River City Connections—2026-03-25 (Patreon)

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RING ME UP by Jordan Warner

Yesterday, I got rung up! I’m so happy.

For context, my dad is a big baseball fan, and as a middle schooler and teen, I watched a lot of games with him. There’s an expression I’m borrowing from baseball.

According to Gemini…

"Ring him up" in baseball refers to an umpire calling a third strike on a batter, resulting in a strikeout. It is frequently used specifically for a strikeout looking, where the batter does not swing at a pitch that the umpire deems to be in the strike zone.

The Action: It refers specifically to the umpire's emphatic hand signal—often a "punch-out" or a pulling motion—used to signal the third strike and final out of an at-bat.

The Origin: The phrase likely comes from old-fashioned cash registers that would "ring up" a total with a bell when a sale was finalized, signaling the end of a transaction.

Yesterday, Carter rang me up.

Literally, he asked me to accept a promise ring. It’s not an engagement. It’s a plan to, when the time is right, get engaged. It’s a big step, placing us somewhere between “dating” and “engaged,” and signaling that we’re…promised to each other.

Metaphorically, I’m out—strike three, no longer on the field.

Yeah, the metaphor is a bit of a stretch. I haven’t been, as they say, “playing the field” at all since New Year’s Eve. I shut that door when I agreed that we were dating.

This, however…

…feels quantitatively—and qualitatively—different.

We’re promised to each other—not just dating.

Be your best you!

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All characters in this story are fictional characters, their images generated with AI for AGI Stories. They do not represent any real person, nor is their appearance based on any real human.

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