Moonshot Landing Coming SooN

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Author’s Note

Center Field of Dreams

This story is about serendipity, not exposure. It’s about the connections we continue to make, and less about the ones that were already made. It’s about unfinished storylines that are left hanging across the planet like wandering satellites. Whether or not they have a destination, they have a path. This story is about two ballplayers who may share more than the same position and nickname.

I’m a writer of both fiction and nonfiction, so this may be the best way to present this version of reality. And… I love baseball. I love its history, and how it’s tied to the narrative of America. I’ve called out sick with Spring Fever and I’ve taken work leave during the Fall Classic. I love how its geometric field begins with a diamond, and ends with nebulous curves and localized variations. I love how my belief in ghosts is dependent upon the presence of a cornfield in the outfield.

I love playing the game and going to the ballpark to take it all in. I love the way it heightens all of the senses. I love the vivid greens of the outfield blades under a neon sun, chewing on the caramelized leather candy twists hanging off my glove, feeling the raspberry burns after sliding into second, and inhaling its incense of beer suds and hot dog water.

I love listening to the rhythms of the game, the snare drum snap catches, the rim shots of splintered pine, the hi-hat clap of a base hit, the bass hit thuds of home plate collisions, and the cymbal crashes of a curtain call applause. With that said, please… all rise.

Crackerjack

The Earth is an oblong spheroid of vast blue waves with pitches of grass and sand. The continental islands rose to the surface from the molten core after blasting through the mantle. A baseball is a sphere of vast white oceans with stitches of red islands, which rise above the surface before they are sewn back into the cotton mantle.

A baseball is also an oblong spheroid after it’s rocketed off the bat of Mickey Mantle. He alone is personally responsible for launching hundreds of them into our planetary orbit. Therefore, the calculation that there is only one lunar marble in our sky is inaccurate. Our memories of the American Pastime don’t fade, rather they remain vibrant while being passed down over generations, and retold in modernistic colors. So the image of a white and red-threaded beauty far above the horizon, and against the backdrop of a midnight Yankee blue, will hang there as if it was pinned into the fabric of space-time. (Mickey Mantle may also have known this to be true, as he featured a crescent moon on each of the Ms in his signature. Even his nickname, The Commerce Comet, twinkles like the space dust on an interstellar home run trajectory.)

Of the thousands of permanent satellites that have been belted off the bats of baseball’s elite, ____ have been cracked off the crackerjack bat of _________.

Wait a sec.

Who is _________ ?