The Comeback

Thomas ‘Tommy T-Coke’ Cocoa watched as a pitch, better yet, ‘his’ pitch sailed straight down the meaty center of the plate.

‘Strike!’ The umpire cried out loudly behind him. 

T-Coke stepped out of the batter’s box and tried to regain his focus. There was an immediate encircling chorus of bitter boos and jeers from the crowd of forty-eight thousand New York baseball faithful and T-Coke bemoaned that this was not the reaction he had garnered only two years ago, maybe even one year ago. ‘Yes,’ he confirmed to himself mentally, ‘definitely not a year ago!’ 

Sure there were jeers and boos last year, but there was also sympathy from the white and black pinstriped fanatics. A feeling of empathy that conveyed that something was off with their once beloved Tommy T-Coke. Something that made him no longer the forty-three million dollar a year player that he had been. Something that caused him to stare catatonically at a ball that in years past would have caused the fans to collectively gasp as that ball sailed deep into whichever corner of the ballpark T-Coke decided to land it in, or, even better, watch as that white speck sailed over the four hundred and eight mark on the outfield wall.

‘It’s okay T-Coke,’ a fan cried out over the fading din, ‘my bat’d be limp too if I had your wife!’ The fan laughed maniacally.

T-Coke scanned the audience for the fan. He just couldn’t fathom that a joke that was that personal was told by his fans in New York. Well, he could. He wasn’t naive. But how had the Yankee faithful gone from literally killing each other in right field over his game winning home run balls, to reducing themselves to attempting to publicly emasculate him.

‘Damn,’ the catcher said over the last few outraged fan cries and jeers as T-Coke stepped back into the batter’s box. ‘To quote Mike Tyson, people forget what it’s like to get hit in the face,’ the catcher begrudged, T-Coke able to sense that the catcher still had yet to send his pitcher his signals for the next pitch. That he instead wanted to give T-Coke a chance to get his head together and learn that he still had someone who wanted to show him the proper respect. 

‘You want to give that guy a beat down, I got your back,’ the catcher went on. ‘You’re Tommy Cocoa. I’ve called pitches that would have blown past Jesus Christ, or even, damn, Babe Ruth. But you, you knocked them out of the park man. You’re a legend.’

There was a pause, pause, and a pause, while the catcher relayed his signals to the pitcher, the pitcher rejecting the first two options.

‘You’re due a comeback,’ the catcher concluded with.

‘Hasn’t been a good comeback since,’ T-Coke stopped himself. The name was forbidden to be said aloud in baseball circles. The player, Dexter Kranz, who had had one hell of a comeback run in his forties, at an age when most ball players are coaching or tending some local bar in some midwestern city that bore them, was now serving life for butchering his entire family, allegedly with nothing more than his bare hands.

Word was his son had thrown a cereal bowl too hard against the wall for the wound tight Dexter to take. According to the twenty-four hour news reports that everyone remotely connected to baseball watched in confusion, Dexter, on his way to fifty home runs, one hundred stolen bases, and a lock on getting into the Hall of Fame, took his anti-cereal bowl throwing wrath out on both his sons and his wife, the funeral a closed casketed affair which T-Coke and many other ball players avoided, T-Coke feeling as if attending might bring even worse luck than what he was undergoing right now.  

‘The term comeback might be cursed,’ T-Coke felt his bat lower. It suddenly weighed too much for the heavy hitter. His body slouched and he felt teary eyed, knowing that Dexter Kranz’s comeback was always suspect, many thinking there were illegal elements involved in his return.

‘Time!’ The ump called, without a request from T-Coke or the catcher.

In order to cover for the ump, the catcher ran out to the pitcher’s mound, as if there had been some confusion with the signals.  

T-Coke stepped out of the batter’s box again and took a few weighty swings. The ump walked past with his hands on his hips and mumbled, ‘Every pitcher in the game still fears you T-Coke. Remind them why.’

T-Coke looked over his shoulder at the visitor’s clubhouse. There, with his feet on the visiting team’s dugout roof was the doctor, or the scientist, or maybe even some eastern European drug lord wanting to break into the steroid market. T-Coke had no idea. All he knew was this morning, T-Coke awoke after yet another bad ball game so desperate to change the trajectory of his game play, that he allowed the doctor to inject his pitched ‘miracle drug’ in him.

‘What are the ingredients?’ T-Coke asked.

The doctor, scientist, drug lord didn’t give an answer.

‘Had the doctor tried it on any other ball players?’ 

The doctor, scientist, drug lord didn’t answer.

‘Would I fail a urine and/or blood test?’

‘Impossible,’ the doctor, scientist, drug lord single-word answered.

‘

Will it change the trajectory of my baseball game?’

‘Yes,’ the doctor said as the needle pierced the skin of his right butt cheek and the liquid inside soared into T-Coke’s system. 

‘Are there any side effects?’

The needle was empty at that point. Whatever the doctor had injected was already coursing through him. 

‘Yes,’ the doctor, scientist or drug lord answered with.

And T-Coke felt nothing. 

Not a sudden rush of blood to muscles he hadn’t used in the past few years. No sudden elation at the fact that his openly overtaking him weaknesses: aging, weight gain, sluggishness and exhaustion, had all been ebbed out by some miracle drug. No desire to perform a feat of strength before the doctor, scientist, drug lord or maybe even madman to prove to the doctor, scientist, drug lord or madman his drugs had worked. He didn’t even feel a slight tinge of guilt or of unnerving excitement that he was cheating the baseball system. That today, he was going to step into the batter’s box and that he might have an edge over all the players he played with on the field!

The doctor, scientist, drug lord stood up then, allowing T-Coke to pull up his pants and cover the spot where the doctor had put the needle in.

‘You will feel something,’ the doctor said, ‘when you need to feel it.’

The catcher returned to his place behind the batter’s box. T-Coke stepped back into the box, took two lazy swings, and watched as the pitcher wound up. The pitcher’s arm pulled back behind his head, his front leg pulled forward, and the ball was released.

And to T-Coke it looked like the pitcher had just thrown a nice, easy grapefruit. The ball, thrown by a pitcher who usually threw balls in the one-hundred miles per hour range, seemed to crawl towards home plate, giving T-Coke plenty of time to pull his weight back, before cutting forward with a mighty swing which T-Coke could have sworn started not in his shoulders and chest, but somewhere in the back of his brain, down his spine, into every nerve fiber in his arms and legs, into his fingers and toes, until, like a supernova bursting open on a science program, T-Coke felt his whole body push to the brink of exploding into a fiery mass, T-Coke finally swinging not with the intent of hitting the ball, but with the hope of alleviating all the pressure that was whatever was inside of him pushing on his skin and which was desperate to force itself out. 

The bat made contact with the ball. T-Coke, as part of his ‘reaching into the community part of his contract,’ had decided to do outreach to kids who needed compensatory education, or, what they used to call special needs children back in his days, the term no longer politically correct.

T-Coke was expected to stop by a summer camp and sign some balls and toss a few around. It was a different T-Coke. Someone at the top of their game, the top of their salary, on top of the world! He had done absolutely no research on children with compensatory needs, he instead desiring to make an entrance, he blowing hard into a whistle to announce his entry. Half the kids, due to hypersensitivities and being on the spectrum, fell down, many covering their ears in terror.

It was T-Coke’s first public faux pas. It was one easily forgiven by his team’s legion of fans. His second faux pas was the unforgivable watching as the third pitch strike sailed over home plate during game seven of the World Series, top of the ninth, two men out, two men on. That moment of stock-still non-movement at the most critical moment of his career was what the fans hated him for. 

And, T-Coke realized, all his senses were magnified. The sound of the bat hitting the ball was so enhanced, he suddenly understood what the sound of that whistle, blown with all the muster and longevity that T-Coke could will, was just as loud as that whistle that affected those hypersensitive compensatory kids at that summer camp.

And that awe of the crowd must have been what the stadium would have sounded like had T-Coke made contact with that top of the ninth, seventh game of the World Series pitch two years ago. 

T-Coke had stopped watching his hits. The bravado that that took meant that he hit balls regularly, something that hadn’t happened in two years. Instead he sprinted up the first base line, expecting the first base coach to command him to keep running or stop. 

But the coach’s back was turned, he instead watched the ball and its trajectory. Turning the base, he saw that the second baseman was doing the same, his posture suggesting that there was no throw coming in and that that ball was gone. 

T-Coke snuck a glance at the third base coach and realized that he too was watching the ball. T-Coke had reached second base and that ball still hadn’t landed yet.

T-Coke caught a glimpse at the one person in the crowd not watching the ball land somewhere in the outfield bleachers. He was the one person in the audience who would not wonder how T-Coke, who was never known for his speed, had somehow defied the laws of physics and was now running bases faster than it took for the baseball to land. 

Suddenly, there was a desperate, unsettling madness that overtook the crowd, the cheers and screams electrifying the stadium which had long settled in for another night of booing their favorite, over-priced, loser. The cheers continued as T-Coke ducked past the catcher and the ump, T-Coke ducking as if a ball whose trajectory he hadn’t followed might be coming in at any moment.

‘Welcome back, Legend,’ the catcher said, lifting his mask and spitting, ‘welcome back.’

‘Doc! Doc!’ T-Coke said, throwing up the doctor’s office doors.

‘Mister Cocoa!’ The doctor responded, stunned. ‘What are you doing here? What are you doing in Europe? In Prague?’

‘It’s November. November. It’s the World Series. The god-damned World Series! And you keep hanging up on me.’

‘As I’ve made clear, the experiment is completed. It’s over,’ the doctor said.

‘You can’t end the experiment two days before the World Series starts! It’s the most important seven games in baseball! The most important four days in baseball if I keep hitting like I was on your dope! I mean, we will sweep the floor with Atlanta! Sweep the floor!’

‘Mister Cocoa, please. While I understand the importance you place on your baseball sport and your baseball money, I’m afraid that the people I am working with have decided that this experiment is over. And I am afraid there is nothing more I can do.’

‘Nothing you can do?’ T-Coke demanded. ‘Nothing more you can do,’ his voice trailed off. ‘Umm. Wait a minute. Why do you keep calling me, ‘an experiment?’’ T-Coke begged, the fact that he was a part of something medical, something scientific had never occurred to him. He had assumed that he was at the mercy of some greedy drug dealer out to get rich.

T-Coke realized that the doctor had been boxing up files in his office before T-Coke entered and seemed to be focused on that instead of dealing with the threateningly large ball player who had only moments before barged into his office. ‘The experiment was over,’ echoed in T-Coke’s head.

‘Doc!’ T-Coke yelled, demanding. ‘I came here, to Prague, to get more of the stuff! I need the stuff! Do you even know how important the World Series is? Do you? It’s like, everything. To the fans, the players, the game!’

The thin and worn doctor nudged his head upwards a bit to acknowledge that T-Coke had been heard, but that is where the movement stopped. 

‘God damn it!’ T-Coke screamed, inflamed. 

The doctor’s office was sparse. Just a desk that was mostly empty of anything and the filing cabinet which the doctor was pulling files out of to keep dumping into the box, relaying again that the experiment was over. T-Coke, out of despair, lifted the meeting chair from before the doctor’s desk and flung it into the filing cabinet. It hit with a loud ‘clang’ which echoed in the minimalist spartan office.

The much older doctor seemed unfazed. 

‘Mister Cocoa,’ the doctor exhaled heavily. ‘We,’ he continued, the doctor looking around the room as if ‘we’ were present, ‘chose the sport of baseball,’ the European doctor cleared his throat in correction, ‘your sport of baseball,’ he again did that slight head movement of acknowledgement, as if to confirm that it was largely not a European sport, ‘because it’s boring.’

T-Coke felt his back go up. Baseball had been his life since he was nine when he hit three singles in a little league game and his dad ordained he would be the next Yankee great. And twice in his life, he was. Yet, he had to acknowledge that without the doctor’s wonder drug, today was the day that second life ended.

‘Please understand,’ the doctor went on, tired. ‘Baseball was chosen because, as exciting as your Hollywood makes war out to be,’ the doctor said, the ‘your’ in Hollywood being in the same tone as the ‘your’ in ‘baseball is ‘your’ sport.’ ‘War is boring. Nothing happens for stretches at a time. I studied your sport before choosing it for the experiment and, well, I have seen left fielders go three innings, that’s what they’re called, innings right?’

‘Yes?’ T-Coke answered.

“Yes. Three innings without chasing a ball, or batting, or doing anything that elicits some kind of adrenaline. That is war. Days and days of waiting. And then you need the adrenaline of a wolf . . .’

The doctor bent down and picked up the chair. He set it in front of the filing cabinet. ‘War in Europe is now inevitable. Your sport,’ he went on, stressing ‘your’ again, ‘was chosen to see if we could create the perfect soldier. To see what was the right amount so that you can hit, stalk, and even catch your prey.’

T-Coke stared, confused. ‘A wolf? War? Baseball? What are you talking about?’

‘The problem with Dexter Kranz, the last specimen we used from your sport was,’ the doctor said in a calming tone, ‘was we allowed him to pick and choose the amount of adrenaline needed. Too little and he was too docile. Too much, and, well. He was the werewolf.’

T-Coke laughed. ‘The what?’ T-Coke laughed again. ‘The case of Dexter Kranz is completely different from mine. I was just in a slump. Dexter was a middle-aged guy who . . . did you say, werewolf?’

The doctor smiled. ‘Oh. I guess you thought that werewolves are mutated half-bred half-human/half-wolves,’ the doctor laughed. ‘You remember when Dexter Kranz killed his family, ripped them to shreds with his bare hands? He was on something that we Europeans used to feed to our armies. Something that drove the soldiers mad, mental, and gave them the abilities of an animal. To kill when threatened, to chew off their own leg to survive, to live off flesh, be it human or animal.’ The doctor waited on T-Coke as if T-Coke would have heard of this super-soldier. ‘You have never heard of the dreaded and feared Berserker armies?’

‘No?’ T-Coke felt the blood coursing through him. The muscles tightening, the anger enveloping, T-Coke was supposed to be on the field in fourteen hours. He needed the drugs, not a history lecture.

‘Ah. I can see you are once again becoming a Berserker. Even though you are a weaker version without a new batch of my drug, you are envisioning becoming a wolf and ripping me to shreds, are you not? Your fingers are sharper like the wolves. Your pores are opening. Feel your gums, tighter, and dare I say it, crueler, no?’

‘I need the drug,’ T-Coke pleaded.

‘Centuries have passed since the Berserker-wolf drug was used. But, we have re-created it, mastered it really. Dexter was a hiccup . . ‘

‘Please. The drug?’ T-Coke pleaded.

The doctor’s smile faded. T-Coke watched as the doctor’s body hardened, got tighter, smaller, his gums seemed to stretch into a ravenous, animalistic snarl. And his eyes went blood-shot red. ‘The experiment is over,’ the doctor repeated.

T-Coke watched as the doctor, like a rabid wolf, attacked him, the first tear ripping through T-Coke’s jugular  . . .