He took them the way some people breathe, without seeming to decide to. He took the last slice of pizza at the team dinner at Pizza Hut even when somebody else's hand was already on it. He took the front seat of the bus. He took your batting practice cuts if he felt like he needed a few more, stepping into the cage while you were still walking toward it, and he would say, "You don't mind, right, buddy?" and he would already be swinging. He took your glove if his was wet. He took your sunflower seeds. He took the good spot on the bench, the one at the end by the water cooler where you could lean on the fence post. And he had taken things from Garrick Thiel, one way or another, since the summer they were both nine years old and on the same Little League team, the Hamilton Feed & Seed Cardinals, when Shug had taken Garrick's spot in the batting order and Garrick's red Cardinals cap and, by the end of that summer, something else that Garrick did not have a name for and would not for years.
That was the thing about the word "anymore." It only makes sense if there was a before. And there was a long, long before.
It happened on a Thursday, the eighteenth of April, against Fort Madison. Not the game itself, which was nothing, a nonconference scrimmage the coaches had scheduled to make up for a rainout, played on a field so soft that the ball died in the outfield grass like a bird hitting a window. It happened in the bottom of the fourth, with Keokuk down three to one, and Shug Kettleman had struck out twice already.
He had struck out twice in the game before that, too. And once in the game before that, swinging at a ball in the dirt, and he had walked back to the dugout so slowly that the Burlington catcher had said something to the umpire and the umpire had laughed.
Shug was in a slump. Everybody knew it. Nobody said it. You did not say that word around a hitter, any more than you said "no-hitter" around a pitcher in the seventh. But the numbers were the numbers, and the Gate City printed them every Tuesday and Friday in tiny agate type, and Shug Kettleman, who had hit .438 as a sophomore, was hitting .190 through the first nine games of his junior year. He had two hits in his last twenty-one at-bats. One of them was a bunt he had not meant to be a bunt.