The Tournament I Called Behind the Plate

Crystal had put down the deposit in April and told me, over the phone, flat as a board, that I would be covering half.

I had told her I would. I meant it. I just did not have four hundred and fifty dollars sitting in an account in May, and she knew it, and instead of waiting two weeks for me to get it together she mailed the bill to my mother.

That was Crystal. It was never only about the money. It was about making sure everybody knew the money was my failing.

I sat in my truck at the lumber yard that afternoon with the window down and went through my accounts on my phone one more time, hoping a number had changed since the last time I looked.

Nothing had changed. I had sixty-two dollars in checking and a payday nine days out, and that payday was already spent before it landed.

I thought about asking for a loan. My buddy Dale would have floated me the four fifty without blinking.

But a man gets tired of borrowing, and I had borrowed off Dale twice already that year, and there is only so many times you can sit across a man’s kitchen table with your hat in your hand before something between you gets bent. I did not want to bend it.

The Blue Shirt

I did not sleep much that Tuesday night. I lay in the dark doing the math I had done a hundred times, and the math did not change just because I wanted it to.

Then I thought about Earl Dietrich.

Earl runs the umpire association for the youth leagues all over the middle of the county.

I knew him a little from my own playing days, and I knew his umpires got paid, because my buddy Dale did it a couple summers and bought a bass boat motor with it. I called Earl on my lunch the next day.

“You still short umpires on Saturdays?” I asked him.

“Ross, I am short umpires every Saturday God sends,” Earl said. “You thinking about it?”

“I am thinking about it hard,” I said.

He told me the deal. I would need to take the online rules certification, two evenings of it, and pass a test.

I would need my own gear, which I could buy used from a guy Earl knew who had quit.

Plate games paid forty-five dollars. Base games paid thirty-five. On a good Saturday with pool play and bracket games, a man could work three or four games, sometimes five if he could stand the heat.