Mon, Nov 09 2009
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Published June 24, 2009 01:48 am - Fade to white... As he trots past the pitcher’s mound toward the dugout, he stops to pick up a stray baseball. Just as he does, a teammate in the batting cage beckons him to throw him a pitch before players leave the field. A Don McCormack column: A Knight’s tale... Having just lost his father, 10-year-old Jeremiah Knight is honoring him by showing the same extraordinary abilities DON McCORMACK Star Beacon Fade to white...
As he trots past the pitcher’s mound toward the dugout, he stops to pick up a stray baseball. Just as he does, a teammate in the batting cage beckons him to throw him a pitch before players leave the field. He reluctantly steps to the rubber, tossing the ball in the air once, his mind drifting back to his days years ago as a flamethrowing southpaw, before the shooting that not only ended his career as a pitcher and completely as a player, but almost took his life. He kicks high, then fires a pitch. Before he knows it, the ball is on... then past... the overmatched batter, whose head turns to see the ball, which was thrown with such velocity it breaks through most of the threads at the back of the batting cage, hanging there, still rocking from pure force of which it was thrown. For a moment, everyone in the entire ballpark is stunned into a freeze-frame, not sure how to gauge what they had just witnessed. One by one, each and every set of eyes in the stadium then turns from the baseball lodged in the back of the cage to the pitcher, who shakes his head, grabs his side and strides off the mound toward the dugout. “Did you see that?!” the coach in the dugout says to the manager. Roy Hobbs, The Natural, had just provided one of those moments only the true greats can stage. Fade to black... Fade to white... The pitch speeds toward the plate, but it’s coming in too high. No way that’s going to be hit. Heck, it might hit the backstop on the fly. Suddenly, the kid in the box takes his bat from here to there in the blink of an eye. The bat makes contact with the baseball, which rockets into the summer air, clearing the 200-foot fence in left-center by a good 30 feet. The pitch was a foot above the batter’s head. “Are you kidding me?” manager Jason Cicon said. “How do you teach that?” “You don’t,” the guy standing next to him said through a laugh and a shake of his head in response to the query. “You can’t teach that. You wouldn’t teach that because you can’t. 
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