“DAD!!!” I yelled as I raced down the stairs.
Father, Mother, Brother, and Sister all sat around the large, round, wooden kitchen table. It was littered with a blanket of pesky crumbs of toast and waffles; leftovers from the morning’s breakfast.
“Dad! Can you bring me to my baseball game?” I asked as I turned the corner into the kitchen. Today was the championship, the game we had all been eagerly waiting for and preparing for since the first pitch of the season.
“Sure, Youngest Son, where are we going?” Father was apathetic, clearly more interested in his coffee than in my championship.
“Uh, I’ll text Coach and ask where the field is,” I replied.
I whipped out my new phone and opened my contact list. I scrolled down to the picture of Coach, and tapped it. He responded immediately, out of excitement, I supposed. “Ramapo. It’s at Ramapo, come on, I can’t be late!” I urged.
Father dug his face out of his mug and sighed, “Alright. Get ready, we’ll leave in five minutes.”
We left 10 minutes later. If there was one thing that was constant with Father, it was that he was never on time. Never. We took his new sports car and sped to the field.
        When I got to the field, Coach started to yell at me.“Hey! You’re late! Get out there and warm up, would you?”
I dropped my bag and placed my bat next to the others along the fence, then trotted out to right field, where my team was warming up. My friend was alone, throwing pop-ups high into the sky, and catching them with the nonchalance of a professional. At 6’4”, he towered more than a head above us all, and certainly outplayed everyone on the field.
        “Apparently the other team is really good,” I said to him with a little nervousness in my voice.
        “Yeah right, who said that?” he responded.
        “My friend with the short brown hair and the blue eyes.”
        “The one in our math class?”
        “No, not him. The one in our science class.”
        “Who? There isn’t a kid with short brown hair in our science class!”
        “Yes there is! He sits right behind you.”
        “Oh yeah, him. He’s probably wrong, what does he know about baseball?” He brushed it off, too confident to care.
        Why is it so hard to explain, I thought to myself. I wish there was a way to distinguish between people, something that no two people had in common. There are billions of people with brown hair, how are we supposed to tell them apart?
        I snapped back into reality.   
When the game started, everyone was focused. Some people had nervous looks on their faces; others just gazed out to the fence, ready to crush our opponent.
        A few short hours later, the game was entering the bottom of the seventh and final inning. The score was tied, 5-5. All we had to do was hold the opposing team to no runs to force the game to extra innings. It seemed simple, but as it turned out, it certainly was not.
        The first batter on their team hit an easy ground ball to short, where my tall friend easily threw him out at first base. I stood at second base waiting for a ball to come my way. I had a lot of action throughout the game, and I made plays on the three ground balls, one line drive, and one pop fly that were hit towards me.
        The next batter, who was pretty short, hit a single to right field. The next batter did the same thing. We found ourselves in a tough situation, with runners on first and third with only one out.
        Coach yelled out to the field, and pointed at my tall friend and said, “You have the steal!”
        Now it was all on me. If the opposing team tried to run to second base, then I would need to be there to receive the ball from the catcher and tag him out.
        There were two huge problems with the situation. My tall friend thought he had pointed at me. I thought he had pointed at my tall friend. He had in fact pointed at me. Without a way to distinguish between players, there was a lot of confusion on the field regularly. This was the championship game! There was no time for miscommunication.
        The runner on first base did run to second base, and the catcher let loose a cannon to second base. The throw was on time, and should have nailed the runner by a mile. But, there was nobody there to receive the throw. The ball rolled all the way to center field, and the runner easily scored from third base. We were down by a run with almost no time to make it up.
        “What the hell are you doing!” I screamed at my tall friend. “Coach pointed at you!”
        “No way! His finger was pointed straight at your dumb face!” he yelled in response.
        I was furious. Not only had he messed the game up for our team, he had the nerve to blame it on me. I could not bottle up the fury that was inside of me. I charged at him, swinging at his flushed, enraged, sweaty face, and hit him square in the nose. He recoiled, screaming in agony as blood gushed from his nostril, streaming down his lips.
        He recovered, and threw his glove at me. While I was distracted, he tackled me, throwing me onto the ground and slamming his body on top of mine. I could hear my ribs crush as I hit the ground. He got up, and ran off the field into the dugout.
        I ended up fracturing three ribs, as well as dislocating my shoulder. And all I had to show for it was a small, silver second place trophy.
        The next day, Coach called a meeting at his house. The whole team came, even my tall friend with his bruised, swollen face, and we discussed what had happened. We came to a conclusion at the end of the meeting that we needed a way to distinguish from one another. So, for the next season, we were going to have numbers printed on the front and back of our jerseys, and call each other by those numbers.
I was going to be number 17, my lucky number, and my tall friend was going to be number 13.
Even though I ended up with several broken bones, it was worth it, as we now had something to individualize us for the next season, and miscommunication should be a thing of the past.