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“That it all matters.” He draws off his cigar and lets it dribble out all over his face. “You know every game starts with one pitch, and that pitch determines everything else in the game. The first pitch sets up the second, second the third. If Reyes gets in a 2-0 hole he throws the pitch that Young hits for a single. With a runner on first, he’ll throw differently to German. And German will swing differently with a runner on first.”

“And then the next time that Reyes sees Young, he’ll choose his pitches based on the previous at-bat, and the scouting report, and every at-bat Young has ever had against Reyes. It all counts.”

“But as much as everything counts,” Jack says. “Is that you can have the right pitch, and have it knocked out. You can have the right swing and still screw up. That’s the thing that makes this game great, is that everything counts so much, that the factors involved in that one pitch are almost infinite. So anything can happen.”

—From the short story “Delay,” Parker Zane Allen