It sounded sharp and fairly solid. I was pleased to have gotten the wrists, shoulders, and hips all contributing, though I'm rarely satisfied with exactly how.

I always try to follow the trajectory as best I can - batting cages are fairly dull unless you watch what you hit. My preferred place is, in essence, a barn. Nothing ventilates the lengthy walk past all the chain-link stalls where people take their swings, so the place has that hayloft swelter to it every summer, the one that informs you as you enter that you'll be sticking to your clothes when you leave.

It's built with a corrugated tin roof over a concrete floor - the one slanted to keep the rain from filling the place, and the other to keep the softballs from doing the same thing. Most of the softballs roll, at the end of their trajectories, to the track down the center of the floor, where a conveyor belt rumbles them away from the hitters. Various simple mechanicals then raise them and sort them by size, hard from soft, so they can roll in an orderly way to the machines that will pitch them again. Of itself, the process is interesting to watch - it looks like what I was raised to call American ingenuity in action.

Right then, though, I was watching my part of the process, and seeing what would happen to the ball that I'd hit with no plan other than to get it in play. It was moving pretty well, on a line - one of the shots that makes the shortstop lean to the right and then relax, because it would be through before the feet could possibly move far enough. I watch that kind particularly closely - given the wrong spin, they'll sail on ya, hang up long enough to land in an outfielder's glove rather than the green green grass one hopes for. Usually, I can see enough of the drive to guess how that would have gone, before they bury themselves in the netting that protects all those wacky mechanicals.

Not this time, though.

The netting isn't unbroken - after all, when the machine's spring trips and its long arm snaps, the pitched ball has to get to the batter somehow. Openings about a foot and a half in diameter are provided, in both parts of a doubled section of net, ingeniously arranged to ensure that thrown balls can get out, but batted ones cannot get in.

Unless, of course, they have just the right spin.

My liner, bending toward the ground as a base hit should, made its way through the net unimpeded, and rocketed on through the mysterious gadgetry of the place. I watched through the net and began to wince, as it traveled through all the money-making stuff, and on into the usual crap piled in back rooms everywhere. Still bending, still bending...

Boom.

The back corner of the place has one of those metal trashcans that were in every public place a few decades ago, before they all turned plastic on us. Cylindrical, white, about four feet high, quietly rusting away. Domed top, broken only by a stainless reflective door embossed with P U S H, because when it was made, they were pretty sure that even if you couldn't figure it out on sight, you probably could read English.

Turns out when you hit that little door with a softball, so that the ball disappears within forever, it sounds remarkably like you tossed a firecracker into the metal cylinder. Leaves a serious crease down the metal of the door, too. The effect is percussive as all hell, and echoes nicely down the concrete of the barn.

Of course, I knew that already.

Two weeks ago, the last time I was in, I had hit that precise line drive, into that precise trash can. It made that precise noise, and at the time, it sounded like a million-to-one shot.

The whole sequence took less than a second, leaving me most of five seconds to shake my head, chuckle a bit, and reset my stance for the next pitch. (The machines don't care what amazing things have just transpired, they're just gonna keep on chuckin'.) I think about how locked in I must be right now, how my very usual actions are having very unusual results these days.

Looks like I'm having another one of those summers.

God, I hope nobody turns up pregnant this time.