She looked at the hitter, a powerfully built 18-year-old named Deshawn Merritt from a program in Georgia, nationally ranked, already being discussed in the same early draft conversations Ethan occupied. He was watching her from the batter's box with the calm, measuring attention of someone who had done his homework. He wasn't smiling. He wasn't dismissive. He was simply there, ready, organized.
This was not Ethan in a practice showdown. This was something different. She knew that. She had known it before she walked in from the bullpen. It didn't change what she had to do.
She went into her wind up. The stadium for just a moment got quiet in the particular way it does when something that has been anticipated for a long time is finally actually happening. And Aaliyah Brooks threw the first pitch. The first pitch was a fast ball and Deshawn Merritt didn't miss it by much. That was the thing about facing someone at this level.
The margin between a clean swing and a foul tip was measuring fractions of the naked I couldn't reliably track. Deshawn got the barrel on it, just barely, and the ball skip fouled down the third baseline with a sharp crack that sent a murmur through the crowd. Not a miss, not a hit, something in between, which was its own kind of message. He stepped out of the box. He took one breath, controlled, deliberate, and stepped back in from the dugout.
The broadcast field microphone picked up something that would be replayed in the highlights later. Deshawn saying quietly and without hostility. You're the girl from the video, right? Aaliyah didn't answer. She was already reading him.
The way his weight sat on his back foot, the slight opening in his front shoulder, the quality of attention in his eyes. He wasn't underestimating her. She'd registered that immediately. He'd come to this atbat with information. He'd watch the clip, broken down what she'd thrown, and arrive at the plate with a working theory about what she was going to do.
That was both more and less dangerous than someone who came in blind. More dangerous because he was prepared. Less dangerous because a theory was still a theory, and theories could be broken. The crowd was loud in a sustained, pressured way. Not the sharp bursts of crowd noise that came with action, but the continuous undertone of 12,000 people paying very close attention.
The broadcast cameras had closed in. On a scoreboard screen, Aaliyah could see the pitch count graphic had already populated with her name. She turned the ball at her glove and for just a moment, one breath's worth of a moment, felt something she hadn't felt on the practice field. It came as an image. Her father on a mound she'd only seen in photographs. a minor league parked somewhere in the south.
The stand behind him half empty. His face in that particular expression she recognized from the ones he made when things were hard and he was choosing not to show it. She knew the story around that photograph without being told it directly. The year it was taken was the year things had started to fall apart for him. He'd pitched brilliantly that season.
None of it had mattered in the way it should have. The image came and went in the space of a single breath. She let it. Then she looked at the catcher's setup low and away and shook her head once almost imperceptibly. The catcher adjusted.
She shook her head again. He reset. She wanted the pitch she wanted, not the one that fit the standard sequence. That was what her father had written about in the notebook's back pages. The courage of making the pitch that was actually correct rather than the one that felt safe.
The one that your read of the hitter told you to throw. Not the one that the situation told you to default to. From the dugout, Coach Riley watched her shake off the catcher twice. He touched his chest, two fingers, the signal they developed across three weeks of early morning sessions. Trust your read.
Not the plan. You read. She went in her wind up. The pitch was a change up. Same arm speed as the fast ball she'd thrown first.
The same delivery. Nothing in the mechanics to advertise what was coming. It came in 8 mph slower than the fast ball and broke slightly down and in. The Shan swing was early in underneath it. Not by much, but clearly the ball caught the bottom of the zone and the umpire's hand came out.