by Mo'ne Davis
You can do a lot with a basic fastball. One way you make the batter swing is to change where you throw the ball—down low by their knees, up high by their chest, close to their body, or far away.
Another way to make the batter miss is to change how you throw the ball. A fastball can go straight, sink, or give the optical illusion that it’s rising or moving slow. When you throw a good hard fastball, we say that you’re throwing a “heater” or “bringing the heat.”
I also learned how to throw a curveball—but not until I was twelve, because it’s harder to do. To throw a curveball, you hold your pointer and middle fingers close together on top of or parallel to a seam with your thumb across the opposite seam. That gives the ball a lot of topspin, which makes it curve downward as it gets close to the plate. Because you throw a curveball a lot slower than a fastball, you can really throw a batter off if he’s expecting a fastball but you throw him a curve. Then there’s a “dirty curve,” which dives but also curves toward the inside or outside edge of the plate. Dirty curves are nasty and hard to hit.
Then there’s a changeup, which I’m still learning to throw. When you’re the batter, it looks a lot like a fastball, but it comes a lot slower. You can’t tell that it’s coming slower until it’s really close to the plate. By then you may already have swung the bat and missed.
Strike one!
Another way to get a batter out is to throw the ball in the strike zone—an imaginary rectangle over home plate that is as wide as the plate and as long as the distance between the batter’s armpits and knees—but to fool the batter into not swinging. Strike two!
Every now and then, I also throw a quick pitch—when I don’t take as long as I usually do to throw it. A quick pitch catches a batter off guard and messes up their rhythm.
Strike three!
Another way to get a batter out is to make them hit the ball to one of the other players—in baseball we call them fielders—so that the players catch it on the fly, in the air, before it touches the ground. Or the batter can hit the ball to a fielder, who picks it up off the ground so they can throw the batter or another runner out.
But you have to practice. To get better I throw thousands of pitches in the pitching cage.
“Even if we don’t go there as part of our practice, every day she goes in there to perfect her craft,” says Zion.
When I’m done practicing sports, usually I go home, take my shower, and get ready for the next day.
“Mo’ne does her homework in the kitchen between ten o’clock and one in the morning,” says Qu’ran. “She’s drinking Canada Dry ginger ale and on her computer listening to ‘Fancy’ by Iggy Azalea, and she listens to Fifth Harmony.”
The next day I do it all over again. That’s the other thing about hard work—you have to really like what you’re doing because you’re going to do it A LOT. But even if you don’t always enjoy what you’re doing, if you do it with friends they can help make it fun.
Studying and perfecting my craft—Jackie Robinson did it. And Marian Anderson, she did it also. Even though her family was poor and her church came together to help her pay for voice lessons, she became great. In 1939, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt invited her to sing at the Lincoln Memorial before seventy-five thousand people. In 1955, she became the first black woman allowed to sing at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City. And John F. Kennedy invited her to sing the national anthem when he became president. Maybe when Marian Anderson was a girl she had big dreams like me.
CHAPTER 8
BEING COMMITTED
BY THE TIME I WAS TEN, THE MONARCHS WERE GETTING really good at all three sports, and I was becoming a really good basketball player. Around Philly, people in youth basketball were starting to know my name.
In one game against Frankford Recreation Center, one of my moves ended up on YouTube after a kid on their team hit a three-pointer on us.
We inbounded the ball, and I slowly walked up the court dribbling. In basketball, I play the point guard position. The point guard in basketball is like the quarterback in football. We get the plays from the coach, and then we run the offense.
Coach Steve gave us the signal for everyone to spread out and for me to drive to the basket. When I reached the top of the key, I started the play. The boy who had hit the three-pointer was guarding me. I faked him like I was going in one direction, then crossed the ball over to the other hand and dribbled in the opposite direction. He fell on his butt. While he was lying on the ground, I drove up under the basket to make them think that I was going to shoot a layup. But then I passed off to Nasir and he scored from the corner. I didn’t know it till later, but somebody was videotaping the game. That was my first “ankle-breaker,” the slang for a play where you fake out an opponent and he stumbles. We won the game.
That year, 2011, turned out to be a big year for us. The Monarchs won the championship in four different sports—indoor soccer, outdoor soccer, basketball, and baseball—even though we were playing in the ten-and-under league.
The basketball championship was against Somerton at Vogt Recreation Center in the northeast part of Philadelphia. We were down by just one point with sixteen seconds left, and then Scott came through with a free throw to tie it and send us to overtime. We won in the second overtime.
That same day we had an indoor soccer championship against Port Richmond. The kids from Port Richmond were old rivals. The first time we played them, we finished in a tie. The next year, the game went to double overtime. The soccer championship was scheduled so close to the basketball championship that we didn’t even get to stay for the awards ceremony.
“Oh my goodness, we were running from the basketball championship to the soccer championship, and they were changing their clothes in the car,” my mom says. “It was hectic!”
Indoor soccer is different from outdoor soccer. For one thing, there is no out of bounds—the ball can go in the stands and bounce back on the floor and you can still play it.
In the last period of this game, the Monarchs were down by a goal. Then on one play, the ball bounced up into the bleachers, and someone batted it right back onto the court. It went straight to Scott, who was standing at midcourt. Scott kicked the ball with his left foot while it was still in the air, and scored! No one could believe he’d done that. You might see that kind of play in the World Cup, but for anybody else, it’s super hard to do.
Scott’s shot tied the game. After that, we played two overtimes, but the game was still tied so we went into a shoot-out. Scott was the first shooter, and his shot hit the crossbar. It was so close! Then it was Port Richmond’s turn to kick. They missed.
The game kept going back and forth after that. Their player would kick and miss, and we would kick and miss.
Everyone sat nervously on the sidelines for several rounds, waiting while each player took their shot.
Then Port Richmond scored. All of a sudden, we were down by one.
It was my turn to kick. If I missed it, we were going to lose.
I ran onto the floor and stared at the goal. Then I took my approach and kicked it into the left-hand corner. The score was even again.
The next Port Richmond player missed his shot. Then on the ninth shot of the shootout Myles came up and ripped it. Myles kicked it high and to the upper left.
Scooooooore!
The whole place went kind of crazy.
After the game ended we had to run out the door. We were late to a preseason baseball game.
Our baseball game was at Anderson against the Philly Bobcats, a new team that had been started at the Taney Baseball League at Markward Playground. We beat them that day, too. It was pretty much a blowout.
What a really amazing day!
Around the Fourth of July of that year we had a great experience when we went to Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, for the Sports at the Beach baseball tournament. We played three teams that day, in the quarterfinals, the semifinals, and then the championships. We blew out this team called the Hurricanes
. Then we played this team called the Revolution. They chanted the word revolution over and over throughout the game.
I pitched inning after inning, without them scoring any runs and getting only two hits.
It was my first shutout.
“That was the year that Roy Halladay was pitching real well,” Scott says, “so we started calling her Mo Halladay.”
We didn’t win the championship that day. We lost to the CB Stars from New York. But it felt really good to be pitching so well.
But by the end of the summer, all the running around from game to game to game started to wear me down, especially when it came to baseball.
Basketball was my favorite sport—I just like the whole game and that it’s fast-paced. I didn’t really like baseball that much at all. Especially when we were younger and still learning how to play, it seemed slow and kind of boring. Plus we played so many games that it took up the whole summer.
That was the summer that my mom took the family to all the water parks in the Philadelphia area.
They went to Six Flags Great Adventure, Dorney Park, Hersheypark, Sesame Place, and Clementon Park, but I didn’t go to any of them.
Whenever my mom tried to pick a day that I could go, I had a baseball tournament. I would be standing on a scorching-hot field while Qu’ran was going down the Python Plummet, the Demon Drop, and the Nitro. Then I would hear all my siblings, friends, and cousins tell stories about how much fun they had.
Coach scheduled so many games that we almost never had free weekends. It was too much. That fall I thought a lot about quitting.
But my teammates didn’t want me to leave. They were like, “Just play one more year and see how you like it.” We were about to move up from the small field that nine- and ten-year-olds play on to the sixty-by-ninety-foot field for older kids. Maybe on a bigger field things would change, they said.
But I had already been complaining to my mom.
“It wouldn’t be right to quit,” my mother told me. “You’ve made a commitment to be a Monarch, and your coach and teammates are counting on you.”
My mom let me miss a couple of games that summer, but only if they were against a team that we would beat by a lot. We would always make sure to tell Coach Steve if I wasn’t going to make it. Coach Steve isn’t a yeller, but the one time he would yell at kids was if they didn’t tell him that they couldn’t come and just didn’t show up to a game.
Someone told Coach Steve what was on my mind.
“I heard it from Robin, who heard it from Keisha,” Coach says. A lot of people, they call my mom Keisha. “I didn’t press it because I didn’t wanna get into a big conversation and give her an out. I kind of wanted to say, ‘You’re playing and that’s it,’ and just keep going until she said she didn’t wanna play anymore. So my position was, ‘We need you and you’re already committed to this season.’ And thank god she stayed with it.”
The Monarchs are big on being accountable. If you say you’re gonna do something, your teammates should be able to count on you.
Plus, I knew that Coach was already planning a barnstorming tour. The more I learned about it, the more I wanted to go.
CHAPTER 9
GOING BARNSTORMING
IN JULY 2012, WHEN I WAS ELEVEN YEARS OLD, COACH STEVE took the Monarchs on a barnstorming tour. It was the sixty-fifth anniversary of Jackie Robinson integrating the major leagues, and the MLB All-Star Game was going to be held in Kansas City. Kansas City is where the Kansas City Monarchs used to play. It is also the home of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. Coach thought that the Anderson Monarchs could pay tribute to Jackie Robinson by playing baseball with teams all around the country, and that we could go to the All-Star Game and see the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
This wasn’t Coach Steve’s first barnstorming tour. In 1997—four years before I was born—he organized a trip with his very first Anderson Monarchs team to mark the fiftieth year that Jackie Robinson integrated baseball. That was the same year that the league retired his number. In every baseball stadium in the country, you will see Jackie Robinson’s jersey number, forty-two.
To show people that kids of different races could develop friendships, in 1997 Coach put together a team of five white kids, five black kids, and five Latino kids from all over Philadelphia. In 2004, when they were thirteen, he took them barnstorming to twenty cities. Along the way they covered 4,500 miles. Now he wanted to barnstorm with us, but everyone had to do a lot to make that happen.
First, we had to do some homework to get us ready for the tour. Every Friday for about twenty weeks, Coach had us watch episodes of the documentary Baseball by Ken Burns.
We learned a lot about the history of the sport, and more about the Negro Leagues and African American players who helped to make the game—players like Mamie “Peanut” Johnson, the first woman to pitch in the Negro Leagues. I was surprised and thought it was kind of cool that there had been a woman pitcher in the Negro Leagues.
We also had to raise money to go on the trip. Well, Coach Steve raised most of it, but he also made us do a lot of work.
“Each parent had to sell one hundred raffle tickets for five dollars each,” my mom remembers. “If we didn’t sell the raffle tickets, we were responsible for five hundred dollars. I sold seven hundred dollars’ worth of raffle tickets and we sold dinners at Anderson. We raised a lot of money.”
Enough for us to be gone for three weeks and visit twenty different cities.
Right before we left, we met Matt Kemp of the Los Angeles Dodgers, an African American All-Star outfielder and Gold Glove and Silver Slugger award winner, at a Phillies game two days before we started the tour. He played for the same team as Jackie Robinson! The Brooklyn Dodgers moved to Los Angeles about ten years after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier, but they still celebrate Jackie Robinson’s legacy. Several African American players learned that the Anderson Monarchs were going to go barnstorming and wanted to meet us.
Coach Steve also gave all of us navy blue wristbands that said Empathy, Integrity, Leadership, and Accountability, four of the character traits that he teaches us. Any time we needed a reminder of who we were, we were supposed to look at our wristbands.
To make the trip as real as possible, Coach found an old-fashioned bus from 1947. Our bus was black and white and said Anderson Monarchs Baseball Club across the top of it. The night before we left, I found out that we were going to take that old bus. At first I thought the trip would be bad because the bus didn’t have any air-conditioning, but it ended up being a lot of fun because, mostly, the weather was super nice, and we got to see a lot of cities. Coach Steve had set up games with any team that would play us.
Our first stop was Secaucus, New Jersey, right outside of New York City. When we got off the bus we went to the MLB Network. We got to go into the studio that they broadcast from, which was really nice. The studio is called Studio 42, which was Jackie Robinson’s number, and was set up to look like a baseball field—it was like a little Wiffle ball field. There was fake grass, a pitcher’s mound and base paths made of dirt-brown artificial turf, real bases, a dugout, Gatorade bottles, a bat rack, and helmets from every team. They even had a replica of Jackie Robinson’s uniform, and a plaque to honor him hanging in their broadcast stadium. On the outfield walls, you could see the scores of every major league game that was being played. They told us that the field was so real that we could have played Wiffle ball on it if they hadn’t been filming.
After we left the studio we drove up to Harlem for our first game. Everywhere we went, we exchanged gift bags with little presents like Philadelphia souvenirs and Jackie Robinson Hall of Fame cards that we gave to kids on opposing teams. We also gave away these really cool pins Coach had made just for the barnstorming tour. They were navy, white, and gold, and were round like a baseball with baseball thread around the edges, our barnstorming bus blazing through the middle, and the skyline of Philadelphia right behind the bus. Then we played a game. The other team was reall
y nice, so after the game we ended up talking to them for a little bit.
We also visited Jackie Robinson’s grave. Jackie Robinson is buried in Cypress Hills cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. It is very green and has a lot of trees. His tombstone is kind of tall—it comes about to a man’s chest—and it is curved at the top. On it is a saying: “A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.”
That saying is also on the back of the bus we sometimes take to games. Coach talks about it all the time.
The things that Jackie Robinson did impacted a lot of African American baseball players in the past, and players of all races today. When I first read the saying, I didn’t know that pretty soon I would have the ability to impact other people also.
At the bottom of his tombstone, there was this patch of dirt that was filled with flowers and baseballs that people had written letters to him on. All of us wrote a little note or a question for him, then we lined our baseballs up in a row. I can’t remember what I wrote now.
From New York, we hopped back on the bus and drove to Pittsburgh, which took seven hours. It was the longest ride of the entire trip, and the fact that we drove through Times Square before we left New York made it longer. While we were riding, we laughed, joked around, listened to music, played Uno and BS—well, we called it “Nike and Adidas” so we didn’t use any bad words—made up a rap song, and slept. We played all these games because no electronics were allowed on the trip. Coach, he says I use electronics too much. Sometimes he calls me “Screen Face Davis.”