Joe Wilcox, Bangor West’s starting catcher, is a foot shorter than King, but very quick. At the beginning of this All-Star season, he did not want to catch, and he still doesn’t like it, but he has learned to live with it and to get tough in a position where very few small players survive for long; even in Little League, most catchers resemble human Toby jugs. Earlier in this game he made an amazing one-handed stab of a foul ball. Now he lunges toward the backstop, flinging his mask aside with his bare hand at the same instant he catches the rebounding wild pitch. He turns toward the plate and tosses to King as the Hampden Horns chorus a wild – and premature, as it turns out – bray of triumph. Johnson has slowed down. On his face is an expression strikingly similar to that worn by Casey Kinney when Casey allowed Johnson’s hard-hit grounder to shoot through the hole. It is a look of extreme anxiety and trepidation, the face of a boy who suddenly wishes he were someplace else. Anyplace else. The new pitcher is blocking the plate. Johnson starts a halfhearted slide. King takes the toss from Wilcox, pivots with surprising, winsome grace, and tags the hapless Johnson out easily. He walks back toward the mound, wiping sweat from his forehead, and prepares to face Tardif once more. Behind him, the Hampden Horns have fallen silent again.
Tardif loops one toward third. Kevin Rochefort, Bangor’s third baseman, takes a single step backward in response. It’s an easy play, but there is an awful look of dismay on his face, and it is only then, as Rochefort starts to freeze up on what is an easy pop fly, that one can see how badly the whole team has been shaken by Matt’s injury. The ball goes into Rochefort’s glove, and then pops out when Rochefort – dubbed Roach Clip first by Freddy Moore and then by the whole squad – fails to squeeze it. Knaide, who advanced to third while King and Wilcox were dealing with Johnson, has already broken for the plate. Rochefort could have doubled Knaide up easily if he had caught the ball, but here, as in the majors, baseball is a game of ifs and inches. Rochefort doesn’t catch the ball. He throws wild to first instead. Mike Arnold has taken over there, and he is one of the best fielders on the team, but no one issued him stilts. Tardif, meanwhile, steams into second. The pitchers’ duel has become a typical Little League game, and now the Hampden Horns are a cacophony of joy. The home team has their thumping shoes on, and the final score is Hampden 9, Bangor West 2. Still, there are two good things to go home on: Matt Kinney is not seriously hurt, and when Casey Kinney got another tough chance in the late innings he refused to choke, and made the play.
After the final out is recorded, the Bangor West players trudge into their dugout and sit on the bench. This is their first loss, and most of them are not coping with it very gracefully. Some toss their gloves disgustedly between their dirty sneakers. Some are crying, others look close to tears, and no one is talking. Even Freddy, Bangor’s quipmaster general, has nothing to say on this, muggy Thursday evening in Hampden. Beyond the center-field fence, a few of the Hampden Horns are still tooting happily away.
Neil Waterman is the first person to speak. He tells the boys to get their heads up and look at him. Three of them already are: Owen King, Ryan Larrobino, and Matt Kinney. Now about half the squad manages to do as he’s asked. Several others, however – including Josh Stevens, who made the final out – continue to seem vastly interested in their footgear.
‘Get your heads up,’ Waterman says again. He speaks louder this time, but not unkindly, and now they all manage to look at him. ‘You played a pretty good game,’ he says softly. ‘You got a little rattled, and they ended up on top. It happens. It doesn’t mean they’re better, though – that’s something we’re going to find out on Saturday. Tonight all you lost was a baseball game. The sun will still come up tomorrow.’ They begin to stir around on the bench a little; this old homily has apparently not lost its power to comfort. ‘You gave what you had tonight, and that’s all we want. I’m proud of you, and you can be proud of yourselves. Nothing happened that you have to hang your heads about.’
He stands aside for Dave Mansfield, who surveys his team. When Dave speaks, his usually loud voice is even quieter than Waterman’s. ‘We knew when we came down here that they had to beat us, didn’t we?’ he asks. He speaks reflectively, almost as if he were talking to himself. ‘If they didn’t, they’d be out. They’ll be coming to our field on Saturday. That’s when we have to beat them. Do you want to?’ They are all looking up now.
‘I want you to remember what Neil told you,’ Dave says in that reflective voice, so unlike his practice-field bellow. ‘You are a team. That means you love each other. You love each other – win or lose – because you are a team.’
The first time anyone suggested to these boys that they must come to love each other while they were on the field, they laughed uneasily at the idea. Now they don’t laugh. After enduring the Hampden Horns together, they seem to understand, at least a little. Dave surveys them again, and then nods. ‘O.K. Pick up the gear.’
They pick up bats, helmets, catching equipment, and stuff everything into canvas duffel bags. By the time they’ve got it over to Dave’s old green pick-up truck, some of them are laughing again.
Dave laughs with them, but he doesn’t do any laughing on the ride home. Tonight the ride seems long. ‘I don’t know if we can beat them on Saturday,’ he says on the way back. He is speaking in that same reflective tone of voice. ‘I want to, and they want to, but I just don’t know. Hampden’s got mo on their side, now.’
Mo, of course, is momentum – that mythic force which shapes not only single games but whole seasons. Baseball players are quirky and superstitious at every level of play, and for some reason the Bangor West players have adopted a small plastic sandal – a castoff of some young fan’s baby doll – as their mascot. They have named this absurd talisman Mo. They stick it in the chain-link fence of the dugout at every game, and batters often touch it furtively before stepping into the on-deck circle. Nick Trzaskos, who ordinarily plays left field for Bangor West, has been entrusted with Mo between games. Tonight, for the first time, he forgot to bring the talisman.
‘Nick better remember Mo on Saturday,’ Dave says grimly. ‘But even if he remembers…‘ He shakes his head. ‘I just don’t know.’
There is no admission charge to Little League games; the charter expressly forbids it. Instead, a player takes around a hat during the fourth inning, soliciting donations for equipment and field maintenance. On Saturday, when Bangor West and Hampden square off in the year’s final Penobscot County Little League game, at Bangor, one can judge the growth of local interest in the team’s fortunes by a simple act of comparison. The collection taken up at the Bangor-Millinocket contest was $15.45; when the hat finally comes back in the fifth inning of the Saturday-afternoon game against Hampden, it’s overflowing with change and crumpled dollar bills. The total take is $94.25. The bleachers are full; the fences are lined; the parking lot is full.
Little League has one thing in common with almost all American sports and business endeavors: nothing succeeds like success.
Things start off well for Bangor – they lead 7-3 at the end of three – and then everything falls apart. In the fourth inning, Hampden scores six runs, most of them honest. Bangor West doesn’t fold, as it did after Matt Kinney was hit in the game at Hampden – the players do not drop their heads, to use Neil Waterman’s phrase. But when they come to bat in the bottom of the sixth inning they are down by a score of 14-12. Elimination looks very close and very real. Mo is in its accustomed place, but Bangor West is still three cuts away from the end of its season.