Red Stitches and White Leather
by JHJ Armstrong
Rating: PG
Content: MSR, fluff. Call it an "all things" alternative.
Summary: Mulder's one of the boys of summer. Scully wants to join him.
Disclaimer: The Yankees, Dodgers and Cubs are not mine. But if they were, I'd
raid their piggy banks to make sure Brad Radke stays with my beloved Minnesota
Twins. God knows he seems to be thinking about anything BUT baseball right now.
It's all Carl Pohlad's fault. Pout, sigh. Where was I? Oh, yeah. The batboy and
batgirl belong to the Master of Yuppie Morbidity and the folks at 1013 and Fox.
Feedback: Send flames, praise and your prediction for the 2000 World Series
(Mine: Boston over St. Louis in 6) to [email protected].
Notes: It's spring, the world is puddle-wonderful, and the local fields are open
... I love baseball. So does Mulder, even if he is a Yankees fan. Feh. Go Twins!
A short baseball trivia note at the end. To Team YV: Love you.
=======================================
I am lying on my couch in grey shorts and blue T-shirt, spending a Saturday in
gentlemanly repose, watching America's pastime and drinking a Sam Adams.
Bernie Williams has just rounded the bases after launching one to left when
there is a knock on my door.
I open it to see my partner tossing a ball with her right hand, bat with a glove
hanging off the end resting on her left shoulder. She's wearing a white
three-quarter sleeved shirt with red sleeves and collar tucked in to black mesh
shorts, black-and-white stirrup socks and beat-up rubber cleats.
The tomboy of my dreams smiles up at me from under a black baseball cap with
polarized shades perched on the brim.
"Hi, Mr. Mantle. Can Fox come out to play?"
I weigh my options. Yankees, Scully. Scully, Yankees.
No contest.
"Let's go, DiMaggio."
--------------------------------
An hour or so later, Scully is trying hard to hit the ball but most of my
pitches litter the backstop. I feel a little bad playing Sandy Koufax to her '65 Chicago Cubs.
"Choke up, Scully." She obliges and the next pitch travels in a high,
lazy arc to short. "Keep your right elbow up." Another miss.
"Square your shoulders. Swing through the ball." A slow grounder
toward first base.
"Hey, that's good! Opposite-field hitters are always in demand." I
don't add that weak hitters tend to swing late and hit to right, even in
slow-pitch.
Her shoulders sag. "I'm gonna take a break, Mulder." She walks over to
the fence, leaning the bat against it and taking a long drink from her water
bottle. I take the bat and head to home plate, tossing up a ball and hitting it
to deep left.
She watches me hit the outfield fence a few more times. "Mulder, you'd tell
me the truth about whether I'm any good, right?"
Caught off-guard, I can't think of an answer before I hear a quiet, "That
bad, huh?"
I turn around, intending to utter a thousand platitudes, but the simple sadness
of her face stops me.
"Why is this so important to you, Scully?"
She crosses her arms and purses her lips, reluctant to talk about it. A sigh,
and then she goes to shag the half-dozen or so balls she managed to hit, talking
as she moves around the field. "Well, the short story is Agent Coleman --
Kari Coleman, she was on fertilizer duty with us last year -- asked me to
play. They need more women. I haven't hit a ball in years -- last spring's
excursion excepted, of course -- and I thought I'd see what kind of player I am
now. Then, if I seemed to have a game, I'd join the team."
She dumps the collected balls at my feet, watching a wayward one as it rolls
over to the fence. "I was hoping I would be good enough to play and not
look stupid, maybe even invite you to a game or two by the end of the summer ...
a fait accompli, so to speak. But it doesn't look very promising, does it?"
"If I say yes, will you keep talking in French?"
"Mulder."
I grin, then grab a ball and smack it into her
palm. "C'mon, let's try out the arm." I trot down to third base.
Her first few throws fall a bit short. "Release it sooner. Snap your wrist.
Follow through to your waist with your hand."
"Ok ... like that?" The ball makes a satisfying "thunk" in
my glove.
"Exactly. You've got a good arm, Scully." She catches my throw,
bringing the glove toward her right ear, arms cocked in throwing position,
before throwing it back. "Your fielding instincts are good, too. Believe
me, being able to catch a ball doesn't mean a thing if you don't know what to do
with it next."
"Mmm. Too bad I can't seem to hit the broad side of a barn with a handful
of rocks."
"Don't worry, Scully, it'll come."
"Does that mean you think I ought to tell Coleman I'll play?"
"Yes." I feed her a hard grounder, throwing overhand at the ground,
and it skips through her legs. She looks at her glove in disgust.
I grin. "Next time, we'll work on fielding, too."
======================================
A little over a week passes before we have time to get back to the field. In the
meantime I notice that Scully, ever the scientist, has consulted various
articles and books on hitting, throwing and fielding. Her enthusiasm is
contagious, and I find that I am just as eager as she is to get back out there.
But it rains, so we head to an indoor batting cage.
She does well for the first token, slapping some line drives and a few base
hits, but after several straight misses I can see she is rapidly getting
frustrated with herself. When the pitches pause, I step inside the cage with
her.
"Damn it, Mulder, this makes me so frustrated! It's a simple matter of
hand-eye coordination. I can drive, I can perform an autopsy, I can fire a gun
-- this shouldn't be such a problem."
"Calm down, Scully, you've got a bat in your hands and the guy in the next
cage is getting scared." She glares at me. Try again, Mulder.
"Close your eyes." She complies after a skeptical glance.
I wrap my arms around her from behind, put my hands over hers on the bat and
lean in close to her ear, wondering if she can feel my heart beat a little
faster at the close proximity. I do note the slight flutter of her eyelids as I
start talking in a low, soothing voice.
"I want you to picture a hot summer day. The grass is freshly mown, the
infield has just been raked and chalked. There's a little breeze, just enough to
take the edge off the heat.
"Humidity is making the air close to the ground shimmer, and the smell of
dirt and leather and sweat is in the air. Take a deep breath -- can you smell
it?"
To my surprise, she breathes in through her nose and says, "Yes ... it
smells good. Clean."
"Okay," I say, quickly continuing the fantasy. "You're up first
this inning. You choose your bat from the rack hanging on the fence. The ump
yells, 'Play ball!' and you step up to the plate.
"Here comes the first pitch ... you pick it up on the arc, but you see it's
going to be too deep. You let it go for ball one."
She takes over the narration, eyes still closed. "The next pitch looks
good, so I swing, but it's a foul ball down the third-base line."
"Good, Scully, you made contact. Keep going."
"Okay ... next pitch is up ..." I feel her body tense, and I whisper,
"Relax. Nothing here but you and the ball." She nods, loosens her grip
on the bat a little and continues.
"It's a good pitch, high and a little short, just the way I like it ...
"
I speak urgently. "Scully, when you swing, remember what it feels like,
what your hands do, what your feet do, where you end up." She nods.
"I swing ... It's a hit! I hit it!" She turns around in my arms and
hugs me, a huge smile on her face. My hands settle loosely around her waist, and
I can't help but grin in return.
She goes still as I bend down to her ear again. "Visualization, Scully.
Works for me every time."
She nods and swallows, but instead of stepping back as I expect she brings her
hands up to the back of my neck. She stands on tiptoe -- is she going to kiss
me? No; she pulls my head down and whispers, "But I bet it helps you with
more than just your hitting stroke, Mulder." I laugh softly and tighten my
embrace.
A hairy brute with bulging forearms bangs on the cage at that moment, making us
jump apart. Scully drops the bat, which lands on the cement floor with an
equally startling clang.
"Hey, you guys gonna make out or hit the ball?" he demands.
Scully incinerates him with a glance and bends over to pick up the bat,
returning to her batting stance beside the rubber home plate. I take my cue and
step out through the latticed metal door, dropping another token in the box.
Sammy So-so is clearly miffed. "C'mon, man, I need the practice time. I've
got a league home run title to defend." He gestures to Scully.
"Besides, she's a waste of good pitches. You're just helping her because
you want to get laid."
I look him up and down. "Home run king, eh? With an attitude like that,
it's a wonder you ever even get to first base."
=======================================
Scully's first few games were a struggle; her perfectionism warred with the
capricious nature of opposing pitchers and differing umpires. After striking out
three times in one game, she was ready to petition to have backspin made
illegal; I think she's still looking for a suitable answer to "Why is the
exact same pitch a strike to one umpire and a ball to another?"
She didn't play every week, what with our erratic caseload, but we always found
a way to practice. Games on TV became three-hour instructional sessions.
She learned that a strawberry is not just something you eat; I learned that
pantyhose, a scraped-up outer thigh and a sweltering day are *not* a good
combination.
The summer wasn't all sweetness and light. I lost my temper more than a few
times while she struggled to develop skills that were as natural as breathing to
me.
In the end, though, Scully turned out to be a consistent spray hitter and a
darned good infielder, all in the space of a few months. She even had a
bases-loaded triple a few weeks ago. Her speed on the bases is tremendous; with
any other runner, it would've been a double.
It is now August, the night before the last game of the season. We are sitting
on the low wooden dugout bench at the little field where we first played,
innumerable hours of playing catch and hundreds of grounders and pop-ups and
balls and strikes behind us.
At this moment, she is studying the faded, frayed red stitches of a ball that
once knew what white was. She turns it in her hand, and I pop it in the air with
an undercut from my left hand, catching it as I hand her the water jug with my
right. She takes the water and gives me a perturbed look, but it comes with a
little grin. I shrug, and roll the ball up and down my arm.
As it comes down to my wrist, she hits the underside of it, popping the ball in
the air and stealing it back. My mock anger becomes astonishment as she bounces
it between right and left inner forearms.
"I'm proud of you, Scully. You've come a long way."
She stops bouncing the ball, sets it between us and smiles sweetly. "You
don't know how much that means to me, to have you say that." Her voice is
thick; she clears her throat. "I want to say thank you, Mulder. Thank you
very much."
"You said that without the required Elvis accent, Scully."
She shakes her head. "I'm serious." She looks over at the field.
"This is something that you are very good at, and I know that playing
brings you great joy. You had no obligation to help me after that first day,
especially when you saw how awful I was."
"You weren't awful. Just raw. The base talent was there, it just needed to
be developed."
"No, don't sugar-coat it. I was awful. I couldn't hit a thing. I could
barely throw the distance from home to third."
"But look at you now! You hit, you run, you score. You've read the entire
ASA rulebook, something I don't even think some umpires could claim to have
done." I stand, tugging on her hand until she gets up, too. We walk to the
car, and as we stow the gear in the trunk, I get inspired.
I run out to the pitcher's mound. "C'mere, Scully!" I call, and a
moment later she joins me.
"Mulder, dare I ask what you're thinking?"
"Oh, just ... sharing my joy."
I move her so she's standing in front of me as we both look toward home. I point
there. "Tomorrow, you will stand 46 feet from here and wait to hit in your
last game of the summer. There'll be umpires, another team, fans in the
bleachers, maybe some dogs. You'll probably be nervous, excited, happy and
hopeful all rolled into one."
"If this is supposed to be helping, it's not."
"Shh, Scully. This is the important part. You'll be feeling all these
things, a million thoughts running through your head, and it might start to
overwhelm you.
"Remember this: At its simplest, a ball game is nothing more than a stick,
a ball, you and your imagination. In the grand scheme of life, balls and strikes
are inconsequential things. If you play with heart, if you give it all you've
got, all the time -- well, even if the score says you lost the game, you'll
always know you won where it counts."
I'm not just talking about the game anymore, and I know Scully knows when she
tilts her head back to look up at me with clear blue eyes and a radiant smile.
She turns around. "Visualization exercise, Mulder. Bottom of the ninth.
Bases loaded. Two outs. Our team's down by three. What happens next?"
I take her beautiful face in my hands, close my eyes, and kiss her.
Grand slam.
-- 30 --
==========================================
feedback to [email protected]
thanks for sharing my joy in the sandlot
p.s. -- Sandy Koufax pitched a no-hitter against the Chicago Cubs on September
9, 1965.
Why are you still here? Go outside and play ball! :P
Or, you could go home.