A Fitting End
It was a day I had been looking forward to and a day I had been dreading, the last of the 22 games on Keppel’s 2010 calendar, the finale of Max’s junior season, the beginning of what will soon enough be the end of his high school baseball years. The Aztecs arrived at San Gabriel with a dreadful 2-19 record, exceeded on the misery index only by the Matadors’ 1-18. We had each won a game against the other, and Keppel needed another win to stay out of the Almont League cellar.
Max led things off with a single, and then scored the first run of the game, staking the Aztecs to a 1-0 edge. They gave the run back in the third inning, and let two more slip by in the fourth inning, putting themselves at a 3-1 disadvantage. For a good while, it looked as though that might just be the way the game would end; Max popped up in his second at-bat, and then popped up again in the one after that. In the sixth, though, the Aztecs rallied, evening the score at 3-3, and when Max came up in the final inning with a runner on second, he was itching for redemption.
In the video you can see him fouling off the first pitch. The second one is high. He fouls off another. The next pitch he drills up the middle, driving in the go-ahead (and soon-to-be winning) run. Mark Keppel 4, San Gabriel 3.
As it turns out a reporter from the West Valley Journal, a Monterey Park freebie, was on hand to witness the spectacle, and as soon as it was over, he pulled Max aside—my son’s first postgame interview. Max seemed amused by the attention, even more so by the reporter’s note-taking technique. I will have to wait for Volume 10, Number 9 to be published to see what he said.
