A very high pop-up
Todd, David Y.
A VERY HIGH POP-UP David Y. Todd Him Wakefield, six-foot-two, two-hundred-and-six pounds, is pitching for the Red Sox. He delivers the ball to a Seattle Mariner, I can't tell who, and the batter...
...Another Mariner hitter enters the batter's box...
...He was a quiet boy, not prone to offer sympathy, even for pain he had caused...
...Steve laughs and laughs...
...The momentum had changed...
...Buckner bends to scoop the skipping ball but somehow misses it, and another Met races home to win the game...
...This particular evening, however, with an appreciation born of that loss and the earlier pain to my right eye, I watch Milt Cuyler move left, then right, then two short steps forward to meet the ball...
...Any reasonably coordinated adult who has ever failed to catch a fly must respect such a player's task-as wind or bad luck may twist a ball's movement at any moment-and appreciate his performance as he adjusts and holds ready...
...But with two outs and none on, the Mets suddenly rally for two runs and tie the score...
...I was the first to throw and launched one that reached the height of the elm trees edging the yard...
...But Cuyler doesn't fail...
...Until then, the Sox had been on the way to winning their first world championship since 1918...
...Boston is leading three games to two and is only one out away from winning the series...
...The ball peaked well above the trees and then began to fall...
...I have since made a separate peace with the sport, even attend a couple of games a year now, a novel in my pocket...
...He catches the ball, then throws it back to the shortstop, who tosses it to the second baseman, who relays it on to third before it is tossed back to the pitcher...
...Steve walked over...
...He delivers the ball to a Seattle Mariner, I can't tell who, and the batter pops it up, a high floater to center field...
...I wait to see if he is really going to catch this one...
...His toss that day knocked out, for many years to come, whatever obligation I'd felt to appreciate baseball...
...The pain astounded me...
...It occurs in the tenth inning of the sixth game...
...The outfielder- I consult my program again, it's Milt Cuyler-positions himself and waits...
...We were standing at opposite ends of his back yard when Steve got the idea that we should throw the ball as high as we could to simulate catching actual fly balls...
...When it dropped, Steve caught and then threw it back toward me, harder, higher...
...They all seem to want to touch the ball, a ritual practice to make it somehow right before it is pitched again...
...He stood by respectfully while I knelt, holding my head but not crying...
...Once, when I was ten, I did toss a ball with my neighbor, Steve Coughlan, now a surgeon in New Jersey...
...We admire him because there is always the possibility that, despite the routine nature of the play, he will misjudge the ball, cramp, slip, suffer a stroke...
...Cuyler being human and this being baseball, there is the chance that he will fail to make the catch...
...I settle back, take another look at Cuyler, then breathe in the sweet evening air of Fenway Park...
...Steve said he was sorry, and that he had heard the ball from his end of the yard when it hit my face...
...But as I sit in the bleachers this cool New England evening, I still wonder how players like Milt Cuyler can catch those towering pop-ups...
...In the kitchen, we four could hear sixty voices in the living room screaming at the television as the ball, we later learned, went between Bill Buckner's legs...
...As I watch the ball crest and finally begin to descend, I sense the crowd go silent, the other players momentarily halt...
...Steve, who is a Mets fan, later showed me Buckner's error, as recorded on his VCR...
...Then the Mets batter (Mookie Wilson) hits a ground ball toward first base...
...But they didn't win the next game...
...In 1986, the night the Red Sox nearly won the World Series against the Mets, I was dancing with three women at a party in Boston...
...I don't play baseball...
...I have heard some Red Sox fans deny that the team lost the series on that play, since the Sox could have won the next game...
...I can still remember the feeling of standing there, looking up, my new glove open, and the ball falling, falling forever it seemed, and then suddenly glancing off the glove before crashing into my eye bone and hitting the ground...
...It is a cool, clear evening in Boston's Fenway Park, and I am watching from the right-field bleachers...
...Now Wakefield bends forward, and the ball is turning slowly in his fingers behind his back as he and the crouching catcher look at one another...
...Steve presses the rewind button, then replays the scene, again and again, to watch the ball roll back, then forward, then back and forward again, through Buckner's legs...
Vol. 123 • September 1996 • No. 15
