The rain ceased two hours before dawn, leaving the Bottoms encased in a thick, suffocating mantle of river fog. The moisture hung in suspension, turning the yellow halos of the streetlamps into blurry, spectral lanterns. The alleyway behind the cottage was completely dark when Wesley stepped onto the back porch at precisely five o’clock.
He wore his faded denim pants, the right knee still torn, and a sleeveless white undershirt that revealed the long, lean musculature of his torso. In his left hand, he held the newly mended glove; in his right, he carried three scuffed baseballs inside an old canvas drawstring bag.
The wooden crate set against the rear fence was damp from the storm. In the quiet gloom of the predawn, the wood appeared almost black. Wesley walked fifteen paces away from the crate, turned, and dragged the heel of his shoe across the packed clay, creating a distinct line in the earth. Sixty feet, six inches. He did not need a measuring tape; his stride had been calibrated against that distance since he was seven years old.
He did not immediately throw.
Wesley set his balls on the ground and began his morning routine. It was a regimen that had not been designed by modern sports performance clinics, but passed down orally through three generations of pitchers who could never afford a gym membership.
He dropped into a deep squat, balancing on the balls of his bare feet, holding his hands behind his head for three full minutes to stretch the hip flexors and open the pelvic girdle. Then, he stood and began swinging his right arm in long, slow, pendular circles—ten clockwise, ten counter-clockwise—letting the weight of gravity draw the humerus bone gently out of the shoulder socket, lengthening the internal rotator cuff without tension.
Next came the fingers. Wesley picked up a heavy, smooth river stone the size of a goose egg, rolling it across the backs of his knuckles, flipping it between his index and middle fingers with a sharp, flicking motion that built unyielding tendon strength through the forearm flexors.
By five-thirty, the first gray light of morning began to bleed through the fog. The freight train down on the levee blew its low, mournful horn, signaling the shift change at the industrial yard.
Wesley picked up the first baseball.
He stepped onto his baseline, placed his right heel firmly on the clay, and looked at the crate. Marked on the face of the wood was a rectangle drawn with a piece of white construction chalk—seventeen inches wide, twenty-four inches tall. The strike zone. Inside that rectangle, at the exact bottom-right corner, was a faded red bottle cap hammered into the grain with a roofing nail.
Wesley did not use a windup. He worked exclusively from the stretch, knowing that in real games, runners on base were where weak pitchers fell apart.
His left leg rose smoothly. His core tightened like a coiled steel spring. When his front foot came down, his arm snapped forward through the foggy air with a dry, whip-like crack.
THUMP.
The ball struck the pine crate directly over the bottle cap, the sound echoing down the narrow alley like a gunshot. The damp wood groaned under the concussive energy, sending a spray of fine water droplets into the air. The ball bounced cleanly back toward the baseline, rolling through the red clay to stop four feet from Wesley’s toes.
He did not retrieve it. He took the second ball from the bag.
This time, his target was the top-left corner, where another nail marked the high-and-tight zone for a right-handed batter.
THUMP.
Again, dead center on the nail head.
For ninety minutes, as the sun broke through the river mist and the heat began to rise from the mud, Wesley threw. He threw fastballs with seams oriented horizontally to produce lateral run; he threw changeups gripped deep in the palm with three fingers tucked beneath to kill the forward rotation; and he threw the brutal, tendon-straining knuckle-forkball that his grandfather had refined on the Alabama red dirt sixty years prior.
Every pitch had a specific acoustic footprint. The fastball hit the crate with a sharp, high-pitched CRACK; the changeup arrived with a heavy, muffled THUD; and the forkball struck with an erratic, double-tap CLACK-BAM as its late, tumbling dive caught the lower lip of the wood before driving directly into the dirt.
By seven o’clock, Wesley was drenched in sweat. His undershirt was plastered to his ribs, his knuckles were stained with red clay, and his breath came in steady, controlled bursts. His arm did not ache; it buzzed with a clean, hot vibration that extended from the tips of his fingers down through the latissimus dorsi muscles of his back.
"You're dropping your elbow an eighth of an inch on the third release," a voice called out from the side gate.
Wesley stopped mid-motion, the ball held firmly behind his ear.
Standing by the rusted iron latch was Otis, the elderly groundskeeper from Riverside Academy. The old man wore his clean Sunday trousers, a faded denim jacket, and carried a round, five-gallon plastic bucket filled to the brim with official, brand-new league baseballs—bright white leather, raised crimson seams, stamped with the golden seal of the State Athletic Association.
Wesley slowly lowered his arm, stepping off the line. "Mr. Otis? What are you doing down here?"
Otis pushed the gate open, his heavy work boots crunching softly on the clay. He set the bucket down between them, taking off his mesh cap to wipe his bald crown with a clean red handkerchief.
"I don't work for Harrison Vance on the weekends," Otis said, his dark eyes scanning the pulverized surface of the pine crate with quiet approval. "I work for the game. And the game told me that an arm like yours shouldn't be throwing forty-year-old street balls that have lost three ounces of weight from sitting in the mud."
Otis reached into the bucket, pulled out a pristine white baseball, and tossed it to Wesley.
Wesley caught it with his bare right hand. The difference was staggering. The leather was supple, grippy with natural oils, and the red cotton seams were tall and sharp, biting firmly into the calloused pads of his index and middle fingers.
"That's a regulation five-ounce pill," Otis said, leaning his hands on his knees as he settled onto an upturned five-gallon bucket. "You're heading to Charlotte next week with Arthur Vance. Don't look at me like that—Arthur stopped by my shed yesterday afternoon before he drove down here. He told me the plan."
"Is it true?" Wesley asked, his fingers unconsciously exploring the raised seams of the new ball. "About Julian Croft?"
Otis’s expression hardened, his mouth setting into a thin, grim line.
"Julian Croft is Harrison’s crown jewel," Otis said. "Son of a state senator. Throws eighty-eight from the left side with a decent sweeping slider. Harrison’s spent three years hiding that boy from national competition, hand-picking his innings, setting him up for a top-twenty draft projection. If Julian gets that showcase to himself in Charlotte, Harrison gets a half-million-dollar bonus written into his academy directorship contract."
Otis pointed a long, calloused finger at the white chalk square on the wooden crate.
"Arthur’s bringing you in as the wild card," Otis continued. "The kid from the shadows. The boy with no high school, no travel team, and no paper trail. When you step out of that bullpen, those scouts are gonna think you're a sideshow. Harrison’s gonna try to have you disqualified before you even touch the rubber."
Otis leaned forward, his eyes burning with an intense, quiet fire.
"So we ain't just practicing accuracy today, son," Otis said, tapping his temple. "We’re practicing cruelty. We're gonna teach you how to read a hitter’s hips before his bat even leaves his shoulder. We're gonna make sure that when you throw that white pill, those boys don't just miss—they quit. Now take your marks. Give me twenty four-seamers at the knees, and don't you dare touch the dirt."
Wesley looked down at the white ball, then across at the old man sitting behind the baseline. Without a word, he turned, stepped his heel against the line, and brought the ball up to his chest.