Bert Wilson's Fadeaway Ball

by J. W. Duffield

“Hey, look at that!” yelled the first speaker, excitedly. “There goes Wilson into the box. Three cheers for Wilson, fellows. Now! One! two! three!”

The cheers were given by the faithful fans, but they had given up hope. It was indeed, as the rooter had said, however, and Bert was actually being given an opportunity to pitch in a big game, when he had only been with the team a few months! Many a pitcher has been a substitute until his junior year, and never had a chance like this one. And, to tell the truth, Reddy himself would have been the last one to put what he considered an inexperienced pitcher into the box, if he had had any alternative. Now, however, it was a case of having no choice, because he knew that the game was irretrievably lost if Winters continued to pitch, so he put Bert in as a forlorn hope, but without any real expectation that he would win.

As he noticed the confident way in which Bert walked to the box, however, he plucked up courage a little, but immediately afterward shook his head. “Pshaw,” he thought, “they’ve got too big a lead on us. If Wilson can only hold them down so that they don’t make monkeys of us, it will be more than I have a right to hope.”

For all Bert’s nonchalant air, however, it must not be thought that he was not excited or nervous. He had had comparatively little baseball experience in such fast company as this. He had learned, however, to keep a cool and level head in times of stress, and he knew that everything depended on this. So he just gritted his teeth, and when he motioned to the catcher to come up and arrange signals, the latter hardly suspected what a turmoil was going on under Bert’s cool exterior.

“Just take it easy, kid,” he advised. “Don’t try to put too much stuff on the ball at first, and pitch as though we were only practising back of the clubhouse. Don’t let those blamed rooters get you nervous, either. Take your time before each ball, and we’ll pull through all right. Now, just get out there, and show them what you’ve got.”

Bert took his position in the box, and the umpire tossed him a brand new ball. Remembering the catcher’s advice, he wound up very deliberately, and pitched a swift, straight one square over the middle of the plate. The batsman had expected the “greenhorn” to try a fancy curve, and so was not prepared for a ball of this kind. “One str-r-rike!” yelled the umpire, and the catcher muttered approvingly to himself. The batter, however, took a fresh grip on his bat, and resolved to “knock the cover off” the next one. Bert delivered a wide out curve, and the batter swung hard, but only touched the ball, for a foul, and had another strike called on him. “Aw, that kid’s running in luck,” he thought. “But watch me get to him this time.”

The next ball Bert pitched looked like an easy one, and the batter, measuring its flight carefully with his eye, drew his bat back and swung with all the weight of his body. Instead of sending the ball over the fence, however, as he had confidently expected, the momentum of his swing was spent against empty air, and so great was its force that the bat flew out of his hand. “Three strikes,” called the umpire, and amid a riot of cheering from the home rooters the batter gazed stupidly about him.

“By the great horn spoon,” he muttered, under his breath, “somebody must have come along and stolen that ball just as I was going to hit it. I’ll swear that if it was in the air when I swung at it that I would have landed it.”

As he walked to the bench the captain said, “What’s the matter with you, Al? Has the freshie got you buffaloed?”