Last night, Fer and I finally met up and went to a baseball game for the first time this season. I like how easy it is to get to the Diablos Rojos stadium on the metro, and I like the tacos de canasta they sell. I have no allegiance to any of the local teams, but I like baseball, and I love an opportunity to drink a beer and yell in public.

            This time, Fer brought along two of his nephews. The younger one, Alex, was chubby and shy and just the right age to be delighted to go to a baseball game with his uncle. The older one, Jos, was on the nasty side of adolescence, all pimples and hormones and pent-up rage. I could tell he was a sour little twerp right away from how he refused to say a proper hello when Fer introduced me. Most people hate kids in that phase, but I find them refreshingly honest. Why should he say hello to me? He doesn’t know me from Adam.

            It was a weeknight game early in the season, nothing special, so we got pretty good seats right behind the first base foul line. Alex was living in a dream of sodas and popcorn and candy his mother would never buy him. Jos was buried on his phone - even Rocco, the team’s mascot of a dog with devil’s horns, couldn’t catch his attention.

            At the bottom of the third inning, Alex needed to pee, and Fer left me behind with Jos.

            “Look, this guy’s a real all star,” I said as number 47 came up to bat and the crowd fell into their usual cheer of “Es Gamboa!”

            “And?” said Jos. I was surprised that he responded at all, he seemed to be deeply involved in a first-person shooter on his phone.

            “So he might hit a home run. I don’t know. It could get exciting.”

            “He looks old,” he said as Gamboa’s headshot and stats flashed on the giant LED screen behind third base. I counted back from his birth year and realized that the baby-faced Gamboa was five years younger than me - a comfortable mid-career age for a sport where players can hang around into their forties but practically the cryptkeeper to a teenager.

            “I’ll bet you one hundred pesos he at least hits a double,” I said.

            “And what would I do with one hundred pesos?”

            “Ok, five hundred if he hits a home run.”

            “Yeah, sure.” He rolled his eyes, but he also sat up with attention and tucked away his phone for the first time all night.

            The first two pitches were bad, the second one so far low and inside that Gamboa jumped back to avoid getting hit in the groin with the ball. On the third pitch, he tipped the ball with his bat just enough to foul right in front of our faces along the first base line.

            “So that’s two balls and one strike,” I explained. “Two more balls and he’ll walk to first base, two more strikes and he’s out.”

            “Yeah, yeah.”

            “This bet is really in your favor, you know. There’s only one way I can win and there’s about ten ways that you could.”

            The fourth and fifth pitches were also bad, but Gamboa made the mistake of swinging and missing on the fifth.

            “See? This is where it gets good, he really needs to do something great with the next pitch or it’s over,” I said. Jos shrugged but leaned forward in his seat. Money always works with kids. I imagined Fer, stuck waiting in the bathroom line, watching the first tense play of the night on one of the monitors in the stadium walkway. Gamboa looked up, crossed himself, and pointed to heaven.

            The sixth pitch was beautiful, dead center in the strike zone, and Gamboa connected with a beautiful crack. The crowd howled. The ball flew high, high enough to make it hard to judge how far it would go. The Tigres outfielders ran deep into the field as Gamboa began his loop around the bases. All of us - Gamboa, Jos, every stranger in the stadium, and I - we followed the ball with a collective breathlessness, letting our beer slosh over the sides of our cups and our handfuls of popcorn fall as though they might hang in the air. The ball began to curve down, and Jos jumped to his feet.

            “Venga, venga!” he yelled. The center fielder sprinted towards the grass line, towards the stadium wall, and then leapt with the force of someone who cares about his reputation. He slammed hard into the wall with his left arm outstretched, and the very tips of his gloved fingers licked around the ball. Jos cheered. Then, as the center fielder slid back to earth, his wrist caught against the edge of the wall. The ball rolled over the tips of his fingers and into the stands.

            The crowd went berserk, stomping their feet in a man-made earthquake. Es Gamboa, es Gamboa, es Gamboa. Jos slammed down in his seat with rage.

            “No mames. That doesn’t count. He caught the ball!”

            “It doesn’t count as catching if it doesn’t stay in your glove.”

            “This is bullshit.”

            “It’s the rules of the game.” I shrugged. With his home run secured, Gamboa slowed down to a leisurely trot as he crossed third base. He crossed himself and pointed to the heavens a second time. Rocco backflipped along the third base line.

            “And what the hell is that, as though God has anything to do with sports,” said Jos. “Like, there are children dying in wars and there’s climate change and everything is fucked up, and I’m supposed to believe that God is helping someone hit a home run?”

            “Listen, you don’t actually have to pay me five hundred pesos. I don’t care.”

            “It’s not about the money, it’s the idea of it. It’s not fair!”

            “If you want to talk about fair, you need to talk to God himself, kid,” I said as I signaled to a vendor for another beer.

            “Well, I would if I could,” he said as he crossed his arms over his chest.

            The stadium lights flickered. For the second time, the air seemed to congeal. All around us, fans froze halfway through their bites of hot dogs and gulps of beer. The next player at bat was posed halfway through a practice swing like a figurine. Jos looked to me for an answer, and I shrugged. We both noticed Rocco crossing the field in a beeline towards us. He hopped the stadium wall with ease and climbed up to our seats. He popped off the mascot’s head to reveal the face of a man you would never think twice of on the street, the real look of a nobody.

            “If you want to complain, you can do it to my face,” said God.

            “Are you serious?” asked Jos.

            “Of course I’m serious,” said God. “You know how many people would literally kill to get to talk to me directly?”

            “I think that’s part of his problem with the whole situation,” I said.

            “You stay out of this,” they said in unison.

            “I just think it’s stupid for you to be caring about baseball when you could be fixing real problems in the world. How many people are praying because they’re starving or they have cancer or someone is about to blow up their home and you’re here listening to a baseball player?” said Jos.

            “Listen, kid, it’s complicated. People have free will, that’s the whole point. I can’t be going around stopping wars just because you think it isn’t fair.”

            “But it’s not fair to make a home run happen either.”

            “You should check out the Book of Job. Suffering is part of the human experience, and sometimes I work in mysterious ways.”

            “That’s stupid.”

            “Do you talk to your mother like that?”

            “If you were so omnipotent, wouldn’t you know if I talk to my mother like this?”

            “Look, what would you do if you were me?”

            “Aren’t you all-powerful? I would do everything. I would save everyone.”

            “Like I said, it’s not that simple.”

            “But you could make it that simple!” cried Jos.

            “But isn’t that boring? If there’s no war, or disease, or billionaires, or hurricanes, what are you going to do with your life?”

            “I’ll probably enjoy it.” Jos took out his phone again and began to fuss with his game.

            God sighed. “You know, kid, you’re right. Who cares about suffering and all that crap. All I really ever want to do is watch baseball. If I fix everything, will you just shut up and watch the game?”

            “Of course.”

            God closed his eyes for a moment. “Okay. Done.” He popped back on the mascot’s head. “I have to get back to the field now. We’ve been choreographing a new routine to ‘Ella Baila Sola’ for the seventh inning stretch, and I want to get warmed up. Have a good life, and don’t make bets you can’t keep.” God trotted back down the stadium stairs and hopped over the wall onto the field. With a snap, everyone around us unfroze.

            “Did you see that home run?” said Fer as he and Alex sat back down next to us. “Now that’s some good baseball.”

            It was some good baseball - another six innings of cheap beer and greasy tacos and a few more good plays. By the time we shuffled out of the stadium and onto the metro, Alex was nearly unconscious with the crash of his sugar high, and I was fading into my own cozy oblivion from the beer. By some miracle, we smashed into a few empty seats at the end of a train car and hurtled back towards our homes.

            Back on the metro’s free wifi network (I’d rather pay for a beer than for more data these days), I took out my phone and flipped through the laundry list of notifications. I’m not sure what I expected, but it wasn’t the usual mess of news updates and petty complaints. Another bomb dropped, another flood, another one of my neighbors complaining in the building’s group chat. If God fixed everything, shouldn’t that have included the weird smell in the lobby?

            “Adults say anything to get you to shut up,” said Jos as he looked over my shoulder at the real mess of humanity manifested on my cracked screen.

            “Can’t argue with that,” I replied. “At least the game was good.”

            “Yeah, sure.”