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My only highlight for the day came during my first at bat against Lazlo. With the count 0–2, I reminded myself to swing early—to simply guess where Lazlo’s next pitch might cross the plate—and smoked a one-hop double off the wall. That was the loudest ball our team hit all day, and it came as a consequence of nothing more than dumb luck. I had closed my eyes before making contact; it was just pray and swing.

Once our team fell far behind, Pinar showed us the killer instinct that marks all championship teams. Instead of sending in a mop-up pitcher to finish the game and offer us some chance of scoring a face-saving run or two, the opposing manager brought in the lethal weapon he had hidden in his bullpen.

The right-hander slowly strode onto the field with the hurry of a lazy monarch accustomed to making his subjects wait. On the afternoon he took the mound against us, ace reliever Porfirio Perez was sixty-five years old, a tall, light-skinned, angular Cuban with long, dark curly hair, a lopsided grin, and satanic eyes that made him resemble a crazed Mozart. He did not have an ounce of fat on him.

He also apparently didn’t have any bones or joints. Pinar fans knew Perez as “the Man of 100 Moves” and it was not just because he was rumored to maintain two wives with two separate families on opposite ends of the island. The first time I saw him wind up, he resembled an octopus unfolding from a coil. Except this octopus changed his form at will. On one pitch, he mimicked El Duque Hernandez with his ’scuse-me-while-I-stick-my-toe-through-my-forehead leg kick. With his very next offering, though, he might bow deep below his waist, bob up, and throw à la Mike Mussina. Or he could rear back to drive his legs down low while coming straight over the top. Greg Maddux to the life.

Flexibility stood out as his primary strength. While delivering a pitch, Porfirio could stretch his leg up toward the sun, throw the ball over his shoulder, catch it with his bare hand behind his back in mid-windup, then deliver a strike to the plate. Read that one more time. It is an impossible move for anyone else to execute, yet this senior citizen performed that routine on top of a double windup.

Tracking Porfirio’s pitches called for radar. The challenge for hitters is to read the pitch, gauge its velocity, and anticipate where it will cross home plate. To do this accurately, they must quickly identify a pitcher’s release slot. Where does he let go of the ball? But Porfirio had more slots than a mail room; you never had any idea where his next pitch might come from. When I faced him, he spun on the mound like a corkscrew, hid the ball behind one knee, and shot it out of his ass. Or at least that is how it appeared.

Porfirio’s graceful ballet on the diamond mesmerized our lineup. We couldn’t smell a hit out there. His pitches veered so eccentrically, some of our hitters grumbled that he threw a spitball.

But I recognized Perez as one of those mescaline-eating sages Carlos Castenada wrote about, and knew he was simply teleporting his pitches through thought control. How else to explain my first at bat against him, when the umpire called a strike on a pitch I never even saw? The ball rested in Perez’s hand for a split second, disappeared from sight, and poof! it magically rematerialized in the catcher’s mitt.

The pitcher displayed all these marvels with an economy of effort that awed our entire team. Porfirio seemingly never threw hard. He just flipped his pitches through the fissures separating space from time. Perez fooled me with one changeup so tardy, it felt as though I took six hacks at the ball while it levitated in front of home plate. Not one of them connected, and the bat ended up wrapped around my ankles. We could not score a run against him.

Porfirio pitched so impressively that afternoon, we enlisted him for our team when we returned to Cuba two years later. That did not work out well. Perez had lost all his velocity by that time, and the Cuban hitters had grown so accustomed