Page 112 of The Fall Classic

He doesn’t buy it—I can see it in how his eyes narrow—but he doesn’t push, either, not with an inning still live. “You ever had a ligament tear? Elbow, forearm, anything?”

“No, never,” I tell him. Knuckleballers don’t usually blow stuff out the way everybody else does. The pitch causes less stress on the arm than most pitches, which explains why you can still see guys throwing knuckleballs into their forties.

“All right,” Joe says. “But we’ll have somebody look at it tonight to be safe.”

I nod and watch the rest of the inning from the bench next to Lucas, but underneath the cheering, there’s a low, familiar hum of dread and the spiraling feeling of a whirlpool trying to pull me down.

***

The game’s still going when I get pulled by the team doctor into the training room, where the head athletic trainer and team doctor are already waiting. The doctor has me sit on the table, presses his fingers into my forearm, and asks me to rate the pain one to ten.

“Two, maybe three?”

“Make a fist. Now straighten your fingers against me.”

I push against his hand, and something pulls along the back of my forearm, down toward my wrist. Not sharp. More like a tight rubber band being stretched too far.

“Again.”

I do it, and the same spot tugs.

He bends my elbow and has me press two fingers against the side of my forehead. “Thinker’s test,” he says.

I do what he asks. Nothing.

Then he takes my hand and pulls my thumb backward with my elbow bent past ninety degrees, putting a stretch through the inside of my elbow.

“What’s that for?”

“Ruling things out.”

Enough said. I know exactly what gets ruled out when a pitcher’s forearm goes, and my brain’s already sprinting ahead, wondering if that was the pitch that ends everything or only the beginning of the end⁠—

Stop. You don’t know anything yet. Nobody in this room knows anything yet.

“Any numbness in your fingers? Tingling?”

“No.”

“Tightness?”

“Yeah. It’s tight along the back of my forearm, into my wrist and knuckles.”

He presses his fingers into the muscle again, then lets go.

“Good. Based on the exam, I think we’re looking at a low-grade extensor digitorum strain rather than a ligament injury.”

I exhale loudly in relief.

“But I’m not guessing past that,” he adds. “We’ll image it in the morning and make sure we know exactly what we’re dealing with.”

I nod and start doing the math on what this could mean while the pitching coach is telling me we’ll look at tape tomorrow and see if we can figure out what went wrong.

Then he goes back to the game, leaving me alone in the training room with the hum of the ice machine in the corner and a whiteboard that lists another player’s PT schedule.

I want to call Georgie.

I hop off the table and go straight into the locker room. I get as far as pulling up her name before I stop myself. What am I even going to say? Hey, something might be wrong with my arm, we won’t know until tomorrow, so could you spend all night too worried to sleep the same way I will?