PART 2 — THE BASEBALL
Prestons cousin reached into his sons backpack and pulled out a scuffed baseball with a date written on it in marker. The little boy in the Braves cap stood beside him, grinning up at Ray.
Two Mays ago, the cousin said, we were at a Little League game when a foul ball came screaming into the stands and hit my boy in the chest. He went down and he stopped breathing. I am his father and I froze. I could not move.
The umpire did not freeze. He was over the fence before anyone else even stood up, and he did CPR on my son right there in the dirt until the paramedics arrived. They told us a minute longer and we would have lost him.
The man Preston mocked for calling balls and strikes had vaulted a fence and breathed life back into a child who had stopped breathing in the stands.
We wrote the date on the ball he was holding when it happened, the cousin said, and we kept it. Then he looked at Ray. I did not know until today the umpire was family. This is the man who saved my son.
The little boy ran over and threw his arms around Rays legs. Preston, who liked to talk about his famous clients, set down his Michelob Ultra.
Ray just flipped the ribs and said he was only glad the boy was okay, that anybody would have jumped. But the father shook his head. Nobody else jumped, he said. You did.
My son gets paid in hot dogs, his son-in-law had joked. One May he kept a child breathing in the dirt behind home plate. That is the man in the mask.