Kid Who Batted 1.000

One Des Moines, Iowa-April 23 It was an achingly beautiful day, the sky so blue you wanted to mount it in a ring and wear it on your finger. The air was tuned to such a fine temperature you weren't even aware of it, and you could practically taste the sunlight syruping itself onto the empty seats. A phantom breeze swirled through the infield as though it had just knocked one out of the park and was taking a triumphant victory lap around the bases, shaking hands with the ghosts of storied giants as it eddied its way home. It was a dead-perfect day for baseball. Down in the locker room, Zuke Johansen wanted to crawl into a hole and die. Even the distant but sharp crack of a bat slammed solidly into a ball, a sound ordinarily as melodious to Johansen as a Gregorian chant to a monk, struck him today as intrusive and, even worse, entirely beside the point, the Des Moines Majestyks having dropped into a cellar so deep that heartless wags wondered in print how they could've gotten there unless they'd started playing before the season had actually begun. The good citizens of Minnesota, who'd loudly bemoaned the loss of the Twins when the team had moved to Des Moines and changed its name, quietly stopped complaining. The team's dispiritedness had taken such firm hold that every loss, rather than serve as a rallying call for the players to reach down within themselves and work harder, became only further affirmation that it was no use even trying. One reporter wrote that he'd spotted second baseman Chi Chi los Parados in line at the mezzanine hot-dog stand. In uniform. During the top of the third inning. Team owner Holden (ne "Homer") Canfield, a former software geek who'd struck it big with some Internet start-up and thereby achieved dangerous delusions of adequacy, had sunk every dime of the club's money purchasing the athletic gifts of Argentinean-born basketball star Juan-Tanamera "Bueno" Aires, one of the most beloved sports figures on the planet, if not the most beloved figure, period. Within two days of having dragged the rest of his sorry team to its second consecutive NBA championship, he'd announced that he was bored and looking for a new challenge. "How about baseball?" Canfield had asked the star's agent, and soon afterwards critics began filling their columns and talk shows with the kind of derision not seen since a U.S. vice president had misspelled a word, something which, astonishingly, none of those reporters and television talking heads had ever done in their entire lives. As it turned out, "Bueno" had quickly developed into a ballplayer of jaw-dropping skill, even to the extent that commentators who should have known better began daring to wonder whether he might eventually go down in history as the best who ever lived. Bueno at the plate was like Reggie Miller at the foul line or Secretariat at the starting gate. A columnist for Sports Illustrated had written that "trying to throw a fastball past Aires was like trying to sneak sunrise past a rooster." When he was in left field, any ball unlucky enough to find itself occupying the same zip code as the transplanted gaucho was as good as caught, and when the situation called for it he could burn it into home plate with such stunning power and accuracy that there was no need for it to first get to the shortstop, who would mutter "Incoming!" to the equally superfluous third baseman and hope that veteran catcher Cavvy Papazian had enough time to steel himself for the impact. Juan-Tanamera's glove was where fly balls went to die, and it was said that three-quarters of the earth was covered by water and the rest by Bueno, so he wasn't the problem on this team. The problem was that, having spent everything to acquire him, Canfield didn't have enough money left to fill out the roster with similarly skilled players. Initially, it seemed as if Bueno mMcAllister, Troon is the author of 'Kid Who Batted 1.000' with ISBN 9780385503372 and ISBN 0385503377.