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planted like oak roots, my helmet screwed down tight, my hands gripping the handle of my thirty-ounce bat tight enough to control it, loose enough to maintain the right feel. The heel of my left hand was flush up against the butt of the bat handle. I don’t like to choke up. You are lost in the universe if you’re choking up, and if you don’t know where you are in the universe how can you ever expect to hit a well-thrown ball? If you feel like you need to choke up you should just move to a smaller bat. Bat’s too heavy, then you’re too cocky. You embarrass yourself. Bat’s too light, you got no confidence. You embarrass yourself. And if there is no bat small enough for you then you aren’t ready to play so sit down for another year or two.
    I have always taken the time to select the bat I could really hit with.
    I was by now staring hard at the machine just the same as if it were a real flesh-and-bone pitcher. Searching for its eyes. It was humming, ready. I could not wait. From my hair to my fingertips to my clenching solar plexus to my twitching thighs, I was ready for this, like the first pitch of the World Series.
    Like every pitch.
    “Okay,” I called, “start feeding balls into that slot in back.” Napoleon did, and started it all coming.
    Sling, it came. Hopping, spinning, straight. I felt what was almost a laugh come up out of me as I went after it, because I was so excited, and because the pitch was so fat and easy.
    Whiff. I missed it by half a foot, and nearly screwed myself into the ground to boot. The place was like a combination airplane hangar/gym, and all the noises were exaggerated a thousand echoey times since we were the only people there. Like the sound of a swing and a miss, whiffing loudly around the place.
    And the sound of the razz.
    “That is the right way then? I think I can do that, Richard. I could do that when I was very little. I guess I am what you would call a natural, then.”
    I hadn’t yet taught him the razz, so maybe he was a natural. All the more reason to ignore him.
    I dug and dug my feet in again, into the batter’s box dirt, the only bit of natural ball field in the place. But just the right bit, the part the hitter makes contact with, feels his way into, connects himself to. With my feet in the dirt I always had the old feeling, that I was where I needed to be, whether I was playing under the lights at night in August, in the sun in June, on the crusted ground of February, or even this indoor weirdness. Feet in the dirt, hands wrapped just so around the bat handle. The rest was just a matter of time.
    Humm, sling, on it came, and this time there was no laugh, no urge, no childish lapse of concentration. There was instead the crack. I never felt a thing, as the ball gave itself up to the very meatiest sweet spot way out on the bat barrel, and I did what a hitter is supposed to do. I hit.
    The ball hissed as it sailed into the netting about twenty yards from the plate. It felt so good, my attention slipped once more as I stupidly paused to dwell on what had already disappeared into the net, and into the past.
    Humm, sling, the next ball was on its way, my way, and I was just getting the bat up off my shoulder by the time the ball went past. Out of instinct, I made a lame wave at the pitch anyway, looking totally foolish and accomplishing less than nothing. It would have been wise to just let it pass, but that kind of wisdom has always come hard to me. I have trouble letting a pitch go by unmolested. Even a bad pitch.
    “You tell me you have played this game before, is that right?”
    Napoleon Charlie Ellis’s rag-the-batter skills were suspiciously well developed. I was going to have to watch him for other surprises.
    He was good for me, though. Because that was the last of my breakdowns. For the next ten minutes solid, not a thing got past me. I hit a few squibs, a few fouls, a grounder and a fly ball, but I did not once swing without making contact with that ball.