It’s the top of the Ninth, the home team is four runs down, and the playoffs were a mathematical impossibility 10 weeks ago. Among the few spectators still in the stands are a pair of stoners with season tickets who have now taken to heckling their own centerfielder.

Joe, who had hoped to give his kids an experience like he’d had growing up, first realized that this ballpark outing might be a mistake when he easily found parking on the first level. Thankfully, the kids had seemed oblivious to the desolation as they walked to their loge.

The stoners are an annoyance, but Joe is glad that anyone at all is still in the stands by the ninth. The heckling has been completely family friendly since one remark had prompted Joe, who has the forearms of a gorilla, to glance back and rest one across his daughter’s chair-back.

***

“I’ll be in Houston next year”, thinks the fielder, “and the fans here deliberately hurt my feelings.” But his body is hard-wired for baseball, and long before the signal arrives from his neocortex, he is already in the air.

***

On the ride home, the boy turns the ball in his hands. In years to come, he will be successful, but at no time will he own an object for which he would trade it.

Joe had been gratified to see both stoners buying number 8 jerseys before leaving the park. “Best loss ever”, he says to his kids, who will remain giddy with excitement for days. Just then his boy asks a question which has been vexing him since the seventh inning.

“Did the centerfielder’s mom really owe that man 5 dollars?”