Mickey & Me by Dan Gutman

me.”
    After she grounded to short and sat back on the bench, nobody said a word to Mickey. She didn’t look like she wanted to talk about it. It was like the announcement had never been made.
    Dolores Klosowski went back to peeling her potatoes. Max Carey went back to flashing signs and barking encouragement. I went back to flirting with Merle.
    Then in the top of the fifth inning, Connie Wisniewski’s fastball must have lost a few miles per hour, because the Peaches suddenly started hitting. After a pair of singles, a passed ball, and a triple, the score was 6-5, and the Peaches looked like they were about to break the game wide open. They had runners at second and third with their cleanup batter—a lefty—strolling to the plate.
    â€œTwo outs, girls!” shouted Max Carey. “We need an out, bad.”
    Mickey asked the umpire for time out, and she came rushing to the dugout.
    â€œYou okay, Mick?” Carey asked her.
    â€œYeah, I’m fine. Flip me one of those potatoes,will you, Stosh?”
    I grabbed a potato out of the bucket on the ground near the end of the Chicks bench and tossed it to her.
    â€œWhy do you need a potato at a time like this?” Carey asked.
    â€œYou’ll see,” Mickey said, slipping the potato inside her chest protector and going back behind the plate.
    Connie looked in for the sign. The batter pumped her bat back and forth slowly. The infielders got ready. The runners danced off second and third.
    â€œCome on, Connie babe!” Mickey hollered. “Put it in here.”
    Mickey’s sign must have been for a pitchout. As soon as Connie let go of the ball, Mickey jumped to the left of the plate. The pitchout was right where she wanted it. She grabbed it and whipped it to third.
    Or, I thought she whipped it to third, anyway. What she had actually done was catch the ball, take the potato out from behind her chest protector, and whip the potato to third.
    Not that anybody in the ballpark knew that at the time. It looked like a baseball.
    Doris Tetzlaff, playing third, reached for the pickoff throw, but it was way too high. The potato sailed into left field.

    Mickey Maguire behind the plate.
    The runner on third base saw the errant pickoff, clapped her hands gleefully, and trotted home with what she thought was the tying run.
    Mickey, however, was standing in front of the plate with the ball in her hand. She calmly tagged out the runner, who had a look on her face like she had seen a ghost.
    â€œYer out!” cried the umpire. Then he stopped. “Hold everything! What’d she throw?”
    One of the Peaches ran out to left field toretrieve the unidentified flying object.
    â€œIt’s a potato!” she screamed, jogging back to show the evidence to the umpire.
    â€œSo what?” Mickey said. “It’s not my fault if she’s so dumb she can’t tell the difference between a baseball and a potato.”
    â€œYou can’t throw a potato!” the umpire yelled at Mickey.
    â€œWhy not?”
    â€œIt’s against the rules!”
    â€œShow me where it says in the rule book that throwing a potato is illegal,” Mickey challenged.
    â€œA potato is a foreign object!”
    â€œIt is not,” Mickey claimed. “It’s from Idaho!”
    In seconds, both teams were crowding around home plate, yelling, kicking dirt at the umpire, and shoving each other. Fruit and vegetables of all sorts were thrown on the field by the fans, who, for the most part, considered the potato incident amusing. I grabbed a few more potatoes out of the bucket and tossed them to the fans in the front row for the fun of it.
    It took fifteen minutes before the ump was able to restore order. In the end, he ruled that Mickey had interfered with play, and the runner was safe at home.
    At the end of five innings, it was Chicks 6, Peaches 6.

9
The All-American Girl
    NEITHER TEAM SCORED OVER THE NEXT THREE INNINGS , and it was still a