Steve Salerno

Steve Salerno writing for the Missouri Review on baseball, manhood and, most of all, a life lived in America’s batting cages:

It is the mark of my absorption that I know the pitching machines in American cities large and small, their habits and quirks, as well as I know their physical locations and the best way to reach them from their respective local airports. I can drive the various routes as if on autopilot, making the turns unthinkingly, in much the same way that I can take my batting stance in any given cage, in any given city, and orient myself in the batter’s box within a fractional inch of where I stand in any other given cage, in any other city, at any other time.