The two players go through the whole bucket of balls and then collect them and go back into the dugout and there is no one on the field. Alex counts the number of times he sees the word Lions around the stadium and is up to twenty-two when some other players come out, and an old guy that looks like the grandpa from the Grandpa House. Someone else wheels out a big machine that looks like a vacuum on stilts. The old man stands behind a metal screen and feeds balls into the machine and they get spit out and fly at the batter. The first guy misses five balls and then goes to the back of the line. The second guy hits three, misses two. The third guy hits the first one up real high, straight up, and it comes falling back into the seats with a loud clatter. It’s just a few rows away! Momma says that Alex is not supposed to leave this seat no matter what, but he can see the ball rolling around and he figures it’ll be fine if he goes and gets it.

Turns out the players hit foul balls all the time, because after Alex finds the first ball, it is only a few swings before he hears the bang, bang, bang of another ball bouncing against the seats, clattering like those big coins that fall through the maze when his grandpa watched The Price Is Right. He finds that ball, too, and then a third foul ball nearly hits him on the head and then one lands out in the left field seats, but he finds it. He carries his treasure in his shirt like a kangaroo. When he looks up from finding one by the visiting team’s dugout, he sees the old man is dragging the ball-spitting machine off the field and somebody else is pulling the screen back to the hole in the outfield wall and all the players have gotten rid of their bats and now have gloves and are throwing balls back and forth between first and second, first and third, shortstop and first, around and around like pinball. There are more people in the stadium now, fathers and sons and some old-people couples in black-and-gold T-shirts, stadium attendants in bright yellow helping people find their seats. Alex surveys the crowd. It looks like somebody is sitting in his seat now, and anyway, he wants to find Momma and show her all his balls.