The Eephus

Vince Reighard

Center field can be a lonely place. Surrounded by an acre and a half of grass, most of the time you have no one to talk to, and nothing much to do, except plant your hands on your knees and try to look tough. 

I never had too much time to myself out there, though. Every few minutes, I’d hear Mr. Taylor, Cy’s dad, grumbling from behind the outfield fence. He watched most of our Little League games through binoculars from the parking lot because he was still technically banned from attending them in person. I don’t think he was supposed to be in the parking lot either, but he was the kind of person no one was too eager to push to the breaking point. 

Cy’s mom didn’t usually show up unless her son was pitching. On those days, she’d set up in a padded lawn chair directly behind home plate and drink gin and tonics discreetly (she thought) out of a green plastic water bottle. I couldn’t really see her behind the umpire, but I could hear her. Everyone could hear her, her voice growing steadily louder each inning, as she became more and more apt to call the game herself, the umpire’s “Ball tw—” intercepted, overpowered, and in any meaningful sense annulled by her own “strike three’.” 

Cy was usually too amped up to notice her much, I think. Actually, he never really seemed too embarrassed about his mom. His dad was another story. Maybe it was because his mom was the one who finally taught Cy his good curveball, the one with real bite to it. That sort of thing breeds loyalty. Plus, she really did call a good game, I have to say. 

Mr. Taylor didn’t like his wife to drink, especially not in public at Little League baseball games. He was on the school board then and thought it was bad for their “public image.” It didn’t seem to occur to him that watching games from parking lots with binoculars pressed to his face wasn’t particularly good for their image either. 

Everyone has their blind spots, and he had more than most. Between 1993 and 1999, he recorded every single Cleveland Indians game he couldn’t catch live. He wanted to be able to watch them later, “at his convenience," as he put it. And watch them he did. Every game, inning, out pitch. If he had to go pee with the team down seven runs in the eighth, he’d pause the tape before getting up, sending Mrs. Taylor, if she were nearby, into a rage. 

The VHS tapes, which he couldn’t bring himself to record over, were piled from floor to ceiling in the family board game closet in a monolithic black tower. You couldn’t have gotten to Monopoly if you tried. Our friend Rob referred to it as Mr. Taylor’s “stash” of “baseball porn," and it really did seem to bear some strange resemblance to the practice of some of the other dads—normal dads, perhaps—who hid old 1970s Playboys out in their garages. 

Mania takes on many forms. Sometimes I think it’s not so much a question of whether you’re an addict, but of what A little mania may even be necessary for getting through life. After all, the world is huge, motley, chaotic. It’s always changing. You can’t count on it.

A mania, an addiction, a fixation—whatever you want to call it—is our flailing attempt to find an antidote to all that sprawling, existential messiness. It allows us to focus our tiny human minds on something small—usually something we can hold in our hands—and turn to it for predictable, reliable comfort. And this can just as easily be a baseball as a bottle. It’s the grown-up version of an infant crying out for his binkie or stuffed bear. We don’t outgrow such things, it turns out. We just get access to better toys. 

I say all this to emphasize that considering who his parents were, it was a miracle how well-adjusted Cy turned out. He was one of those rare popular kids who didn’t really understand the rules of popularity and wanted nothing to do with its privileges. He was nice to everyone, not out of charity, but simply because having more friends made life more fun. 

In other respects, though, he caught his parents’ penchant for mania. I can still remember this one summer afternoon, back when we were in middle school, when I rode my bike over to the Little League fields across town. Cy was there, like he was most every day, throwing baseballs against the backstop over and over again. He’d probably been there since eight o’clock, as if it were an office. And in a very real sense, it was. He was trying to develop a “secret weapon pitch,” something really malevolent, and he’d gotten frustrated, because nothing he tried was coming out right. So he kept throwing harder and harder, trying to break through the difficulty as if it were a literal wall, and the only thing he had to knock it down with, brick by brick, was a bucketful of baseballs. Eventually, he opened up a blister on his hand, but he still didn’t stop—though I begged him to—until the baseballs were streaked with blood. 

Repetition is the foundation of excellence, but it’s also the essence of insanity. What does this mean? I have no idea. All I know is, by the time of our senior year, Cy had spent the past few seasons watching the other kids we played get bigger and stronger, while he kept his same narrow frame, no matter how hard he worked out in the offseason. 

He’d already hit whatever growth spurt he was going to have, evidently, so by the time the college recruiters started coming around, he found himself routinely passed over for kids who hadn’t put in the work, the loving, maniacal, brutal work that he had. The only offers he got were for partial scholarships at Division III schools. And all the while, he had to hear his dad subtly insinuate that this unfortunate circumstance was not only a “failure,” but a “failure of effort.” 

But none of that mattered to me, and eventually, none of it mattered to Cy either. What did matter, and what no one who was lucky enough to witness it first-hand would ever forget was the day Cy finally had his breakthrough, when his mania finally alchemized into genius. 

About a half hour before our first game senior year, he took me aside and told me he’d finally developed his secret pitch, his “magic pitch,” as he called it When I asked him if Hurst the varsity coach, knew about it Cy shook his head grinningly and said he wanted it to be a surprise. 

“Can I at least have a clue,” I asked, “so I know what to look for?” 

“You can’t miss it," he said, a little glint in his eye, “not unless you’re asleep or dead.” 

It was hard to believe a new pitch could be invented all the way into the twenty-first century. There were only four fingers and a thumb. You could only arrange them on a baseball so many ways. But if Cy said he’d invented a brand-new, magic pitch, I thought he probably had. He knew more about pitching when I first met him at the age of eight than I do to this day. His parents made sure of that. 

As Cy went through his warmup, I watched him as close as I could from out in center field. I was trying to keep an eye out for the magic pitch, wondering if I’d be able to recognize it from all the way out here. But as he faced Grafton’s lead-off hitter, nothing seemed all that different. His fastball had a little more jump than the last time I’d seen it, maybe. I wondered if that was all he meant. 

The second hitter stepped into the box. Cy threw a fastball just off the plate, but the batter swung and missed. With his next pitch, Cy reared back to his heels, seemingly with all his might, and let loose this big, looping, twenty-mile-an-hour beauty that seemed to scrape the bottom of the stratosphere. If you’d tried to map the ball’s trajectory, it would have looked like pair of tweezers stood on end. 

As soon as the ball left his hand, the crowd let out this awful gasp, assuming Cy had broken his arm mid-pitch. Then the catcher fired the ball back to Cy, who turned and raised his glove to me in salute. 

Back behind home plate, Cy’s mom just laughed and laughed. 

Behind the center field fence, meanwhile, Mr. Taylor asked me what the hell kind of pitch was that? He wasn’t banned from the games anymore, but watching them from the parking lot had become a habit, maybe even a superstition. 

“I have no idea,” I told him truthfully. 

“Do you think it’s a good idea?” 

“Probably not.” 

“Is it going to work?” 

“I think so.” 

The opposing players started laughing at first, heckling Cy, telling him the slow pitch softball league played on Sundays. But then they got mad, really mad, when they realized they weren’t going to tee off on it, like they assumed, but could barely touch it. 

One batter started to swing, stopped, and then swung again for the second time, missing badly. Hurst started shouting to the ump that it should count as two strikes, but the umpire just shrugged. Another batter swung so hard, he lost his balance and almost fell over. Finally, one of the hitters had a little better luck with it, but he still couldn’t put it in play to save his life. He just kept fouling off one magic pitch after another, before Cy finally finished him off with a fastball that seemed, by contrast, like it was travelling just a tick under the speed of sound, colliding against the catcher’s mitt in a leather-smacking sonic boom. 

At the time, the only person who knew Cy hadn’t invented anything—that he’d accidentally stumbled onto Rip Sewell’s absurd eephus pitch—was Hurst, the varsity coach. Hurst had been a diehard Pittsburgh Pirates fan growing up, so he knew all about Rip Sewell, a four-time All Star for the team, even though he played back in the 1940s. 

We found out later that when Cy first threw it, Hurst almost swallowed his three-pound wad of Big League Chew in one gulp. “My God,” he started coughing, recognizing it at once, “the eephus!” 

Over the course of his career, Sewell only gave up one home run off the pitch, and it was in an exhibition game, against Ted f'ng Williams, and Ted Williams even knew the pitch was coming because Sewell told him beforehand. And Williams still fouled the pitch off the first time Sewell threw it. The second time, Williams moved up so close to the pitcher’s mound that he was outside of the batter’s box, which meant that technically, he should have been called out. 

The pitch was absurd, but if you knew what you were doing with it, and didn’t mind looking absurd, practically unhittable. The trick, which Cy had finally mastered over the winter, was to figure out how to get the pitch to begin in his hand and end in the strike zone, like normal, while embarking in-between on a journey normally reserved for astronauts. 

Years later, he admitted to me that he’d been having an existential crisis that winter. Baseball, which up until then had been his life, was beginning to seem pointless. He was going through all the same motions, but increasingly, insidiously, for the wrong reasons. In short, he was burning out, and it was necessary for him to take drastic and defiant measures. 

When Cy was a little kid, pitching had been an art. As he got older, he slowly learned the craft, perfecting some pitches, dispensing with others, until it became a science. At that moment, he was a better, more effective pitcher than he’d ever been. But that was also the moment of ultimate danger for him, because it was the first time he’d begun to get bored. 

Mania had taken him just about as far as it could. He’d finally come to realize that baseball was absurd and arbitrary, just like life. But instead of ending it there, and moving on to golf, or fishing, or bourbon, or one of the other handy, pre-packaged manias, he made an additional leap, noble and courageous, and decided that baseball, like life, was lovable not just in spite of its silliness, but maybe even because of it. 

And so, early one January morning, his truck pulled into our high school parking lot, empty except for the janitor’s van. Hurst had given Cy a pair of keys to the gymnasium in case he wanted to get some work in over break.  

Flipping on the overhead lights, Cy did arm circles while they flickered and hummed to life. While no one was watching and snow fell softly outside, he had decided to elevate his craft one more time. From art to science to...I don’t know what, exactly, but something hazy and unprecedented, one-half art, one-half science, blended together in a way that approximated magic. 

Image © Filip Živaljić