Green: The Angels and the Devil (Rays)
It started like any other morning. I was slurping down my coffee and thinking about baseball — the same way I start every day. “The Cubs have probably been the best team in baseball,” I mused. “But the Rays have the best record. Gee, what if the Cubs won the World Series exactly 100 years after their last championship? Or what if the Rays went worst-to-first and won? That would be so exciting. Ooh, I sort of want them to!”
No sooner had the thought formed in my brain, when the smell of burnt peanuts filled my nostrils and I heard a crack like a broken bat. I turned to see a man about six inches tall floating over my left shoulder, wearing a baseball uniform under a dark cloak. “How can you think like that?” he demanded in his shrill little voice. “What about your team? What about the Red Sox? What about loyalty?”
I opened my mouth to speak, but suddenly, there was a smell of fresh-mown grass and the sound of an organ playing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” I turned my head and saw, floating over my right shoulder, another tiny man, this one bearing a strange resemblance to David Ortiz in a bedazzled white robe. “Don’t listen to him, Sarah,” he said. “It’s OK to be happy for those other teams. I mean, think how happy you were when the Red Sox finally won in 2004.”
“Yes!” interjected the belligerent man to my left. “And think how happy you’ll be when they win again! And again! And again!”
“Come on, man,” said the man in white. “Cubs fans deserve some of that love, too. And it’s hard not to like the Rays. Of course,” he went on, almost to himself, “I do also have a soft spot for the Angels.”
“Yeah,” I chimed in. “Cubs fans have suffered enough. And the Rays are such a talented young team, a team they’ve built from within. I have to respect that.”
“Silence!” shouted the man on the left, stamping his feet and shaking his wee fists in fury. “Enough! If you like those other teams so much, why don’t you just turn in your Red Sox hat right now?!” I experienced a momentary pang of doubt. What if he was right?
Yet the next moment, the angry man’s cloak fell open, revealing a glimpse of the uniform beneath. Was that — pinstripes? I ripped back the tiny cape in one smooth motion. There, right over his heart, staring back at me, was the telltale interlocking N and Y. “Baseball is only about winning!” he roared in his high-pitched voice, “Winning, winning, win—” I dumped my coffee on the tiny Yankee, and he dissolved, midscreech.
“Who was that guy?” I blurted, turning to my right. But the man in white was gone.
Sarah Green is a freelance writer.
