The skills of all the players have improved during their six-week season, but in some cases attitudes have improved as well. Nick started deep on the bench, despite his proven skills as a defensive player and his potential as a hitter; his fear of failure made him unready to play. Little by little, he has begun to trust himself, and now Dave is ready to try starting him. ‘Nick finally figured out that the other guys weren’t going to give him a hard time if he dropped a ball or struck out,’ St. Pierre says. ‘For a kid like Nick, that’s a big change.’
Today, Nick cranks the third pitch of the game to deep center field. It is a hard, rising line drive, over the fence and gone before the center fielder has a chance to turn and look, let alone cruise back and grab it. As Nick Trzaskos rounds second and slows down, breaking into the home-run trot all these boys know so well from TV, the fans behind the backstop are treated to a rare sight: Nick is grinning. As he crosses home plate and his surprised, happy teammates mob him, he actually begins to laugh. As he enters the dugout, Neil claps him on the back, and Dave Mansfield gives him a brief, hard hug.
Nick has also finished what Dave started with his game of pepper: the team is fully awake now, and ready to do some business. Matt Kinney gives up a lead-off single to Carl Gagnon, the pest who began the process of dismantling Stanley Sturgis. Gagnon goes to second on Ryan Stretton’s sacrifice, advances to third on a wild pitch, and scores on another wild pitch. It is an almost uncanny repetition of his first at bat against Belfast. Kinney’s control is not great this afternoon, but Gagnon’s is the only run the team from Lewiston can manage in the early going.
This is unfortunate for them, because Bangor comes up hitting in the top of the second.
Owen King leads off with a deep single; Arthur Dorr follows with another; Mike Arnold reaches when Lewiston’s catcher, Jason Auger, picks up Arnold’s bunt and throws wild to first base. King scores on the error, putting Bangor West back on top, 2-1. Joe Wilcox, Bangor’s catcher, scratches out an infield hit to load the bases. Nick Trzaskos strikes out his second time up, and that brings Ryan Larrobino to the plate. He struck out his first time up, but not now. He
turns Matt Noyes’s first pitch into a grand-slam home run, and after an inning and a half the score is Bangor West 6, Lewiston 1.
Up to the sixth, it is an authentic four-leaf-clover day for Bangor West. When Lewiston comes to bat for what the Bangor fans hope will be the last time, they are down by a score of 9-1. The pest, Carlton Gagnon, leads off and reaches on an error. The next batter, Ryan Stretton, also reaches on an error. The Bangor fans, who have been cheering wildly, begin to look a little uneasy. It’s hard to choke when you’re eight runs ahead, but not impossible. These northern New Englanders are Red Sox fans. They have seen it happen many times.
Bill Paradis makes the jitters worse by singling sharply up the middle. Both Gagnon and Stretton come home. The score is now 9-3, runner on first, nobody out. The Bangor fans shuffle and look at each other uneasily. It can’t really get away from us this late in the game, can it?
their looks ask. The answer is, Of course, you bet it can. In Little League, anything can and often does happen.
But not this time. Lewiston scores one more time, and that’s it. Noyes, who fanned three times against Sturgis, fans for the third time today, and there is finally one out. Auger, Lewiston’s catcher, hits the first pitch hard to the shortstop, Roger Fisher. Roger booted Carl Gagnon’s ball earlier in the inning to open the door, but he picks this one up easily and shovels it to Mike Arnold, who feeds it on to Owen King at first. Auger is slow, and King’s reach is long. The result is a game-ending 6-4-3 double play. You don’t often see around-the-horn d.p.s in the scaled-down world of Little League, where the base paths are only sixty feet long, but Roger found a four-leaf clover today. If you have to chalk it up to anything, it might as well be that. Whatever you chalk it up to, the boys from Bangor have won another one, 9-4.
Tomorrow, there are the giants from York.
It is August 5, 1989, and in the state of Maine only twenty-nine boys are still playing Little League ball — fourteen on the Bangor West squad and fifteen on York’s team. The day is an almost exact replica of the day before: hot, foggy, and threatening. The game is scheduled to begin promptly at 12:30, but the skies open once again, and by 11 it looks as though the game will be — must be — cancelled. The rain comes pouring down in buckets.
Dave, Neil, and Saint are taking no chances, however. None of them liked the flat mood the kids were in when they returned from their impromptu tour of the day before, and they have no intention of allowing a repeat. No one wants to end up counting on a game of pepper or a four-leaf clover today. If there is a game — and TV is a powerful motivator, no matter how murky the weather — it will be for all the marbles. The winners go on to Bristol; the losers go home.
So a makeshift cavalcade of vans and station wagons driven by coaches and parents is assembled at the field behind the Coke plant, and the team is ferried the ten miles up to the University of Maine field house, a barnlike indoor facility where Neil and Saint rally them through their paces until the boys are soaked with sweat. Dave has arranged for the York team to use the field house, too, and as the Bangor team exits into the overcast the York team, dressed in their natty blue uniforms, troops in.
The rain is down to isolated dribbles by three o’clock, and the ground crew works frantically to return the field to playable shape. Five makeshift TV platforms have been constructed on steel frames around the field. In a nearby parking lot is a huge truck with MAINE BROADCASTING
SYSTEM LIVE REMOTE painted on the side. Thick bundles of cable, held together with cinches of electrician’s tape, lead from the cameras and the temporary announcer’s booth back to this truck.
One door stands open, and many TV monitors glimmer within.
York hasn’t arrived from the field house yet. The Bangor West squad begins throwing outside the left-field fence, mostly to have something to do and keep the jitters at bay; they certainly don’t need to warm up after the humid hour they just spent at the University. The camerapersons stand on their towers and watch the ground crew try to get rid of the water.
The outfield is in fair shape, and the skin parts of the infield have been raked and coated with Quick-Dry. The real problem is the area between home plate and the pitcher’s mound. This section of the diamond was freshly resodded before the tournament began, and there has been no time for the roots to take hold and provide some natural drainage. The result is a swampy mess in front of home plate — a mess that slops off toward the third-base line.
Someone has an idea — an inspiration, as it turns out — that involves actually removing a large section of the wounded infield. While this is being done, a truck arrives from Old Town High School and two industrial-size Rinsenvacs are off-loaded. Five minutes later, the ground crew is literally vacuuming the subsurface of the infield. It works. By 3:25, the groundskeepers are replacing chunks of sod like pieces in a large green jigsaw puzzle. By 3:35, a local music teacher, accompanying herself on an acoustic guitar, is winging her way through a gorgeous rendition of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ And at 3:37 Bangor West’s Roger Fisher, Dave’s dark-horse pick to start in place of the absent Mike Pelkey, is warming up. Did Roger’s find of the day before have anything to do with Dave’s decision to start him instead of King or Arnold? Dave only puts his finger on the side of his nose and smiles wisely.
At 3:40, the umpire steps in. ‘Send it down, catcher,’ he says briskly. Joey does. Mike Arnold makes the sweep tag on the invisible runner, then sends the baseball on its quick journey around the infield. A TV audience that stretches from New Hampshire to the Maritime Provinces of Canada watches as Roger fusses nervously with the sleeves of his green jersey and the gray warm-up shirt he wears beneath it. Owen King tosses him the ball from first base. Fisher takes it and holds it against his hip.