Baseball Great (6 page)

JONES BUMPED INTO HIM
hard, striking Josh's sore shoulder and knocking him back.

“Let me get out, will you?” Jones said.

“Sorry,” Josh said, sidestepping the older player and tugging on his batting gloves. He hefted a bat, but it didn't sit right in his hands. Even a slow swing sent shards of pain down his arm.

“Let's go,” the young coach behind the pitching machine said. “I don't have all night here.”

Josh stepped up to the plate, and the first pitch came at him like a shot; the yellow rubber baseball from the machine was a blur. He swung and missed, and the coach fired another. Josh barely had his bat back in place. He swung again and missed, his shoulder on fire. Tucker chortled from outside the net.

Josh heard Tucker say under his breath, “Thinks he can bat both sides of the plate.”

Besides the pain, Josh's arms felt as they had the time he'd fallen into the deep end of his friend's pool in Manchester with his clothes on—sluggish and slow.

Another pitch came and another miss.

“Three strikes, you're out,” Tucker said.

Josh saw the coach make a check on his clipboard, then feed another ball into the machine. Another whiff.

Josh stepped back and held up one hand.

“What now?” the coach asked. “You wanna change to righty?”

Josh turned to the bat rack and found the shortest bat they had. He picked it up and felt the lightness. Maybe he couldn't blast line drives and homers, but he'd be darned if he'd let any more pitches by him. His shoulder might hurt and his arms might be exhausted, but he could still see the ball and read its path.

He gritted his teeth, swung the new bat three times, and stepped up to the plate, still as a lefty. He narrowed his eyes and focused on the tube that launched the balls.

The pitch came.

He swung, more with his wrists than his arms.

Crack.

A grounder through the hole between first and
second. The next pitch came.
Crack.
Another grounder. Another pitch.
Crack.
Another.
Crack.

Josh missed only two of the remaining sixteen swings as a lefty, then hit every one from the other side of the plate. None of the hits had any power, but Josh knew the coach couldn't do anything but mark them down as hits. He went to his next station, then joined the entire team for sprints before Rocky called them in.

“A crap practice today,” Rocky said, glowering. “You want to do it to it? You gotta work harder than this. I don't have anything else to say other than if you do this to me tomorrow, you better tell your mommies and daddies to find you girls a new coach.”

Rocky turned abruptly and stormed off the field.

“Okay,” Moose said, picking up the slack and raising a hand that the rest of them rallied around. “‘Do it to it' on three. One, two, three.”

“DO IT TO IT!”

Josh dragged himself back to the locker room, arriving last. The other players dug into their lockers, pulling out gym bags, some of them changing into dry clothes. At first, Josh attributed the quiet to Rocky chewing them out, but when he reached into his gym bag, he recoiled.

“Yuck!” he said.

The rest of the players burst into laughter and
applause.

Josh looked around at their laughing faces and then down at the slippery goo all over his hands and inside his bag.

From the back, someone shouted, “We figured you could use it, to butter up the coach!”

Josh looked at the yellow mess, half of him ashamed and angry, the other half glad that it was only butter.

“Or save it for yourself, since you're gonna be toast!”

Josh looked for the source of the voice, a stubby kid named Perkins, the team's backup second baseman. Perkins stared at Josh from beneath an eave of blunt-cut blond bangs and grinned with a set of buckteeth that many kids would be ashamed of. Without thinking, Josh walked over to Perkins and stood toe-to-toe, looking down.

“What are you gonna do, you little twelve-year-old sissy?” Perkins snarled. “Butter me up, too?”

Jaden—and Bart Wilson—flashed across Josh's mind, and without thinking, Josh grabbed a handful of Perkins's T-shirt and slammed him into the lockers with a crash.

“Fight. Fight. Fight,” the others chanted.

Perkins's eyes went wide. He staggered sideways, slapping Josh's hands off him. Perkins snarled and charged with his head down. Josh sidestepped Perkins,
grabbed the back of his collar in one hand and the waist of his pants in the other, and hurled Perkins like a battering ram into the opposite lockers.

The lockers shook under the bang, and Perkins crumpled to his knees, pawing at his bloody head.

The locker-room door thundered open.

“What the heck is going on in here!”

Josh whirled and stared into the sweaty purple face of Rocky Valentine.

“NOTHING, COACH,” JONES SAID,
stepping in front of the fallen Perkins. “We're just fooling around.”

“Fooling around?” Rocky said, glaring at Josh. “LeBlanc, you fooling around?”

Josh opened his mouth, but nothing came out.

“Well?” Rocky said.

Josh nodded his head. “A little, Coach.”

“You think that's what we do around here?” Rocky asked, his jaw snapping as he worked it back and forth.

“No, Coach,” Josh said.

“Do you?” Rocky asked Jones.

“No, Coach.”

“Perkins,” Rocky said, looking around Jones. “Get up and get out of here. I don't want to see any of you
anymore. Go on! Get out!”

Josh grabbed his bag and scrambled out of the locker room with the rest of them. His dad met him with a somber face in the lobby, put an arm around his shoulder, and guided him outside toward their car. Josh climbed in and tucked the slimy bag under his legs.

When they were under way, Josh's father said, “That was some pretty weak batting in the cage.”

Josh rubbed his shoulder. “I never lifted weights before.”

“Well, you'll get used to it,” his father said. “That's part of it. You gotta toughen up a little bit. That's one thing for me with having two older brothers—I didn't need to toughen up. They did it for me.”

Josh's father grinned at him.

“How's the job going?” Josh asked.

“Not bad,” his father said. “Getting into it a little. Rocky wants to start expanding his baseball teams—you know, a U12 and a U16—so I'll get involved with that a little. Sell it a little. Get some coaches lined up, some players, maybe. Do it to it. We've got the Super Stax franchise for the area, so I'm starting to set up meetings with the different coaches and trainers at the universities around here.”

Josh let that sink in before he said, “And that stuff's good, right?”

“What? Super Stax?”

Josh nodded.

“You think I'd have you taking it if it wasn't?” his father said. “It's proven. If you don't like the banana, they got it in chocolate, too.”

“No, banana's okay.”

“Josh,” his father said, stopping at a red light and looking over at him. “I know it's hard, but it gets easier. Trust me. Your body will adjust. Especially with the Super Stax. That's what it's for, to build muscle.”

Telling his father about Rocky's car at the hospital danced on the tip of Josh's tongue, but the direction of the conversation made him certain it would sound stupid, so he dropped it. After a few minutes, he turned the radio on to fill the silence while he replayed the fight with Perkins in his mind. Before today, Josh had never been in a fight.

When they got home, Josh choked down a glass of milk with Super Stax, then gobbled down two plates of his mom's spaghetti and meatballs. He tried to play a game of Candy Land with Laurel while his mom cleaned up the kitchen, but Laurel kept chewing the cards. After that he polished off what little homework he had, kissed his parents good-night, and crawled into bed early with a copy of
Heat
. He only got through a couple chapters before his eyes grew heavy, and he fell asleep without bothering to turn off the light.

Josh woke, and panic raced through his veins. His
left leg wouldn't move. He rolled from the bed and hit the floor, the feeling returning in the form of a million needles. Every other muscle in his body shrieked with pain. Josh groaned and pawed at the bed to help himself rise. He limped down the narrow hall to the bathroom. His father was just coming out, wearing only the bottoms of his red and white striped pajamas. His father's hair was a mess and his beard extra stubbly.

“Dad,” Josh moaned. “I'm sore all over. I can barely move. My shoulder.”

Josh clutched his aching right arm.

His father studied him for a few seconds with his lips pressed tight before he said, “Hang on. I got something to help you.”

His father ducked back into the bathroom, and Josh followed him. His father opened the medicine cabinet behind the mirror and jiggled some pills out of a prescription bottle.

“Here,” his father said, handing Josh a little octagonal yellow pill.

Josh turned the pill over in his fingers and asked, “What is it?”

“Anti-inflammatory,” his father said. “Go ahead. It'll help.”

“Can I?” Josh asked. “You don't have to check with the doctor or anything?”

His father frowned and made an impatient gesture
with his hand. “You think I don't know about this stuff?”

“No.” Josh said. “I mean, yes. I know you know.”

“You'll feel better,” his dad said, pushing past him and shuffling off toward his bedroom. “Medicine is part of sports. The higher you go, the more you have to get used to that. It's just part of the game. Don't worry. It's safe.”

Josh looked at the pill and the tiny numbers stamped on its face. He filled a paper cup with water and washed down the pill, then looked at himself in the mirror to see if anything had changed.

JADEN STARTED SITTING WITH
Josh and Benji at lunch every day. Bart Wilson didn't show his face around the neighborhood, and Sheila made a point of walking past Josh in the halls, just so she could turn up her nose. The second article Jaden wrote about Josh in the school's weekly paper didn't take up much space. It explained the situation with him joining the Titans in a sympathetic light and pointed out that with Kerry Eschelman's arm, the team should be a contender anyway.

The Mount Olympus Titans continued their grueling practice sessions, but the excruciating soreness Josh felt in the mornings began to ease up. He stopped taking the little yellow pills and learned to pack his throwing arm in ice every night before bed.

Josh, Jaden, and Benji teamed up for a science poster
project that brought them all together at Josh's house on a Thursday evening. Josh's mom made a stir-fry of chicken and vegetables that everyone loved before the three partners spread out their materials on the living-room floor.

“Benji,” Jaden asked, “what are you doing?”

Benji sat with his back against the wall, and he looked up from his notebook only after writing something down. His face turned red and he said, “Just a little math.”

“We're doing science,” Jaden said. “Our
team
project?”

“I just figured, while you guys were working out the details, I could get this done,” Benji said. “I'm not a good detail guy. I'm more of the big-picture type.”

Jaden looked at Josh, appealing for help.

“Come on, man,” Josh said. “We gotta work together.”

“Well, I'm a science genius, but this math stuff is killing me,” Benji said, rumpling up his face. “I got a sixty-four right now and if I fail, I'm off the baseball team. I know that doesn't mean much to a big travel team star like you, but us little people got to eat, too.”

Jaden scooted over next to him and examined his notebook.

“Where's your work on this problem?” she asked.

Benji shrugged. “What do you mean?”

“Your work,” she said. “The calculations for the problem. You've got the formula right, but the answer's
wrong. Where did you do the work?”

Benji crunched his eyebrows and said, “I sit right next to you in math. I see the way you do it, and you've got, what? A hundred and two average?”

Jaden looked at him, and her face relaxed. She shook her head and softly said, “I think if you just do the work out on paper, you'll be fine. There's a lot of calculations you have to make with this. If you write it down, it's ten times easier to keep track of. Here, let me show you.”

Benji watched her, nodding his head.

“Yeah, I get that, dude,” he said. “Just what I was doing, but in my head.”

“So,” Jaden said patiently, “if you just write it down like this, I think you'll be golden. The formula is the hardest part, and you got that.”

“Yeah,” Benji said, “that I got. That's the hard part. But I still don't get why I shouldn't do it the same way as you.”

“She's smarter than you, meathead,” Josh said. “Don't get mad. She's smarter than me, too.”

“But she can't swing a bat like me,” Benji said, grinning.

“That's why you're her hero,” Josh said. “Now that you've solved the meaning of life, can we get back to this poster? I got to get to bed.”

Benji wrinkled his brow and said, “Anyone else tell you this Titans baseball team has turned you into a real bore?”

“Tomorrow, I'm either in or out,” Josh said, “so you might not have to worry about it.”

“What's tomorrow?” Jaden asked.

“We got a tournament down on Long Island this weekend,” Josh said. “Rocky says the team has to be down to eighteen, so somebody's got to go.”

“Not you!” Jaden asked.

“I'm the only twelve-year-old.”

“So what,” Jaden said. “I can't believe you're not as good as any fourteen-year-old. You're as big as most of them, right?”

“Kind of.”

“So?” Jaden said.

“I'm not the strongest,” he said. “Not even close.”

“You don't have to be the strongest to hit,” Jaden said. “Or play shortstop.”

“It helps,” Josh said. “But I'm getting better.”

“That stuff you drink at dinner when you hold your nose?” Jaden asked.

“You ever check out what that stuff is?” Benji asked her.

“The technical name is arginine alpha-ketoglu-tarate,” she said. “In theory, it replenishes the nitrogen in your cells and enhances the production of amino acids, the building blocks for muscle development.”

“What?” Benji said, his eyes wide. “Steroids?”