A few swings later, Sweeney hits one just to my right. It’s going to be close. I scoot a few steps and swing the net over. The ball clanks off the handle and drops at my feet. Inelegant, but hell, it’s a ball, and Sweeney’s as good a player as they’ve got.

I’m not sure who hits me the next one. It’s right at me, and a few feet out from the lip, so I’m not taking it away from anyone, but I misjudge it and it bangs off the handle a good foot from the head of the net, and falls back to the field. The boos and laughs shower down, and I slump back in a stool and hang my head. “Nice going, Netman.” “Netguy, you suck!”

The guy beside me points out a dent in the handle. It’s a good-sized ding, the metal buckled inward. I can’t close the handle all the way anymore.

Juan Gonzalez puts a bunch out by the Coke bottles, and then some guy in a blue fleece sweatshirt hits another right at me. It rises past the solid background of the roof and up into the blue sky, then falls fast. It’s going to be short, and I dip the net out and down. I don’t think I’ve got enough reach, but I must, because it’s a swish, just a gentle tug on my arms and then the ball swinging in the mesh, caught. The crowd goes wild. “Yeah, go ahead, Netman!” “Hey, gimme one—isn’t it catch and release?”

The ball has a pink stamp on the sweet spot: KCR enclosed by a thin circle, like something on special at CVS. The hitter was Benito Santiago—the BEN from his bathead’s imprinted backwards across the cowhide.

Like Mark Bellhorn, I had a chance to redeem myself. And just in time too, because that’s it for BP. Packing up, I’m visited by two people. A burly security dude who tells me I’ll have to surrender the net to him before game time (so I don’t interfere with play), and a reporter for the Greenfield, Mass, paper who saw the catch and wants to interview me. I get to use my Bellhorn analogy. “You’re down one minute and the next you’re up again. That’s baseball.” And, canned and corny as that sounds, it is: as long as you keep at it—stubbornly, dumbly—something good might happen.