Astros 1
Cubs 3
Contributed by NeilT
You grow up wild and Amish you come to a bad end, and everybody in our community knew that’s where my friend Samuel Hershberger was heading. He once showed me a picture that he kept in the hay loft of his father’s barn of a tractor. He said it was his older brother’s but I knew better. And of course he claimed to be an Astros fan.
Us Amish kids love baseball, and Papa says that until the ban back in ’95, even the baptized men played. A lot of us here in Lancaster County follow the Phillies, but the Astros? That was Samuel. He always knew better, and he always knew better faster.
Last year, he had taken off to Philadelphia and watched an Astros game on TV. He told me after he come home that he ate at this place called Hooters, where you could see most of an English woman’s bosoms. That’s just the kind of place Samuel would go. He was always wild and dangerous.
But when he got home Samuel seemed to have straightened out, like something had happened that was so terrible he couldn’t forget it. The only thing he told me was that he’d watched the Phillies whip the Astros, and that that was enough of the English life. Samuel and I are the same age, and my family lives on the next farm over but one, so we were friends since we were little, always playing baseball with our brothers and sisters, always together when there weren’t work to be done. So I could tell that Samuel was subdued but unchanged. The old wild Samuel was still there.
I hadn’t seen much of Samuel this summer. He was spending a lot of time at the Kunz’s, and of course we all knew why: he was sweet on Esther, their third daughter. But that summer who wasn’t? She was a pretty girl and her parents’ dairy made good cheese. So I was surprised on Friday when he came tearing down the road in his father’s buggy. “C’mon,” he said, “we’re a-going to Chicago. The Astros play the Cubs this afternoon!”
I could tell something was wrong. He smelled like sweat and his eyes were wild. There was a half-empty 12-pack of diet Pepsi on the seat beside him, and empties were strewn all over the floor or the buggy. And then I saw the worst: crumpled, empty yellow packets of Splenda. He’d been snorting maltodextran.
What could I do? I could have said no, but then what kind of friend would I be? I climbed onto the buggy seat beside him. “Samuel,” I said, “Chicago’s a long way away, and we’re not getting there this day.”
But Samuel wasn’t listening to me, he was listening to some devil deep inside. He stood up in the buggy, reins in hand. “Esther!” he wailed, a long loud shriek that carried his despair to the world. And then he brought the whip down hard on the back of the mare and the horse took off.
But the buggy didn’t. Samuel sailed through the air, reins gripped tight, as the horse and shaft separated from the buggy. Apparently Samuel hadn’t checked the connection, and the jerk of the whipped horse was enough to pull things apart. Samuel still gripped the reins when he landed and was dragged 20 feet as the horse and shaft headed up our drive to the road.
He lay there crumpled, bleeding from a gash across his head and from his nose and mouth. I caught up with him just as he was breathing his last: “Esther,” I thought he was saying, but then I realized that wasn’t it at all, it only sounded like Esther: “Astros” he whispered with his dying breath.
***
It is a good thing that the team ERA for June is 2.78. That’s 4th in the majors, and the next best is the 3.24 of our hated rivals, what’s-their-name from Oakland. 2.78 is a very good thing.
But here’s the problem: the bats are dead. For June he team OPS is .619, third worst in MLB. The team’s allowed 63 runs. The team’s made 66 runs. 63 runs allowed is great. 66 runs made is not great. Unless you’re allowin 40 runs. It’s all relative.
Keuchel allowed 3 runs, all on home runs. He pitched 6 innings, with relief from Fields, Wright, Clemens, and Blackley. The Astros one run came off of a Carter home run. See? It’s all relative.
***
Samuel wasn’t dead, but he broke his arm, his collarbone, and a couple of ribs. I visited him in the hospital and he told me that Esther had said he wasn’t the man for her, that he was too wild. That, he said, was what set things off.
As I was leaving he stopped me. “Do you think,” he asked, “it’s wrong to hate the Cubs? Esther said it was wrong to carry such hate.”
“Who doesn’t hate the Cubs,” I said.
