Willson Contreras was not supposed to be here. It was a Friday day game at Wrigley Field in the late summer, late in the game with the shadows ominously creeping up to the batter’s box and the three o’clock seagulls divebombing the outfield, and the park was filled with tourists and children enjoying their last weeks before school and a lot of people who, like Willson Contreras, were supposed to be somewhere else. Contreras should have been gone, traded to a contender for one or two babyfaced nineteen-year-olds, and he had spent the season as a ghostly specter haunting Wrigley but here he was fully corporeal in the eighth inning blasting a pitch into the left field bleachers and pointing to the ecstatic fans and ground as if to say “this is where I am” as the last-place Cubs took a 2-1 lead over the last-place Marlins.
Baseball Maudlin Sentimentality Check-In
