You had just the one job,….

On the importance of focus on the task at hand.

Once upon a time, there was a softball game played under a cobalt-blue sky darkening with the approaching dusk, an orange sun dropping slowly toward a distant horizon, a faint breeze that was just the thing to remind everyone that the temperature was exactly where we’d set it, if we could ever find the thermostat, and with a promise of a cold and sweaty beer to come.

I played in that game. It was everything an intramural or rec-league slow-pitch softball game is supposed to be, according to human preferences, imagination, and what the people we used to call the Madison-Avenue-types want us to see in our mind’s eye as they try to sell us financial advice services, mortgages, cars that see only perfectly paved roads and green lights, ridiculously expensive watches, and Bounty paper towels, the quicker picker-upper. The gods had even arranged for my new girlfriend to be in the stands. (She didn’t yet know she was my girlfriend, but soon her knowledge caught up with reality. “It was a magical evening” just doesn’t do this one justice.)

I played third base and batted third. In my deepest inner self, I wanted to believe that this was a sign of some deep karmic connection with George Brett, who that summer played third base, batted third, and, as our game was being played, was hitting .401 for the season, in early September. It was not such a sign, nor was there any deep karmic connection on which I could call or rely; such fantasies are the cheap paper currency of the young.

But I had doubled, driving in a run, and later scoring, in my first at-bat. (Yes, yes, I know, it was slow-pitch softball. Fred Flintstone look-alikes could and did hit for the cycle and have multi-homer games with regularity. Just work with me here.) In the second inning I singled, then scored from first on an infield single and a bad throw to third. (Yes, again, I know: intramural slow-pitch softball—let’s just everyone agree that one’s opponents in slow-pitch softball at the college intramural level don’t always feature high-level athleticism. Let me have my sweet little memories. Now let’s move on.)

When I went to bat in the third inning, we were down a run, but had runners on first and second. One out. The sun was just touching the tops of the trees to the west of the park. The light wind made the leaves at the peaks of the trees dance about like they were trying to dodge the sun.

I sauntered up to the plate like I owned the place. I positioned my feet, grinding them into the dirt a little, like George does, tapped that house-shaped pentagon with my bat, and took my stance, bat held back and high, hands still, left shoulder and arm primed to pull the bat through the ball as if to smash it into oblivion, right arm ready to push and guide, weight balanced, every sense attuned to the pitch.

My swing connected hard, but I pulled the ball to the left of third in a line drive that, had it been just a few feet over, might have had me running for days. Foul ball, strike one. I repositioned, tapped the plate, and retook my stance.

Twice in my lifetime I have succeeded in hitting a softball as hard as my body, my coordination, and the laws of physics allow. The other time was years later, and the ball tore through the night air over a softball field in Groton, Connecticut, splitting the distance between a pair of outfielders and hitting the base of the outfield fence on the fly. Only a good bounce for the left fielder kept me to a triple.

This time, the ball ripped into the blue-turning orange sky behind third and dropped into the grass deep in foul territory. Strike two.

In our league at the time, having two strikes raised the possibility of striking out while having very much to have hit the ball. A foul ball with two strikes, unlike in baseball, where it doesn’t count as anything, would be strike three. Even if I were to knock the cover off, if it goes foul, I take a seat.

With the above in mind, I once again took my batting stance.

The net pitch was a thing of beauty, in this batter’s eye. The pitcher released it on its upward arc and the ball followed a path that seemed carved into the air by Galileo and Newton working together. Pure, graceful. And on line to pass right across the middle of the plate.

The thing about slow-pitch softball, when you’re the batter, is that it’s slow. One has time to assess, collect information about spin and speed, compute trajectory, to take into account the wind; to make micro-adjustments of bat grip, angle of opening of the front hip, and front foot, and more.

The ball, side-lit by the evening sun, had a golden tint over-glow atop slightly scuffy gray-white. It had a gentle back-spin, nothing that would affect its flight. At apogee, its moment in space and time was one of a perfect pitch. This ball needed to be hit. And hard. I felt my left thigh twitch as I adjusted ever so slightly, preparing for a swing that would meet the ball just a little further back over the plate; my right elbow was a little tighter than usual, to keep the arm from extending quite as quickly, or as far; both these things to keep the ball over fair territory.

As the ball came over the top of its arc like a roller-coaster easing over the top of the first hill, it started to accelerate down and towards the plate—and a violent meeting with destiny—exactly as dictated by gravity, drag coefficients, relative humidity, the Coriolis Effect, and a grasshopper’s buzz in the grass past the outfield fence. It was coming straight down the tube, its perfect trajectory unsullied, its path fated to cross the exact middle of the plate, waist high as it came through the hitting zone. I wanted to hit it, and the gods said, Okay, here ya go.

Behind home plate lay a rubber mat, to aid the umpire in calling strikes. The idea was simple, and beautifully mathematical. Given the distance between pitcher’s release and home, and the rule requirement that the high point of the pitch be between six and twelve feet from the ground, to be a strike the ball would, commanded by everything Newton ever said, land behind the plate somewhere on the area of that mat.

Not that it mattered, of course. I had never seen a ball land on that mat, at least not up close and personal, as it were. No-sir-ee Bob. If the ball was that hittable, and I was at the plate, it was gonna be hit. I mean, it’s a softball, a big target. And it’s slow-pitch, so we know it’s not moving fast. And—ooh, boy, just look at that thing, it’s getting closer to the zone, still coming right down the pipe at fat-boy-running-out-of-gas pace. Yep, ladies and gentlemen, this ball, this pitch, this most exquisite delivery imaginable, more perfect than any effort that has ever been, before or will be in the hereafter, why, it’s a hitter’s dream. The sound of the bat meeting ball will be like the first note of a Beethoven symphony. The bat will first flatten the ball at point of impact, then in an instant reverse its momentum, lifting and accelerating it in accordance with every letter of Newton’s Second Law, and the ball will feel—yes, it will feel the force, as it must, the gods have ordained it so!—it will feel the energy, then the wind, the drive, the explosion up and over the pitcher and the infield, beyond the reach, then the sight, even the very ken of the outfielders, and it will begin to glow, a second sun arising to discuss matters with the first, then, finally, its flicker of flames will erupt into a fireball as it explodes out of the atmosphere and into the realm of legend and the darkness of space, where, thousands of years hence, some curious being will pluck it from its place in space-time’s web and wonder how it came to be that a leather-bound sphere with Spalding scrawled across was in that particular neighborhood of the galaxy.

When the ball hit the mat, the umpire didn’t hesitate. The call was prompt, to the point, and emphatic. No one, not even I, could argue that it was unnecessarily so, however. The sound, a plop that reminded me then, and now, of a rock dropped into quiet water, was accompanied by a little jump of the mat, a puff of dust from its edge, and my shock and amazement.

I had not swung. The perfect pitch. Absolutely so, there was no other adequate description. ‘Why,’ Rob, our first baseman, said later, ‘even Helen Keller could’ve seen that pitch was just ab-o-so-lute-ly beggin’ to be hit.’ It had to be. It just freakin’ existed for it to happen. It had been ordered up by Zeus or Apollo or whoever was in charge that day to be delivered to the guy at the plate so attuned to the cosmos and prepared to notice every little perfection such that it, the pitch itself, should be praised and worshipped right up until the moment it was spanked into oblivion. But there was no spank.

We won the game—how, I cannot now recall. I probably had at least a couple more at-bats, and I remember I dug out a sharp grounder at third and threw to John at second for a force, and John very nearly got it turned for a double play, but his foot slipped and his throw went into the dust at Roy’s feet. I don’t remember much else.

Because we won, the team could be gracious about my strikeout. It was, I’m almost certain, the only called-third-strike strikeout we had all season. And the other guys let me know about it occasionally, all in good fun, pretty much. But I’ll never forget it.

I went up for that at-bat with only one thing in mind. A truly singular purpose. I was gonna hit that ball, and but Boy Howdy! was I gonna hit it. That’s all I had to do. Another liner into the gap, and at least one run scores, maybe two, and I’d have been standing on second with a grin on my face, waving to the pretty girl in the second row when she waved excitedly, as I knew she would, the whole thing being so dad-gum dramatic and all.

When I strode back over the bench, I snuck a glance in her direction. I’d had exactly one job, and I had completely, utterly, and with amazing, quiet drama, failed. And not just failed, I hadn’t even swung the bat. Pathetic. Surely I’d fallen a notch or two or three or thirteen in her eyes.

She was laughing and talking with Sarah, Roy’s girlfriend. It wasn’t clear she even knew there was a game going on. Whether it was due to kindness or she was truly ignorant of it all I still don’t know, but when we went for pizza after the game with the rest of the team and girlfriends and at least one wife and, I’m pretty sure, a mistress, she sat next to me and never said a word about it, then or later. I once thought, a few years later, that maybe I should have married her. I know I thought about proposing. I just didn’t do it. Roy later told me he thought she was perfect for me.