A very high pop-up.

Tim Wakefield, six-foot-two, two-hundred-and-six pounds, is pitching for the Red Sox. He delivers the ball to a Seattle Mariner, I can't tell who, and the batter pops it up, a high floater to center field. The outfielder--I consult my program again, it's Milt Cuyler--positions himself and waits. It is a cool, clear evening in Boston's Fenway Park, and I am watching from the right-field bleachers. I don't play baseball.

Once, when I was ten, I did toss a ball with my neighbor, Steve Coughlan, now a surgeon in New Jersey. We were standing at opposite ends of his back yard when Steve got the idea that we should throw the ball as high as we could to simulate catching actual fly balls. I was the first to throw and launched one that reached the height of the elm trees edging the yard. When it dropped, Steve caught and then threw it back toward me, harder, higher. The ball peaked well above the trees and then began to fall. I can still remember the feeling of standing there, looking up, my new glove open, and the ball falling, falling forever it seemed, and then suddenly glancing off the glove before crashing into my eye bone and hitting the ground.

Steve walked over. He was a quiet boy, not prone to offer sympathy, even for pain he had caused. He stood by respectfully while I knelt, holding my head but not crying. The pain astounded me. Steve said he was sorry, and that he had heard the ball from his end of the yard when it hit my face.

His toss that day knocked out, for many years to come, whatever obligation I'd felt to appreciate baseball. I have since made a separate peace with the sport, even attend a couple of games a year now, a novel in my pocket. But as I sit in the bleachers this cool New England evening, I still wonder how players like Milt Cuyler can catch those towering pop-ups. I wait to see if he is really going to catch this one.

In 1986, the night the Red Sox nearly won the World Series against the Mets, I was dancing with three women at a party in Boston. In the kitchen, we four could hear sixty voices in the living room screaming at the television as the ball, we later learned, went between Bill Buckner's legs. Until then, the Sox had been on the way to winning their first world championship since 1918. Steve, who is a Mets fan, later showed me Buckner's error, as recorded on his VCR. It occurs in the tenth inning of the sixth game. Boston is leading three games to two and is only one out away from winning the series. But with two outs and none on, the Mets suddenly rally for two runs and tie the score. Then the Mets batter (Mookie Wilson) hits a ground ball toward first base. Buckner bends to scoop the skipping ball but somehow misses it, and another Met races home to win the game. Steve presses the rewind button, then replays the scene, again and again, to watch the ball roll back, then forward, then back and forward again, through Buckner's legs. Steve laughs and laughs. (I have heard some Red Sox fans deny that the team lost the series on that play, since the Sox could have won the next game. But they didn't win the next game. The momentum had changed.)

This particular evening, however, with an appreciation born of that loss and the earlier pain to my right eye, I watch Milt Cuyler move left, then right, then two short steps forward to meet the ball. Any reasonably coordinated adult who has ever failed to catch a fly must respect such a player's task--as wind or bad luck may twist a ball's movement at any moment--and appreciate his performance as he adjusts and holds ready. We admire him because there is always the possibility that, despite the routine nature of the play, he will misjudge the ball, cramp, slip, suffer a stroke. Cuyler being human and this being baseball, there is the chance that he will fail to make the catch.

As I watch the ball crest and finally begin to descend, I sense the crowd go silent, the other players momentarily halt. But Cuyler doesn't fail. He catches the ball, then throws it back to the shortstop, who tosses it to the second baseman, who relays it on to third before it is tossed back to the pitcher. They all seem to want to touch the ball, a ritual practice to make it somehow right before it is pitched again.

Another Mariner hitter enters the batter's box. Now Wakefield bends forward, and the ball is turning slowly in his fingers behind his back as he and the crouching catcher look at one another. I settle back, take another look at Cuyler, then breathe in the sweet evening air of Fenway Park.