PERSON PITCH

As it turns out, my brother was at game one of the 1986 WS. I didn’t know this until a few years later.

I was sitting in his rented house, the one where the wood floor in the living room sloped to the west, and squirrels breached the flue routinely. He was working the remote, and stopped at a Mets’ game.

“What are you doing? You hate baseball.”

And that was true, as far as I knew. Baseball was my thing.

Growing up, I had a bottomless chest of baseball cards in my room, and had memorized all sorts of arcane facts and records.

I spent many afternoons as a kid hurling a tennis ball against my garage door, pretending I was Jon Matlack or Jerry Koosman. I played in the neighborhood street games with the boys my brother’s age, who chose me for their side before they chose him. I played little league, made all-star teams, went out for celebratory pizza and soda with the coach.

And all the while my brother glowered at the game. Said it was for “pussies.”

Really what it had become was a symbol. A symbol of how much easier things seemed to be for me. A symbol of all his struggles in the world.

But as we sat quietly and watched the game together that night, so much of the accreted bitterness dissolved away.

We sat and we watched, and we did not make a sound for destiny to hear...