Helen, an eighteen-year-old with a disability, loves listening to the Cincinnati Reds game on the radio every evening. She hasn't missed a game in two years. She prefers to stay indoors anyway, fearing that people will make fun of her hand. Her family teases her about her obsession with the Reds, asking her how she can love baseball so much even though she's never seen a game. This makes her angry, but she doesn't change her behavior. She tries to talk to her family about baseball. Her brother used to play in grade school, so she values his opinion, but in general, he and their mother don't know as much as she does. Her father listens to her recap the games before heading out to work on the night shift, but Helen never gets the chance to tell him everything that happened that day. The Reds are on a winning streak, but Helen doubts that they'll go far, knowing how often the team makes errors. Everyone around her is optimistic. Tom, her brother, tells her that if the Reds make it to the World Series, he'll buy tickets and take her. This upsets Helen, as she suspects that he's being disingenuous, making fun of her hand as well as her love of the sport. As the season goes on, Cincinnati continues to win, eventually making it to the World Series. Even when Tom shows her the tickets that he promised, Helen continues to distrust him. She says that she won't go. Despite continuous prodding from the whole family, Helen is obstinate that she won't go. The day of the game, however, she changes her mind. She gets dressed up nice for the first time in three months. Fixing her hair and putting on a nice dress make her feel more confident. She goes with Tom to the ballpark. When they find their seats, she peers down at the field, which is surprisingly small. She had imagined that everything was much bigger. The players, too, were tiny and indistinguishable, even though she had felt that she knew every single one of them on the radio. In addition, the advertisements on the outfield fence as well as the people selling snacks make everything feel too commercial. By the second inning, Helen wants to leave. She gets up, and Tom follows her, begging her not to go. Helen runs to the bathroom to clear her head. There, she realizes that everything for the past two years had been a fantasy in her head. She believes it was a sickness. Baseball wasn't something special just for her, it was for everybody—the whole stadium of people. She washes her hands to clean herself of her former obsession and resolves to become a different person.