The House of Daniel by Harry Turtledove Page B

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    Well, what else did they have to do? Whole flock of ’em had no work to go to. They’d sit wherever they’d sit, and they’d stew. Or they’d cough up a quarter and go to the pictures. They could do that all day, every day. House of Daniel came through once every couple of years. The hope of beating us ought to be worth half a buck, hey?
    And then the Ravens went and did it. Happy days for Tulia. One happy day, at least. If that kid kept pitching and his arm didn’t blow up, he’d go places for sure.
    This was the third game I’d played for the House of Daniel, the fourth I’d seen. I felt mad about losing, and I felt bad about losing. We were the House of Daniel! We were supposed to charge on into these no-account hick towns and win .
    It’s funny. I didn’t feel the same way when I played for the Enid Eagles. I wanted to win then. I tried to win. But I knew sometimes we wouldn’t. We were good. We weren’t that good, though.
    When I looked at the other fellas with the lions on their shirts, I needed a few seconds to cipher out how they felt. Then it hit me: they were embarrassed to lose a game to the Tulia for heaven’s sake Ravens. You play baseball, you’ll get embarrassed every once in a while. The game does that to you. Doesn’t make it any more fun when it happens.
    Harv walked over to the Tulia dugout. He was a better sport than that so-and-so in Amarillo. When he said, “Well, you got us this time,” he didn’t sound like he wanted a tornado to blow the Ravens and the ballpark and the whole town straight to nevermore. He may have felt that way, but he didn’t sound like it.
    â€œI’m much obliged,” the Tulia manager said. “Sidd pitched his arm off out there today, didn’t he?”
    â€œHope not, for his sake. I don’t know how long you’ll be able to keep him,” Harv said. “A year from now, he could be in the Texas League. Three years? Maybe the bigs, if he stays sound. He’s trouble, all right.”
    â€œThat’d be something, wouldn’t it?” The guy from Tulia turned his head and hollered, “Hey, Sidd! The House of Daniels reckon you got the stuff to pitch in the big leagues!”
    â€œI’d sure like to.” Sidd’s uniform was all soaked and soggy with sweat. Well, so was everybody’s, but the pitchers and catchers had it worse. He went on, “You pitch up there, your name goes into the record book all official, like, and you’re in there forever so they can remember you.”
    â€œThe Lord always remembers you forever,” Harv said, but even he sounded kinda halfhearted about it. What we did would go in the local paper—a guy from the Tulia Herald was talking with some of the Ravens and scribbling down what they said—but who except the ballplayers and their kin would recollect the game and what all went on longer than Tuesday after next?
    Baseball. It’s the same game, semipros or the bigs. Oh, they play it better—they play it real well a lot more often—up there. But it’s the same game. Only in the bigs everything everybody does between the white lines gets written down for all time, almost as if they carve it in stone. Sidd said it: play the game there and you’re part of history.
    Play in Enid or Amarillo or Tulia and everything you do is written on the wind. The dust devils will grab hold of it and rub it out or blow it away, so it might as well’ve never happened. Same thing for the House of Daniel, or near enough. Being the best semipro team around—what’s that? It’s like being the best cook in Enid. Even if you are, who’s gonna remember you fifteen minutes after you’re gone unless he knew you beforehand?
    I wondered why the demon I bothered. Come to that, I wondered why anybody bothered working hard to be the best cook in Enid, or anything else where they forgot about you