The Ballplayer

The narrator of this story is a professional baseball player. Readers are not given his name or told what league he plays for. They do know, from the very first sentence, that he is famous enough to have his hitting problem discussed in the newspapers. When he was at the top of his game, children waited around the parking lot of the baseball stadium, just trying to get a glimpse of him. He has an attendant to park his car for him at the stadium. Also, the fact that the ballplayers who were famous when he was young now know his name is one more sign that he is famous and that he may have been a star player before his slump began.

Now that he is afflicted with his batting problem, he does not spend his time studying batting technique. Instead, his thoughts about what has...