| "Earth Baseball Tourney" sneak preview
The Earth Baseball Tourney: An Invitational to Disaster is Claude Walker's upcoming dark comedy about baseball, greed and killer cellphones. An excerpt...
Prologue
Crack of the bat. Costa Rica's shortstop fouled off another one.
Bottom of the 9th. One out, nobody on. The tiny Cambodian pitcher peered in to the catcher for the sign. But she knew what the sign for the next pitch would be. She knew, the batter knew, the 58,000 delirious fans in Singapore's sparkling new Stadium Solaria knew, and most of the 5.2 billion viewers and listeners around the planet knew.
Chhom Seth would throw her knuckleball.
The same knuckleball that had propelled her Cinderella team to this dramatic championship game. The same knuckler that had baffled batters throughout the 1st Earth Baseball Tourney, including all 27 hitters in her perfecto against Fiji. The same odd pitch that was about to give Chhom another complete game shut-out, and make her the wealthiest and best-known Cambodian on Earth.
Casually perched on the mound, Chhom Seth was the picture of poise, a Zen nonchalance in cleats. No stranger to the spotlight, she had been the waifish darling of the Summer Olympics. Winning the gold in Women's Badminton, she charmed the world audience with her wicked serves, shaved head and easy smile.
When the Games were over, she returned to Phnom Penh a celebrity and played badminton every morning along the busy Phnom Penh River just before it flows into the Mighty Mekong. She made a decent living from an Australian sports gear endorsement deal and coaching the kids of diplomats, but missed the competitive life.
When Cambodia was invited to play in the inaugural Earth Baseball Tourney, Chhom was determined to make the team. A natural athlete, her strong wrists and long fingers enabled her to learn and master the knuckleball. Her cousin in the United States sent her six balls, a glove and a DVD called Major League Baseball's Legendary Knucklers. She set up a backstop made of pipes and fishnets in a dusty park overlooking the river and practiced the hard-to-control, harder-to-hit pitch.
Crowds gathered as the Badminton Queen experimented with different grips and deliveries. She studied famous knucklers Eddie Cicotte, Hoyt Wilhelm and Tim Wakefield (who she had a crush on). She taught herself how to throw the ball with no spin, and to make it jiggle and jump. Just like a badminton grip, with that little wrist-flick at the end to give the projectile personality.
Masaoka Nishi, a bureaucrat at Phnom Penh's Japanese Embassy, had his old catcher's mitt shipped via diplomat pouch from Yakult, where he once was battery-mate to Kaz Ishii. Hearing of a pitcher on the Phnom Penh, Nishi strolled over one afternoon, asked Chhom if she wanted to play some catch. He became her battery-mate, the first in Cambodia's long history. He taught her how to throw a curveball and screwball, and helped her adjust speeds on her lovely knuckleball.
In the shadows of Cambodia's gilded Royal Palace, Chhom Seth learned to throw shadows.
Resembling a 50-mph butterfly, each of her pitches was a tiny work of art, a 4-dimensional sculpture, a delight to watch. The ball would quiver, flutter and float, uncertain about where to land. Sometime it would take its sweet time as it left Chhom's hand, then accelerate at the end. The ball would suspend itself in mid-air, taunt the batter, then rush in. She experimented with a "knuckle-scroogie". While often uncontrollable, it mocked laws of physics and common sense.
Chhom's mysterious knuckler, unorthodox sidearm delivery and quick grasp of baseball fundamentals made her a natural choice when the Cambodian national team was assembled. She quickly became the team leader and ace pitcher. One of only 28 women participating in the 16-team Invitational, she was on the verge of becoming the Earth Baseball Tourney's first MVP.
Now, in the final inning of the final game, Cambodia led 2-0. Each player on the winning team would get a $5 million bonus, while the 2nd placers each get $2 mil, so national pride wasn't the only thing on the line here.
When the name of the next batter was announced - Costa Rica's flashy shortstop Pío Lyra - five billion people carefully wrote down his name. "Pío Lyra" in Urdu, Yoruba and Aleut. Two minutes earlier, the world had jotted down the name of the previous batter - Berto Rocha - but he was quickly forgotten. "Pío Lyra" in Mandarin, Basque and Swahili. Tamil, Tagalog and Tajik.
In 24 time zones around our orb, 5.2 billion people crammed into living rooms, internet cafes, bars and movie palaces to witness this game. Mexico City's zocalo, Tiananmen Square, Red Square, Times Square. All jammed with viewers of jumbo TV screens, each viewer carefully recording the name of the batter and game score, waiting for that phone to ring or that precious life-altering e-mail or text message to arrive.
This final game of the Earth Baseball Tourney was becoming the most-watched sports event in history, far outpacing the 3.3 billion viewers of the last World Cup. In fact, 89 percent of humans with TV sets were tuned into this game, the largest market share since the final episode of MASH in the previous century. The internet was experiencing unprecedented demand. Sports wagering had never been more intense. Singapore's stadium was rocking, everyone on their feet, including Myanmar's new President - Aung San Suu Kyi - as well as Ernie Banks, the Pope, Dalai Lama and Mick Jagger.
Costa Rica's Pío Lyra was 4-for-5 in their semifinal win over Uzbekistan, but had never seen a knuckleball before he had faced Seth in the Prelims. She had embarrassed him then (three strikeouts) and again today (two whiffs and a dribbler to the mound). Unlike some of his more macho teammates, Pío had no problems competing with a woman. In his native city of Limón, some of the greatest athletes were female - Olympic swimmers, sprinters, basketball players - and he knew Chhom Seth was something special.
He got the sign from Costa Rica's 3rd base coach: bunt. Maybe that's the only way to get on base with this crazy Cambodian lady, Pío thought. Bunt on, then Costa Rica's slugger (and former Toronto Blue Jay) Ernie Mesa smacks one out. No problema. Brand new ballgame.
After toeing around some of the chalky dirt, Lyra dug into the batter's box and fixed his gaze on the hypnotic stare of Chhom Seth. Two unlikely heroes on the global stage, during a "group moment" unlike any humanity had ever experienced. Crowd on its feet, bellowing.
From the corner of his eye, Pío noticed a flickering outside the stadium. He glanced over the right-field bleachers just as the shimmering neon skyline of Singapore rippled into dusk's darkness, as if a black velvet curtain was slowly being drawn on the island metropolis.
The electric grid in Asia collapsed first...
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