Two balls skittered past me, one right between my legs. “Shit!” I muttered.

Then there come a ball that jumped halfway to me, ran on, and leaped again just before it reached me. I followed it with my eye, poked my glove at it and caught it with a smack that set my palm to tingling.

“Good!” Isom yelled. “Had it all the way!”

I wiggled my shoulders around, cocky-like, and turned the ball over in my hand. It was hard but warm. Throwed with enough force it could kill a man if it hit him in the head. But I had stopped it, damn straight I had. I admired the smoothness of its skin.

“Back up and I’ll hit you some flies,” Isom said.

I stood high upon that centerfield and felt like I was riding the hill, a frozen wave that would crush everything in its path once it was unleashed. I learned to judge the fly balls and seldom missed one. Then I throwed the ball to home plate, pretending they was a coal operator standing there and the baseball sliced him right in half.

I took batting practice, swung viciously.

“Level it out,” Isom said. “Smooth it out. You aint tryin to bash in somebody’s head. Watch the ball in.”

After while he couldn’t get one past me. I didn’t care where the ball went, over Isom’s head or straight up in the air. It was soothing to beat on that ball.

“You swing at ever damn thing,” Isom complained. “Real pitcher would tie you in knots.” But he sounded happy. Then I hit three straight pitches over the left field fence.

“C.J., you got to play,” he pleaded.

“Aint I too old to start this?”

“Thirty-six,” Isom said. “We got two guys older than you. You can play a few year.”

They give me number 33, a gray flannel uniform trimmed in red. We are the Annadel Redlegs, named after Cincinnati. My first year in the Independent League I hit twenty-five homers. Little boys followed me around town, and I’d set them down and tell them about how the coal companies stole the land.

By 1918 folks was wondering who had the best baseball team in the Levisa coalfield—Davidson of the Miners League or Annadel of the Independent League. (Actually, I reckoned the best team was the Justice Cardinals of the Negro League. We played them in pre-season games and they took three out of four.) Lytton Davidson wasn’t happy with the idea of our teams playing each other. He had put too much money into his ballteam to be embarrassed by Annadel. Davidson was from Philadelphia and was buddies with the owner of the Athletics. He hired on a full-time manager, Tiny Sanders, a former A’s coach who washed out on account of his drinking. A Davidson miner who played ball got special treatment, like outside work or a foreman’s job down in the mine. Mario Angelelli, the legendary Davidson shortstop, had not seen the inside of a coal mine in ten year, and his son, Carmello, the second baseman, was a section boss even though he was only eighteen. This was to be Carmello’s last year in the Miners League. Tiny Sanders had arranged a tryout with the Philadelphia Athletics and they agreed to pick him up for the 1919 season.