“You’re nuts,” I say. “They don’t want to walk the leadoff man in a tie game in the last inning. They’ll pitch to him.”

Jack digs into the batter’s box and takes his familiar wide, slightly open stance. He’s a big kid, six feet two inches and a rock- hard two hundred ten pounds. He has a strong jaw and a prominent, dimpled chin- a “good baseball face,” as the old-time scouts would say. He’s crowding the plate as he always does, daring the pitcher to throw him something inside.

The first pitch is a fastball, and it hits Jack between the eyes before he can get out of the way. I hear the awful thud of the baseball striking his head all the way from the outfield. Jack’s helmet flies off. He takes a step backward but doesn’t go down, and then starts staggering slowly toward first base. The umpire, as stunned as everyone else, jogs along beside him, trying to get him to stop. I sprint down the fence line toward the gate, watching Jack as his coaches scramble out of the dugout to his side. By the time he gets to first base, I can see blood pouring from his nose.

I make my way through the silent crowd and onto the field. Jack’s coaches have taken him into the dugout and sat him on the bench. One of them is holding a white towel over Jack’s face. I see immediately that the towel is already stained a deep red. The coaches step back as I approach.

“They did it on purpose,” the head coach, a thirty-year-old named Bill Dickson, says. “They haven’t come close to hitting anyone else.”

I bend over Jack and gently remove the towel. His head is leaned back, his mouth open, and he’s staring at the dugout roof. The area around both of his eyes is already swelling, and there’s a deep, nasty gash just above the bridge of his nose. He’s bleeding from the cut and from both nostrils.

I put the towel back over the wound.

“Jack, can you hear me?”