“I’ve been throwing to Larry lately,” Travis told the coach. “I’ve got some pretty good heat on the ball.” He got up from the bench. Nate might have been imagining, but it seemed like Travis sneered at him as he headed out to the mound.

At first the pitches Travis threw looked inconsistent— two balls to start it off, followed by a slow curve that even a bad hitter like Corey Tomkins had no trouble connecting with. Followed by two strikes in a row. Then another ball. Another easy hit. Another strike. It went like that for the first few players in the lineup, though by the end of his try-out Travis was starting to look impressive.

“You showed me some nice work out there,” the coach said as Travis made his way back to the bench.

Then it was Nate’s turn.

He got the feeling, as he stepped onto the pitcher’s mound, that all eyes were on him—not only the coach and the players, but the mothers who’d come to watch, and a bunch of fathers, too, and the guy at the hot dog wagon who had set up shop for the start of the season.

A wave of dizziness came over Nate. He looked down to the dirt, trying to remember how he used to do this. The ball, in his hand, suddenly felt like a foreign object, something that dropped down from space, that he’d just happened to pick up. He tried to remember his father’s instructions for putting his fingers across the stitching, imagined how it would be if his dad were sitting there on the bench now, watching. He took a deep breath and pulled his arm back for the windup.

“Sometimes your worst enemy is your own brain,” Dad had said to him once. “You let the wrong thought come into your mind at the wrong moment, and suddenly you’re lost.”

It happened now, the split second before he released the ball—the picture of his father. Not his father as he’d been when the two of them were out behind the barn, throwing pitches at the mattress. The picture that came to him was of his dad as he’d been that day the bloodhounds brought him in from the field—stumbling to the ambulance, blood pouring down his face.

It was too late. He’d let the ball out of his grasp. He’d thrown a terrible pitch, wild to the left. It was so bad, people didn’t even laugh, they groaned.

Steady now, he heard his father telling him. Take your time with the next one.