in front of God and everybody. Instead he growled:

What the fuck Bard!? Time…

DB slunk back to turned-around position and found the girl in green. He stared at her hard. For an instant, he considered taking a quick run out there…But Youk, running up glove-to-mouth, woke him up.

Dude what the fuck!? You need help?

Bard motioned out to the stands, raising his glove toward the amazing woman. He said:

Look.

Youk took a quick look, saw crazy fans yelling at him, at them. He turned back and got in Bard’s face:

Dude. Get the fuck back here NOW.

He pointed a callused index finger into Bard’s sternum, then turned and jogged. Bard - discouraged and confused - turned back to the girl. She was there again, beckoning to him with her eyes. The swelling against the green tee was otherworldly. Then, just as he was about to turn back and finally concentrate on Jeter and the game, he saw two hands - not the girls hands, other hands - reach and grab the bottom of her green t-shirt and lift.

For just a second, Bard thought he might have fainted. When it became clear that he had not, he was able, for just a few more precious moments, to gaze upon the exposed wonder of the perfect girl’s perfect breasts. Then Joe West yelled from the backstop:

FUCKING MISTER BARD! PLAY BALL!!

Bard turned from the still bared breasts, determined to win the contest and go find the green shirted girl. Damn JOE WEST!!!

He stared in again at ‘Tek. He dropped one, then two, then touched his left and right shoulders in order. Then he dropped one.

Heat. High. Bard worked to the plate.

***

In the history of professional baseball, few things are as argued and mused upon as the triple-digit fastball. For years, as the league muddled thru its infancy and young adulthood, lack of dependable measurement caused massive conjecture as to just what it was that made a fastball effective. Some said it was the movement, the “late” life on a man’s toss that made the pitch elusive. Some were of the opinion that the threat of a curve-ball strike was the ultimate fastball set-up, the difference in speed and movement making the fastball - even if it wasn’t all that fast - practically un-hittable.

But as time went by, and technology advanced to the point where it became possible to gauge the exact speed of a given pitch, the truth made itself clear. Just about every hitter in the majors could catch up to fastballs in the high 80’s or low 90’s. At those speeds, a pitcher has too be getting curves and sliders over the plate, and must feature a well-controlled change up. If he cannot, then hitters can just wait on the (not very) fastball and swing for the fences. Pitchers with good command of a 94-98 MPH fastball, it was found, faced a whole different set of imperatives. At those speeds, it wasn’t so essential to have other pitches get over the plate. A 95 MPH pitch overtakes the hitter with such immediacy, that the pure speed might be enough to make the pitch effective. Eventually though, the “book” would get out on that pitcher, and his fastball’s effectiveness would fade. A 98 MPH fastball was an awesome thing, but not awesome enough to negate the pitcher’s necessity of other effective pitches. 100 mph was a different beast altogether. At 100 mph, the mechanics of the problem happen so quickly, that a pitcher, especially one who only worked one or two innings at a time, could essentially throw only that and still be effective night in and night out. Enter D. Bard.

Bard threw 100 miles per hour almost since he was old enough to throw at all. His dad remembers putting him on a gun when Daniel was fourteen years old and being amazed. Of the ten pitches his son threw that day, seven of them were clocked at over 90 mph. the other three read 100, 101, 99. Mr. Bard started thinking then, about incredible things that might be.

***

And so here he was. He’d thrown the pitches. He’d seen that miraculous girl’s miraculous tits. He felt good. He needed one more good one, and then he could run out there to the stands with bottles of 100 dollar champagne in each hand and ask that girl to marry him. He looked in, worked to the plate.

He knew right away that it was nice. He could always tell, because the good ones sort of flipped off his fingers like when you flipped an egg in a pan. The pitch he’d just thrown felt just like that. He felt all the energy from his hand pass directly into the tiny orb as it slipped free and started laser-ing toward the plate. Just at the very last point of contact did Bard begin to perceive even the slightest tendency foreign to what he’d been trying to produce. He wasn’t worried though, Jeter had to swing. And there was no fucking way his bat was finding leather.

Jeter himself thought otherwise. He saw the pearl leave Bards hand the way he saw all pitches from every major league pitcher: in slow motion. He saw the look, the wind-up, the pitch all in regular life-speed. But when Bard released, Derek saw only frame-by frame. He began to swing the moment Bard’s fingers left the orb.

Bard watched Jetes lining it up and right then he knew what was going to happen. He yelled, but it was way too late. In the end he crouched, bowed his head, and prayed.

Jeter saw at the last instant (which was just after the first instant) that he’d been wrong. Instead of swinging (an act that his body was now fully engaged in), that he should have been ducking. No not ducking. He should have forced his legs out from under him and hit the dirt hard. He did not.

A baseball traveling at 100 miles per hour becomes - for all intents and purposes - an aimed bullet a hundred times the size of a normal bullet. Daniel Bard’s fastball that night, was moving at 102.7 miles per hour, the fastest ever recorded speed for a fastball in major league play at any level. It hit Derek Jeter in the right eye-socket. The speed and force generated by the throw carried the pitch through the space where Jeter’s eye had been, through the bone and cartilliage sinus’s behind the eye, through the grey and white brain tissue behind that, and through the occipital bone holding the rest of Jeter’s brain inside his skull. His entire skull casing, in fact, blew apart as if wired to strategically placed explosives. Pieces of hot bone and brain rained down on a shocked Jason Varitek. Jeter’s body had finished the swing he’d initiated and then fell to the ground as well, twitching freaking out for a few seconds. Umpire Joe West, crying and wailing like a woman, tried for a few seconds to still, and console the writhing thing, but blood had started to pool all over his feet and legs and soon there were Yankee staffers all around the scene, babbling and crazy, everybody trying to somehow make it so the last forty seconds had never happened.

Bard had risen from his crouch to find everybody on the field running full blast toward home plate, and that’s where he himself aimed to go too. He’d just started moving that way when he remembered the girl. He changed direction suddenly and started making for the batter’s eye, trying to remember what she looked like.