Baseball Great Page 3

  Josh hefted the bat, letting his body absorb its weight again. He studied the pitcher. In the article Jaden had written about Josh being a baseball great, the next biggest reason she said the team would win the championship was the pitching of Kerry Eschelman. Esch, as his friends called him, had pitched two no-hitters in Little League as a sixth grader. Josh saw why when he watched Esch pitch to Benji. There weren’t many twelve-year-olds who could throw heat, and a curveball, and a changeup, too. That kind of pitching wasn’t typical until high school.

  But Josh wasn’t worried.

  The thing he had—reaction time, or reflex, or whatever it was called—that thing that never let a ball get by him in the infield, also let him see the ball the instant it left the pitcher’s hand. He didn’t just see it; he could read it. The placement of the hand, the laces on the ball, and the spin it had all showed up in his mind as clear as the headlines of a newspaper. And then he had the eye-hand coordination to smack it dead center with his bat.

  So when Esch wound up and let fly with a curveball, Josh watched it come down the middle and veer toward the outside corner of the plate the way most people follow the path of a ladybug slogging along on a windowpane. He swung down on it, driving it right through the hole between first and second. Esch threw two more curves and a changeup, and Josh drove them into every hole the infield had.

  The next pitch came in with heat, right down the pipe, Esch trying to burn one past. Josh jumped all over it, driving it over the left-field fence. Coach Miller let a low whistle escape his puckered lips. Josh glanced at him and tried not to smile.

  “Let’s see you put it past him again,” Coach Miller said to Esch.

  The pitcher threw three more fastballs in a row, and Josh put every one of them over the fence.

  “I don’t suppose you can bunt,” Coach Miller said, almost under his breath.

  Josh dribbled the next two pitches down the third-base line, stepping expertly in front of the pitch, his hands gingerly holding the bat as if it were a big potato chip.

  Up in the bleachers, Jaden was on her feet, clapping politely at the show. Josh and Coach Miller grinned at each other.

  That’s when Josh’s dad stepped out from behind the dugout. He wore a short leather coat. His hands were jammed into the pockets, and his face was darkened by unshaven stubble. He gave Josh a look that meant business and said, “Nice hitting, Son, but get your glove and come with me.”

  “Dad?” Josh asked. “Why?”

  “I said, get your glove,” his father growled through clenched teeth. “When I say do something, you don’t ask why.”

  Josh dropped the bat and scooped up his glove, his eyes on the ground as he shuffled toward the dugout.

  “Mr. LeBlanc,” Coach Miller said, his voice sounding high and weak, almost apologetic, “Josh can’t just leave. This first week of practice is to see who makes the team.”

  “Well, that’s nice,” Josh’s father said, turning his redrimmed eyes on Coach Miller, “but Josh doesn’t need to make your team. He’s not playing.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  JOSH FELT LIKE A dog bone.

  His dad was a pit bull, and he chewed and chewed.

  Josh just sat there in the passenger seat, listening, knowing that he shouldn’t have questioned his father, especially in front of another adult and especially when his father’s pursuit of a lifelong dream had come to a grinding halt.

  “I’m sorry,” Josh said for the fourth time. “I’m sorry.”

  His father stared at the road, teeth clenched, hands white-knuckled on the wheel, driving steadily toward a place he hadn’t yet revealed. It took a few minutes, but finally his thick eyebrows relaxed, his teeth disappeared behind his lips, and he took a deep breath that sounded like the filling of a big propane tank.

  His father let the breath go and said, “Okay.”

  Now Josh waited, knowing not to ask. They got onto the highway and headed east, through the city and away from Onondaga Lake.

  “You got talent, Josh,” his father said. “Not just banging the ball around for some chump school team, real talent. When I was your age, no one did squat for me. My old man was a drunk. The only thing he cared about baseball was that they’d bring a beer and some peanuts to you right in your seat. No one trained me. No one told me anything.”

  Josh’s father nodded, and he looked over at Josh as if Josh should know exactly where this was all leading.

  “You know what I mean?” his father asked.

  “Kind of,” Josh said, not wanting to sound completely stupid but having no idea.

  “Yeah,” his father said, returning his attention to the road and getting off the highway and onto a boulevard lined with offices, shopping centers, and chain restaurants. “Look at that.”

  Up the boulevard and off to the right, back near the highway, stood an enormous white bubble that looked like a snow-covered hill.

  “Used to be an indoor tennis place,” his father said, pulling in and taking the long driveway that cut between a Sam’s Club and Raymour’s Furniture. “They went belly-up three years ago. That’s when Rocky Valentine took over. You heard of Rocky? Your friends talk about him? His team?”

  “I think, maybe,” Josh said, “I heard someone mention his name and the Titans or something.”

  “Yeah,” his father said, tossing him a quick glance. “Guy’s amazing. Three years and he’s got one of the premier youth baseball teams in the entire country. I’d heard his name but had no idea how good he really was. Did you know they won the East Cobb tournament down in Atlanta last year?”

  “Wow,” Josh said, doing his best to sound knowledgeable, “no.”

  “And this year, he says, the Titans’ goal is to get to the Junior Olympics Tournament down in Fort Myers,” his father said. “And if Rocky says it’s their goal, you better believe they’ll get there.”

  “Great,” Josh said.

  As the giant bubble came closer into view, Josh read the sign that said “Mount Olympus Sports.” He knew from English class that Mount Olympus was the place where all the Greek gods lived and where the word Olympics came from. Titans were half men, half gods, and Josh wondered if Rocky had a reason for all the Greek references.

  They came to a stop in front of the facility, pulling up behind a shiny black Porsche. The license plate said DOIT2IT.

  “Guy’s a businessman, too,” Josh’s father said, nodding at the expensive car. “He’s got a DVD out hosted by Bruce Jenner on how to make money. Owns two vitamin stores, a travel agency, a car wash, and a nightclub.

  “Guy’s a good guy, too,” his father said. “The minute he heard about them letting me go, he’s on the phone, asking me if I want to be his VP of sales.”

  “What do you sell?” Josh asked.

  “I don’t know,” his father said with a shrug. “Memberships. Supplements. DVDs. Time-shares. He’s into everything.”

  “Oh,” Josh said.

  His father got out and said, “Come on. Bring your glove. Wait till you see this.”

  Josh clutched his glove and followed his dad in through the double glass doors and past an empty reception desk. They passed by locker rooms on either side, one for men and one where the letters spelling “women” had been stripped away, leaving a clean outline in the grain of the blond wood. His father swung open one of two wide wooden doors in front of them, and they stepped out onto a concrete gallery with small metal bench seats rising up on either side and, out in front of them, an ocean of green plastic grass under a sky of black wires and stained white canvas.

  Rocky, a muscular man with tan, oily skin, a black flattop haircut, and a stubble beard like Josh’s dad, stood in loose red sweatpants and a skintight black T-shirt. He had folded his massive arms across his barrel chest; and while his team ran through agilities from one side of the field to the other, Rocky blasted them with his whistle. Josh and his father watched for twenty minutes while the team went from agilities to push-ups, rotating in sequences of sit-ups, up-
downs, and leg raises.

  “They’re big,” Josh said.

  “It’s an under-fourteen team, so most of them are ninth graders,” his dad said.

  “I meant big muscles, too,” Josh said.

  “There’s a fitness center here. They come right from school every day and spend the first hour in the weight room,” his father said, wearing a painful smile. “Something I never did, never knew about.”

  After another couple minutes, Josh quietly asked, “Do they play baseball?”

  “Oh yeah,” his father said. “They play. Come on.”

  Josh followed his father down the concrete steps and out onto the field. Rocky twittered his whistle, cutting short a set of push-ups and bringing his team in to a perfectly formed semicircle, the players sweating and gasping for air but keeping their heads held high even though they all got down on one knee.

  “Gentlemen,” Rocky said, his voice raspy and his words guttural, as if they could barely make their way out of that massive chest, “we have with us now Mr. Gary LeBlanc. If you’re a baseball fan of any kind, and I know you guys are, you don’t need me to tell you that he’s the star player for the Chiefs—twelve years as a pro and a first-round draft pick right out of high school.”

  Rocky unfolded his arm and extended his palm toward Josh’s father in a dramatic gesture. The team burst into applause.

  “Gentlemen, I know Mr. LeBlanc from doing my nutritional consulting with the Chiefs, and he and I are going into a joint business venture; but what you guys will be interested to know is that his son, Josh here, is going to see if he’s got what it takes to join this team.”

  Rocky turned to Josh and held out a meaty hand. Josh took it and winced under the crushing grip.

  “Now,” Rocky said, turning back to his squad, “you guys do the right thing and make Josh feel welcome. We’ll see how he does, and we’ll see if he can help us do it to it and get to Fort Myers.”

  Josh had no idea why, but he could tell by the looks on the players’ faces that no matter what their coach said, every single one of them wanted to kill him.

  CHAPTER TEN

  JOSH KEPT UP WITH the others. He fielded the ball as well as anyone, scooping grounders, snagging pop flies, and snatching line drives like a frog snaps up gnats. His arm wasn’t the strongest of the bunch, but it wasn’t the weakest. Still, this bothered him, because a shortstop needs a cannon for an arm. The shortstop gets more action in the infield than anyone else. He has more ground to cover. That meant trickier glove work, and he had to make the throw to first base automatic.

  The other challenge for Josh was the distance between bases. For twelve-year-old teams, the bases stood just sixty feet apart. The fourteen-year-old players competed on an adult field—ninety feet between bases—a much more difficult throw. Rocky had three younger assistant coaches, each a former collegiate player. As a group they were silent and tough. They all cut their hair close, like Rocky, and they all knew the game.

  By the time they got to batting practice, Josh had a sweat going, and his arms felt heavy. He waited outside the netting, watching one of the young coaches feed yellow rubber balls into a machine throwing seventy-mile-per-hour pitches. Each player got twenty swings, and the coach tallied the hits, duffs, and strikes. Matt Jones, the tall, red-headed boy in front of Josh, connected with just seven pitches, three of them dribblers. By the time he left the cage, Jones’s eyes glistened with tears.

  “That’s all right, Jonesy,” a husky outfielder named Tucker said, patting him on the back. “This kid ain’t gonna do any better than that.”

  Josh glanced back and saw them looking at him and understood he was the one they were talking about. He ducked through the seam in the netting and picked a bat out of the rack.

  “I’ll put a couple past you,” the young coach named Moose said, “just so you get a feel for it. You probably haven’t hit off a machine this fast before.”

  “That’s okay,” Josh said softly, stepping up to bat lefty. “I’m ready.”

  “Thought you were a righty,” Moose said.

  “My dad makes me bat both ways,” Josh said.

  The young coach smirked at him and muttered something as he nodded his head.

  Josh clenched the bat in his hands and hefted it, letting it swing back and forth enough times to become part of him. When he stepped up to the plate, the coach fired the first pitch before Josh even had the bat back. Josh tried to swing; the pitch hit the neck of the bat, right near his hands, jarring his bones and stinging his fingers.

  “Ow!” Josh cried, dropping the bat to the ground. His face burned like a spaceship plowing into the earth’s atmosphere.

  “Oh,” the coach said with a mean smile, “I thought you were ready. Sure you don’t want to bat righty?”

  Josh said nothing. He bent down and gripped the bat, this time staying back for a minute to readjust. When he stepped to the plate again, the coach fired the ball. The ball came right at him. He jumped back to avoid the pitch. The kids behind him snickered, and the coach held back a smile.

  “Thing throws wild sometimes,” the coach said.

  “That’s okay,” Josh said. “I saw it with Jones.”

  He stepped up for a third time and the ball came fast, right down the middle. Josh swung, and the metal bat clanged like a bell. The line drive nearly took off the coach’s head.

  “Not bad,” the coach said, feeding another ball into the machine.

  Josh connected again, seeing the ball the instant it left the machine, knowing where he had to swing, and choosing the way he’d hit the pitch based on its height. Anything in the lower part of the strike zone he’d chop down on, driving grounders or line drives to either side of the coach. If it came higher, he’d swing through it, blasting the ball on a trajectory that he imagined would take it into an outfield hole, if not over the fence itself.

  Halfway through, Rocky reappeared and stood, arms crossed, watching Josh hit a couple from one side of the plate before stepping around to bat righty.

  After the last pitch, Rocky asked, “How many?”

  “All forty,” the younger coach said.

  “Good,” Rocky said. “We’ll see how he does tomorrow after lifting weights for an hour.”

  Rocky walked away. Josh slipped out through the seam in the netting, and the next boy stepped in. Up in the stands, Josh’s father gave him a thumbs-up. Other parents sat scattered in the stands, too. Josh waved at his father and jogged off to the next batting station, where another assistant coach tossed balls up for him to hit into a net.

  Ten minutes later, Rocky lined up the team along one side of the field for sprints. Josh took off on the first one, winning it and drawing glares from the kids around him. He put his head down and kept running, winning the next one as well.

  “Why don’t you let up, show-off,” the kid next to him snarled. “We all know you came in here fresh as a daisy. Save it for tomorrow when you lift with the rest of us. We’ll see how fast you are then.”

  Josh opened his mouth to say something but thought better of it. The whistle blew again, and he took off, this time letting a handful of the older kids beat him to the line.

  Finally, Rocky blew his whistle three times, signaling for the team to join him in the middle of the field. Josh took his place in the half circle and went down on one knee, huffing, his side aching and his stomach wanting to heave.

  “Not a bad day today,” Rocky said grudgingly. “Get your sleep and don’t forget your supplements with dinner. You need to replace those amino acids. From what I’ve seen tonight from Josh, we may have a little competition on our hands, and that’s a good thing. By the way, Josh, I need to see you and your dad in my office before you leave.”

  Josh caught the dirty looks other players flashed his way.

  “Remember,” Rocky continued, gazing around with small, dark eyes and veins bulging in his thick neck, “T-E-A-M. There’s no I in team. If you’re not good enough, it’s not fair for you to drag down the othe
rs. Now, bring it in.”

  The group of boys converged on Rocky with their hands all reaching up for his, all touching one another’s.

  “‘Do it to it,’ on three!” Rocky said. “One, two, three.”

  “’DO IT TO IT!’” they all shouted.

  The cluster broke up, and the kids started ambling toward the stands where their parents waited.

  Josh touched Jones on the shoulder and in a quiet voice asked, “Jones, did I do something wrong?”

  Jones flinched when Josh touched him but kept walking. Without looking back, Jones said, “Yeah, you showed up.”

  “What do you mean?” Josh asked, jogging to stay even with the older boy.

  Jones stopped in his tracks. He glanced back at the coaches before he said in a low, snarling tone, “You think you just join this team? You get chosen. But you stumble? You’re gone. Rocky finds someone better? You’re gone. Some snot-nose kid with a daddy from the pros shows up to stay? It means one of us goes.”

  Jones turned and started to walk away.

  “But don’t worry,” he said over his shoulder, sneering. “If us guys have anything to do with it, you’ll be gone before that happens.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  ROCKY’S OFFICE OVERLOOKED THE green plastic field. Rocky’s desk, like the Chiefs’ GM’s, faced in, toward the two chairs in which Josh and his father sat. The shelves on one wall bowed under the weight of trophies and ribbons. Several photos with ribbons strung around their frames showed Rocky atop podiums and flanked by other bodybuilders. Josh looked at the coach behind the desk, the swell of his neck and biceps. He was huge, but nothing like the man in the framed photos, who looked as if he’d stepped out of the pages of a comic book, so disproportionately large were his muscles.

  “A lot of metal,” Rocky said, noticing the direction of Josh’s stare, “but that wall’s the one I really like. My Wall of Fame.”

  Josh turned his attention to the opposite wall and the pictures lined up neatly in three rows from one end to the other. In them, Josh recognized Rocky standing with his arm around various celebrities: Jessica Simpson, George Bush, AROD, LeBron James, and Al Gore.