They've got you figured out, Rich, the boys in the bullpen do. They've got you completely figured out and you're dished. You're completely dished. And they said it was easy, that they've been analyzing you. Poring over the box score for weeks, watching the slash lines, even looking at pictures of you, those pictures being published in that New York rag, day after day. Pictures of you instead of real news, like the only thing in the world that matters is one hot streak from a team that's spent that last five years cold. I gave the boys those pictures, actually. I've been cutting them out: the ones of you at the plate with your powerful hands held high over your head, gripping your bat like it's a club, or something. Your dumb brute energy stored in a wicked twist of your waist, primed either to send a ball to the fucking moon or cleave the zone with a whiff that'll damn near rip your arms out. You animal, you son of a bitch, Mr. October, who'd ever thunk they'd call you that.

They never called you that back here, that's for sure. I shielded you from the worst of it, but you were the wise one from the start, all the way back to that week we were both called up and you told me not to clip that "Hometown Heroes" headline from the Globe. It won't feel so good when they turn on us, you said, and you were right, one hundred percent. And after that very first game, the one where I got pulled after one miserable inning, and everyone was looking at me with pity, and I fretted to you that I needed to get it together before that pity turned to disgust, you were the wise one again. Wise to tell me that one game was nothing, wise to take me to a quiet corner for a pep talk. Your huge back hid me from the pitying eyes of our teammates while I cried and cried.

But really, Rich, it was your fault, wasn't it? When your raw strength became a weakness as everyone realized you always swing at the first pitch? Somehow my name got tied up with yours. I was putting up two hundred strikeouts a year but it was the two of us that were cursed. Our ascent led to that pathetic decline.

And now, even as you've dragged your clueless new team into the postseason, the boys in my bullpen are saying they've got you figured out again. Completely. It'll go like this: I'll do my thing until it's time to call them in, and then I can sit back in the dugout and watch you flail. I'll have to sit back and watch because I've never been able to strike you out, even in the most casual interteam game. And even now, with both of us more or less at peak form, you still only get hot after the first time through the order. So I'm telling you, they know exactly how they're gonna get you. They've been analyzing you since the day of the trade. I don't know the details, and it's not like I'd tell you if I did, but I heard something else Wilson said when they all thought I had left: he said that if you crowd the plate like you always do, if you shuffle over the zone and beg for a walk, then he's willing to give you a walk, damn it. He'll throw high and inside to scare you off, he said, but if his control falters and you end up taking 97 to the face, well, that's that, that's that. I could hear him spitting through his yellow teeth, rabid for a fair chance to nail you, to really fuck you up more than he ever could in the clubhouse.

Remember how the disdain for you — for us — fed into itself? And every group of people found something new to trash about us? And the criticism grew more pointed and more virulent the tighter the circle got? Maybe the fans just thought you were in a slump — a years-long slump, they reasoned, praying that the performance you had promised in the minors would show up again someday. But the newspapers, the guys on the radio, what a circus! Rich, was that really the plan the whole time? Were you trying to tank our team, plotting for this since the day you were born? No, really, were you? Because the second you shipped off to the Bronx and started looking like fucking Superman out there, the sportswriters must've been patting their crystal balls for a job well done.

How did my name get tied up in all that? Maybe the curse is the both of us, and the key was to get us apart. That seemed like it worked, right? Because now you're gone and both our teams are rising stars. And after a year, we'll finally meet again in the championship series, right? But damn, that curse. The way that our fortunes reversed back then was just brutal. I pulled it together and you swung into thin air over and over again, but the times you made contact... boy, was it spectacular, and even if it was never at the right moment, your swing was so beautiful that they couldn't just take you out of the lineup.

And you were always happy to be playing with me, even when you stopped saying it, but I knew it stayed true every time I did my windup — looking to the right, then the left, to where you stood in the big hitter's position, where the giant men who hopped and stretched their gloves for swipe tags lived, where your pink face glowed with alertness every time we locked eyes. But back in the clubhouse, the cheer had diminished. You were struggling and everyone knew it. Showing up drunk to batting practice put you in our teammates crosshairs even though they were throwing back greenies like they were nothing. Up at the wrong time, down at the wrong time.

No, the nastiest stuff came from the inside, where Wilson and all the other guys latched on to the story like it was the funniest thing they'd ever heard. For your own sake, I'll spare you their names and the number of them. Obviously none of those pricks had any friends. Nobody that meant anything, at least. Nobody they'd stick with through thick and thin. I knew this by the way they talked about their former teammates — guys who would dive and crash in the dirt for them — like they were lower than dirt. So the two of us, playing together since boyhood and, whoa, what are these guys, a couple'a fuckin' fairies? And maybe I'm built like a twig but you'd be the world's strongest fairy: you could have smashed their stupid faces in if you wanted to. And they would have deserved it.

I warded off the worst of it. I stood in front of those guys and took it for you. Consider it debt paid for how you treated me after that first disastrous outing. But I felt so low when they got through to you, the insults they hurled over my shoulders. Especially the pranks and the shoves. The front office never did a thing, first because we were rookies, then because of seniority, then because you were fucking it up at the plate so much, and finally, worst of all, because it lit some kind of spark in you. Those idiots put two and two together because the days they roughed you up at practice led to nights where you sent balls into orbit — still at the wrong time, but God was it breathtaking. You'd take your lumbering lap around the plates and always look back at the dugout and smile right at me, looking like a superstar. I'd make a mental note to remember that face because it'd be wiped clean by the time we were all going home. I hated that postgame blankness. It wouldn't have been like you, but you should have gloated to those guys. They would have deserved it, but I think you burned yourself out trying to prove them wrong, somehow, as if baseball meant anything.

They never got their faces smashed in — never even threatened with it — so they got bored. So they stopped messing with you and you plummeted under .200 and I swear you were happiest then.

And now that you're wearing those old-fashioned pinstripes, looking like an oaf in a fucking Mickey Mouse cartoon, did your new teammates figure out how to make you tick? Do they turn you into a cannon and light a fire under your ass until you spit fireballs on command? Now that no one will stop them from sending you tumbling into the lockers, bleeding out of your head? Is that what they're doing to you? I told you I clip those pictures of you, ones of your batting stance and ones of you rounding the bases, and you know what I see? Just a blank fucking face. Really, tell me: was I holding you back this whole time? Holding us all back when we should have used you as fuel for a pyrrhic postseason run like this? If Wilson doesn't take you out in game one, will your team leave anything left of you by the end of the season? Maybe I should take you high and inside, good and square in the jaw, and take you out for a year. A real career ender. I'd shoot your limbs off so you don't crawl into your own grave, Rich. Why do you take this? Why have you taken this for so long? Grit your teeth, lose, give up, and live! Give up, please.

This wasn't anything like we imagined. There's always people yelling from the stands, pissy little kids and coked-out bookies waiting for you to fail or getting mad when you don't succeed. Everyone you play with has completely lost himself. The uniforms are hot and the lights are hot and bright. Maybe this is what we used to want, and maybe tonight, when we face each other in the matchup of our wildest dreams, something will click in place. Maybe there's just something I'm missing. God, Rich, the stadium lights are so bright. You can see everything all the time. I miss when we were boys at that little park in Cambridge, late in October as the days grew short and we played into the night. I remember one time you blasted one off of me and our friends all strained their eyes to follow the ball's arc across the twilight sky. I thought I was the only one who didn't want to watch, but then I saw your face, sixty feet six inches away and dim under the amber streetlights, and you were looking at me too, looking at me like you were in love.