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| Marty Barrett scoring the winning run. |
This is a fastball of literary devices — hindsight, like Ted Williams’s vision, can be 20/10 — but it works wonderfully here, thanks to a diverse roster of characters. The third basemen, Cal Ripken Jr. for Rochester and Wade Boggs for Pawtucket, will enjoy careers that lead to baseball’s Hall of Fame. A free-spirited Dutchman named Win Remmerswaal, who pitches in the 18th through the 22nd innings for Pawtucket, will become an alcoholic, suffer brain damage and wind up confined to a wheelchair in a nursing home in The Hague. The exquisitely named Rochester right fielder, Drungo Hazewood, will exit baseball bitterly, drive a truck and think about “the best time of his life: the days he spent playing baseball on nights like this, as cold as it is, with got-your-back teammates close by, and the Baltimore organization invested in his future.”
