The Yips Pt. 01

"Baseball is 90 per cent mental. The other half is physical." -Yogi Berra

"Being with a woman all night never hurt no professional baseball player. It's staying up all night looking for a woman that does him in." -Casey Stengel

"They gave each other a smile with a future in it." -Ring Lardner

"All acts of sex in the following fantasy are performed by and on persons over the age of 18 who should have known better." -Hunter S. Thompson

**********

The Yips

Part 1

**********

Bryan Monnic had the biggest problem of his career. No, make that the biggest problem of his life. Which was the same thing, he guessed, as his career pretty much was his life.

His wife had run off with another man.

That wasn't the problem.

The problem was that he had the yips.

He suspected the yips were somehow related to his wife's betrayal of their wedding vows, but then again, nobody knew how the yips started, why they kept on plaguing you, or how or even if they could be exorcised.

Yes. Exorcised. The yips were a demonic possession. They took over your body and made it do -- at the most inconvenient moments, moments that defined your career and thus in his case his life -- the equivalent of rotating your head 360 degrees and puking up a stream of neon green stinking vomit. In front of 35,000 paying customers and several millions more watching on television. He didn't want to even think about the YouTube videos that would live until the sun consumed the earth.

Bryan Monnic was a baseball player. A pretty damn good baseball player. If you met him in his street clothes, you might shake his hand and think him a regular guy. Mechanic, maybe, or a plumber. He occupied the middle of the physiological bell curve at 5 foot 10 and 185 pounds. He had a steely grip and a lean body, but so did several million other 25-year-old males. But few of those millions had the eye-hand coordination and muscle memory necessary to spear a rocketing baseball in midair or scoop up one wildly bouncing at 80 miles per hour, pivot, and make an accurate and hard throw to the first baseman's glove.

And even if that one in a million had such skill, they still would have to then pick up a slender piece of cylindrical hardwood, stand calmly while a 5-ounce round projectile screamed almost invisibly close to their head and not only not fling themselves screaming out of the way but swing that wood and hit the damned thing.

And not only hit it, but hit it in such a way that it passed by or above eight other guys who also had the skills mentioned before necessary to catch it and deliver it to first base before the runner could get their ass down the line.

And do that again and again, day and night, home and away, indoors and out, 300 times out of a 1000 while fighting travel fatigue, media attention, stalkers, fanatical fans, dealing with requests to attend charity events, to visit sick children, to speak out about abuse, poverty, injustice.

And after that your damn wife goes off and starts fucking some idiot football player?

**********

Bryan never had the illusion that his life was his by some unknown right. He realized that he had lucked out at birth. No defects - genetic or skeletal or muscular, the eyesight of a predator, upper-middle class parents in a loving, harmonious home who supported their children's outdoor activities with their money and their encouragement. Growing up in Hondo, Texas, in a climate in which those outdoor activities could be partaken of all year round. Bryan spent his youth out on whatever cleared patch of land was available with a glove on one hand or a bat in two, playing the game with whoever showed up. They played nine aside, they played work up, they played home run derby. He played with his peers, he played with younger kids, he played against older guys. He hit, he caught, he threw. Every day.

These are the breeding grounds of many American professional baseball players. Bryan suspected he had a chance to become one of those rare entities when, after a stellar high school career, he was awarded a scholarship to the University of Texas at Austin, one of the reliable incubators of future major league players. He knew the dream could be his the day he got the call from his future coach. Up until that time he had only dreamed.

In college the level of competition was so far above that of high school or even any of the elite traveling teams he joined by invitation over his formative playing years that it seemed like a different sport. The speed, the nuances, the mental aspect. He had to relearn it all practically from scratch. He was fortunate that the coaching staff was professional and that they were on his side from the beginning. He was fortunate that they convinced him to switch positions from shortstop, the cornerstone infield position that everyone desired, to second base, which almost no kid growing up wanted to play unless there was not another way to get into the game. He was fortunate, he was fortunate, he was fortunate. Good things piled upon good things.

One of those good things, he had thought, was Lauren Esposito.

**********

"Eileen tells me you were reading to the preschooler group yesterday," Mrs. Lowell said. The windows were open to catch the breeze; the salty mild airs of early June on the Cape.

Bryan nodded, cutting the side of his fork into the cod filet on his plate. "Yes, ma'am. After she told them I played for the Kettleers, they just kind of piled into my lap."

Mrs. Lowell beamed. Bryan noticed that every time he had called her ma'am in the four days he had been living with the Lowell family, she was overcome with a pleased look that he had started to think of as her Yankee Wasp manner orgasm. He had begun to accentuate his very slight Southern accent, at the same time altering it almost unconsciously from his usual distinctive cattle drive Texas twang until he could have passed for a gentleman from North Carolina.

The daughters, all young copies of their mother, appreciated it. He could tell. The Lowell twins, Clara and Sara, were seniors in the local high school, identical beauties with short blonde hair and blue eyes. The baby of the family, Brie, was a junior, long platinum hair and huge eyes with turquoise irises Bryan sometimes felt himself falling into.

"What did you read them?" Brie asked.

"Oh, the mouse with the cookie book, the dragons with the tacos book, stuff like that."

Brie giggled. "Those are my favorites. Would you read them to me? I still like bedtime stories."

"Brie!" Her mother admonished her, reinforcing it with a haughty glare. "You are embarrassing Mr. Monnic."

Brie rolled her eyes.

"Ignore her," Clara said. "She's at that age where a girl feels she just has to tease the hell out of any available guy."

Bryan paused his chewing. Available?

"Girls," Mrs. Lowell said. "It will be a long summer for all if you make Bryan uncomfortable."

Sara said, "Bryan, are we?"

He shook his head slightly. "Not at all. I grew up with two brothers. This is a nice change."

"Well," Clara said, "in this family you have four sisters."

"That reminds me," said their mother, "The pool service will be here tomorrow." She addressed Bryan. "Ordinarily, we would open the pool earlier than this, but it has been a dreadfully cool spring. And with my husband traveling, I didn't see the need to have it ready. But he flies in from Madrid in the morning."

"Is Melody coming down with him?" Brie asked.

Mrs. Lowell smiled at Bryan. "You will get to meet your last sister. Melody has been working at Ashton's firm and also studying for the bar exam. She is an annoyingly hard worker, just like her father."

"Hey," Sara protested. "What are we, chopped liver?"

**********

February batting practice in Austin is often taken in long sleeves accompanied sometimes with a knit cap pulled over the ears. Bryan was taking his cuts one cool Monday afternoon when the head coach walked out onto the field and stood by the cage to watch a few swings.

"Good rips, Monnic," the coach said. "Now try this stick."

Bryan came out of the cage. His coach held something down against his thigh. He lifted it out to Bryan.

It was a maple Warstic. 34 inches long and 34 ounces in weight. Natural color on the barrel, black handle, with a gold band the border between the shades.

Bryan held it in two reverent hands like it was a message from the baseball gods. Which it was. He grinned at his coach.

The message was that he had been invited to play in the Cape Cod League.

The message was a wooden bat.

Bryan had only ever competed using an aluminum bat. Every amateur program - farm league, Little League, Babe Ruth, Legion ball, high school, college - used aluminum bats. Baseball and softball. It made economic sense because, unlike wooden bats, metal bats never broke. Plus, they had larger sweet spots, they rebounded with more snap and propelled the ball faster and farther than wood. The ting of bat on ball was the background music of Bryan's life. Thus far.

But professionals used wooden bats. And professional teams liked to know how their potential draftees performed with a wood bat. The transition from metal to wood was not always seamless. Some players fell into bad habits at the plate which were enabled by the forgiving properties of aluminum bats. Wooden bats did not reward bad habits. They did not give you a seeing-eye single if you swung at an inside pitch and got jammed up. They did not give you a soft line drive over the infielder's head if you hit a ball off the end of the bat. No, if you did not strike the ball truly and square, a wood bat might splinter and fall to pieces and there would be little momentum transfer. Just a white sphere rolling gently over the green grass, an embarrassment. An easy out.

So his invitation to play in the Cape Cod League was a big deal. It had been the preeminent summer league since 1885. The other players would also be top college talents who had each prayed and waited anxiously for the call. The lucky few gathered each year on this small spit of sand that jutted out into the Atlantic and played the game they loved, knowing that a thousand before them had stepped more or less directly from the small gatherings of polite supporters of their town's team at each Cape game into raucous Major League stadiums crammed with rabid fans. Each Cape game was attended by scouts from all the major league teams who closely observed from folding chairs behind the screen backstop with their notebooks, radar guns, and stopwatches. They were all there to see how these promising players adapted their hitting skills to wooden bats.

To Bryan, an aluminum bat was like Phoebe MacRey. Phoebe was all muscle and mascara and libido. She had wavy auburn hair and grey eyes and a big nose and a big mouth filled with perfect teeth. They met at a concert freshman year at UT. He had bumped into her in the crowd, apologized profusely, and two hours later he was in her bed and deep inside her. Phoebe was uncomplicated. When Bryan looked at her, he wanted to fuck her. Fucking was her function. She was great at it, reliable at it. Like an aluminum bat, however, her specifications met the criteria of many men and her smooth handle fit any hand.

A wooden bat was like Megan Barlow. (Here he always had to pause to brace himself against the impact of the memory. A momentary hesitation, often a deep breath, then continue.) Sandy brown hair in a pixie cut, wide brown eyes, round face, dimples, always smiling. When she enveloped him with that gaze and spun that smile on him, he felt weak. That place in his gut right below his breastbone started to spin, disoriented. He knew in his bones she was for him and just for him. Sex with Megan was fresh every time. He kept finding new places on and in her that provoked a moan or a squeal or a giggle. Their couplings were sometimes spectacular, sometimes good, sometimes slow, sometimes fast. But always special. Like the snowflakes very rarely seen in this part of Texas, each one unique, each one beautiful and perfect and worth making eternal.

Wood is a natural product with the imperfections that implies. You pick up a dozen wooden bats that have been turned to be all the same length, weight, barrel diameter, handle diameter, knob shape. Yet they each contain a unique set of subtle flaws. They are different. You test swing them and hit a few with them and you can immediately tell which one of the dozen is for you. Which one of those bats, visually all suitable, visually all similar, will treat you right. Megan had been for him. He knew she would treat him right. And she had. Right up until that summer sunset when a guy in a pickup truck turned his eyes down to his phone for just a sliver of a second too long and Megan on her bicycle looked up for the last time, probably still with that wonderful smile on her trusting face.

Every aluminum bat ever made was, like Phoebe, still out there being what they are, still satisfying one and all. Wooden bats were eventually, like Megan, broken and discarded.

**********

The Texas spring baseball season ended, and the next day Bryan was on a plane to Boston. He caught a ride to the Cape with two guys from Michigan State who were both playing for Wareham. He told them he had a job at the Cotuit Library. One of the State guys was going to be giving youth baseball clinics. The other had been assigned to janitorial duties at a middle school. They dropped him off at the front door of a huge shingled house from which he could see the water, which he assumed was the Atlantic or some spur of it. Hondo was a three-hour drive from the Gulf, so he was impressed by the ocean being just a long fly ball away.

His knock was answered by a young blonde woman wrapped in a towel, her hair loose and wet around her head. The towel ended far too high on her leg. She smiled at him, and he just managed to keep his helpless male eyes from trying to memorize the topography of her thighs.

"Hello," she said. "I'm Brie. You must be Bryan?"

He nodded, careful to keep his nod well elevated.

The family, what there was of it in residence, descended on him like overly polite hummingbirds. They stowed his bags, fetched him drinks and snacks, toured his room. They walked him the hundred yards over to the library and introduced him to Eileen, the librarian and his new boss. They sat him down and fed him dinner and peppered him with questions.

After his day of travel, he was drained. On the porch, he relaxed on a glider with Brie next to him, Mrs. Lowell - who asked him to call her Adair - in a rocking chair, and the twins sprawled on cushions. In the fading twilight the ocean air crept inland and cooled them as he told them about life in Hondo, Texas.

**********

The day the pool was serviced, he returned in uniform from Bourne at 5. The game had started at noon due to some lighting issues. He showered. From his bathroom he saw Mrs. Lowell -- he just could not address someone his mother's age by her first name -- swimming laps. The three sisters were sunbathing in bikinis. Clara was lying on her stomach, her top straps untied.

Bryan reached out and turned up the cold water.

**********

He was floating on a huge ridiculous inflated flamingo when the sliding door opened and someone came out onto the deck. He could not make out who it was through the glare on his sunglasses.

"Mel!" Mrs. Lowell cried, going to embrace the newcomer.

Bryan paddled to the side and dismounted the bobbing plastic bird with as much dignity as one could under those circumstances. He stood and approached the fourth sister.

Melody Lowell was so visually different from her siblings that at first Bryan thought the mother must have had a first marriage. Melody was as tall as Bryan, with bobbed red hair and pale blue eyes that she turned onto the stranger with suspicion.

"Bryan Monnic," he said pleasantly. "Pleased to meet you."

She looked at his outstretched hand like he had just wiped his ass with it, spun away from him, and addressed her mother. "Father is bringing in his bags." Then she stalked back into the house, leaving Bryan with his hand still out and feeling like an idiot. His cheeks burned. He could not remember the last time he had been so embarrassed.

Mrs. Lowel shrugged apologetically and followed her daughter into the house.

The twins looked at each other. "Who twisted her nipples?" Sara said.

Brie gave Bryan a strange look, oddly mature beyond her years. He wondered what the hell was up with this family.

Later, he met Mr. Lowell at the dinner table and the genetic mystery became clear. Ashford Lowell was tall. His wide nose was unmistakably the prototype for his eldest daughter's, and what little color remained in his thinning white hair was red.

"Well, Bryan, how does the team look so far?" he asked.

"Too early to tell much, Mr. Lowell," Bryan said. "One and one. We're all strangers, so the timing and teamwork parts of the game, like turning a double play and setting up the cutoff man, we need to work on. But baseball is what it is."

"You throw the ball," Brie said, "you catch the ball, you hit the ball. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes it rains."

"That's my girl." Mr. Lowell laughed. "And Bryan, please call me Ashford. Or Ash if you'd like."

Bryan nodded. This meant that he was duty bound to also call Mrs. Lowell Adair. He wondered how she would respond to being addressed as Addy.

Mrs. Lowell got up to fetch more rolls. "It's good to have a ball player back with us. We had to take a break from our tradition last summer."

Bryan saw that same look on Brie's face again. This time as she shot just the briefest of glances at Melody, who was intently dissecting her chicken.

"What happened?" Bryan asked cautiously.

"France happened," Mr. Lowell said. "I had so much business to do in Paris that we just all up and moved over there for two months. No baseball to be found there at all. I think we were all starved for it by the time we got back."

**********

It was the best summer of his life. The sun shone bright; the cooling winds blew off the Atlantic. There were no beastly heat waves like in a Texas summer. When it did rain, it rained at night. He got to play baseball every day. He missed his parents and his brothers, but he loved his new sisters. Well, three of them. Mel came and went from Boston. He was glad when she was not around, as she treated him like he had a communicable disease. Her parents, however, were great. They gave him their spare Prius to use, fed him, came to most of the Kettleers home games to cheer for him, and otherwise left him mostly alone. He worked at the library early in the morning until it was time to leave for his game, shelving books, checking material in, helping customers find items, demonstrating the library computer system.

He also discovered something about the Cape Cod League which was not to be found by searching with the library computers.

There were women who looked upon the young college players as items available to be signed out and taken home.

One morning he was woken by the slowly increasing light of dawn. Disoriented, he tried to recall where he was. Then he tried to recall who the plump dark-haired woman snuggled naked against him was. The sun rose slowly as his brain plugged in the missing data. He was in Orleans, and her name was Marley. He thought she was a dental assistant. He thought she was about ten years older than he. He knew that she had a cunt that gripped him like he might never get loose.

She moved her arm, then her hand. She found his erection and mumbled, "Batter up?"

There was muscular Isabella in Yarmouth, who had a teenage daughter asleep in the next room and climaxed in strings of shaking but silent orgasms.

There was Andrea in Dennis. She had multicolored tattoos of snakes and axes and skulls that covered both arms and much of her back. She had butterflies on her tits and Chinese characters on her shaven mons. Her hair was black and slick like synthetic fiber, but she had not one piercing, not even earrings. She liked to be put on her knees and fucked in the ass. After sex she would play her guitar for him. She was very good. When Bryan imagined her with no ink he realized she was one of the most beautiful women he had seen in the flesh.