Baseball Genius Read online

  For my wife, Illyssa,

  and our five amazing children!

  —T. G.

  To Jalen, who makes every day an adventure

  —D. J.

  1

  JALEN PEERED THROUGH THE WINDOWS of the Silver Liner Diner to make sure his father was still busy. A man in a black knit cap sat at the counter with a newspaper, a cup of coffee, and a piece of pie. In one booth a young, awkward-looking couple in fancy clothes scowled at each other, arguing in silence behind the glass. Jalen watched his father deliver two plates of his special stuffed calamari to the couple. While the Silver Liner was a diner, it was also much more: a place for authentic Italian food. While the two didn’t seem to go together, Jalen’s father somehow seemed to scratch out a living.

  When a car drove up with new customers, Jalen knew he had time to sneak off into the spring night. He snugged the empty backpack on his shoulders as he crossed the railroad tracks. Wind picked at his curly hair, and he paused at the wailing sound of a distant train.

  Beside the station stood a fast-food place, the lights on its big yellow-and-blue-and-purple sign extinguished for the night, since it closed after the last train arrived from New York. Jalen’s dad usually let his help go after dinnertime but squeezed a few extra dollars from the Silver Liner by staying open late, even after midnight, if he had any customers.

  Main Street was empty, but Jalen decided to take a detour and avoid the streetlamps. He jogged fifteen minutes to the other side of town, all uphill, to Rockton’s oldest and biggest estate. It had been built in 1782 by the great-great-grandfather (step-great-great-grandfather, she’d always point out) of one of his best friends, Cat Hewlett. Its heavy iron gates stood open, but he stopped to catch his breath. Fastened to one of the great stone columns by a thick chain was a bronze plaque letting visitors know they were about to enter Mount Tipton. Jalen wondered what name his home would go by if anyone cared to call it anything. Probably Broken Box or maybe Shabby Shack.

  He darted through the gates and into the shadows, avoiding the long, sweeping driveway and the lights buried in the grass alongside it. His friends were waiting for him at the corner of the stables. The rich smell of horse manure swirled deep in Jalen’s nose. Daniel Bellone didn’t even smell it anymore. He and his family lived above the horses, along with two other families who helped maintain Mount Tipton in all its original glory, trimming the gardens and grass, painting the buildings, scrubbing floors, and polishing the brass and silver when needed.

  Cat lived in the big house—as Daniel called it—but with her messy brown hair, scrubby jeans, and the sweatshirt she wore, she looked like she was the one who lived above the stables.

  “Ready?” she asked, snapping her gum and cutting the barn smell with a whiff of peppermint. She bumped fists with Jalen. Even Cat’s raspy voice and the smudge on her face couldn’t hide how pretty she was.

  “As I’ll ever be.” Jalen bumped Daniel’s fist, then turned to look down the hill, over the treetops, at the big brick house a quarter mile beyond Mount Tipton’s stone wall. The huge mansion sat on a hilltop of its own, bathed in soft yellow light.

  Jalen and Cat trudged off down the grassy slope, following Daniel, who knew the way through the tangle of riding trails better than anyone. They skirted the trout pond on a wide, grassy trail before plunging into the woods. The trees above swished in the wind. The beam of the flashlight on Cat’s phone flicked this way and that so that shadows of the thick tree trunks danced and jumped. When they reached the high stone wall marking Tipton’s boundary, Daniel pulled up.

  “You sure about this?” Cat asked Jalen, directing the light at their feet so that its glow lit the three friends’ faces.

  Jalen was surprised. “Why are you saying this now? We all agreed. It’s not like I’ve got a barrelful of choices.”

  “I could . . .” Cat’s voice drifted off on the wind. She looked toward the estate, but they all knew that her stepfather gave her nothing.

  “Maybe . . .” Daniel looked slightly embarrassed. His fee for the travel baseball team had been paid. His spot on the Rockets was secured.

  Without words, Jalen tried to tell Daniel that it was okay. Daniel’s parents were two of the hardest-working people Jalen had ever seen. It wasn’t his fault that Jalen couldn’t afford the travel team fees, and Daniel could.

  “Just . . . be careful of the dogs.” Daniel peered out from beneath a shock of hair as dark as the night and shook his head before uttering his version of a curse. “Hot sauce.”

  “I know.” Jalen patted his pants pocket and the pork chop bones wrapped in plastic tucked inside. He bit his lip and started to climb the rock wall, inserting the toes of his sneakers into the cracks. When he reached the top of the ten-foot wall, he straddled the flat fieldstones and looked down at his friends below.

  “Maybe we should go with you?” Daniel’s face was hidden in the gloom, and his whisper barely rose above the trees.

  “Thanks,” Jalen said. “But no. If it goes bad, I could be . . . I don’t know. Arrested?”

  “I don’t think—” Cat began, before a long pause during which her face grew grim. “Maybe.”

  “So, no sense in taking you guys down too,” Jalen said. “Thanks for coming this far.”

  “We’ll wait right here,” Daniel said. “We won’t leave.”

  Cat began to climb the wall.

  “No, Cat,” Jalen said. “I told you.”

  She reached the top and sat with her legs hanging down on the Tipton side as she held up her phone. “I’ll keep it here, in case you get lost. It’ll be a beacon.”

  Jalen gave her leg a pat. “If it’s not me for any reason, jump and run.”

  “It’ll be you.” Cat’s blue eyes glittered, even in the dim light. “You can do this. It’ll work, and you’ll be on that travel team going up and down the East Coast, knocking in runs and turning twos.”

  “Thanks.” Jalen let himself down a few feet before simply springing away from the wall and dropping to the ground. He didn’t look back because he didn’t want to chicken out. He plunged into the darkness of the trees, waiting for his eyes to adjust, stumbling through the open woods, his eyes fixed on the lights of the huge brick mansion owned by a New York Yankees star.

  Jalen’s stomach felt empty and cold and fragile, like a fist in wintertime without a glove. It wasn’t just the darkness. It wasn’t just being completely alone. It wasn’t just the danger.

  It was that—despite all the rules Jalen had bent in his life—he’d never taken anything that didn’t belong to him.

  Never stolen so much as a candy bar.

  That was about to change.

  2

  THE WOODED SLOPE ENDED AT a narrow creek, easy to hop. The bank on the other side opened onto a wide grass skirt surrounding the front and sides of the house on its own hill. The yellow lights in the bushes around the building lit it from the ground up so that as he got closer, Jalen could see the diamond-shaped pieces of glass in windows crosshatched with white trim. Broad green shutters. Flower boxes filled with color. A large stone fountain babbled from the circular driveway. Bronze angels struggled skyward for a trumpet that splashed them all before finding the fountain’s wide pool. Beyond the fountain, a sleek black Lamborghini rested before the wide steps leading to the front doors. Jalen kept to the tree line, circling the mansion toward the back. A terrace supported by brick columns looked down over a pool area fenced in wrought iron, but Jalen’s target lay beyond that, in a grassy dip hollowed out of the trees, where black netting drooped from tall posts like the forgotten web of a monster-movie spider.

  Jalen’s heart thumped the underside of his ribs, knocking to get out. There were no floodlights here, only the glow from the pool and the dim path lights
around it. Through the hiss of the wind in the trees and the gurgle of the pool, Jalen strained for the sound of dogs. He knew there were two. James Yager—JY—owner of the brick mansion and future Baseball Hall of Famer, was known nearly as well for his Rottweilers as his batting average. People even knew the dogs’ names, Butch and Missy, and frequently the tweeted pictures of the Yankees’ second baseman included JY’s dogs.

  As Jalen approached the batting cage, he peered around, looking for the baseballs that should be lying scattered about the cage floor. In the dark, he saw nothing. Panic choked him because he was there, in the dark night, for the balls. Jalen knew what James Yager did with those balls. Everyone knew that story. Cat had read the story aloud to him and Daniel right off her phone.

  Once a week, the batting-cage balls, stamped with a special Yankees logo and autographed by JY before he bashed them around inside the cage, were collected by the memorabilia team from Steiner Sports and sold online for a hundred dollars apiece to support the Yager Youth Foundation. It was the limited number of balls and the skid marks from JY’s bat—proof that the star player had not only signed, but actually hit them—that gave them their value. Jalen needed ten of them, and that was all he’d take to sell and then use the money to pay the $990 fee required to join the Rockton Rockets summer travel team.

  He crept closer, fretting about whether the balls would even be there.

  He knew the Yankees were on the road today for a series with Toronto, and if the balls had been collected, there wouldn’t be a new batch of them until next Monday at the earliest. Too late. The Rockets’ sign-ups ended Saturday. If Jalen got left out, he’d spend his summer busing tables in the back dining room at the Silver Liner to pay for what batting-cage time he could get at the Pro Swing down in White Plains, and that just couldn’t happen. The Rockets were 13U, the biggest transition in a young player’s career. If he couldn’t spend the summer getting used to the larger field, he’d get left behind, and he knew it.

  He slipped his fingers into the mesh netting and pulled it taut so he could see more clearly into the cage. The floor was bare, but beside the faint outline of the pitching machine rested what might be a plastic bucket. Gone was the idea of scrabbling around the edges of the net, scooping up the ten balls he needed and flying away. He looked back up at the big brick house. Only a few of the windows glowed from within. He knew Yager wouldn’t be home, but he had no idea who else might be in the house. A maid? A cook? Someone to watch the dogs?

  Whatever the case, he saw no signs of life, and he heard no sounds of dogs. So, with trembling hands, he lifted the net and ducked underneath it. He flung the backpack off his shoulders and dashed across the concrete floor to the pitching machine. He banged his knee on the machine and cried out against his will. He didn’t stop to see if anyone had heard, because it was a bucket, a big bucket.

  And it was more than half-full of baseballs.

  Two at a time he grabbed them, stuffing them into his pack, counting because he needed no less than ten and wanted no more. Jalen could justify ten because the Yager Youth Foundation said its mission was to help kids like him. When he first read about it online on the Rockton Public Library computer, he’d shaken his head in disbelief. He’d read the foundation’s mission statement three times, looking for a trick or a mistake, because how could a dream like that really come true?

  Carefully he’d filled out the request and submitted it. He even told his father about it. Every day after school and four times on the weekends he’d checked his e-mail at the library. When he heard nothing from the foundation, he began to e-mail them and call, but he got only electronic replies that requests would be processed in the order they were received and that while YYF did its very best to fulfill all requests, applicants should also seek other sources of funding.

  Jalen waited and waited. For three weeks he waited before he decided that he’d have to take matters into his own hands. Cat and Daniel agreed. It was like destiny that Yager lived right next door to Cat’s stepfather. And it was like destiny that Daniel knew all the paths through the woods, and the one spot where you could scale the wall and—unlike by the front gates—there were no security cameras.

  They were simply speeding up the foundation’s process. They all agreed that if JY knew about Jalen, he’d want his foundation to help. Even though Jalen shared the same zip code with some of the richest people on earth, he lived in a tiny house near the tracks. His clothes came from Walmart, if not Kmart. He had no mother, and his father worked long hours for very little money. Jalen had overheard his second-grade teacher talking about him when she didn’t know he could hear her. She’d told another teacher that Jalen and his father lived “hand to mouth.” He’d looked that up. It meant you struggled with money, and that was pretty true.

  “Underprivileged” was the word the foundation used, and Jalen suspected that he qualified. The other thing the foundation was looking for was kids with a passion for baseball. The foundation wanted to help them pursue that passion by providing money for equipment, uniforms, and yes, travel team fees. That was why Jalen felt only the slightest twinge of guilt as he stuffed the last ball into his backpack and zipped it tight.

  He chuckled out loud as he crossed the concrete floor, heading for the net. He knew he was smiling. He could feel it. He felt as light as a balloon.

  But his smile, and his optimistic feelings, came crashing down when a terrible sound pierced the windy night. A terrible sound.

  The sound of dogs.

  3

  JALEN GRABBED THE NET AND flung it up and over, but too much slack remained, and he found himself tangled in its folds. The sound of bloodthirsty barking closed in on him fast. With his heart in his throat, his eyes detected two shadows streaking toward him. Jagged white teeth flashed in the dim glow of the pool. He couldn’t get away, and he knew it.

  Jalen struggled to get back inside the batting cage. His hands flew, casting the net up and away. He knew he had only another instant when he broke free, falling backward into the cage as the dogs hit the net. Up and down they leaped, casting themselves into the mesh like demons. If they hadn’t been jumping so high, Jalen felt certain they could have burrowed their way underneath, but they were mad with rage and flinging themselves as high and as hard as they could, punching the netting before it flung them back into the grass.

  Still, he didn’t feel safe, and he wasn’t.

  Floodlights from the house exploded into the darkness. Swimming in bright light, the dogs cast huge shadows that rose and fell like waves. Jalen hugged himself in fear and felt the pork chop bones in his pocket. He fumbled with their plastic wrapping, pinched the end of one, and poked it through a hole in the net with trembling fingers. One of the dogs lunged and snatched it from his hand, leaving his fingers wet with slobber. Quickly he removed the other bone and stuck it out too. The second dog attacked it. The bone flew and the dog continued to roar, barking at Jalen like he wanted him dead.

  “Butch! Missy!” a man’s deep voice shouted from near the house.

  Jalen felt his insides crumbling. He’d spent so much time worrying about not being on that travel team that he’d never considered the consequences of being caught. It came to him now like a hammer blow. He’d be sent away. His father had no money for a lawyer. The world would come crashing down on him, and he’d find himself in some kind of detention home for kid criminals. He’d heard about those places.

  Suddenly the second dog stopped and sniffed the bone, then gobbled it up and began to chew, trotting over next to the other dog to hunker down beside it and eat. Except for the crackle and grind of teeth on pork bones, everything went eerily quiet. Jalen backed away, stepping softly to the other side of the cage. His eyes never left the dogs as he swept the net high up over his head and slipped free. Crabbing sideways so he could watch the dogs, he moved as quickly as he could without making a noise, because he knew someone was out there, somewhere in the shadows.

  Relief flooded him as he approached the tre
es. Their shadows would swallow him whole, and he could let loose with an all-out sprint for the wall. The thought of Cat’s beacon swelled his heart.

  He took a final deep breath, turned his back on the dogs, and set off like a rocket.

  He was two strides from the tree line when someone tackled him from behind.

  4

  HIS BODY THUMPED THE GROUND.

  He gasped for breath, but none came. It felt like his chest would explode until finally a great gust of air filled his lungs, then left with a groan. Whoever had tackled him was big and strong and had Jalen by the collar with one hand as the other fished around in the backpack before Jalen was lifted off his feet and shoved toward the house.

  “Little thief.” The man’s growl oozed with disgust, and he muttered to himself as he propelled Jalen forward. “Butch! Disgraceful.”

  The bigger Rottweiler looked up from his chop with perked ears before smacking his lips and returning to the bone.

  The man seemed to be limping, and they were halfway to the house, now under the glare of the lights, when Jalen found his voice.

  “Please, let me go,” he begged.

  “Please? You live in a town like this, and you steal?” The man stopped and turned Jalen around to get a look at his face, and Jalen realized the man was James Yager himself, which wasn’t possible because the Yankees were in Toronto.

  “Please, you’re my favorite player. You’re my hero.”

  “I’m your hero? That makes it worse, kid.” The player frowned. “Stealing from me? I get that. I can handle that, but those baseballs . . . they’re for kids. Did you know that? Of course you did, otherwise why are you even back here?”

  The Yankees second baseman steered Jalen uphill.

  Jalen had so much to say, but shame strangled him and not a single word could squeeze through its grip. When they reached the pool area, Yager led Jalen through the gate. They walked right past the glowing electric-blue pool and circled the house to the far side, where a five-car garage stood. Beyond that in the grass was a large shed in the shape of a barn. Yager opened a side door and deposited Jalen inside before stepping back and dialing his phone.