There is a curious vacuum just after anything breaks, a brief untroubled stillness that anger and mourning can’t yet disturb, and in it what is seen most clearly is whatever has been lost. O’Hara first saw the ground rush toward him, the infield’s pebbly red-brown filling up his vision, then in that improbable serenity that sets in just after realizing something is terribly wrong, his last moments of safety were recalled in a kind of vivid, morbid slow-motion: fat crack of wooden bat; hot line drive; shuffling feet; ball sizzling through humid air, too far away; too old, too slow to still be a ballplayer; sprint, sprint; dive… Tasting dirt and then warm blood, O’Hara turned his face from the ground to the empty grandstand. In the glint of hot sun off metal bleachers, he saw the deity he had prayed to for years, his simple request only to be kept upright and in motion. The Baseball God was just as O’Hara had imagined, an old man settled in his own corner of the stands, looking like a long-ago acquaintance of someone’s grandfather and maybe a bit eccentric in the faded windbreaker he wore to every game whether snowing in April or scorching in August. Covering his white brush-cut was a bent-brim felt ballcap embroidered with the markings of some obscure team only a purist would recognize—was it the Port City Trawlers, O’Hara wondered; perhaps the Menominee Lumbermen or Jackson Generals; or was it the old Klamath Aces? The Baseball God scribbled earnest, cryptic marks in a weathered scorebook, taking little notice of him.  

The ballpark was in a coastal town O’Hara had never heard of and once he saw seemed too second-rate to deserve a franchise in any kind of league. It looked like something built in the 60s for a big working-class Catholic school, then left to decay when the neighborhood got rough.  Remnants of hand-painted advertisements for regional beer and local steakhouses stuck in the grain of battered and sunbaked plywood strapped to rusting bleachers that might seat a couple hundred. Nobody wore uniforms for the lazy stretching, half-hearted long-toss, and macho chatter that constituted the training camp Dex had invited him to. He had learned that when anyone says, “that’s what I can offer,” there was little reason for excitement and often an undercurrent of charity. “You’ll pay your own way down here,” Dex had told him, “and play your way onto the squad. No guarantees, but you’ll get your shot. Strictly per diem. That’s what I can offer.”

The players in camp were mostly Latin, with a few college washouts mixed in, muscly young bucks with prideful scowls announcing their displeasure at not being somewhere better. The few who noticed O’Hara in the third base hole that morning chirped in Spanish or chuckled with coltish dismissal. He picked grounders off the hard-packed infield hit leisurely by Ubaldo, Dex’s Dominican assistant. There was relief in the movement, and that seemed to matter most. O’Hara was one of those unsmiling grinders who feared losing more than he loved winning and knew that when movement stopped and he could no longer stick to a roster, his entire career would be objectively judged a failure and chalked-up as a loss. Avoiding the L had ceased being about dreams—he’d made peace with his signature accomplishment of eleven At-Bats in Triple-A. His aspiration now was eluding, or at least forestalling, elimination. O’Hara learned to fake enough nonchalance to mask desperation, switching between burner phones when old contacts started screening his calls. He endured short-season leagues and semi-pro, a stint with the Jackson Generals, winter in the DR, a half-season with the Klamath Aces, Croatia for a year, success relative as calibrated against the alternative, perhaps even inconsequential if he managed to keep playing.  

His old coach’s offer came weeks after tryout lists for even the shittiest teams were finalized. With no place left, O’Hara’s final elimination looked unavoidable. He’d spent those weeks mulling his lifetime stats: OBP, OPS, TOB, WAR, SLG, etc., wondering which one had let him down. These equations had measured his worth since eighteen, and he had learned the art of selling whatever numbers might catch a roster-maker’s eye. The vodka-soaked night he confronted the inevitability of elimination from even baseball’s seediest periphery, O’Hara concocted a new stat. This gauged his probability of success in the unknown real world: SAFE (Survival After Final Elimination). He laughed darkly at the irony of the warm-sounding acronym, taking small pride in how it echoed a baseball term. Sometimes he expressed SAFE as a ratio, sometimes a percentage, but always knew the odds were low and that if a wager on his survival after baseball were an Over/Under proposition, the wise bettor would take the Under. Only two shaky factors, O’Hara figured, might improve his numbers in SAFE: his ex-father-in-law ran a roofing company, and the guy still kind-of liked him. Dex’s nicotine-scarred southern drawl came with both relief and disappointment. But it was movement.

“Take a break O’Hara,” Dex growled, strolling up the foul line, another player trailing.  “Let’s see what the kid here’s got.”

The player was a strapping giant with a child’s face, fine yellow hair spilling from his cap in a curtain blunt-cut at the shoulders like a mythic Master of the Universe swordsman. But atop the towering bruiser’s body, blue eyes like sea glass darted in search of approval and pillowy lips hung open in adolescent vacancy.

“He’s eighteen,” Dex whispered to O’Hara. “Jameson Naylor. Good name for a slugger, ain’t it?” 

“Or porn star.”  

Frowning, Dex tapped a tin of Skoal. “Naylor’s raw, all potential. Nobody knows about him but me. I’m gonna develop him here where nobody’s watching. Should be a big payday after he’s learned some things and the scouts get wind of him.” Dex paused as if admiring his plan, coughed then grew dour, seeming to struggle with his next line. “I brought you to camp to teach Naylor everything you know. I know you want to keep playing, and I love your hustle. You’ve hung on a long time and know all the tricks. I’ll pay you through the end of camp, but your full-time job is teaching the kid.”  

“I came to play,” O’Hara said hollowly, reminded of the visceral sensation of plummeting down an elevator shaft that time he recognized a teammate’s phone number among his then-wife’s texts. He found himself having the same debate: what was worse, falling from a safe place and hitting bottom, or realizing safety had been illusory all along? “So, you lied to get me down here,” he said finally.

“C’mon,” Dex grumbled in an attempt at warmth. “Naylor needs help, and you’ve figured things out. Quit now and all that is wasted. Don’t you want to be a mentor?”

A mentor, O’Hara thought. A foreign concept. He’d learned to grind on his own when it became evident his talent wouldn’t stave-off elimination—detecting signs, interpreting opponent’s idiosyncrasies, poring over stats, leaning in on inside sliders to parlay bruises into an HBP and chance to run the bases. Few praised his accumulated savvy, but it had kept him on rosters for years. “If you can’t out-hit them, then out-run them,” Dex had preached. “If you can’t out-run them, out-field them. If you can’t out-field them, then out-work them.”  

O’Hara stared numbly as Naylor fielded Ubaldo’s tepid grounders. He chuckled mirthlessly at his new part in the oldest sports cliché: aging veteran staring down his replacement. Except that the youngster was nothing like him. He watched the boy-giant haltingly charge lazy one-hoppers as if he feared them. His motion is all wrong, O’Hara thought, critiques flickering instinctively in the darkness and echo of a door just slammed shut. It was as if Naylor was unused to his own size, squatting to gather the baseball, getting twisted around tree-trunk thighs, tying thick arms around themselves.    

“What do you think of him?” Dex asked.

O’Hara shrugged, then spit, imagining the baseball catching a divot and smashing the boy in the face, a plaintive moan escaping those puffy child’s lips.    

“That’s enough,” Dex called. Ubaldo dropped the bat, reaching into his pocket for a cigarette. Naylor stepped away with a dopey, satisfied smile.

“Hey Baldy! I’m not done!” O’Hara shouted, glaring at Dex, ignoring the boy, slapping his glove, and motioning Ubaldo to keep the ground balls coming.

Ubaldo sighed, retrieved the bat, then peppered him with shots, adding extra zip, O’Hara gathered, over the smoke break’s delay. O’Hara relaxed at being in motion again, absorbing everything deftly, flawlessly, noticing after a time the guarded glances of players who had paused their efforts to watch. Ubaldo seemed to sense the growing spectacle, sending sizzling rug-burners and wicked short hops with menace. O’Hara picked each one with grace, as if intuition guided his feet and glove, imagining how hopeless and inadequate young Jameson Naylor feels, and how regretful or angry—he didn’t care which—Dex must be, as the other players began to hoot each gloved ball approvingly.  

Ubaldo seemed desperate to end things, smashing a line-drive opposite O’Hara’s glove side, a rocket shot he had no chance of reaching.

Electrified by cheers but more afraid of missing his last, impossible chance, O’Hara snapped his feet into the dirt. Like a boxer in the final round, made desperate by the impending bell and throwing brutish haymakers, he hurled himself forward, body scraping the ground—the game’s continuation all that mattered.

There was an odd relief when the suction broke and his knee gave way, thousands of stringy fibers abused over the years deciding they had stretched enough, with nothing left but to pop and fray. Ligaments unraveled like strained rope severed with a dull hatchet as electricity shot through bones grinding against each other.  

In the few still seconds before men rushed to him, O’Hara replayed his final moments of safety, admiring them like one might remember a beautiful, fragile vase slipping from fumbling hands, knowing this was the final cut and that even illusions were gone. He would take the loss. But as he lifted his head O’Hara realized that the L wasn’t what he feared, what he’d run from. He squinted into the distance, but could only see the grandstand where the old man sat glumly shaking his head, solemnly winding a page around the scorebook’s wire spiral, finally snapping it closed. Beyond the field was an unseeable nothingness where O’Hara knew he could never survive. He had played too long. The team encircled him in sickened reverence, Naylor’s babyface crowding out the sun. O’Hara sniffed Marlboro and leather as Dex and Ubaldo clawed at his armpits. “Hielo!” Dex yelled in Alabama Spanish. “Ice, goddamnit!”

The players carried him, movement making O’Hara briefly forget the pain. They didn’t seem to know where he was supposed to go, stopping on the dugout steps and disappearing one by one until only Naylor remained. The two stood quiet, the boy propping up the older man, the red-brown base paths empty in front of them.

“So,” Naylor said finally, the voice coming out a surprising little squeak. “Coach says you can teach me some things.”        

“I’m not going anywhere,” O’Hara grunted. For once, precious movement seemed to come from staying still, the boy’s strength apparently infinite, capable of supporting him for at least a while. Training camp was short, but there was time enough for what he could offer. Beyond the field, O’Hara imagined a still unnamed but not completely unfamiliar grind waiting for him. Up in the grandstand, The Baseball God busied himself with a fresh scoresheet.  

TIM JONES  is a fiction writer living on the North Carolina coast. His work has appeared in Into the Void, The First Line, Flash Fiction Magazine, and many others. Three of his sports-themed flash fiction pieces were featured in the Winter 2021 edition of the Under Review. "SAFE" is for everyone who grudgingly transitions from young buck to wise elder, and is dedicated to Michelle Jones PhD, who is now among The Baseball Gods.