The Greatest

A short story

“There’s a man who wants to speak with you on Line 1.”

“Did you ask his name?”

“His name is Carl.”

“Carl. And did he say who he was with?”

“He did not, but he was insistent that he needed to speak with you. He said it concerns an urgent personal matter.”

I sighed. Amanda means well, but she’s not terrific at screening out sales calls.

“Alright, I’ll talk to him. Line 1?”

“That’s right.”

I clicked the button next to the flashing light.

“Hello, this is Garrett.”

“Good afternoon, Garrett. My name is Carl, how are you doing today?”

“I’m doing well, thank you. May I ask what this in regards to?”

“I’m calling from the Wish Fulfillment Department, and—”

“Ah. Listen, I’m sorry, but I’m already giving to several organizations, and I’m not really interested in—”

“Mr. Patterson, this is not a solicitation call.”

“It’s not?”

“No sir. I am calling to inform you that your wish has come true.”

I sighed again. I hate hanging up on salespeople, but sometimes they just can’t take no for an answer.

“My wish.”

“Yes, Mr. Patterson, your birthday wish.”

“My birthday wish. Well, Carl, I hate to tell you this, but I don’t think I’ve made any birthday wishes in quite some time.”

“Oh, this isn’t a particularly recent wish, Mr. Patterson, in fact, let me check my notes here—this wish was submitted on February 17th, 1990.”

“… my 8th birthday?”

“That’s correct, sir. As I understand it, you had a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles-themed birthday party.”

“I probably did, yes.”

“At that party, you had a birthday cake, and when you blew out the candles—quite successfully, might I add—you made a wish. That wish has now come true.”

“That was thirty-four years ago.”

“Yes, and we do sincerely apologize for the delay. The Wish Fulfillment Department has been backed up for years. Historically speaking, we’ve approved 1.7% of properly-executed birthday wishes—that is, wishes wherein the candles were blown out in one puff, the wish was not disclosed to others before or after, and the wish did not entail anything immoral, improper or ill-intentioned. We’ve found that that percentage is just enough for people to retain a belief in the possibility of wishes coming true, but not so many as to throw off the fundamental balance of society. We’ve been in business fulfilling wishes ever since the tradition of blowing out lit candles on birthday cakes first became popular in 19th-century Germany, but—if I may be perfectly frank—we were not prepared to scale our operations in tandem with population growth. Once the tradition was adopted in America and an increase in household leisure spending made the traditional nearly universal, well, we fell behind. We’ve tried a number of things to try to lessen the onslaught of wishes—developing those trick candles that don’t blow out as easily, encouraging people to divulge their wishes and invalidating them in the process, increasing the level of cynicism in society as a whole, things of that nature, but those wishes just keep piling up. We’re still addressing them as they come in, it just takes a little longer for us to do so.”

“Thirty-four years.”

“Again, we do apologize for the delay. Frankly, you’re lucky you got it in when you did. The backlog for a wish made freshly today is estimated to be nearly sixty-two years.”

“Listen, what’s your angle here? I’ve got a lot of work to do.”

“No angle, Mr. Patterson, we’re just in the business of making dreams come true.”

“So what is this, an It’s A Wonderful Life thing? Are you an angel?”

“I am angel-adjacent, yes, though not in a manner specific to any one religious tradition. But no, what you are describing is a Guardian Angel scenario, and that’s an entirely different department. Besides, you don’t wish that you’d never been born, do you?”

“Only when I’m leading Cub Scout meetings. Listen—and I want to be clear, I’m only humoring you because I’m intrigued by the creativity of whatever scam it is you’re running here—if you were really fulfilling a wish of mine, why wouldn’t you just come down here and do it in person?”

“Well, as I stated, my department is not specific to any one religious tradition, but we are angel-adjacent, and in terms of our general appearance, the Bible did come pretty close to getting it right.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Angels aren’t the white-robed humans with wings depicted in Renaissance art, remember. I am a series of interlocking wheels covered in eyes. It’s quite terrifying if you’re unprepared for it.”

“Wheels covered in eyes.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Named Carl.”

“Carl Schmidlapp.”

“So you’re afraid that I would tremble in horror upon seeing you?”

“I don’t take it personally, Mr. Patterson, I’ve looked this way my entire life and I’m quite comfortable with it. I have a lovely wife and three beautiful children, and they are also wheels with eyes. It is what it is. But, you know, the whole trembling in horror thing makes every appointment take that much longer, and as we’ve already discussed, doing my job as efficiently as possible is of the utmost importance given our tremendous backlog of cases.”

“Of course.”

“Also, after COVID, we realized that we could lower travel costs and improve employee satisfaction and retention by managing these cases remotely.”

“Yes, well, work-life balance is very important. Alright, so you’re a giant wheel covered in eyes, and you’re ready to grant a wish that I made on my eighth birthday. I’m gonna be honest with you, Carl, I don’t even remember what I would’ve wished for back then.”

“You wished to be the best baseball player in the world.”

“I’m forty-two years old, Carl.”

“Again, we do apologize for the delay. This would’ve been easier on everyone if we’d been able to get in sooner, but there’s no sense in dwelling on that. Heck, a lot of kids in your generation wished to be astronauts. That would’ve been much easier to grant if we’d gotten to it in a timely manner, given the current state of NASA funding. Dealing with SpaceX, is, if you’ll excuse my language, a real pain the eyes on the bottom of your wheel.”

“Are those the ass-eyes?”

“Yes, Mr. Patterson, they are.”

“Well, listen, Carl, this all sounds great, but I don’t think that I stand a great chance of being the best baseball player in the world right now. I’m 42 years old, I’m twenty-five pounds overweight, my knees click when I go down the stairs, and the closest I’ve come to athletic competition in years is going on a company outing to TopGolf.”

“Yes, yes, that’s all in the dossier, and while it’s not ideal, it’s all things that we can work with. We might be backed up, but we do have wide latitude to make wishes come true once they reach the top of our pile. That said, I will confess that I glad that you did not wish to be the best football or basketball player in the world, as that would’ve been a bigger reach given the average size of players in those sports. Baseball, you don’t necessarily need to be big or muscular, you just have to have specific skills that—while admittedly unusual for a person of your age and general physique—aren’t technically impossible. Shohei Ohtani’s recent rise to stardom did complicate matters a little for us, of course. If we’d gotten in five or six years ago, we could’ve had a reasonable case for making you a great hitter or pitcher, but he really reset that bar. To be the best player in baseball today, you’d have to be both.”

“Of course. So, how’s this work, I just wire fifty thousand dollars to a foreign bank account? Or do I just give you my social security number and you handle the rest? Oh, or is it like that lady in that article from The Cut, and I put my life savings in a shoebox and then you promise to return and magically make me the best player in baseball?”

“No, Mr. Patterson, nothing like that. In fact, there’s nothing you need to do. The wish was granted forty-five minutes ago. You are currently the best baseball player in the world. This phone call was just a courtesy in order to make you aware of that fact.”

“Hmm. Well, I haven’t noticed anything different.”

“Have you played baseball in the past hour, Mr. Patterson?”

“I have not.”

“Well, there you have it.”

“Listen, Carl—can I call you Carl?”
“That’s my name, Mr. Patterson.”

“Carl, I still haven’t figured out what your angle is here, but I will concede that it has been fun speaking with you. That said, I have a 3pm conference call that I need to hop on to, so I’m going to have to let you go.”

“Of course, Mr. Patterson. Before we hang up, though, I just want to make you aware of a few parameters here. You are currently the best baseball player in the world, but what you do with that information and ability is entirely up to you. I do not have any affiliations with Major League Baseball, Nippon Professional Baseball or any other professional baseball league, I can’t just drop you onto a roster. Also, the wish is not permanent. There have been many people who have, at one point the history of the sport, been considered the greatest baseball player in the world. Currently, that is you, but eventually someone else will take up that mantle. I encourage you to make the most of it while you’re in your prime.”

“I got winded walking up the stairs earlier today, Carl.”

“Babe Ruth probably did sometimes, too, Mr. Patterson. Anyhow, you’ve got your conference call to get to, and I’ve got to go tell a middle-manager in Tulsa that he can finally have those nunchucks he asked for. Have a great day, and hey—have fun with it, okay?”

---

“Hey. How was your day at work?”

“Ugh, it was fine. I was in meetings all day, though. How about you?”

“Same. Oh, I got the weirdest call this afternoon, this guy–”

“Shit, hold on, my phone’s ringing. It’s Liam’s mom, I’m trying to schedule a playdate this weekend.”

“He told me not to call them that anymore. They’re hangouts now.”

“Right, whatever. Hey, Kelsey! How are you!” She cupped her hand over the receiver. “Can you get dinner going?”

I stepped into the living room, where my son’s attention was entirely focused on his Switch.

“Hey, monkey. How was school today?”

“Good.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“You want spaghetti tonight?”

“Yeah.”

“Alright, I’ll get a pot of water going.”

As I held the pot in the sink to fill, I looked out the kitchen window. A plastic baseball bat was laying in the middle of the backyard, left out the previous weekend. 

“Hey, you want to play a little baseball before dinner?”

“No, thanks.”

“C’mon, it’s a beautiful evening, it hasn’t been warm like this in weeks. Let’s get outside.”

“I’m close to getting the next rune here.”

I sighed, again.

“Tell you what, if you come play outside before dinner, you can watch YouTube after dinner.”

“Even the videos with the guy you hate?”

I winced.

“A half-hour of him.”

“Yay! I’ll get my shoes!”

---

“Alright, Dad, throw it here!” He pounded his glove, just like he’d seen me do. I gripped the baseball, and lobbed an easy toss across the backyard.

“AHH! WHAT THE HELL, DAD!?”

“Hey! I told you I don’t like when you swear.”

“You almost took my head off!”

“Sorry… I thought I was going easy. Go get the ball, let’s try this again.”

He lobbed the ball back to me. I wound up just slightly, and put little effort into my throw. It zipped across the yard, and he dove for the grass as it zoomed past him, splintering a board on the fence twenty feet behind him.

“STOP IT, DAD!”

“Shit! I’m sorry, bud!”

“I’m going inside and telling Mom!"

“Wait, don’t. Just hold on a second, okay?”

I trotted over and grabbed the baseball, wincing at the new hole in the fence. I’d have to patch that up before the dog got out. I picked up the baseball, and realized it felt different in my hand—strangely comfortable.

“I don’t want to play catch anymore, Dad. I don’t need to watch YouTube tonight.”

“Just wait, okay? I won’t throw anymore, I promise, you can do the throwing. Can you just run down to the garage and grab my bat? The one that says ‘Black Magic’ on it, it’s behind the lawnmower.”

He hesitated.

“I’ll let you watch forty-five minutes of the annoying guy.”

“I’ll be right back!”

---

I settled into the same batting stance I’d imitated for thirty-plus years, any time I picked up a baseball bat, yardstick, broomstick, wrapping paper tube or anything else of a comparable size and shape. I extended the bat straight toward the pitcher—in this case, my now-nervous nine-year-old son—as Jim Thome always had. I drew it back over my head, and waggled it like Gary Sheffield.

“Alright, bud. Let ‘er rip.”

He sailed the first pitch straight at my head, and I ducked as it rolled toward the house.

“Okay, FINE, now we’re even.” I trotted over to grab the ball, and tossed it back to him. “Put the next one over the plate, okay?” 

He lobbed a soft underhand toss—little timing step like Manny Ramirez—I swung, and—

“Oh shit.”

“Hey, Dad, don’t swear!”

It was a full seven seconds before we heard a THWACK, the sound of the ball striking the roof of a house half a block away.

“Should we go get the ball?”

“We should probably go inside. I think the water’s ready by now.”

---

“The kids and I are going to get started on mini-golf, you sure you don’t want to join us?”

“I’ll come find you, I just really want to hit the batting cages right away.”

“We’ll play your turn for you!” my daughter chirped happily.

“See, perfect. I’ll meet up with you in a few minutes.”

I made my way over to the batting cages, where a few teenagers were practicing their swings. I walked all the way to the end, spotting an available fast-pitch cage.

“Uh, sir?”

A teenage employee saw me opening the gate.

“Yes?”

“That’s our fastest cage. It’s 90 miles per hour.”

“I know.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to try out one of the easier ones? Most of the older guys that come here use the slow-pitch machine down there.”

“Son, let me make my own mistakes, okay?”

I popped on a helmet, and tapped my credit card on the reader. Sixty feet away, the pitching machine whirred to life, and I settled back into my stance. The first pitch crackled by.

“Fuck!”

“Sir, I think—”

“I DIDN’T COME TO FUNTIME ZONE FOR YOU TO THINK, BRAYDON, NOW JUST GIVE ME A DAMN MINUTE.”

The machine whirred again, and the pitch ripped in. I swung. CRACK.

“Whoa.”

Another pitch. Another swing. CRACK.

WHOOSH. CRACK.

WHOOSH. CRACK.

WHOOSH. CRACK.

Activity in the nearby cages ground to a halt.

WHOOSH. CRACK.

The balls were flying off my bat, still rising as they struck the net at the back of the facility.

WHOOSH. CRACK.

I could hear surprised voices chattering from the miniature golf course behind me.

WHOOSH. CRACK.

The machine whirred to a stop, my five dollars spent and me nearly as spent. Breathing heavily, I turned to see that a small crowd had gathered around the cage, the now-stunned teenage employee gape-mouthed at the front of the group.

“Did you play ball?”

I nodded, handing the helmet and bat back to him.

“DiamondStarz U10, North Olmsted, 1991-92.”

---

“I am not a believer in spirits, genies, angels or anything like that,” my wife noted as preface.

“You’re very scientific.”

“I’m not big on superstitions.”

“I see the kids step on cracks all the time, and yet your back remains in great condition.”

“I believe there is a logical explanation for everything.”

“I once saw you make a magician cry. That was actually when I first fell in love with you.”

“With that said, I have known you for fifteen years. In that time, you have run a handful of road races at respectable-enough-for-your-age paces, bought a set of SelectTech dumbbells that you have used twice, and demonstrated an on-again-off-again relationship with our Peloton.”

“We’re going through a rough patch right now, and we ask that you respect our privacy.”

“I think it’s fair to say—and I say this with love—that during that time you have not demonstrated an above-average level of athleticism, coordination or skill at sport.”

“I do not any take offense at this read of the situation.”

“You fell over getting up from the table at a restaurant several weeks ago.”

“It was a weirdly deep bench and I thought that curtain was a wall, but yes. I stumbled onto that couple having a date, and I hadn’t even been drinking.”

“I’m not sure that they believed you, but I had been with you the whole time, and I can confirm that it was completely sober clumsiness.”

“Correct.”

“Since this phone call you received, however, I have seen you throw a baseball three hundred feet, and hit one four hundred feet. I have seen you sprint ninety feet faster than you ever have before and jump higher than you ever have before. Also, when I threw a wrench at your head last night, you caught it bare-handed.”

“That was a bit of a leap of faith on your part.”

“Dodgeball is a great movie, and I’m not sorry.”

“Nor should you be.”

“The point is—whatever the hell that call was—something has changed with you. You possess athletic skills that you did not possess last week nor have you possessed at any point in the time I have known you. It does not make one damn bit of sense to me, but I think it’s time we consider a possibility.”

“And that is?”

“That you actually are the greatest baseball player in the world right now.”

I paused to let the notion sink in.

“… so what the hell do I do now?”

---

Continued in Part II…

—Scott Hines (@actioncookbook)

Getty Images / Justin Wood