Читать книгу Rage. The Legend of "Baseball Bill" Denehy онлайн

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I thought, Here it comes. See if you can hit it. You can’t fucking touch it.

I don’t know if I was hyped up because I knew Carl Hubbell was coming to see me or what, but I just had an exceptional fastball that day, and I had it throughout the entire game. I was throwing just as hard in the ninth inning as I was in the first.

I thought, Take a deep breath, because here it comes, baby.

After the game I was on a high, waiting to hear what Carl Hubbell had to say about my performance. I waited.

Carl Hubbell never showed up. I was crushed. I felt let down like the cast in the movie Waiting for Guffman. I later heard from another scout that Hubbell hadn’t made it to the game that day because he was playing golf.

My success against Rockville wasn’t a fluke. In a game against Niantic, the score was 0–0 for fifteen innings. We won on a squeeze bunt in the top of the fifteenth.

In the American Legion tournament, my Middletown team lost the opener and we had to start from the loser’s bracket. I think we would have won if I had pitched the opener. We played Rockville in game two, and in that game I struck out fourteen of the eighteen batters I faced.