Now Batting for Holland My catcher was an embassy staffer from Philadelphia named John Dwight. (If you’re out there buddy give me a shout.) Anyhow, John and I had basically two signals; one finger for a fastball and two for a curve. Anything more would have been ludicrous since the Dutch seldom made contact with the ball anyhow. We were playing a team whose Indonesian ringers showed up en masse. That meant 2/3 of their lineup were pretty good ballplayers who gave a better account of themselves than usual. But the Indonesian players introduced something new to the Dutch that day: trash talk. It turns out that Dutch and Indonesian English vocabularies are equally expansive. So while they were anxious to share their capacity for “chatter” their catalog of English insults ran a bit thin. The best they could come up with to unnerve me was to start calling me “Fastman!” (Their exclamation point, not mine.) John and I tried to play baseball with our shoulders shaking to avoid letting the Dutch know that their catcalls were more amusing than stressful. We didn’t want to discourage them, it’s a part of the game after all. So for eight innings I suffered the humility of hearing, in very broken English, “Hey there Mister Fastman! Whatchu gonna do now, huh?” I guess asking me what-I-was-gonna-do-now was designed to confuse me because both sides pretty much knew what I was going to do. I was going to strike out the side. Predictably, the game grew out of their reach. John came trotting out in the eigth inning and asked if I didn’t think it would be fun to throw a few knuckleballs. Now those of you who haven’t played baseball or who don’t know what a knuckleball does may have experienced a similar effect if you’ve played ping pong. Sometimes when someone slams a ping pong ball directly at you it “buffets” against the air and dances wildly. That is caused when the ball does not rotate. A knuckleball works on the same premise. I’d like to be able to say that John had to convince me to break out the knuckleball. But I’d decided by then that I didn’t like being called “Fastman!”, even though it was more of a tribute to my pitching than an insult. I decided to take umbrage on the grounds that THEY didn’t know that. So John trotted back behind the plate and the Dutch umpire settled over his shoulder. The batter dug in and someone had told him to try sneering at me. It nearly worked. It was so difficult to avoid giggling that I nearly balked. But I contained myself, tucked my index finger behind the ball and launched the knuckler. Time stood still. When the baseball began to dance the batter’s eyes grew as large as cheesewheels. He didn’t just back out of the batters box, he left skid marks. I think he screamed. The umpire, equally terrorized, chose retreat in the opposite direction. I doubted John later when he swore that the sudden collapse of the vacuum created by the umpire’s hasty exit created an audible thunderclap. In any case, by the time the ball arrived, John was alone at home plate. The batter was at least ten feet away in one direction and the umpire had gone that far in the other. Everybody froze including John who remained crouched like a statue, holding the ball in his glove, waiting for the call. The umpire looked at me strangely, convinced I’d done something dark. Before airing his suspicions he walked calmly back behind John and leaned forward to examine the relative position of the ball to home plate. Completing his calculations he leaned back and bellowed at the top of his lungs “STRIKE ONE!” A full 30 seconds had passed since the ball had crossed the plate. John and I decided it would be pointless to unleash anymore knuckleballs on the Dutch. After that first one the batters were so afraid I would throw another they tended to swing wildly at the first three pitches and sit down again. They kept half-heartedly calling me “Fastman” but the exclamation point had disappeared. Some might think we were taking unfair advantage of the Dutch by beating them so soundly. Not so. They’d have known and been insulted if we had sandbagged them....and when rugby season came around, rest assured they got even. But that’s another column.