"Gary” always felt like a misnomer to me, something I had to put up with to keep the peace.

I remember the next morning, puking, shaking violently, asking for God’s mercy. There was too much light coming through the blinds. I was a living, breathing version of “Hurt.” 

I didn’t have headphones for my CD player, so when my parents were home I kept the volume low. At night when they went to bed I played it at a barely audible level and hugged the machine against my ear.

We have shirts!

We played in our cousin’s backyard. It was always pitcher’s hand out, right field out. If you did dish it right over the barbed wire into burdock, Queen Anne's lace, thistle, milkweed, you had to

Three boys took their positions on the makeshift field. The flagstone wall edging the upper lawn was the outfield fence. One foul line was the street, the other the edge of the woods. Joey pitched.

This is our second time playing but he’s still constantly clarifying, correcting. The game, this one or the real one, has strict rules. You can’t fuck it up. You need to understand every instruction, every play, need to speak the language, know the abbreviations.

As the blows against each other’s ribs and the glancing strikes on their now helmetless heads escalated, I moved to get out of the dugout and pull them apart, but their father, Coach Christen, blocked the exit with a Louisville Slugger

He visited the library later that night still in his baseball gear, his eye black dancing with tears.  I'm sorry, I said, but three strikes is three strikes. His batting glove let me know he understood.

Watching the game
from the dug out
the coach paces distracted by nothing

It soon became clear that he wasn't laughing at our tableau. Just at me. At my interpretation of a professional batter.

When I was nine my grandfather taped every episode of Ken Burns’s Baseball and mailed me the VHS tapes from Kansas City. I’d sit there in the basement where the TV was, pressing the Tracking button on

The veteran second baseman
is fiddling with his glasses in the twilight: The calculated
third baseman is scanning over the crowd for his family...

Usually when my parents went off to lead one of these weekend retreats, they’d leave all four of us kids to stay at the same place, usually with another retreat family, sometimes even people we already knew.

It felt like a belly flop
crammed into a calcified bounce house

At the end of the 90s, the MLB’s closest analogue was the WWF.

The helmet is slightly too big, and the interior foam padding is the texture of damp dough, thanks to Paula’s fat, sweaty head.

At first I thought he meant food, but he never asked what I wanted.

Eighty-five percent of the Earth’s surface is tarp

I never mentioned to the skipper
how my mother died

In Maine his whole life except the year there wasn’t work.

This will not work.

“How ‘bout it, Ronnie. Throw something Butch can hit. Try over the plate for once.”

​I knew a man, older, who was afraid to cry.

I was 11 and my buddy, Dennis, and I
kept hounding Coach Phillips for some chew