Whit's Flop

Davey Holcomb is having the worst day of his Little League career. With the bases loaded in the top of the ninth, Coach Tom Riley keeps encouraging him to watch the pitcher and swing, but Davey strikes out again, and his teammate Ralph makes sure everyone knows whose fault it is. The Coyotes are still ahead, so the coach sends Davey out to right field and promises the team a victory party at Whit's End if they can get three quick outs. The lead shrinks anyway, run by run, and by the time the Coyotes reach Whit's End their coyote howl sounds more like a growl.

John Avery Whittaker, whom everyone calls Whit, is surprised to hear that Davey is on the team at all. Davey has been in his Sunday Bible class and has never once mentioned baseball. Ralph is happy to explain why. Before the game, a portable backstop toppled over the moment Davey walked near it. During warm-up laps, Davey bent to tie his shoe and nearly tripped the whole team. He struck out three times and stepped on the second baseman's foot coming out of the dugout. Ralph calls him a klutz, and Whit tells him firmly that is no way to talk about anyone. Then a crash outside announces Davey's arrival, and Coach Riley is already assuring him that a broken planter could have happened to anybody.

Whit takes Davey on a tour instead, showing him the displays, the gadgets, and Inventor's Corner, where any kid in Odyssey can start a project. Davey is not interested. His ideas never work, he says, and he has decided to quit the team. So Whit asks for help carrying something out of his private workshop, and unveils it for the whole crowd: a machine he calls Whit's Flop. It does nothing at all, which is exactly the point. It was a failure, and Whit invites the kids to guess what it was supposed to be. Davey is the one who spots the levers, the gears, the motor, and the light bulb, and when Whit urges him to poke around inside, he traces the whole mechanism correctly - until a lever snaps off in his hand. Certain that he has ruined one more thing, he heads for the door.

Whit catches him and refuses to let him run. Accidents happen, he says, but what matters is what a person does next, and doing the responsible thing means fixing what he broke. Grumbling that he might create a monster like Frankenstein, Davey settles in at the workbench. He not only repairs the lever, he gets the tray assembly running better than Whit ever managed. The machine still will not make copies and never will, so the two of them decide to turn it into something else, swapping the light bulb for a heating coil.

At the unveiling, Davey explains his invention, flips the switch, and something bangs. Ralph jokes that he has built a machine that explodes, and Davey walks out. Outside, Whit finds him with a plate of small pizzas and tells him about Thomas Edison, who tried more than a thousand materials before one stayed lit inside a glass tube, and who counted every failed experiment as one more thing he now knew would not work. Whit reminds him of Romans 8:28, that God works all things together for good, which is not the same as saying all things are good, and that the working together sometimes takes a very long time. Then Amanda stops by to thank Davey for the pizza, Ralph rides past shouting about it too, and Davey learns the truth. The bang came from faulty wiring, not from his design. With a new fuse, his oven works perfectly, and the pizzas are proof.

Davey is thrilled to have finally succeeded at something, and Whit points out that his own flop was a success all along - it just needed time and a little help from Davey. Nothing done in faith is truly wasted, he says, because God will use it somehow, though maybe not in the way anyone expects. There will be a next time, and another after that, and Whit asks what Davey plans to do then. Davey's answer is that he is done quitting. Already dreaming up a frozen pizza business, he heads back inside, tripping over a trash can on the way.