Rivals (2010)

WHEN THE SUN CAME
blasting in through the hotel room curtains on Sunday morning, Josh pulled aside the shades and felt the thrill of being in a championship game wash over him like the sunlight. The feeling quickly sank into a sea of doubt. Being considered a great player by the Titans was one thing, but the better their team did, the better the competition became. There were other kids out there—not many, but they were there—whose skills rivaled Josh’s. Josh’s father—a mountain of a man who’d been a first-round draft pick out of high school but spent all of his thirteen years as a pro in the minor leagues—told Josh that if he wanted to be truly great, he had to relish the thought of a rivalry.

“Great players always want to go up against the
best,” his father would say, “even if they don’t win. A real rivalry is when teams or players go back and forth between who wins and loses so when they play each other, both are at their very best.”

It bothered Josh that he didn’t relish the thought of a good rivalry. He just couldn’t help wishing for the kind of games where they swamped the other team. That’s how it had been in this qualifying tournament so far, but Josh knew that it wouldn’t be true today. He’d be up against the tournament’s best pitcher, and the sickening dread smothering the thrill made him feel that he was something less than what his father wanted him to be.

These were the kind of feelings he could only talk about with one person—Jaden Neidermeyer. Somehow, her being a girl let him speak freely, and her perky reply hadn’t made him sorry.

“Everything you do, Josh,” she had said, “you do well. You work to be the best. If having a rival you look forward to is part of what it takes to be great, don’t worry, it’ll happen. Just be you, Josh. That’s all you have to do.”

Benji, his other best friend and roommate on the road, rolled over in his twisted pile of sheets and groaned.

“Turn it off,” Benji said, blindly swatting the air.

“Come on,” Josh said. “The Toledo Nighthawks are the only thing between us and the Hall of Fame Tournament in Cooperstown.”

“Hall of Fame Tournament?” Benji asked, scrunching up his face.

“It’s supposed to become the biggest thing in youth baseball!” Josh said. “It’s the first major tournament of the summer. My dad said that this year they’re going to have more people watching on TV than the Little League World Series. He said the teams are going to be the best of the best.”

“You don’t have to tell me how big it is; I’m a Cooperstown veteran,” Benji said, pulling a pillow over his head that muffled his words. “You’ve seen my Babe Ruth paperweight, haven’t you? The one where he’s in a Red Sox uniform? That’s how I like to think of him, the Red Sox being the greatest franchise in baseball history and all.”

“But you never
played
there,” Josh said, yanking Benji’s covers off the bed. His oversized friend was wearing white boxer shorts spotted with red hearts.

Josh laughed, thankful for something to lighten his mood. “No wonder you wanted to undress in the dark. Where’d you get those things?”

“I can’t help it if I’m a ladykiller,” Benji said, his face turning as red as the hearts. He slipped sideways into the bathroom, covering as much of his shorts as he could.

“Ladykiller?” Josh said.

“Girls love a man with good taste in underwear,” Benji said from behind the bathroom door.

“What are you talking about?” Josh said, still laughing. “No one’s going to see your underwear—not any ladies, anyway—unless you’re planning on flashing someone at the pool.”

“It’s not about what they see,” Benji said, bursting forth from the bathroom with his baseball pants hiding the hearts. “It’s an
attitude
. Women can smell it on you.”

Josh could only shake his head as he ran a comb through his hair.

“Look at you,” Benji said. “I know you’re working yourself over in that mirror pretty hard for Jaden.”

Josh rolled his eyes. “Cut it out. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

“Everyone knows she’s crazy about you,” Benji said, pulling on the rest of his uniform and pitching his voice like a girl’s.
“Oh Josh, you’re so strong. Is it even a challenge for you to hit a home run with those two-hundred-foot fences after playing all those games in U14?”

Benji made kissing noises.

“Would you rather I
didn’t
smack them over the fence?” Josh asked.

What Benji heard Jaden say was true. Until Josh and Jaden exposed his former coach, Rocky Valentine, for steroid dealing, Josh had been part of a U14 travel team. He’d gotten experience playing with kids two years older than he was on a field that was much
bigger. The fence for U14 was at about three hundred feet instead of the two hundred feet for Little League, or U12. The bases, too, went down from ninety feet apart at U14 to sixty for U12. It was Josh’s incredible vision—being able to see the ball the instant it left the pitcher’s hand and read its spin—as well as his unusual size and strength for a twelve-year-old that let him keep up with the older kids.

With the strength-training program he’d been on with his old team—even though Josh never did use his old coach’s steroids—he’d been able to hit home runs over the three-hundred-foot fence, so, more times than not, when Josh got all of the ball against a U12 pitcher, he put it out of the park. Josh’s dad had kept the strength-training regimen as part of his own U12 team’s preparation, only without the steroids. Along with Josh’s incredible scoring ability, it had a lot to do with the Titans being so successful.

“Honestly?” Benji said, his eyebrows disappearing up underneath his dark bangs. “It gets a little disgusting.”

“You like winning, though,” Josh said with a grin as he pulled on his uniform.

“Everyone likes winning,” Benji said. “Don’t change the subject. Jaden is crazy for you, man, riding out here with the team, staying at our hotel. I know she’s supposedly writing for the paper, but I think there’s a lot more than Pulitzer Prizes on her mind. She probably has your name tattooed on her butt.”

“Stop it. She’s a nice girl, she loves baseball, and you know it. And I’m not the one with the hearts on my underwear,” Josh said, zipping up his overnight bag and heading for the door. “I’ll leave the girl stuff to you. I got baseball games to play. Come on. We’ll be late for breakfast.”

They took the elevator down and, to Josh’s embarrassment, the first thing they saw when they walked into the restaurant was Jaden, a tall, pretty girl with honey-colored skin, green eyes flecked with yellow, and frizzy hair that she kept pulled back tight off her face. She sat at a round booth just inside the hostess stand calling Josh’s name and waving frantically for them to come and sit down. Josh looked around and hung his head before slipping into the booth. Jaden was as good a friend to him as Benji, and he wasn’t going to stop being nice to her just because he hated Benji’s teasing.

“Sit down,” Jaden said. “Listen to this! I was checking out this Toledo team, and you guys can’t believe what I heard.”

“They’ve got Sandy Planczeck, the best pitcher in the state of Ohio,” Benji said, yawning and picking up his menu. “He throws a seventy-five-mile-an-hour fastball. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we know. Josh could barely get to sleep last night. How’s the pancakes in this joint?”

Jaden scowled at Benji and said, “He throws a
seventy-five-mile-an-hour fastball, yes, but it’s what he’s planning on doing with it.”

“Yeah,” Benji said from behind the menu, “he’s gonna strike out Josh. Oooh, now we’re all scared. Josh’ll knock it into the river.”

In the park where they would play, beyond the fence was a road, and if the ball went another hundred feet or so past that, it would hit the Genesee River.

“No, he’s not going to try to strike out Josh, you goofball,” Jaden said, pulling Benji’s menu down. “If the Nighthawks need it to win, he’s going to throw a beanball at Josh.”

“You’re kidding,” Josh said, setting down his water glass without taking a drink.

“No,” Jaden said, “I’m not. I was scouting them out in the semifinals yesterday, and I met his girlfriend.”

“Planczeck’s got a
girl
friend?” Josh said.

Jaden nodded. “She didn’t know who I was and started bragging about him. I said I’d seen the Syracuse Titans, and they had a really great player named Josh LeBlanc who was almost six feet tall. That’s when she told me they already knew about you and that if he needed to use it, her boyfriend had a surprise for you. She said it exactly, a beanball.”

“
Bean
ball? What is that?” Benji asked, crinkling his face. “Like he farts in the middle of his windup?”

Jaden rolled her eyes. “You are so lame. A
beanball
. This guy’s a headhunter.”

Josh turned to Benji. “She means he’s going to try and hit me with that seventy-five-mile-an-hour fastball.

“Right in the head.”

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