watched them from the bullpen with his mask pushed up on his head and finally said, to nobody in particular, "This is the weirdest season of my life," and Ty Vosberg said, "Yeah, but we're winning," and they were. Keokuk won six of their next eight. Garrick moved up to second in the batting order. He stayed in right field.
Shug's average did not jump. That would have been a movie, and it was not a movie. It crept. A walk here. A hard grounder that the shortstop had to dive for. A double down the line against Mount Pleasant that would have been a home run on a drier day. By the middle of May he was at .241, which was what Garrick had hit the whole year before, and Garrick pointed this out on the carpet square one night and Shug laughed so hard he had to sit down on the basement steps.
But .241 was not .300. And Vern Kettleman sat in the third row with his arms folded and his green notebook on his knee, and he wrote it all down.
The game against Burlington was the last Saturday in May. It was the last conference game of the year and it was at home, and it mattered, because Burlington was Burlington, bigger and richer and forty miles up the river, and Keokuk had not beaten them on that field since 1979. The water was gone from the left-field corner by then. The grass had come in thick and green and the infield dirt was raked and lined, and there were three hundred people in the bleachers and along the fence and sitting on the hoods of their cars out past the outfield, which for Keokuk was practically Wrigley Field.
Ruthann Thiel was there. She had traded a shift at the plant with a woman named Bets who owed her one, and she sat in the top row of the bleachers along the first-base line in her good blue sweater with a thermos of coffee and a seat cushion, and she did not cheer, exactly, but she leaned forward every time Garrick came up.
Berniece Kettleman was there too. She almost never came. She sat at the end of the third row, a few feet down from her husband, in a tan raincoat though it was not raining, and Garrick noticed her from right field