Authors: Mike Lupica
Either way, he was still an outsider.
Nick was good at that by now.
When the team got around to scrimmaging, he went back to feeling as if he’d forgotten how to play. It was as if his equipment, even his red-and-yellow mask that he’d painted in Captain Marvel colors, was on backward. As if his throwing arm still wouldn’t work right. He’d hear baseball announcers saying sometimes that pitchers who couldn’t throw a strike to save their lives had “lost” the strike zone, the way you lost a pen or a notebook in school.
Nick felt as if he had lost more than the strike zone. He never came close to throwing out any of the guys trying to steal a base on him.
Every throw was different. Bounce one. Sail one. Throw one wide. If I keep this up, Nick thought, I’m gonna end up like one of those pitchers who get so wild they have to finally switch positions.
After the first six guys had stolen on him, Coach Williams called time and started walking toward home plate. On the previous pitch, Nick had airmailed one into center field, even though the runner trying to get to second was Steve Carberry, the slowest guy on the team.
Gary Watson was the batter. As Nick stood there and helplessly watched the ball go so far over Joey Johnson’s head he didn’t even bother to jump for it, Gary was finally ready to say something.
“Dude,” he said in a loud voice, “are you absolutely sure you’re right-handed?”
Coach Williams said, “Gary,” and made a motion with his hand for Gary to walk away from the plate for a second.
To Nick he quietly said, “You’ve got to find a way to relax.”
“I
can’t
,” Nick said.
“Nick, this is baseball, not life and death.”
Nick wanted to tell him he was wrong, it was
much
more important than that to him. Or at least it felt that way right now.
Nick had taken off his Captain Marvel mask, had it in his hand, his cap turned around backward on his head, the way catchers did. And just like that, he could feel his eyes start to fill up with tears.
He tried to look away. But Coach Williams saw. Grown-ups could always see tears coming, even from a mile away.
Crying in front of the whole team would be all I need, he thought, squeezing his eyes shut like he was thinking real hard about what the coach was saying to him.
Then he quickly put his mask back on.
Needing the mask in that moment as much as he ever had.
“You know what?” Coach Williams said. “I just had a brilliant thought.”
He yelled, “Listen up!” and told everybody that Gary would be the last batter of the day—they were going to quit a little early. Then he jogged back to
the mound, Gary hit a liner to Joey Johnson and Coach said it had been a great practice, for everybody to pick up and he’d see them tomorrow.
As the rest of the guys started to leave, Nick sat at the end of the bench on the first-base side and started to take off his gear.
Coach came over and said, “Leave it on for a second.”
“How come?”
“Just leave it on.”
Joey Johnson was the last of the varsity players to leave the bench area. When he did, catching up with everybody else as they walked toward the gym, Coach Williams said, “Okay, then.”
This must be when he tells me he’s sending me back to JV.
The thought of
that
didn’t make Nick want to cry; it made him feel relieved more than anything.
“It really is okay, Coach,” Nick said. Trying to help him break the news.
If Coach Williams had heard what Nick said, he didn’t let on, just stood up and said, “Let’s get to work.”
“Work?”
Nick felt a little bit like he was getting kept after class for doing something wrong. In this case, it just happened to be baseball class.
“Well, work in the sense that we have to work to get you to start playing baseball again,” Coach Williams said. “Make you feel the way you did when you first started playing ball.”
Nick said he didn’t understand.
Coach Williams said he’d show him.
For the next half hour, just the two of them on the varsity field, that is
exactly
what he did.
They played.
It was like he was a Riverdale Redbird all over again.
The first thing Coach Williams did was take out his car keys.
Took them out, handed them to Nick at home plate, walked away until he was halfway between Nick and the pitcher’s mound, turned around with this great big grin on his face, as if he knew something that Nick didn’t.
“Toss me the keys,” Coach Williams said.
“Toss you the keys?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Can I ask why?”
“No.”
“Okaaay.”
“No questions, no comments. Just throw me the keys.”
Nick tossed him the keys, underhanded.
Coach caught them and tossed them back.
“Again.”
Nick didn’t say anything this time, just threw back the keys.
“Good,” Coach said, and then came back to where Nick was standing.
“What just happened here?” he said to Nick. “Oh, wait. I know. You made two perfect throws. If I hadn’t grabbed the suckers with my hand, they would have hit me in the middle of the chest both times.”
“I threw you your keys,” Nick said, “not a baseball.”
“I don’t care if you were throwing me a bag of peanuts like those vendors do at the ballpark,” Coach Williams said. “The point is, you didn’t
think
about making a perfect throw. You didn’t worry about putting too much on the ball. Or whether you were throwing sidearm or coming over the top. You didn’t worry, period. I said throw, you threw.”
Nick said, “It’s not that easy when it’s for real.”
“With an arm like you’ve got?” Coach said. “Yeah, it is. Or at least it should be.”
“I feel like I’ve got to make a perfect throw every time to show these guys I belong.”
“You’re
kidding
!” Coach Williams said. Acting shocked in a funny way. “I hadn’t picked up on that at
all.
”
“I know what you’re trying to do,” Nick said. “It’s just that the harder I try—”
“The worse you throw. And even worse than that, the worse you think you look.”
Nick decided to just come right out with it, before he wasted any more of Coach Williams’s time.
Get this over with once and for all.
“You should find another catcher now, before the season starts,” he said. “And send me back to JV where I belong.”
“No,” he said. He clapped his hands together, as if the fun were really about to start now. “Now that we’ve conquered key throwing, let’s advance to baseball throwing.”
Coach Williams went over to the old canvas ball bag and began rolling balls in front of the plate. Maybe ten or twelve of them. When he was done, he lined them neatly up in the dirt, at the edge of the batter’s box closest to the pitcher’s mound.
Then he grabbed his glove out of the bag and jogged out to second base.
“Drill’s simple enough,” he said to Nick. “Start on either side. Pick up the ball on the end and throw the sucker. Then the next one. And the next. There’s only one rule: no hesitation between throws. Imagine it’s like that three-point shooting contest they have at the NBA All-Star game and I’ve got the clock on. You’ve got just long enough to pick out your target—that would be me—and let those babies fly.”
“One question,” Nick said.
“Shoot.”
“Can I wear my mask?”
“Knock yourself out. Then start trying to knock
me
over with that arm of yours.”
Nick fixed his mask in place as if this were a real game and he was getting ready for the next batter and the next pitch. The mask really was a beauty, what Paul and Brenda had called his Opening Day present, even though they actually gave it to him as a surprise a few days before JV practice had started.
“So technically it’s Opening Day because you’re
opening
it now,” Brenda Crandall had said, and Nick could see how pleased she was that she’d made a little joke, then even more pleased at how excited Nick had been, in a Christmas way, when he’d opened the box sitting there that morning on the table in the kitchen.
It was exactly the one he’d wanted, the one he’d been checking out on the Internet, the Rawlings Coolflo hockey-style catcher’s mask, the Pro 2.
Today, more than ever, Nick needed it to be his superhero mask.
He needed to get his powers back, at least to show this coach, the one who kept saying he believed in him so much, that he did have some game after all.
Right now he didn’t care about Gary Watson and the other guys.
Just this coach.
“Go!” Coach Williams yelled.
Nick picked up the first ball in the line and promptly sailed it over coach’s head.
But before he could hang his head for long, just at the idea that this one-on-one practice was starting out exactly the way real practice had ended,
he heard Coach Williams say, “You’re on the clock, dude. Throw the keys.”
Nick picked up the next ball and let it rip. It wasn’t perfect, but it had some steam on it, and Coach Williams managed to grab it without taking his foot off the bag. Even made a sweep tag on an imaginary runner for show.
On the third ball, Nick fired a strike.
Then another one.
And another.
By the last couple of balls, he wasn’t even looking where he threw. He could picture Coach standing there, feet straddling the bag.
Better yet, he felt like he knew exactly where the ball was going.
He was sweating when they finished, and out of breath. The good kind of tired you could get in sport. But the only rest he got was when Coach Williams jogged back in from second to put the balls back in the line in the dirt in front of the plate.
“Again,” he said.
When he had gotten halfway through the second group and was five-for-five throwing strikes
down to second, Coach Williams told him he could stop. Nick’s arm was tired—not that he was going to admit that in about ten thousand years—but he didn’t care. When he tipped the mask back off his face, he couldn’t help it. He was smiling.
On the varsity field.
Coach Williams tossed his own glove away as he passed the pitcher’s mound, smiling himself. “If you can do it with me here today, you can do it with your teammates tomorrow.”
“Can I tell you something, Coach?”
“You can tell me anything, son. That’s going to be our deal.”
“They don’t feel much like my teammates.”
“They will,” Coach Williams said.
“How do you know?”
“Because they’re gonna start seeing what I see in you.”
“What’s that?”
“A guy born to be a catcher,” Coach said. “It’s in your blood, Nick. I’ll bet your father was a catcher, am I right?”
For a second Nick felt the way you do when you
get hit in the stomach playing sports and get the wind knocked out of you.
The only thing he could think to do was flip the mask back down.
“No,” he said in a small voice.
“I just thought, because you look like such a natural to me.”
Nick didn’t want to tell his coach he had no idea if his real dad had been a catcher, didn’t know anything about his real dad at all.
He wasn’t going to tell Coach Williams that he was adopted. He tried to figure how Gracie would get out of this, and he knew she’d try to find a way to joke her way out, but Nick didn’t feel too funny right at that moment.
“No,” Nick said again, “I learned how to make crummy throws all by myself.”
Coach Williams rapped on the side of Nick’s mask and said, “Hello, in there? Talk like that ends today.”
They walked off the field together, Nick with the ball bag slung over his shoulder. Feeling all right about himself. Not great. Just all right, for a
change. Because the day had ended a lot better than it began.
Like he’d come from behind a little bit in a game in which he’d been way, way behind. Not coming all the way back and winning.
Just getting back into it.
It turned out they hadn’t finished much later than a normal practice would have. That was why when they came around the corner of the main administration building, Nick could see a lot of his teammates still waiting to be picked up.
Gary Watson and Steve Carberry among them. Just standing there.
Watching Nick.
Nick put his head down, started to jog toward the locker room.
It was then that he heard the jangling of some keys.
At first he thought Coach Williams had appeared out of nowhere to give him one last reminder about just reacting and throwing and not thinking so much, everything they’d spent the last half hour talking about.
But then he looked up and saw Gary Watson grinning at him, holding up a set of keys. Tossing them in the air and catching them.
They were watching, Nick thought. They hung around to watch Coach and me.
Nick stood there, unable to turn away as Gary motioned Steve to move a few feet away. Then he made a show of gently tossing Steve the keys, the way you’d toss a ball to a little baby.
The keys didn’t help for long.
By the next day, Nick was back to pushing the ball toward second and third, when guys began stealing on him all over again.
He wasn’t as wild as he’d been the first couple of days of practice, wasn’t bouncing as many or sending as many throws to the outfield. But as soon as he was back on the field with his teammates, it was as if he got scared of his arm all over again. Before long, he was taking way too much time to release the ball and had given up on trying to use all his arm, throw with everything he had the way he used to. He just wanted to make sure to at least hit the glove he was aiming at.
He
was
throwing like a baby, pretty much.
Over the last three practices before they got to
the weekend, Coach Williams kept trying to give him pep talks, tell him he could see improvement, and every once in a while, when the rest of the Tigers weren’t watching, he’d jangle those keys in his pocket.
Both Nick and his coach knew better.
They knew Nick wasn’t nearly the catcher this coach had thought he was getting, and he wasn’t nearly ready for his first varsity baseball game the following Tuesday.