He had. For the first time, he believed it too, all the way down to the tired arm and the dusty cleats.
Chapter 23: Bases Loaded Again
A week after Marietta, the Falcons played a team from Cedar Grove under lights, and the game came down to the seventh inning the way close games always seemed to do. The Falcons led by one run. The bases were loaded. There were two outs, and Davon Mitchell stood on the mound with the ball in his hand and the whole park watching.
He had been here before, in a way. Not in a real game like this, with a scoreboard and a crowd, but in his head, a hundred times, throwing against the cinder-block wall while the evening light faded. Only now the bases were real, and the runners were real, and the hitter at the plate was a broad-shouldered Cedar Grove boy who had already doubled twice that night.
Marcus Bell called time and walked out to the mound. He did not rush. He pushed his mask up and looked Davon in the eye.
"You remember the plan?" Marcus asked.
Davon nodded, but his mouth was dry. "Change-up away. Do not give him the fastball he wants."
"That is right," Marcus said. "And if you walk him, you walk him. A walk ties it, it does not lose it. Do not throw a pitch you are afraid of."
Marcus jogged back, and Davon stepped onto the rubber. He took the breath Beasley had taught him, long in through the nose, slow out, and felt his shoulders drop. The first pitch was a fastball, low, just off the corner. Ball one. The crowd groaned. Davon did not look at the crowd.
The second pitch was his change-up, and it dropped the way it was supposed to, but the hitter held back, watching it fall into Marcus's glove. Strike one. The Cedar Grove dugout shouted for the hitter to wait, to be patient, to take what came. Davon could hear them, and he tried to let the sound pass through him like wind through the fence.
He threw another fastball, this time inside, and the hitter fouled it straight back into the screen. One ball, two strikes. The count was in his favor, but the bases were still loaded, and one mistake would still change everything. Davon felt the old urge rise in him, the urge to throw harder, to overpower the moment, the way he used to throw against the wall until his arm burned.
Instead, he remembered what Beasley said after the Marietta game: trust the pitch that got you here. He nodded at Marcus's sign, wound up, and threw the change-up away from the hitter, soft and late and falling.
The hitter swung, and for a half-second Davon thought the ball would fly. It did not. It came off the bat weakly, a soft grounder toward second base, and the Falcons second baseman charged it, scooped it cleanly, and threw to first in one smooth motion. The umpire pumped his fist. Out. Game over.
The Falcons bench poured onto the field, and Davon stood on the mound for a moment, alone in the middle of it all, breathing hard. He had not struck out the side. He had not thrown three perfect pitches. He had gotten one good out, with help, and that was enough. It felt, strangely, like more.
Cody Sullivan reached him first, grinning. "You trusted it," he said. "That is the whole thing, right there."
Coach Callahan came next, and he did not make a speech. He just put a hand on Davon's shoulder and said, "Good pitching, son." The word son landed differently than it once would have. It did not sound like a joke anymore.
In the parking lot afterward, Maya Torres showed Davon the clip she had filmed, not of the final out, but of Marcus walking to the mound. "That is the part people miss," she said. "Everybody films the pitch. Nobody films the talk."
Davon watched it twice. Marcus, calm. Davon, listening. A team, working.
On the ride home, Rose asked him how it felt, and Davon thought before he answered, which was new for him. "It felt quiet," he said at last. "Even with everybody shouting. Inside, it was quiet."
Rose nodded, as if that was exactly the right answer. "That is what practice is for," she said. "So when the moment gets loud, you do not have to."
That night, Davon sat by his bedroom window with his notebook open, and he wrote down the sequence of the last at-bat, pitch by pitch, the way Delaney wrote in his notepad. Fastball low, ball. Change-up, strike. Fastball inside, foul. Change-up away, ground ball. He underlined the last line twice, not because it was perfect, but because it was his. Bases loaded, two outs, and he had trusted his pitch and his team. He closed the notebook, set his cleats by the door, and slept without dreaming about fences at all.