My friends and I are in an on-again/off-again writing club where the rules are simple. Every two weeks you have to submit three short stories that it took you 20 minutes or less to write. These are the results.

DH roped a single over the shortstop’s head, and immediately felt something clench in his hamstring on his way to first.  The manager brought in a nineteen year old from Omaha, thin as a mantis, to pinch run.

DH dropped his enormous ass on the dugout bench so hard even the deputy pitching coach felt it, way down at the end, but the crash fixed the static on the bullpen phone.

Three and a half minutes after DH raised his batting average to .338 he’d devoured an entire family pack of sunflower seeds, a half pound of homemade jerky he kept in the luxurious shaving kit that held his multiple batting gloves, and two cream pies meant for the pitcher’s face if he managed to win.  The pitcher was a rookie, and they’d planned to cream pie him when he got interviewed.  The other pie was backup.  DH ate both.

No one spoke to him in the dugout.  He knew he was fat and old.  He looked awful in a baseball uniform.  He suspected that’s where the expression ten pound sausage in a five pound bag originally came from—fat guys like him putting on embarrassingly tight clothes with no shame and jiggling around in public in the name of sports.  At least the famous boozers of the twenties didn’t have to play on television, he thought.

He began weeping in the dugout.  At first quietly, then his shoulders began to shake, and eventually he was bawling, snot down the front of a jersey already stained with jerky grease and cream pie.

He’d been right—everyone hated him.  The team released him that night and he flew home to Florida and sulked in his mansion.  When he came back two days later to clear out his locker, someone’d pissed in it, possibly multiple times.  His leather jacket was ruined and his kids’ drawings floated in the puddle at the bottom.  But he thought there might still be a jar of gherkins way back in the top and he stood on his tip toes to see.