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Chapter Excerpts

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from Chapter 1 . . .

It’s Friday evening at a youth baseball complex in Tyrone, Georgia. Dusk has settled into the grass and trees beyond the outfield fence, turning them into something resembling quiet woodlands. But the baseball diamond is as brightly lit as an operating room.

At the moment, our team of twelve-year-olds, the Druid Hills Bulls, are getting waxed. We’re down 10-0 in the last inning. The team we’re facing is so well-coached and so all-around good—the word is that they won some world series out West last year—that it feels more clinical than your typical 10-0 beat down. It might hurt more in the morning.

Then it starts to get interesting.

An out here, a few seeing-eye hits there, a walk, another out, and bases are loaded with two outs. It’s time for my son, Henry, to step into the batter’s box.

Moments like this are the hardest. There’s nothing on the line—this is just another Friday night in another weekend tournament. But for some crazy reason, to at least one person watching this game, it feels like everything is on the line.

I should start walking away, down the right field line, away from the blinding whiteness of home plate. I should call someone on my cell phone, someone who thinks there are more important things in life than baseball, and make plans to do something tomorrow that has nothing to do with baseball.

I should do anything but what I am doing, gripping the chainlink fence and praying for a miracle.

Please, God, please. . . grant him a hit.

I don’t want it for me. I want it for him. I want my son to be happy.

Henry cocks his bat. Damp locks of hair poke out from his dirty batting helmet. He’s sweaty from catching behind the plate the whole game and from throwing himself around like a rag doll while trying to block curve balls in the dirt. His cheeks and stomach still carry a hint of that adolescent softness that will melt away in another year. At this moment, everything is pure and anything is possible.

In my mind, I can already see his swing and the metal bat meeting the red-seamed ball at that perfect sweet spot, the little white orb disappearing like a shooting star over the outfield fence. I can see this without the first pitch even being thrown, which makes me feel like I’m hallucinating.

The pitcher winds up and throws a fastball down the middle of the plate.

Henry watches it.

“Strike!” yells the umpire, pumping his fist with the conviction of a man who knows that in a few more minutes he’ll be sitting in a camp chair beside his car in the parking lot and cracking open a cold one from the cooler.

The finality of the ball slamming into the catcher’s mitt—instead of leaping off Henry’s bat—is a little disorienting to me. What just happened? I look around to see if anyone else just noticed that he didn’t swing at the ball. His teammates in the dugout beside me are experiencing a range of emotions: the next two batters have their helmets on and want a chance to hit; the others are squirming on the bench, looking forward to the game being over so they can start the next adventure.

Some fathers I know would take it personally that their kid didn’t swing at that pitch. I’m not that bad. But I am wracking my brain for the reason why he wouldn’t offer at a perfectly grooved fastball. Is he still smarting from his last at bat, when he swung at a first-pitch curve ball and grounded weakly to shortstop?

Or did the Skipper give him the take sign from third base?

My mouth feels rusty, like I’ve been sucking on a dirty penny. The buzzing of the overhead lights grows louder, raspier. My mistake was in thinking that I could pray to one baseball god and get some satisfaction. There are many baseball gods—a true polytheism of deities that love to screw with us.

My vision of a ball ascending into the dusky sky is now replaced by the hot pain of doubt and fear. A strikeout to end the game would hurt bad. The absence of all hope. Hell.

Baseball can be such a cruel game.

from Chapter 2 . . .

My adopted father and grandfather, both of them long-distance truck drivers, stand before me in the middle of the living room. In the background, an afternoon baseball game plays on the black-and-white TV. It’s a long-ago moment from my childhood that for some reason has never faded. I am four or five years old and listening closely to their conversation about somebody named Mickey. Finally, even though I’m not supposed to interrupt grownups, I can’t stand it any longer.

“Are you talking about Mickey Mouse?”

They stop in mid-sentence. My father, a no-nonsense ex-Navy man whose arms, legs and chest are filled with tattoos that range from a lion’s head to a full-figured swimsuit girl, gives me a hard look for interrupting. Or for being a wise ass. Because he spends most of his week on the road, he doesn’t know if I’m pulling his leg or not.

My grandfather, who will retire soon from truck driving to spend most of his days at the Paxton Lounge, located in a nearby shopping center, gives me a big grin with the gleaming white dentures set in his tanned, wrinked face. “No, Mickey Mantle. The baseball player.”

What’s so strange is that, over forty years later, these are the only words I can remember between myself and my adopted father, who died when I was eight, or my grandfather, who drank himself out of our lives. I never played catch with either of them and besides this conversation, don’t remember ever talking about baseball.

A few years later, I discovered baseball by myself at the little park near our house. It was sandlot baseball where the trees on the field outnumbered the players. But until I was twelve years old it was the most important thing in my life.

That’s all to say, the version of baseball I grew up with bears absolutely no resemblance to the organized game that my sons play.

from Chapter 5 . . .

Pitching a baseball is, to put it mildly, a torturous and self-destructive act. This is the opinion of the research director of the American Sports Medicine Institute, who explains why in these words: “Pitching is the fastest known motion in human bio-mechanics, the shoulder rotating at the rate of 7,200 degrees per second at its maximum, or the equivalent of 20 full revolutions per second. At the time of the ball’s release, the forces acting on the shoulder are basically equivalent to the pitcher’s body weight; they are akin to someone of similar size trying to yank his arm out of his shoulder socket.”

As the father of a pitcher, when I hear something like this, I wonder: What the hell are we doing to our children?

I’ve read somewhere that pitching coach Rick Peterson wouldn’t let his three sons pitch until they turned fifteen. Peterson tells a story of once throwing 200 pitches in a single game for his community college team, then pitching in relief the next day. Subsequently, a tendon in his throwing arm fell off the bone.

Geez….

I’m not one of those parents who thinks we need to spare Henry’s arm now so he can be a million-dollar bonus baby one day. I gave up those illusions years ago (well, almost two years ago). I’m talking about saving his arm so that when he’s my age he can throw batting practice to his children. Many of the older dad-coaches at our park can’t even do that because of scar tissue from their Little League and high school playing days.

One problem for dads like me is that there is so much information out there that I don’t know who to believe. Do you believe a former major leaguer who ripped a tendon in his pitching arm? Or do you believe dads from the park who’ve been down this road before and whose sons went on to pitch in high school and college? Or do you believe the orthopedists who are performing the kind of complicated elbow and shoulder operations on young pitchers that used to be reserved for adults?

from Chapter 7 . . .

How did Alexander Cartwright ever think of this game?” asks our shortstop. He sits in the dugout and watches sweat drip from his nose to the hot concrete floor, where it quickly evaporates. We are losing the second game of a doubleheader, and nobody really cares.

“He must’ve been really bored,” says the ball-hawk centerfielder.

This raises a good point. How did youth baseball evolve from sandlot games to weekend tournaments that require the logistics of a Special Forces operation?

from Chapter 8 . . .

In my sandlot world, fathers went missing. They worked hard during the week and disappeared into chairs in front of the TV at night. Most of them knew how to make themselves scarce from the demands of wives and children on the weekend as well. The only time they came to the park where we played was to drag some poor offending soul home. Among my best friends, one father stayed home all day on disability leave (although we all knew he snuck off to go hunting in Wisconsin once a year); one father was divorced and never accounted for; and one was an alcoholic who disappeared from view for long stretches. My birth father was unknown, my adopted father was dead, and when my adopted mother remarried a little over a year later, my new stepfather, a stereo salesman at Montgomery Wards who would soon become a Life of Georgia insurance agent, brought stability to our home, even if he had no interest in baseball.

Fortunately, an adult came into my life around this time who spoke the language of sports, which I understood then to be the secret language of manhood.

In his first sermon at Our Lady of Angels church, whose heavy front doors faced Interstate 10 on the worn-out fringes of downtown Jacksonville, Father O’Neil introduced himself by saying he was from Chicago, that he loved the White Sox and that, although he tried, he had little charity in his heart for the team on the other side of town.

from Chapter 9 . . .

Whose team is it anyway?” my wife asks. Last night my fellow dad-coaches and I were, in Coach Sam’s words, “overserved” at a neighborhood bar.

Now it’s Thursday morning, and I’m hungover and trying to think of a reason why four grown men would talk about youth baseball for almost five hours nonstop.

In the next room, the PlayStation game goes quiet. Henry wants to hear my answer, too.

from Chapter 11 . . .

The big day finally arrives. Every baseball we’ve caught, dropped, thrown, hit or waved at this summer, every family dinner we’ve missed, every ballpark hotdog we’ve eaten, every sip of beer at every late-night dad-coach bull session has been aimed at the PONY regional tournament that starts this evening. If we lose three straight games, we’re done. If we win, we play in the state rounds the following week, and if we keep winning, we could go to the PONY World Series in Washington, Penn. That’s a terrifying thought.