CS:\u00a0<\/strong>I played baseball from the time I was five until the end of my freshman year of college. I played other sports in the off-season, but baseball was always on my mind, even throughout those terrible Indiana winters, when it was hard to remember what the field looked like beneath so much mud and snow. I gave up baseball when I was nineteen, and then three or four years later I was talking to the woman I would end up marrying about her sister, who had also been good at sports. My wife said something about how her sister was a very creative person but that she spent that creativity on the basketball court. Even though I had been writing daily since giving up baseball, it had never occurred to me that I had been doing something \u201ccreative\u201d all those years I\u2019d spent out at shortstop, or roaming centerfield, or standing atop the pitcher\u2019s mound.<\/p>\nI\u2019d always claimed that baseball players were the smartest athletes, even though I doubted it was true, and after I started thinking about things, I realized just how much creativity I\u2019d put toward baseball before I\u2019d given it up. I thought about all the little routines I\u2019d employed, about all of the visualizing I\u2019d done. People who prefer basketball or football like to claim that baseball is boring, but it\u2019s never really boring if you\u2019re engaged with it on a pitch-by-pitch basis, as a fan or when you\u2019re out there on the field. There are just so many things going on. Each half inning, each game, is a story, however slowly or quickly it unfolds.<\/p>\n
Which brings me to that question you asked: I made the Number One Draft Pick a catcher because catchers usually know more than anybody outside the manager what\u2019s going on in a game at any given time. When the clean-up hitter steps into the batter\u2019s box with a runner on first, the catcher knows what happened the last time he was at the plate, and they\u2019re already kind of anticipating what might happen the next time he comes up in another inning or two. In short, catchers are smart. They are never not thinking.<\/p>\n
This character of mine doesn\u2019t necessarily come off as smart, at least off the field, but he\u2019s starting to make the right kinds of connections. He\u2019s starting to see the way there are threads running through everything, connecting event to event the way those seams on a baseball stitch two ordinary pieces of leather into something amazing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
“…it had never occurred to me that I had been doing something ‘creative’ all those years I\u2019d spent out at shortstop, or roaming centerfield<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":10483,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-995","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction","writer-tim-chilcote"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/995","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=995"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/995\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17661,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/995\/revisions\/17661"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10483"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=995"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=995"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=995"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}