The Scoreboard Is Counting Runs for a Team That Never Arrived

We were stripping the field before the demolition crew arrived. My night shift included Tessa, who handled irrigation; Malik, our equipment mechanic; and an old security guard named Orson Vey. By midnight we had removed the outfield pads, rolled up the foul-line screens, and stacked both dugouts with seats torn from the upper deck.

At 2:06, every floodlight came on.

The scoreboard glowed through a skin of dead moths.

VISITOR 1. HOME 0. TOP 1ST. TWO OUTS.

There was no visiting team. There was no home team. The transformer feeding the board sat on a pallet in the parking lot.

Orson walked onto the warning track with his flashlight. He called it residual current until we heard cleats striking the base path.

The footsteps came from second base, fast and heavy, throwing small fans of dirt into the air. They passed third, accelerated toward home, and ended in a long slide. Dust erupted around the plate.

The scoreboard changed to VISITOR 2.

From the empty grandstand came polite applause.

Not loud applause. Not the roar of a crowd. It sounded like several thousand people clapping with gloves on.

Tessa grabbed my arm. Shapes had appeared in the seats behind home plate, darker than the shadows around them. They sat shoulder to shoulder, each holding a square of white paper where a face should have been.

The public-address system crackled.

Now batting for the Ashen, Number 0, Enoch Vey.

Orson dropped his flashlight.

Enoch was his older brother. He had disappeared at Hollis Field during a thunderstorm in 1968, when the brothers were children. Searchers found Enoch's raincoat beneath the bleachers and one muddy shoe on the pitcher's mound.

Orson had never told us that story. The announcer told it in Orson's own voice.

Infield dirt stirred around the batter's box. It climbed in a spiral, thickening into legs, a torso, and a small boy wearing an old wool uniform. His body remained the reddish brown of clay except for two pale ticket stubs pressed where his eyes should have been.

He lifted a bat formed from packed chalk.

The mound split open. Another figure pulled itself upright, taller and faceless, with a baseball lodged between its teeth. It began its windup.

I shouted for everyone to leave.

The service gates would not open. Malik drove a utility cart into the center-field exit, but the cart stopped as if it had struck a wall. Its wheels spun against nothing. Beyond the fence, the city had vanished into blackness.

The pitch crossed the plate too fast to see.

The clay boy swung. The crack echoed through the stadium, and a baseball shot toward left field. It struck an empty seat in Section 14.

A shadow stood from that seat, peeled itself away from the concrete, and walked down the aisle toward the field.

The scoreboard displayed E.

Error.

The shadow crossed the fence without climbing it. When it reached the visiting dugout, dirt covered it and shaped it into another player.

Orson whispered that the Ashen were filling their roster.

I found the old paper scorebook in the press box. Hollis kept every game ledger dating back to opening day. The last page should have been blank. Instead, names were appearing in fresh graphite beneath a heading dated September 27, 1968—the night Enoch vanished.

The visitors' lineup contained nine missing people linked to the stadium: a beer vendor last seen after closing, a pitcher who disappeared on a road trip, a demolition inspector whose truck still sat outside. Enoch batted leadoff.

The home lineup contained four names.

Mine. Tessa's. Malik's. Orson's.

Five blank spaces waited below us.

The scoreboard advanced to the bottom of the first. The home dugout door opened.

The announcer called my name.

My uniform appeared on the bench. It was the green groundskeeping shirt I already wore, but older, stiff with dried dirt, and numbered 1. When I refused to enter the batter's box, the crowd began stamping its feet.

Each stamp made the grandstand sink an inch into the earth.

Tessa understood before I did. If we did not play, the field would bury itself with us inside. If we lost, the Ashen would finish their roster with our shadows.

I stepped to the plate.

The clay pitcher grinned around the ball in its mouth. It removed the baseball with two fingers, leaving tooth marks in the leather, and threw.

I swung the chalk bat.

The ball felt heavier than stone. Contact sent cold through both arms, but the hit rolled past first. I ran.

As soon as my foot touched the base, I forgot my mother's face.

The memory did not fade. It was cut cleanly away. In its place, I remembered a game at Hollis in 1987 that I had never attended, viewed from Seat 3 in Row F.

The bases were trading our lives for the crowd's memories.

Tessa drove me home with a line hit. When I crossed the plate, the scoreboard tied the game, 2–2. Two shadow spectators vanished from the stands. Somewhere behind us, two real people took their seats and raised blank scorecards over their faces.

Malik refused to bat. The field took his shadow before the first pitch. It slid away from his boots, crossed the foul line, and put on a visiting cap. Malik remained standing, but the floodlights passed through him as if he had already become less real.

The game accelerated.

Innings changed between blinks. Clay runners moved with impossible speed. Every stolen base cost us a memory. Every error pulled another figure from the seats. The scoreboard climbed: VISITOR 5, HOME 4. VISITOR 8, HOME 7.

At the top of the ninth, Orson faced Enoch at home plate.

The clay boy had grown old during the game. His dirt face now resembled the brother Orson might have known, lined and gray, still wearing ticket stubs for eyes.

Enoch reached for him.

Orson said, I should have gone back for you.

The announcer repeated the confession in thousands of borrowed voices. Every blank face in the stadium turned toward the brothers.

Enoch touched home plate.

VISITOR 9.

Orson collapsed into a pile of old ticket stubs. His shadow joined the Ashen at the end of their bench.

We entered the bottom of the ninth down by one, with two outs and Malik fading beside the dugout. The scorebook showed me at bat. Beneath my name, someone had written PLAYER TO BE NAMED LATER.

I had spent my career making the field obey rules: ninety feet between bases, sixty feet six inches to the mound, foul lines straight to the poles. The game needed those measurements more than it needed electricity.

So Tessa and I changed the field.

She opened every irrigation valve. Water burst from the turf and turned the base paths to mud. I drove the chalk liner from home plate toward the outfield, laying new white lines in tight circles, figure eights, and dead ends. Tessa pulled second base from its anchor and threw it over the fence. I buried home plate beneath a load of mound clay.

The clay players staggered.

Without a valid diamond, they did not know which direction to run. The invisible crowd argued in whispers. The scoreboard cycled through balls, strikes, innings, and symbols I had never seen.

I drew one final chalk line from the batter's box to the open maintenance gate.

The board interpreted it as a base path.

Tessa, Malik, and I ran.

Behind us, the Ashen followed, but irrigation water dissolved their legs. They crawled along the chalk on arms of packed dirt. Enoch's voice called play-by-play through the speakers, counting the distance between us and the gate.

Tessa crossed first. Malik crossed second. I felt clay fingers close around my ankle as I stepped through.

The floodlights died.

City traffic returned beyond the fence. The scoreboard went black. Only three minutes had passed since 2:06, though the scorebook contained nine complete innings in my handwriting.

Hollis Field was demolished the next week. Workers found human-shaped cavities beneath every seat and nine sets of footprints circling the buried home plate. Orson was never found. No employment record says he worked there.

I have stayed away from baseball since then.

This morning, a small scoreboard appeared on the wall across from my bed. It is made of infield clay and dead moths. There is no wire behind it.

VISITOR 0. HOME 0. TOP 1ST.

The lineup card taped beneath it has one name: PLAYER TO BE NAMED LATER.

A chalk line now runs from under my bedroom door to the foot of the bed, and somewhere in the hallway, something wearing cleats has begun its windup.