Attention, Please. Now
by Matthew Pitt

Graffiti
by Komal Patel

Shocking, Surprising Snodgrass
by Jay Rogoff

Attention, Please. Now
    Matthew Pitt

You are familiar with his stance. His stroke. The way he stepped out of the batter’s box when his team ailed for runs, stepped out and just stood still, arms crossed, until the ump urged him back. He’d return to home plate, all right, but only after ignoring repeated warnings. He took no practice cuts and made no adjustments, unless you count that hard glare he’d direct toward the stands. Like he expected the scoreboard to apologize. More than once you probably brought your mitt along to the game, dreaming of catching one of his screaming line drives. God knows he tried to make your dream come true. The guy was a baseball repellant. For so many hard-throwing pitchers it was a familiar failure: Throw Mr. Spalding into his wheelhouse, then say farewell—108 red stitches instantly soaring. The staggering career numbers of Steve Sprissel are done up in a bow for the Cooperstown Hall of Fame: .308, 485, 1,441. These are statistics that can retrieve discarded childhood memories of Little League and freshly cut backyard lawns. Not one of those 485 homeruns came cheap, either. Sprissel didn’t get cheated on a single swing. Thanks to that approach, some sportswriters believe he did get cheated out of some of his career. If Sprissel had ever learned to choke up, he might’ve not torn that tendon during his sixth season or wrenched that bum shoulder the year he turned thirty-nine, the last year he could see his way clear to play.
    By the end of his last season—which he mostly spent in Triple-A and which I was there to chronicle—Sprissel was so gimpy, our organist had time to play the entire opening theme from M.A.S.H. during his labored shuffle from on-deck circle to batter’s box. That’s when I realized the inevitable was closing in. Sprissel must’ve known, too, only he wasn’t about to let his dignity get leeched by some stilted farewell tour, receiving rocking chairs in Gulfport or bronzed cowboy boots in Tupelo. But Sprissel deserved to be heralded in some way. And as the public address announcer for the Spartanburg Stags, I was the one with the means. The one with the loudspeaker. But management had warned me not to tout Sprissel’s major league feats during his at bats. And they nixed the video crew’s plan of showing highlight reels of his best hits in between innings.
    None of us in the publicity department could fathom why Sprissel’s tour with the Stags was being played down. Not that we knew what Sprissel was doing in the minors in the first place, taking hacks with hacks. We’d heard that some of Steve’s family—his mamma, and a sibling maybe—lived just a few towns over from Spartanburg. But being closer to kin hardly seemed to me like grounds for giving up the major leagues.

Continued in volume 42, issue 4, autumn 2006