Joe Wilcox, who didn’t want to be a catcher and ended up doing the job anyway, rams a one-out 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 All-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.