BY THE BOTTOM OF THE NINTH, it's Braves 4, Giants 0. Tim Hudson is pitching a shutout gem, but his control isn't quite as sharp. He walks the lead-off hitter, Omar Vizquel, then Randy Winn. (The game will go 13 innings and end 7-5, Braves.)

I'm dialing Spaceman for advice again as the PA system booms, "Now batting . . . number 25 . . . BARRY BONDS!"

The stadium is packed, and the seismic vibration of umpteen thousand screaming fans is transmitted via water through my frozen butt—kind of a tingly sensation.

Spaceman answers the phone. Talking fast, I tell him, "The wind's still blowing out, but it's swung west, right to left."

"For God's sake, hug the foul line!" he says. "Hudson's been killing him all night with that sinker." Because of the stadium noise, I can barely hear Bill add "Drink two rums and call me in the morning" before he hangs up.

Seconds later, I'm paddling hard toward the right-field foul line, into a wind that could push a foul ball fair. I'm the only boat in the area as I cling to a buoy. This is it, I realize: one of those rare moments with sufficient intersectings to qualify as baseball legend. No outs, bottom of the ninth, tying run on deck, and the soon-to-be most successful home-run hitter in history at the plate—on his birthday.

The stadium quiets for a beat as fans take a tribal breath, waiting for Tim, working from the stretch, to kick and deliver. Umpteen thousand people, including my McCovey Cove kindred, want it to happen. Number 754.

I also realize this: I don't want it to happen.

It's not because I dislike Barry Bonds. It's not because of the steroid controversy. Hell, for a season of old man's baseball, I used the same over-the-counter stuff Mark McGwire used—hit .240 and looked like someone had goosed me with an air hose. Bonds is an athlete. If I thought pills could give me one day playing major-league ball, I'd let someone shoot them down my throat with a damn slingshot.

No, the reason I don't want it to happen is Tim Hudson. He, too, is an athlete. His senior year at Auburn, he was first-team All-American as a pitcher and utility player—hit .396 and struck out 165 batters. With Oakland, he was named a Sporting News Rookie Pitcher of the Year in 1999 and was runner-up for the Cy Young Award in 2000. But the man isn't just a pitcher, he's a baseball player—a rarity in this age of specialization.

There's another reason I don't want Bonds to homer: I'm a catcher—never gifted, but I love the game and the position. I like the way the bars of a mask frame the world, tunneling vision so all that exists are the pitcher's eyes and the spinning trajectory of the ball. There's an energized dynamic between the mound and home plate, a flowing communication, both linear and intuitive, and a circuit that is completed over and over again through the orbiting exchange of a baseball. I'm a catcher, not a water spaniel—a receiver, not a retriever—and although my attachment to the game may be fanciful, it is an orbit I choose not to break.

In past off-seasons, when I caught Tim, he'd say, "I just want to get loose," so we'd head to the only ball field on the island where his in-laws live. We'd play long toss for 15 minutes, then he'd take the mound and throw 25 to 35 fastballs—fastballs with freakish movement, tailing as they sank. Once, we took my fishing skiff to nearby Useppa Island and worked out on shell middens built by contemporaries of the Maya, the baseball tracing the flight of ancient arrows.

Good mojo.

Tim's a little taller than me, weighs 30 pounds less, yet when he touches a baseball, there's the illusion of some elemental transfer of power between the animate and inanimate. It's as if, through a blessing at birth, his right hand is a conductor in some mystical, kinetic process by which the ball is infused with energy, and so it seems to glow with a voltaic, accelerating force when it jumps from his fingers.

Not true when I toss the ball back. When I throw, gravity reasserts itself and the ball is smothered by friction, its arc collapsing as if a parachute has been pulled. "Put a little color in that rainbow" is a cliché I've heard too many times.

But a baseball has energy, as Spaceman says.

On this night, freezing and afloat in McCovey Cove, I'm grinning: Hudson jams San Francisco's man with another nasty fastball, and Bonds pops a weak fly to third. I pump my fist. Yeah.

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