While we’re still stuck in the quagmire of the 1999 novel The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, a summary might be a handy road map.

The “Pregame” chapter opens with nine-year-old Trisha McFarland lost in the woods after ducking off the trail to pee while her older brother Pete and divorced mother Quilla are fighting. We get exposition about how Pete has been discontent after having to move from Malden to Sanford, unable to make friends due to being a computer nerd and always complaining on the regular outings their mother has been taking them on since the divorce a year ago–including this one, to the Appalachian Trail. As Pete and Quilla fight in the car on the way to the trail, Trisha escapes by fantasizing about her (and her father’s) favorite baseball player, Red Sox relief pitcher Tom Gordon, whom she has a crush on and imagines meeting at a hot dog wagon, where he’s in need of directions.   

In “First Inning,” the three McFarlands pack their gear and hit the trail. Quilla and Pete, fighting over Pete’s inability to make friends, ignore Trisha when she asks to stop at a water pump, and then she decides to step off the trail to pee near a place where the path forks. She decides she can cross the gap to pick up the trail on the other side. 

In “Second Inning,” Trisha can’t find the trail where she thinks it should be, and after ten minutes she can no longer hear voices coming from it. She wriggles under a fallen tree blocking her way and a “fat black snake” wriggles under her hand. She goes a little farther and trips and falls and decides to turn back, but after walking in that direction still doesn’t find the trail. She tries to ignore the voice in her head telling her she’s lost. Finally she gives in and starts shouting out for help and that she’s lost. 

In “Third Inning,” Trisha cries for a bit after no one responds to her yelling, and, surrounded by a cloud of bugs, imagines the fuss that will have to be made to find her (while we’re told her mother and brother still have not even noticed she’s missing yet). In a panic, she starts to run and almost runs right off a cliff but manages to turn just in time. She tries to convince herself she’s okay, and faints. 

In “Top of the Fourth,” Trisha wakes up to a thunderstorm. After a while she feels hungry and takes out all the food from her pack, eats a hard-boiled egg and a Twinkie and drinks some of her Surge. As she’s putting the rest of the food back in her pack, she finds her Walkman and turns on the radio and hears news from Castle Rock. She walks along the bluff listening for water that she thinks she’ll be able to follow back to people. She imagines finding a hunter’s cabin with a phone as she comes across a small stream. As she’s following it, she gets stung in the face by a wasp and goes tumbling down the rock slope. She falls twenty-five feet, landing by the wasps’ nest so that more sting her. She runs back to the stream and recalls her mother talking with someone about an allergic reaction to wasp stings. She checks her pack and finds her Gameboy shattered but her Walkman in tact. When she turns it on she hears the news on the radio that she’s been reported missing. She follows the stream for hours. She tries to pray and recalls the discussion she had with her father about whether he believes in God and his explanation that he believes in the Subaudible. She listens to a Red Sox-Yankee game on her Walkman and eats half a tuna sandwich and the second “splooshed” Twinkie. Tom Gordon comes on in the ninth inning of the game to preserve the lead, and when he succeeds and the Sox win, Trisha thinks it means she’ll be saved–though we’re told she’s already left the area that rescue workers are focusing on in their search for her. She sleeps while suspicious “sounds” move closer to her. 

In “Bottom of the Fourth,” Trisha has a nightmare that she encounters a huge wasps’ nest when she tries to get her father a beer out of the cellar. She wakes covered in bugs and itching. Illuminated by moonlight, she washes her face in a stream and applies mud to it to soothe the itching and stings. The voice in her head tries to convince her she’s going to die and that the sounds she hears are from some “thing” that’s after her. Trying to think of something else to imagine, she imagines Tom Gordon, who tells her the “secret of closing” is “establishing that it’s you who’s better.” In a Castle View hotel, her distraught parents end up having sex, and her brother has nightmares. 

In “Fifth Inning,” Trisha reapplies mud to her face and recalls putting makeup on with her friend Pepsi when they were little. She continues to follow the stream thinking it will lead her to people and feels something watching her. The stream ends up leading into a bog, and Trisha steps into mud that sucks her shoe off and she has to fish it out. She debates turning back but keeps going, walking through stagnant water and tripping and falling into it at one point, shortly after which things get “wiggy” and she starts talking to Tom Gordon. She’s excited to see a row of beavers on a log. She gets to a hummock where she finds edible fiddleheads, then a severed deer head buzzing with flies that the voice in her head tries to convince her was killed by the “thing.” She finds solid ground and more fiddleheads, then the rest of the deer. She resists drinking from the bog. Hours later she’s extremely thirsty and comes across a brook; she falls getting down to it, then drinks. As she’s finding a place to stop for the night, her stomach cramps and she has diarrhea, then gets lightheaded and falls back into her own shit. After cleaning her clothes in the stream, she starts vomiting, then shitting some more. She crawls into a little shelter and listens to a Red Sox game, which they lose, with Tom Gordon not playing. The police get a tip Trisha was abducted. Trisha vomits some more and sees Tom Gordon for the first time waiting for a sign for a pitch. As she sleeps, “something” watches her.

In “Sixth Inning,” Trisha wakes up and drinks from the stream again. She walks with Tom Gordon and after a few hours is too weak to get up when she trips and falls. She’s thirty miles outside the area searchers are focusing on and crosses out of Maine into New Hampshire. She finds a lot of bushes with edible checkerberries, then, after encountering a doe with two fawn, sees they were eating beechnuts that she gorges on and collects in her now empty pack. She sees a bigger stream connected to the smaller one and then sees three robed figures in a clearing. One looks like her science teacher and tells her he’s “from the God of Tom Gordon” who’s too busy with other things to intervene; one looks like her father and says it is the Subaudible and is too weak to do anything. The one in the black robe (the other two are in white robes) says it’s “from the thing in the woods”/”from the God of the Lost” and has a head of wasps. She thinks she might be hallucinating from the food she ate and continues downstream. 

In “Top of the Seventh,” Trisha finds a sports radio talkshow on the Walkman and hears about the police questioning the child molester suspect in the search for her. She sees a meteor shower. She has a dream that Tom Gordon is messing with a ringbolt on a post. Coughing and possibly feverish, she gathers some branches to cover herself, hears an inhuman grunt, and falls back asleep thinking the “thing” is coming for her. In the morning, the pine needles near her are disturbed enough for her to think she wasn’t just being irrational in her fear of being stalked the night before. Seeing some little trout when she drinks from the stream, she uses a stone to cut the hood off her poncho and uses that to catch one, then eats it raw. She keeps following the stream until it disappears into a marsh, prompting her to have a mini-breakdown. She sleeps for a bit then decides not to cross through the marsh, turning north instead. We’re told if she had crossed it she would have seen a pond and a New Hampshire town, but instead she’s now moving deeper into the wilderness. 

In “Seventh Inning Stretch,” the next four days of Trisha’s journey are summarized as she talks to Tom Gordon and her friend Pepsi. She sees a helicopter but it flies away. She’s sick with a fever and coughing. She listens to Red Sox games and is careful about preserving the Walkman’s batteries. She feels the presence of the God of the Lost accompanying her. Stopping to cough, she leans on an old stump she realizes is a post because it has a ringbolt screwed into it, and Tom Gordon tells her she dreamed of this place. She finds a hinge on the post and realizes it was a gate. She searches for more posts to try to identify a path they’re marking, and finds some. She follows the path for hours until it meets a dirt track. 

In “Eighth Inning,” Trisha comes across the cab of an old truck on the track and takes shelter in it from a thunderstorm and senses the God of the Lost very nearby, seeing something with “slumped shoulders” at the edge of the road when lightning flashes. When she wakes to sunlight hours later, she sees something has dug a circle around the cab.

In “Top of the Ninth,” Trisha walks all day and can feel the thing tracking her. She trips over a log and can’t get up, then eats the last of the nuts from her pack. She turns on a Red Sox game but falls asleep and the thing comes out of the woods and points at her. 

In “Bottom of the Ninth,” Trisha wakes up to find the Walkman’s batteries dead. She walks on then stops for the night and drops the Walkman in the grass but finds it the next morning. She has trouble figuring out which way on the road she was going, and starts to cough up blood. She hears a distant noise she recognizes as a truck backfiring. She goes on, and the “rutted track” hits a perpendicular dirt road. She decides to go west–which, this time, is the right decision. She thinks she can hear the distant hum of traffic, then hears the God of the Lost behind her and turns to face it. 

In “Bottom of the Ninth: Save SItuation,” a black bear emerges from the woods that she thinks is just a bear until it stands on its hind legs. She realizes “she must close” and channels Tom Gordon’s stillness. She tells it to come on and it approaches her and she sees its eyes are tunnels and its throat is filled with wasps. She stays still, gripping the Walkman like a baseball, and as it sniffs her face she sees its face shifting. It rises on its hind legs again and tells her to look at it. She does, then makes her pitch. A man in the woods out hunting deer out of season sees them and we cut to him describing it later, how when she pitched the Walkman like a baseball the bear was startled and stepped back, far enough away from her for him to shoot it. From Trisha’s perspective, she sees the bear’s ear “fly apart,” then her pitch hits it between the eyes, and it turns and runs. The man comes out and tries to talk to her and she asks if he saw her throw strike three. He’s not sure if the thing was entirely just a bear but won’t tell anyone that. She falls and he catches her, accidentally discharging his rifle right by her ear. She tries to tell him she got the save as she passes out. 

In “Postgame,” Trisha has the dream of Tom Gordon messing with the ringbolt on the post again. She wakes up in a hospital room with her mother, brother, and father. The nurse says she has pneumonia in both lungs and is trying to get her family to leave, but Trisha gestures to her father that she wants her baseball cap, which he gives her. Making sure he’s watching, she taps the cap’s visor then points to the ceiling, and when she sees his smile of understanding, she falls asleep. “Game over.”

-SCR