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  After six innings he'd thrown exactly fifty-four pitches. After seven, exactly sixty-three. After eight, exactly seventy-two. All strikes. All about as hittable as a rifle bullet.

  The crowd went by stages from amazement to hoarsely screaming delirium.

  When he took the mound at the top of the ninth, I was no longer able to sit. I could hardly breathe. Martinez was apoplectic beside me. He'd been screaming along with all the others. The wonder of the game had flensed him of his sports hack's veneer and left him to stand without disguise, as the fan he really was. As all of us who cover this sport have to be.

  I couldn't imagine what the hacks in the TV booths were saying, to their viewers, to one another, or to themselves. I couldn't imagine what I would have said in their place.

  We were witnessing a miracle, a new definition for "the perfect game." It was draining us of words, the stuff of our trade.

  In that time and place, Conrad Bearing had stripped us of our defenses. We jaded and cynical ones, too worldly wise to admit to our childlike devotion to a childish game, had been reduced to the same openmouthed state of awe a small boy feels in the presence of his hero, or a man feels at the discovery of his one true love.

  We knew he had perfection in him. We'd seen eight innings of it. We were desperate to see him end as he'd begun. He did not disappoint us.

  Three whizzers down the cock to Berglund. Three curves that seemed to swerve around the bat of Sant'Angelo. Two sinkers to Petrovich that looked like they'd dropped all the way to China.

  He saved his best for last.

  When he wound up, you could see him marshaling his forces for the pitch, a service that would ring all the bells in America. When he let fly, I half-expected his arm to catch fire.

  Petrovich swung...about half a second after the ball reached Wriston's glove.

  144 miles per hour.

  "Yerrrrr....out!"

  The crowd went mad.

  His teammates converged on him at a sprint. Before they could reach him, he held up a hand in the universally understood sign to halt. They did. The stands fell immediately silent.

  He stood there on the mound, scanned the stands end to end once again, and smiled: the supremely sunny smile from his All-Star appearance.

  "Thank you," he said, and walked off the mound toward the dugout.

  By the time Martinez and I got to the locker room, he was gone.

  ***

  Time warps the memory. Things once bright and clear grow dim and indistinct. We illuminate the high points and efface the drudgery and drear. The lucky ones among us retain their "signposts:" the events that mark their transitions and achievements, and gave color to their undertakings.

  I will never forget that last game. It would be the last game Conrad Bearing would ever pitch. He did not return for the following season. The Olympians' public relations office gave no explanation.

  I thought I understood it. By baseball standards, he was an old man. He'd had a season to eclipse every other season any pitcher had ever played. Likely it would never be surpassed. Why return? Why show the fans he'd thrilled so completely anything less than that pinnacle of performance? It was obvious he didn't care about the money. He was letting us remember him at his peak.

  It was several years before I discovered how wrong I was.

  His departure from the game was as sharp as his arrival. Not only didn't he turn up on anyone's roster; he didn't turn up anywhere. No sportscasting billet; no endorsements; no appearances at charity events. No one had an inkling of where he'd gone or what he was doing. Conrad Bearing had absented himself completely from the public eye.

  When I stumbled into him in a department store in Seattle, it took me a moment to recognize him for who he was.

  I wasn't at my sharpest. I was sorting through flannel shirts and thinking about the mass of yard chores I'd been putting off all spring. He was passing behind me when an old woman lurched into him and knocked him into me. He was steadying her on her feet when I turned and registered his face.

  "My God!" I said.

  His eyes caught mine, he smiled meaninglessly, and tried to pass on. I grabbed him by the arm -- that incredible baseball machine -- and held him there.

  "Where have you been?" I murmured.

  He essayed another meaningless smile. "Excuse me? I think you might have mistaken me for someone else." He tried to pull away. I didn't let him.

  "Oh, I don't think so, Conrad." I pitched the name so that only he would hear it. "I still want that interview, you know. And don't try to give me the slip or I'll call out your name, here and now."

  "It's George," he hissed. "George Matulovich. Now let go!"

  I shook my head. "Maybe that's what it is now. Your car or mine?"

  He tried to stare me down, but I wasn't about to relent. I kept my grip on him and waited. Presently he conceded defeat.

  "All right. Yours."

  That must have been hard.

  ***

  "What do you do now?"

  "Not much. Until last year, I was a mailman."

  "So why did you retire?"

  "I got bored with delivering mail."

  "No, from baseball!"

  "I always wanted to be a mailman, and I didn't want to lose my last chance."

  "Come on!"

  He shrugged. "Don't you have a theory?"

  I scanned his living room. It was as ordinary a place as I've ever been. Moderately used mid-grade sofa, recliner, and tables. Two bookcases filled with popular novels in paperback, plus two portrait photos of a handsome older woman. A small television propped on a homebuilt redwood stand. It was a modest house, in a modest rural neighborhood well removed from the clamor of city life. A retired mailman's house.

  "At first," I said, "I figured it was that you wanted to go out at your peak. That would have been natural, so I believed it for a while. But then I realized that it would have been the only natural thing about you. So no, I don't. Would you tell me, please?"

  He stared at me in silence for a long interval.

  "George," I said, the name strangely ill-fitting in my mouth, "I'm as far out of the game as you are, now. I don't have a byline any more." I spread my hands. "No steno pad. No tape recorder. I don't want to sell you to anyone. I just want to know."

  He rose from his recliner and paced the little room, hands in his jeans pockets.

  "Who would believe me anyway?" I said.

  "It's not who would believe you," he said. "It's whether I can get you to believe me."

  I started to protest, thought better of it. If there'd ever been a figure to challenge credulity, on the field or off, it was he.

  He stopped before one of the bookcases and caressed the photo it bore.

  "Your wife?"

  He nodded without looking at me. "She passed away six years ago."

  I counted backwards. "Right after...your season?"

  Another nod.

  "Then you retired to be with her?"

  "You could say that." He closed his eyes. There were tears at the corners. Presently he opened them and returned to his seat. I inched forward on mine.

  "Doris was...very sick when I joined the Olympians. Pancreatic cancer, one of the worst forms. She had very little chance to live, and all of it depended on a treatment we couldn't afford. I had to raise a lot of cash very fast, and baseball was the only legal way to do it."

  What?

  "Are you telling me," I said slowly, "that you did it for the money?"

  He frowned. "Well, of course! Why else would anyone play pro baseball?"

  "Uh, never mind. But...you took the minimum! You never haggled, never tried to renegotiate, never threatened to, uh, strike. If it was all about money, why didn't you press your advantage?"

  He looked at me as if I'd started babbling in tongues. "I made what we needed. We didn't need more. Why should I have demanded more?"

  "But..." I fell silent. There are some things y
ou don't probe. It took me two divorces and a catastrophic career collapse to learn it, but learn it I had.

  It took me a moment to realize that I hadn't asked about what I'd always wanted to know. He'd startled the question right out of me with his revelation about money.

  "George...the why makes sense, but I have to know about the how." He grimaced. I could see him casting about for a credible lie. I held up a hand. "No evasions, now. No one else will hear."

  He hunched forward, dropped his eyes to the floor, and sat silent for a long interval. Finally, he rose and headed for the back door.

  "Come with me."

  ***

  He had a spacious back yard, well maintained. It sported a large barn and was surrounded on three sides by a split-rail fence. Along one run of the fence were propped a quartet of sheet-steel plates. The first three were irregularly perforated with ragged circular holes about a baseball's size. The fourth was unmarked.

  "I used to stand over there," he said, pointing to the opposite run of the fence, "and throw baseballs at plates just like those until I could exactly control which hole it would go through. I did it for hours at a time, day after day, until it was almost a bore. Then I started experimenting with curves, screwballs, and sinkers. I got so I could make the ball do whatever I pleased, and still make it go through whichever hole I chose. It was mostly a way of passing the time, but I never completely outgrew it."

  I squinted at the plates. "What made these holes?"

  He shrugged. "A baseball."

  "What? Are you telling me --"

  "Want to see me do it right now?" He had a baseball in his hand.

  "Uh, no.“

  The far fence was about a hundred fifty feet away.

  "How old were you when you...developed your skills?"

  "About ten." He smiled. "I've always loved baseball. The sport, not the professionalized entertainment spectacle and scandal factory."

  "And you kept on at that for twenty-seven years, until your wife's illness made you decide to cash in?"

  He pursed his lips and turned away.

  A retired mailman.

  "George, how old are you?"

  He hesitated. "I'll be sixty next month."

  "You were...fifty-three the year you played for the Olympians?"

  "Fifty-four, actually."

  I was six years his junior.

  "What's the matter, son?" He grinned. "Do you think I needed more seasoning?"

  I barked a laugh, halfway between absurdity and pain.

  I'd have given everything I've ever had and everything I've ever been to play even one game in the majors. I'd never gotten beyond single-A, and I knew early on that I never would. He'd disdained it for fifty years, and turned his back on it once it had served his need.

  He sensed my anguish and laid a hand on my shoulder.

  "You're thinking I wasted something priceless, something you'd have given your soul to have," he said gently. "But think about that last game, the one where I let it all out. Suppose you were a freak like me. Suppose you could have done that, not once, but every game you played, once every four days, even into your sixties. What would that have done to you? What would it have done to the sport you love?"

  I could not reply. He nodded and squeezed my shoulder.

  "A sport like baseball is only worth playing if there's a rough equality among the players. Oh, some will always be better than others, no denying it. But for one player to be an order of magnitude better than all the rest, able to have his way with them whenever he pleases, would belittle the sport itself. Whenever he was on the diamond, it would be no fun at all, even for him."

  "Are you saying it was no fun for you? All that ability and you didn't even enjoy it?"

  His grin was rueful. "Very little, son. Until the very last game I had to hold myself in check, as much as morally possible. Except for the All-Star Game, of course."

  "So you never gave the team your best, then?"

  His eyebrows rose. "What I gave the Olympians won them forty-one of the sixty-five games they did win. What point would there have been in humiliating the rest of the league even further?"

  "But that last game..." I misted up at the memory. He smiled.

  "Yes, that day I let it all out. I had to know just how good I could have been. I told myself the sport wouldn't suffer too much from that one indulgence. Was I wrong?"

  "No."

  He hefted the baseball, loped to the opposite end of his yard, and tossed it at me. I caught it automatically, started to throw it back, and stopped.

  "You do love the game, don't you?" I called.

  He nodded. "Almost as much as I loved Doris. About as much as you. You just going to stand there, or are you going to throw that thing?"

  We played catch for the rest of the afternoon.

  ====

  Francis W. Porretto is an engineer, fictioneer, and commentator. He operates the Eternity Road Website (https://eternityroad.info), a hotbed of pro-freedom, pro-American, pro-Christian sentiment, where he and his Esteemed Co-Conspirators hold forth on every topic under the Sun. You can email him at [email protected]. Thank you for taking an interest in his fiction.