The Under Review - Issue 4 | Summer 2021

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Bring on the boos, Ryan thought as he stopped on to the artificial turf warning track at the Rogers Centre.
He kept his head down as he jogged in from left field. He didn’t look up as he passed Arturo Stone, now his
teammate. He waited for the jeers to hit him. They did not.
Canadians, he tried to tell himself, so polite. But he had a suspicion it wasn’t that. It was more likely
staggering indifference. People knew there’d been an incident the day before, but did they bother to
remember the name of the middling reliever who started it? Evidently not.
In a way, he would have preferred the boos.
His new manager and catcher were waiting for him on the mound. The manager was a grizzled 72 year old
named Herman Blackburn. A wad of tobacco puffed out his left cheek. He spit; the turf did not absorb the
output as quickly as a grass field, leaving a brown splotch near Blackburn’s feet.
“Hey, we go one for fastball, two for slider, three for change,” the catcher said. “You got anything else you
like to throw?”
Ryan was relieved that the catcher didn’t seem to hold a grudge against him. No one had spoken to him in
the clubhouse, not even Marvin Walker, who’d played with Ryan in Minnesota for a couple of years. The
bullpen didn’t exactly exclude him from their conversation, but he couldn’t follow it. The Blue Jays’ relief
corps had a language of their own, just as the Twins’ did.
“Don’t worry about any of that today,” Blackburn said. “He’s gonna hit this guy and probably get tossed.”
Ryan glanced at the plate. Ben Brennan - “BB” - was up. He couldn’t hit BB. The guy had come up through
the Twins’ organization with Ryan, catching him since rookie ball. There was no one in baseball Ryan
trusted more than BB.
The day before, they hadn’t even had to discuss what Ryan was going to throw to (or, more precisely, at)
Arturo Stone. BB set up on the inside of the plate. This would allow Ryan to plausibly claim that, yes, he
was throwing inside and the pitch got away from him. Ryan gave BB a slow nod, which was all the signal BB
needed to know that the pitch would not be anywhere near his glove.
THE UNDER REVIEW