Young Writers Society

The Mound


The dirt on the mound seemed like it was speaking to him. “Throw the slider. Sling it across the strike zone,” it told him. The pitcher looked at the catcher, and saw him call for the fastball on the inside half of the zone. The pitcher had a tough decision. He looked down again at the sandy dirt. He grabbed a handful of it and rubbed it around his hands. Putting on his glove, he stood ready to pitch. His left leg rose and his right hand gripped the baseball. He hurled the ball and the slider went straight through the zone, the batter quickly swung, and missed.
“Striiiiike!” the umpire hollered. The pitcher looked down and looked at the mound.
“I told you,” the pitcher looked around to make sure no one was looking at him.
“What the heck are you?” he whispered gently
“I have been here almost twenty years. I have endless knowledge in the game, you like to call, baseball,” the mound answered back with a scoff to his voice.
“What do you mean?”
“Listen to me, throw a change-up out of the zone, and I will tell you my secrets.” the mound replied to him. The pitcher thought about the decision. He could seriously put his team in danger if the mound was wrong, but he could also get ahead in the count. The catcher called for the pitch, a fastball, on the lower part of the zone. The pitcher nodded and gripped the baseball, concealing it, in his glove. His left leg rose again and his right arm flung the ball.
“Striiiike!” the change-up hit the zone, and the umpire called it out. The pitcher looked down again, completely astonished.
“When you see several pitchers play here, you learn the language, and therefore I help all pitchers.”
“But, how can I hear you? You do not even have a mouth,” His mind whirled around.
“You don’t worry about that dilemma. Most other pitchers ask that too, but then they see I help them tremendously, and they don’t care anymore.”
“Alright, how should I strike this guy out?” he asked the all-knowing mound.
“Throw a fastball, right, near the top of the zone.” The pitcher gripped the baseball with the two-seam grip. He looked at the batter’s eyes. They glistened like the stars above everyone’s head. He lifted his left leg and hurled the ball. The batter’s eyes grew wide and everything went through his mind, extend on the ball. Don’t drive it into the ground. Hit the sweet spot. The pitcher heard the crack of the bat and he whipped his head around. He saw the ball leave the stadium. The crowd roared, and the batter started running the bases. His jaunt ended where it started.
“Thanks,” the batter said “you really helped.”
“No problem, I know how to handle pitchers here,” the home plate replied back to him.

Hey, Michael! I'm Rose, and I'll be reviewing this piece today.

First off, welcome to YWS! It's an amazing place; I can't even explain how much my writing has improved since I first joined. There are plenty of awesome, talented writers on here who are always willing to offer advice and help; they're also quite fun to just plain talk to. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask me and I'll help you out in any way that I can! Now, on to the review.

I'm not sure how I feel about this piece. What I like about it is its quirkiness. By reading this, I can tell that you're very creative and that you have a unique viewpoint. It's impossible to put a price on that. With a little bit of work and editing, your writing can become magical. I'm positive that it can.

However, I'm not nearly as crazy about how you executed this piece. It's rough in some places. I'll edit a small portion of it to show what I mean.

"Striiiiike!” the umpire hollered. The pitcher looked down and looked at the mound.
“I told you.” The pitcher looked around to make sure no one was looking at him.
“What the heck are you?” he whispered gently.

While this has technical problems pertaining to capitalization and punctuation, they're not what I'm concerned about. What I'd like to focus on is the words you used. You used the verb 'look' three separate times in a very short amount of time. Be very careful about overusing words. In the first sentence, you used a wonderfully vibrant verb: "holler". I would've loved to see more verbs like that. Remember, one of the main things that will make your work differ from what other authors create is the words that you use. In other words, the way you tell the story is more important than the story itself. Tell it uniquely by using unique words.

While I caught quite a few other technical errors, I'm not going to go over them all with you. I'd rather focus on something that I feel is much more important: your characters.

Characters are the most important element of any story. If your characters are interesting, readers will want to read about them no matter what they're doing. Interesting characters are almost always well thought out. Spend a little bit of time creating characters and understanding their emotions, preferences, and flaws. That way, you'll understand what the character would do if he were real, and your stories will make sense.

Remember, as long as you love what you write, my or anybody else's opinion is irrelevant. At the end of the day, what you think is all that matters. Feel free to disregard my suggestions if you love this piece the way it is.

Always keep writing! I hope to see more from you!

-Rose

Hi, Michael!

Well, I'll say I was a bit apprehensive of where this was going when I first started reading. You set up quite the interesting scene, and perhaps that's something to be acknowledged, as it was creative and caught the reader's attention instantaneously.

However, you don't seem to dress up the scene much apart from all the baseball talk. Though, this contradicts my approval of being able to appreciate the writer knowing what he's talking about, I think you could have injected something a little more into this scene. The humor doesn't quite come until the very end. Meanwhile, I'm simply taking in what's going on vaguely for what it is.

I enjoyed the way you turned this around in the end, for sure. The story was well rounded in that sense. Towards the beginning though, I feel like you could have perhaps made this a bit smoother. In particular, I wasn't as big a fan of how abrupt the pitcher could acknowledge the mound for what it was. Why wouldn't this just be an odd voice in his head? He didn't at any point grow distracted or bothered either. There was no real substance in this area of your story. You simply let things be so fairly quickly.

This sort of reminded me of something I'd read in school as a child. About third grade or so. It was simple and to the point and cut to the humor just in time for you to call the story an end, and it was entertaining on a certain level, but it still lacked any larger point. Not that that is a problem. Some pieces are just that way, and they work. My only advice in bettering this would be to tweak the details of the pitcher's encounter with the mound to make the story a little fuller and satisfying to read. Because as I mentioned, there was a lot of that baseball talk. ;] Even it out a bit with a differing approach.

Aside from these few things, I really think you're golden. It was tough to weed out the little oddities I found could use some minor critique. And that doesn't happen often when I review a work. This was enjoyable and I think others would think so if they read it as well. It's simple, and there's nothing very extravagant about it, but that's okay.

Keep up the good work!

-Smylin'