The Greatest Sports Story Nobody's Told: The Montage
During a tournament run for the ages, The River Rats create a montage of miracle moments and a new superhero comes to life.
The Greatest Sports Story Nobody’s Told
Part One: The Park
Part Two: The Town
Part Three: The Montage
Part Four: The Championship
“You don’t play catch without a ball, and you don’t play ball without a fence. We count s**t in this game.” My friend Derek, circa ‘97
Scott had fast feet and a wry smile. He swung a quick bat but ran a faster mouth and filled it with more sarcasm than McGwire had natural juice in those days. Early in the season, he caught a pop fly basket-style like Willie Mays. Instead of just trotting back to the dugout, he stopped at the pitcher’s mound where, instead of handing the ball to the other team’s pitcher, he dropped it at the kid’s feet, chuckled, tapped him on the hip with his glove, and walked away.
The pitcher fired a fastball into Scott’s back the next inning, the hit by pitch now the only successful one he’d managed all afternoon.
“Ain’t been on base all day. Figured I had to get there somehow,” Scott said later wearing a grin and sipping a Gatorade purple fierce.
Derek, who looked more like a middle linebacker from Iowa than a pitcher in Ohio, once said his right arm was “more Clemens than Clemens.” He took the mound the next inning and got chucked from the game by the ump for retaliation after his first pitch buzzed two feet behind their batter and rattled the backstop fence so hard it sent the friendly neighborhood Applebee’s sign hanging off the back of it crashing into the sidewalk.
The River Rats trailed 11-2 when all this happened, and Derek watched the rest of the game from the dugout eating Mike and Ike’s.
Damn, these kids loved baseball.
Derek and Scott were the only kids I ever knew who played one-on-one baseball, stacking hour atop hour at the park, moving from one game into the next, making up the rules as they went. One game might be the first to throw ten straight strikes without the other getting a hit. While the next might be the first to three consecutive hits in the air out of the infield.
To win around-the-world, you had to hit a baseball to every position on the field and end it with a home run over whatever fence marked the edge of whatever field they were playing on. “You don’t play catch without a ball, and you don’t play ball without a fence. We count s**t in this game,” Derek liked to say.
They’d play until past the moment it was too dark to see, ride their bikes home, sleep, and be back at the park just after the sun had arrived but before the sprinklers had started watering the outfield grass.
Nobody ever asked to join, and they never invited anyone else to play. I’d watch, mesmerized, from off to the side back then, a book or a notebook in hand, and wonder how my two friends who never stopped talking nonsense to everyone else could play for so long with so few words between them.
They moved in silent harmony, sliding from one game into the next, from pitcher to hitter to fielder, a soundtrack of bats on balls and dusted-up tennis shoes crunching dry dirt the only tune playing.
They must have played thousands of games in those years we grew up together. Once, I asked who was winning.
Scott looked at me, rolled his eyes, and said, “Is that even a question?”
“F**k off,” Derek said and punched me in the inside of my shoulder. “Silly question, book boy.”
They laughed and walked onto an empty infield, a lone cloud above the only other spectator besides me and played catch. Neither spoke, and neither stopped smiling until, a long time later, they nodded in unison at each other and walked off the field.
Baseball was their language, and good luck trying to interpret it.
The River Rats played twelve regular season games.
They won three, lost eight, and filed one formal protest with the league office (our town’s recreation department) for a game they “lost” 13 to 3 after a thunderstorm in the fifth of seven innings turned the infield into a swamp and the outfield into a Slip ‘N Slide. Derek and Scott alleged, amongst other injustices, that The River Rats thrived in the mud and the muck and, quite obviously to them, would have won had the game continued.
When the playoffs started, they were seeded seventh out of eight teams. A quick exit was all but guaranteed.
But that’s not what happened.
Because here’s what happened instead.
Round 1
Scott smacked a double to the gap in left to drive in an early run and stole third standing up on the next pitch. A sharp single to right sent him sprinting towards home where he stopped two feet short of the batter’s box, raised both arms in the air, and high-stepped across the plate.
The River Rats led 3 to 1.
Derek came on in the 6th and proceeded to:
Strike out the side throwing more strikes than he’d thrown all year
Walk a batter to start the 7th
Strike out the next two hitters
Put the tying run on first by hitting him in the left thigh
Scoop a slow roller with his bare hand, shimmy and shuffle at the batter like he was juking a cornerback, and flip the ball option-quarterback style to first base
That night we snuck three cans of Stroh’s from an old fridge in the basement of my house, stuffed our cheeks full of Levi-Garrett, made our heads a little spinny, and fell asleep watching The Specialist on fuzzy Cinemax.
Scott and I woke early the next morning to see Derek already wide-awake spinning a baseball in his right hand.
He very seriously said to us, “From now on, you call me The Closer.”
Round 2
Scott’s face beat a deep red. He rounded third. Pumped his arms. Drove his legs. Blasted big breaths from cheeks ready to explode. The throw came late. His left-hand grazed home plate a sliver before the catcher’s glove smashed down on him. Scott popped to his feet, flipped up his jersey to fly dust into the catcher’s face, sprinted to his team, and leapt into their arms just outside the dugout.
The inside the park home run had given The River Rats the lead 4 to 2 in the top of the 7th.
Then, The Closer did what closers do:
Smoke a kid in the ribs on his first pitch
Yell at the ump to “back these chumps off my damn plate”
Get a batter to swing and miss on a high fastball for the first out and force an easy fly to the shortstop for out number two
Then, with The River Rats one out from the semi-finals, The Closer stood on the pitcher’s mound soaking everything in. Instead of rushing his next pitch, he waited. And waited and waited but never budged, even as everyone—the umpire, the coach on the other team, angry parents—yelled at him to throw the damn pitch.
Slowly, he tilted his head to the sky, closed his eyes, spread his arms wide, and waved for his fans to rise up, cheer, stomp, and yell
With half the crowd in a tizzy and the other half in a frenzy, he sent the last batter home on a called strike three
Round 3: Semi-Finals
In the semis, The River Rats led 2-1 in the 6th with runners on 2nd and 3rd and two outs when coach called for The Closer.
The following events happened next:
The Closer, playing second base when he was called in to pitch, walked all the way to the wall in center where I handed him a small, portable CD player and his older brother’s Oakley sunglasses
He put on the sunglasses
He pressed play on the CD player
He walked, slowly, toward the pitcher’s mound wearing bright orange, tinted shades blasting Bitter Sweet Symphony as loud as the portable player could
The Closer took no warmup pitches, intentionally walked their #7 hitter to load the bases, then coaxed a feeble grounder to third, which Scott fielded, tagged a runner, and ended the scoring threat
The Closer went three up, three down in the 7th.
And The River Rats were on their way to the next night’s championship game and the greatest ending to the greatest sports story nobody’s ever told.