Meet the Sounds’ Ambidextrous Pitcher

Meet the Sounds’ Ambidextrous Pitcher

HIS NEW GLOVE is jet black, with gold stitching. From afar, it looks like any other mitt, but up close, it is unlike any glove you’ve seen. It has six fingers, or four fingers and two thumbs, with a small nest of a pocket in its middle, splitting the half-dozen digits precisely in half. It looks made less for a hand and more for a paw.

The man can remember the first time he held a six-fingered glove. He was 7 years old. His father had searched for one that could accommodate the skills of his special boy, and he discovered that Mizuno in Osaka, Japan, had made one. In 1995, a man with a mustache had pitched a single major league inning as a switch-pitcher for the Montreal Expos: He threw with his right hand to two right-handed hitters and with his left hand against two lefties, flipping his custom-made Mizuno glove in between. A switch-pitcher hadn’t appeared in a big league game since 1894; none has appeared since. In more than a century, there has been one, for one inning, making them an almost mythical breed, the most rare of baseball creatures.

The father had called Osaka several times before he found someone who could understand or perhaps believe his request and its consequences: There is another one. He had his boy put each of his hands flat on a piece of paper and traced them, and then he faxed the pages to Mizuno. Several months later, he took a trip from the family home in Omaha, Nebraska, to San Francisco and picked up the glove after its journey across the ocean. It was in a black box. When the father came home, his boy was waiting for him at the airport. Now a 29-year-old man, he can remember perfectly the moment he opened the box and saw the glove that had been made just for him. It made real what sometimes even he could only imagine.

He still gets a charge whenever a new one arrives. It’s as though each glove reminds him of everything he defies, how complete his otherness is. Mizuno’s most senior craftsman made the newest black mitt. What must he imagine about the man who wears his glove?

In Japan, the highest compliment a baseball player can receive is kaibutsu: That man is a monster. Does the Japanese craftsman believe that he’s working on behalf of some strange animal, that he’s a saddle maker for a unicorn? Did he look at the six-fingered glove after he had finished it and think: (continue reading)

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