The Youngest Hero

by Jerry B. Jenkins

  There were still a dozen or so balls left in the machine, so I got back into position. If I could tip one, maybe I could get more of the bat on another. I missed several, but the second to last pitch hit the top side of the bat about six inches off the end, hit the wall, and slammed into my side, just under the shoulder and above the rib cage in a fleshy area that seared with pain.

  I hit the deck again, this time in the lefty box. I knew I was out of danger of being struck with a pitch, but I wondered how stupid a guy could be.

  How many times was I gonna do this before I learned that fouling off a pitch like that made it bounce off the wall and try to kill me?

  The last pitch sailed past me, hit the wall, and flew to the other end. Maybe because of where I was on the floor, maybe due to having been hit in the hand, the head, and the side, I was able to see this one. I finally decided that it was because I was on the floor, looking up into the dim light in the center of the room, and the ball was silhouetted before it.

  Whatever the reason, I was fascinated by it. The pitch, as were all the others, was a screamer. It wasn’t as if I could see it in slow motion, I decided, but because I had been watching hundreds of pitches already, I was able to break this one down as it came. I was aware of it snaking its way from the container to the trough, the tilt of the trough toward the wheels, the wheels grabbing and shaping themselves around it, seeming to mash it between them before slinging it out. It spun wildly and darted more than a foot and a half from left to right as it traveled less than forty feet to the wall. It swept past where a left-hand hitter would stand, breaking over the outside corner.

  I had seen it all the way. I longed for the day when I had developed my eye-hand coordination, bat speed, and strength to where I could not only swing at that pitch at the right instant but also be able to hit it. I wasn’t thinking about just getting my bat on it. I wanted, as I always planned, to attack the pitch, hit it with authority, drive it somewhere.

  I had seen Chipper Jones turning with that ferocious power stroke on Randy Johnson and actually pulling a fastball in the high nineties into the upper deck in left field. That was the way I wanted to hit. Not just spraying the ball, but turning on it, driving it, sending it to the gaps or to the seats, no matter what it had on it when it left the mound. I slowly gathered up the balls, occasionally reaching to rub the sore spot on my side. That would be another bruise. I was sure glad I had invested in the batting helmet. The question now was, did I need a piece of canvas on the batting wall too, so when I did start fouling off pitches I wouldn’t hurt myself?

  I decided against it. I imagined foul balls and missed balls hitting a tarp and dropping at my feet. I couldn’t imagine rigging up some sophisticated device to keep the balls from rolling forward and tripping me. That would be all I needed: to be sent to the floor while swinging at a demon pitch. I’d be killed for sure.

  Something nagged at me as I retrieved the balls. Had this been a perfect practice? I had swung hundreds of times, and always tried to do it right. I had stood in against unbelievable pitching, and though I was frustrated at not hitting, it was certainly understandable that I hadn’t.

  But had it been profitable? I decided not. When the balls were in the basket, I dumped them in the container in the machine and left the machine off. I dug out my rubber-coated baseball and stood by the machine. For the next half hour I threw against the far wall, aiming at tiny spots in the strike zone and fielding the ball as it came back to me.

  When I threw the ball high, it came back in two or three bounces. When I threw it waist-high off the wall, it came back as a skipping grounder. When I threw it low, it skittered along the floor, hardly bouncing. I worked up a gigantic sweat and concentrated ferociously. When I wanted a liner, soft or hard depending on how I threw it, I made the ball bounce on the floor just before hitting the wall. The harder I threw, the harder it came back.

  There was little challenge in catching balls you threw yourself, but I was a perfectionist. I wanted to cleanly field a hundred in a row, every time with my left leg forward, head down, glove down, butt down. The glove was like a vacuum cleaner, my dad had said. There was only one right way to do it.

  “Lots of guys can bend at the waist and spear a ball one-handed,” my dad had said. “They might even have a big gun of an arm and be able to throw the guy out at first. But that’s the wrong way to do it. Do it right, same way every time. Head down, glove down, butt down, left foot forward. Move to the ball, keep the hands and arms relaxed and out front. Play the ball; don’t let it play you. Gather it in, pulling both hands across your body to the right as you take one step and make a crisp, hard throw all in one motion.”

  I repeated the motions over and over and over. My breathing became shallow. I huffed and puffed and sweat some more. Off the wall, to the glove, you can always come up on a hopper; you can hardly ever get the glove down if you start in the wrong position. Do it right, every time. Be in a position to whirl and start the double play. Don’t be lazy. Perfect practice makes perfect.

  Perfect practice. Perfect practice.

  27

  I had sweet-talked Ricardo Bravura into a second key for the basement. That way, I assured him, I could check on Elgin and make sure everything was tidy. It also, of course, allowed me to go and find the boy when he had been in the basement too long. Like now. It was bedtime. When I opened the door and peered down the stairs, I saw him turn from where he was sitting, on the bottom step with his back to me, and smile. He looked beat.

  “What’re you doin with that helmet still on?” I said.

  “Just forgot,” he said, pulling it off.

  “Have a good workout?”

  “In a way.”

  “Do any hitting?”

  He laughed. “I tried.”

  “No luck?”

  “That’s for sure. Look at this.” A purple spot had already risen on his palm.

  “Did you try to block a pitch? You know what your daddy always said about that: only block it with your hand if it’s comin at your head or face. Protect those hands.”

  “I know, Momma. I was trying to catch a pitch.”

  “Bare-handed? A golf ball?”

  “Not bare-handed.”

  He explained his entire evening.

  “So, you got in some good fieldin practice anyway, huh?” I said.

  He nodded wearily.

  “You need a shower, buddy.”

  He nodded again.

  “It’s fun to work out alone, Momma. But I don’t know how long I’m gonna be able to stand not hitting the ball.”

  “What kinda attitude is that, El? This thing got you beat?”

  “Momma, you should see it. I feel like I’m a year away from really hitting the ball.”

  I sat next to my son and put my arm around him. He was wet all the way through his sweatshirt.

  “Boy, you’re hot.”

  “Um-hm. Be careful.”

  “Of what now?”

  “My side. Look at this.” He lifted his shirt.

  “Elgin! I can see the imprint of the dimples from the ball! You got that one battin righty, didn’t you?”

  “No. I was hitting lefty and reached out and tipped it. It bounced off the wall and got me.”

  “If anybody at school sees your bruises, they’re gonna send the authorities after me for child abuse.”

  He laughed. “I’d love to see that!”

  “I’ll bet you would. Now get upstairs.”

  “I gotta turn that light out.”

  “I’ll get it. I promised Ricardo I’d check up on you, anyway.”

  He turned and started up the steps and I moved into the batting room. Tidy, I thought. I idly flipped the switch on the machine and heard the container begin to turn and the balls begin to roll.

  “Momma!” I heard from the stairs. “Take cover! Get out of there now! The machine is loaded!”

  I froze, not knowing what to do or where to go. Was I to hit the floor? Hide behind the machine, what? E
lgin appeared just as the first ball was being fed to the spinning wheels. He raced to me, yelling, “Get down!” and I ducked behind the machine. For the first time, I heard the unusual, violent sounds of the grab, the pitch, the flight, the wall, the second flight, and the canvas behind me.

  “Whew!” was all I could say.

  “‘Whew’ is right,” Elgin said. “Lucky for you, they’re all flying that way.”

  He reached around and turned off the machine.

  “They do go fast, don’t they?” I said, my voice weak.

  He laughed. I didn’t know if I could laugh until I saw him. He sat there, smiling, sweating, bruised, tired. I knew he was frustrated at not having been able to hit the pitches, yet he still seemed excited at having tried. Had anyone ever loved baseball as much as this boy? I couldn’t imagine.

  He was like a newborn calf that wanted to run, a new bud reaching for the sun, a tender shoot eager to sprout and blossom. For the briefest moment, in the middle of a miserable Chicago winter, I was glad we had moved there.

  My bruises turned ugly and were hot and hard to the touch. They stung whenever I brushed against anything. My limbs ached from the harder and longer than usual workouts, but after a few weeks, I was in shape and could handle them. In fact, I looked forward to them.

  I forced myself to stand in the batter’s box for three buckets of golf balls from each side of the plate before I did my fielding and throwing work. Though I tipped only one pitch, batting lefty, in several days, I kept swinging and felt I was getting my timing down. There were times, of course, that I wondered if swinging over or under or ahead or behind thousands of pitches was doing anything for me. But my chest and back and arms grew stronger.

  When I had gone several weeks with just a few tips of the ball from each side, I added something. I began taking one hundred swings from each side as hard and fast as I could with no pitches coming. I wore myself out, tore down my muscles and built them up again doing that, hoping to increase my bat speed. That had to be it, I decided. The only reason I was missing those pitches was because they were so fast and the ball and bat were so small. I had to learn, to force myself, to catch up with the pitches.

  Chico came by one day to complain about the snow and the sad state of the fastpitch area.

  “Man, I could use a good game of catch, you know?”

  “I hear you, Chico. It gets lonely working out alone.”

  “You’re workin out?”

  “A little.”

  “Where?”

  “The hotel.”

  I was afraid Chico was going to keep asking questions or suggest that he join me, so I changed the subject.

  “Our sidewalk is cleared. Let’s play a little catch.”

  “With what?” Chico wanted to know.

  “I’ve got a rubber-coated baseball.”

  “It’s cold out here, man.”

  “We’ll take it easy. I need to throw just like you do.”

  Chico ran home for his glove. He returned with a big grin. “My mother and my brother think we’re crazy,” he said.

  “We are!” I said, following him out.

  We began about twenty feet apart, throwing easily. I knew it wouldn’t show yet, but I felt good and strong. I had wanted to get into some kind of game or at least throw with someone just to see if my workouts were paying off. The first thing I noticed, of course, was that the ball looked huge to me, much the way it did when I threw it off the wall after watching more than three hundred golf balls whiz past me.

  But outside, playing catch with someone to whom I had been used to throwing a bald tennis ball, I really got the perspective. Chico seemed tight, almost awkward. I threw like I meant business.

  “Hey, man,” Chico whined, “back up if you’re gonna throw like that.”

  I smiled. “You loose, Chico?”

  “Yeah, but put an arch on it or somethin. Just don’t make me stand there and catch fastballs.”

  I had not been aware that I had been throwing that hard. I felt I had some snap on my delivery, but Chico had always been able to catch me. Of course, we had always played with a rubber ball. This one, despite its coating, was hard, especially in this weather.

  As we backed up from each other, I still felt strong. I whipped throws right to Chico’s glove, hardly making him move more than an inch. Chico shook his head with every throw.

  “Man, you’re hot!”

  Hot was exactly what I felt. I loved this, but I was also sweating. I took off my coat and put it next to the building. The frigid air felt good on my face and neck, and it breezed through the thin material of my long-sleeved shirt.

  I threw long and straight, popping Chico’s glove. Chico smiled, shook his head, and lofted the ball back. Every time I caught it I imagined a different game situation. A runner was tagging or leading off too far or in a rundown or represented the second half of a double play. Catch and fire, catch and fire. How I loved the game, the sheer joy of it, the great fun of throwing a baseball!

  But I lived to regret my foolishness. I had not known I was being careless, of course. I felt a dull ache in my arm, near the shoulder, at bedtime. I had just been telling my mother how great it had been, how strong I had felt. I said nothing to her about the pain.

  In the middle of the night I awoke with a burning sensation in my shoulder and biceps. My elbow hurt too. What had I done? It wasn’t worth waking my mother, but I ran the sink full of cold water, got on one knee, and dunked my arm to the shoulder. By morning, I could hardly bend it. The muscle was swollen and tender. Dressing and eating were a chore. I felt like an old man with, what was it my mother called it? Bursitis?

  Throwing in cold weather was not something I’d had to worry about in Mississippi. And the winter before had been mild enough that the guys got used to the weather because we played in it the whole time. It had been nearly two months since I had played fastpitch, and we all had worn warm jackets.

  What had I been thinking? I should have known better.

  My teacher grew tired of my excuses for having to write with my left hand. I may have been able to switch-hit, but writing lefty was not one of my strengths. I felt like an idiot and knew I had brought all this on myself. I hated the idea of not being able to practice my fielding. There would certainly be no stopping my hitting practice, if you could call it that. It hurt to hold the bat in my usual manner, so I had to swing with one hand. I swept through with my top-hand power stroke from the left and pulled through with a smooth, level cut from the right.

  Who knew? Maybe I would start hitting these crazy pitches when I could come at them with just one hand.

  The first night I tried working out with my bad arm dangling. I couldn’t even stand the pain that came with swinging with the other hand. Eventually my mother rigged me a sling. I felt more comfortable with the arm bent and close to my body, but I felt more like a cripple too.

  It took longer to set myself and practice-swing with one hand, and I was able to swing at only every other pitch. When I first began fouling off one of every ten or so, I knew I was making progress. I had only done that well with both hands.

  It took me longer to retrieve the balls and to get them into the machine, but then it had taken me even longer to get out the apartment door and down to the basement too. I found as I walked through the motions of my batting workout that I merely looked forward to the day when my arm would be back in shape and I could see if I had made real progress at the plate.

  I missed my throwing and fielding workouts, and I vowed to never again risk injury because of enthusiasm. Nothing was more frustrating to a perfectionist than not being able to train.

  I guessed my arm was a month away from being back to normal, and then I would have to build up the muscle again. That seemed like an eternity away.

  28

  I had never had reason to doubt Elgin before, but neither had I ever experienced a cold-weather arm injury. Elgin had gone through the typical childhood stage of duplicity, but it had been two fu
ll years since I had caught him in an outright lie. Still, I had to ask.

  “El, are you sure all you were doin to hurt that arm was throwin without your coat on? I mean, you weren’t wrestling or roughhousing or something, were you?”

  He insisted he was not. He told me how he had felt so good and how his throws were crisp and right on the money.

  “I got warmed up, the cold air felt great, and I guess I just got carried away.”

  I had insurance at work, but the deductible alone would have threatened my various weekly savings programs. I was willing, of course, to take Elgin to a doctor, but he told me he was sure the arm was just strained.

  “I don’t think anything’s broke or pulled,” he said. “I just got to wait it out.”

  Waiting it out was as tough a thing as I had ever done. It was two weeks before I could use my right arm to help pick up the golf balls at the end of each hitting session, and two more before I could start throwing easily. The muscles had atrophied and I couldn’t fully straighten the arm for a few more days. It wasn’t long, however, before I could bat with both hands.

  That was what I had been waiting for. The Christmas vacation had been lost to what I considered profitable workouts, though even standing in against the pitching machine with one hand and fouling off a few did more for my eye and my timing than I imagined.

  For a few days after resuming my normal right and left batting stances, I had as much trouble catching up with the pitches as I always had. But then the day came when I was batting righty and was also relaxed. After weeks of being rigid and tense in the box, I had learned the rhythm and cadence of the machine and knew what the pitches would and would not do. It didn’t bother me—as it once had—to just wait on a few pitches, not swinging or even looking at them, but rather getting myself set for a future pitch, say the fourth or fifth one coming up.