The Big Field

by Mike Lupica

  His mom had told him all about that, and Hutch had watched the game on videocassette plenty of times, because his dad’s year in Williamsport was one of the first years ABC had put the finals on television. Nobody else on East Boynton could do much against the Taiwan starting pitcher that day, but his dad had managed to get three hits off the kid, one of them a long home run.

  The announcers had said you could never call anybody in sports a sure thing, but this East Boynton kid sure looked like one to them. They even joked that Cal Ripken Jr. would be looking over his shoulder someday, because this tall, skinny kid his teammates called Hutch was destined for shortstop in the Major Leagues.

  Only, by the time he was supposed to be gaining on Cal Ripken, Carl Hutchinson was back in East Boynton, trying to sell cars.

  He worked briefly as an assistant manager in his uncle’s hardware store up in Juno Beach, but that didn’t last, either. Nothing did.

  Maybe that was why two summers ago Hutch’s dad, between jobs again—needing what he always called a J-O-B—had even run the snack truck at Santaluces for a while. Hutch knew why he was doing it, because he needed the work, but every time Hutch would look over at the truck, it would feel like somebody just punched him in the stomach. Even now Hutch would look over at that truck during a break in the game and remember what it was like when he knew his dad was inside, or when he’d see his dad leaning against the side of the truck and watching from there while Hutch’s team played.

  Then, and now, Hutch wondered what his dad was thinking, watching his son play on one of the fields where he’d been the biggest star in the area once, the kind of star Darryl Williams was now.

  Watching with those sad-looking eyes of his.

  Carl Hutchinson would never come right out and say it, but Hutch knew something as well as he knew all the baseball numbers he carried around inside him:

  The only job his dad ever cared about was baseball.

  And it was baseball that broke his heart for good by telling him he wasn’t good enough and sending him home.

  Carl Hutchinson had worked with Hutch at the very beginning on baseball, the first year his son had been old enough to play tee ball. He showed him how to hold the bat and played catch with him in the yard, backing up a little bit at a time as Hutch’s arm began to get stronger. Hutch had hoped that his dad, because he’d been as good as he was at baseball, might coach him in Little League someday. But he never had.

  By the time Hutch was eight, he felt like he was his own coach, even on all the summer nights when he would be out behind the house in their small yard, throwing balls against the pitchback his mom had bought for him, fielding one ground ball after another until it got too dark.

  There wasn’t a single night he did it when he didn’t keep waiting for the back door to open and his dad to come walking out, wanting to play.

  It never happened.

  Sometimes Hutch would look up and see his dad’s face in the kitchen window, watching him. Hutch would wave. His father would wave back.

  The next time he’d sneak a look over there, his dad would always be gone.

  It was almost the same way with watching games on television. He could remember sitting next to his dad on the couch, his dad pointing out things about where the fielders were playing, the way a shortstop would come across the bag on a double play, somehow knowing which pitches would be the best ones to hit before the pitcher would even deliver the ball to the plate.

  A guy he’d started out in the minor leagues with, a catcher named Tom McCain—now a backup with the Marlins—was still a big star with the Braves when Hutch was younger, and Carl Hutchinson would talk about the old days and what they were both like when they were kids starting out.

  Over time, though, his dad began watching games, when he still watched games, by himself. Always with a can of beer next to him. It was the only time Hutch ever saw his dad drinking beer, when a game was on. Sometimes Hutch would come into the room and the game would be on with the sound turned off, almost like his dad didn’t care what the announcers were saying, and he’d feel as if there were some kind of force field around his dad.

  Or there should have been a sign near the door to the living room reading No Visitors Allowed.

  Not even your own son.

  His dad wouldn’t sit through the whole game. Hutch never knew where he went, but he’d hear the door close and know his father had left again.

  He came to Hutch’s games when he could, even though it was never as many as Hutch wanted. It killed him when he would do something great in a game, something that in his own mind measured up to the kind of things his dad did all the time when he was Hutch’s age, and he’d look up to the stands to find his mom watching, not his dad.

  He’d come home after the game and try to tell his dad what had happened, describe it the best he could, explain what he was thinking and feeling when he’d made a play in the field or driven a ball somewhere to win a game, and he’d see his dad trying to act interested.

  But more and more it was just that: an act.

  His dad claimed he was tired. He was working two jobs now, caddying during the day at the Emerald Dunes Golf Club in West Palm, then driving for Sun Coast limousines three or four nights a week, sometimes more. But Hutch knew it wasn’t just work that made his dad seem so tired all the time, so beaten, even so much older than he really was. It was more than that, something Hutch wasn’t sure he understood totally or could have explained to someone:

  But both of his dad’s jobs involved being a caddy, really. He either carried guys around in his car, or carried their golf bags. Hutch wouldn’t have admitted it, but he was embarrassed for his dad, thinking of him like some sort of Caddyshack caddy in his white overalls. The great ballplayer.

  Maybe his dad sensed that from Hutch.

  Maybe that was why the distance between them seemed to be growing all the time.

  Most of the time Hutch felt as if his dad wasn’t really there, as if nothing had changed since Hutch was little, when he was playing in the yard and his dad was inside the house, one minute there, the next minute gone.

  5

  THERE WERE EIGHT TEAMS IN THEIR REGIONAL, THE BOTTOM HALF of the brackets in the new version of the state American Legion tournament.

  Their county, Palm Beach, was broken up into two leagues, National and American. The Cardinals had won the National League and the Tequesta Post 271 Angels had won the American. The rest of their bracket was filled up with two teams each from Dade County, Broward, and Lee/Collier, on the west coast of Florida.

  It was pretty simple the rest of the way for everybody in the South regional:

  Win three more games and you got to play in the World Series from their age group, against the 17-under team that won the North.

  After that it was a best-of-three series at Roger Dean, every game under the lights, every game on TV for as long as it lasted.

  Their version of the World Series, winner take all.

  “We could be five games from winning this whole thing, you know that, right?” Cody Hester was saying.

  They were sitting at a bench near the snack truck at Santaluces, waiting to play their first game in the regionals, against a team from Naples, the Yankees.

  “Or,” Hutch said, ripping open a pack of gum, “we could be one loss away from your only exercise being mowing lawns the rest of the summer.”

  “And you are telling me this because…?”

  “Because I don’t want you to think about the whole rest of the tournament,” Hutch said. “I’d sort of just like you to play these suckers one at a time.”

  “Captain Hutchinson of the Cardinals,” Cody said in a deep announcer voice, “has stressed that his team must take these games one at a time. As opposed to playing the games two or three at a time.” Cody shook his head. “When did you turn into a football coach?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “What, you just play one on TV?”

  “You know the only game I’ve
ever cared about is the one we’re getting ready to play,” Hutch said.

  “I know, I know,” Cody said. “I just want to get to that big field at Roger Dean so bad.”

  “Where’s that?” Hutch said. “The only field I can see is the one right in front of us.”

  It had turned out to be a home game for the Cardinals because of a flip of the coin. After this, the regionals would play themselves out down in Fort Lauderdale.

  Hutch’s parents and Cody’s parents were all coming to the game. Hutch’s dad had caddied earlier in the day and had the night off from the car service, where he had been mostly working nights since he started with them. So this would be the first game he’d seen since the Cardinals had started the county tournament.

  Before Hutch’s mom had driven him and Cody to Santaluces, Hutch had gone into the living room and grinned as he asked his dad, “Any last-minute advice?”

  His dad was watching the ESPN show where the sportswriters bickered and kept score over who bickered the best.

  “Don’t try to do too much,” he said to Hutch.

  “Got it.”

  “Play within yourself,” his dad said.

  Same stuff he always said.

  “And,” his dad said, “don’t try to pull everything, even if it’s a lefty pitching. You’re better off hitting to right.”

  That was it.

  “See you over there,” his dad said, then smiled, not at Hutch but at the television, where the host had muted one of the sportswriters. “I love it when they do that,” he said.

  Hutch had left him there, the air conditioner attached to the window sounding louder than a dishwasher. His mom and Cody were waiting in the car. Before Hutch walked out the front door he leaned against it, closed his eyes, and wished he could have spent just one day with his dad when his dad was young.

  Wished he could have met the dad who loved baseball the way his mom said he did.

  Now he and Cody walked all the way to where their bench was on the field closest to the small lake at Santaluces. Field No. 2. Their bench was over on the first-base side, the home side of Santaluces. Behind the batting screen, the neighborhood people were already setting up their lawn chairs, like the area was their own personal luxury suite.

  “Hel-lo?” Cody said now.

  Sometimes Cody was like background noise to Hutch, like keeping a ball game on the radio when you were reading.

  “What?” Hutch said.

  “You zoned out on me there for a second.”

  “I was just thinking about some stuff my dad told me before we left the house.”

  “Such as?”

  Hutch smiled, then gave his head a good hard shake, as if trying to clear away any bad thoughts. Because the prospect of getting to play a game like this, maybe keep playing games like this, was too much of a happy-making thing to let any bad thoughts get in the way.

  “He told me to catch anything I could in front of my right fielder,” Hutch said. “Says the guy out there has the range of one of those palm trees behind the outfield walls.”

  Cody just looked at him, his face like a blank wall.

  “Do me a favor?”

  “Whatever you need.”

  “Don’t try to be funny,” Cody said. “I’m the funny one.”

  Hutch grabbed a ball and they started soft-tossing between the bench and the first-base line. Darryl joined them. So did Brett Connors. The pregame chatter all around them began to get louder, before they were even on the field for infield, or batting practice. The guys on the Cardinals kept stealing looks across the diamond, checking out the Naples players, listening to the chatter from over there.

  Hutch thought to himself: The only time in baseball that’s better than the game is this.

  It didn’t matter what field they were using, whether it was here or at Caloosa or any of the other ballparks in Palm Beach County. Or Roger Dean, if they made it that far.

  In moments like this, Hutch felt more at home here than he did at home.

  6

  NAPLES JUMPED ON THE CARDINALS’ ACE, TRIPP LYONS, FOR FOUR runs in the top of the first.

  Before anybody was out.

  Single.

  Triple.

  Double.

  Home run.

  The game had only started about five minutes ago, and Hutch realized that the other team had already hit for the cycle. The Naples team called itself the Yankees, even wore Yankees pinstripes. Now they had come out swinging like they were the real Yankees.

  So the Cardinals were in a 4–0 hole, just like that. And it would have gotten much worse a few minutes later without Hutch.

  Tripp had finally managed to get two outs by then. But the other guys were threatening again, with runners on second and third. The runner on second, the Yankees catcher, had just ripped a shot past Hank Harding at third, the ball looking as if it were going to roll all the way into the corner before Paul Garner cut it off. Paul then made a perfect cutoff throw to Darryl and the Naples third-base coach held the other runner there, even though there were two outs and sometimes you took a chance in that situation, tried to steal another run on a bad throw to the plate.

  Naples was down to the ninth spot in the batting order. Mr. Cullen liked to call it a soft spot for the pitcher to land, even when the pitcher was in the kind of jam Tripp was still in. Because another hit here and the score was going to be 6–0 before the Cardinals even came to the plate.

  And the No. 9 hitter wasn’t going to be soft.

  Hutch could see it just by the way he dug in, the way he held his bat. Hutch knew. He hadn’t paid really close attention when the Yankees were out there for fielding practice, so he wasn’t sure what position this guy played. But he was a player. For one thing, he wasn’t all twitchy, like a lot of hitters were once they got into the box. They were the ones who kept fooling with their batting gloves the way their heroes did on TV, the ones who had to check to see if their feet were in the exact spot they wanted.

  The kind who could make baseball feel slower than a traffic jam sometimes.

  This kid was up there to hit.

  The first pitch was outside.

  Never moved.

  The next one from Tripp was a fastball right down Route 1 and the hitter was all over it, driving the ball up the middle, right between Tripp’s legs before he could get his glove down, the ball looking for all the world as if it were on its way into center field.

  Hutch was moving to his right as soon as the ball came off the bat. He was still learning about angles from the other side of second base, after a whole lifetime of watching the ball come off the bat from short. But he was getting better at it, more confident, every day.

  He didn’t fade toward the outfield grass, knowing his only chance was to cut the ball off right there if he was going to have any kind of play at first.

  Hutch still had to dive at the last second, full out, and try to backhand the ball.

  Which he did.

  Everything seemed to happen at once after that. Hutch feeling the ball in his glove, somehow getting to his knees, getting off a sidearm throw from his knees, and putting something on it. Cody would say later that the kid had been slow coming out of the box, like he was sure he’d hit a single up the middle. Or maybe he just didn’t think there was a second baseman in Legion ball who had enough arm to get him from there.

  Hutch did.

  His throw to Tommy O’Neill, their first baseman tonight, beat the guy by two steps.

  Inning over.

  The game stayed 4–0.

  Hutch had kept the game from turning into a total blowout.

  For now.

  “Some of those guys on the Yankees look like they’re in college,” Cody said as they ran off the field, high-fiving Hutch with his glove.

  Hutch said, “Tell me about it. I think the guy who hit the home run got lost on his way to the nineteen-and-under game.”

  “And he’s not as big as their starter,” Cody said when they got to the bench. “C
heck it out.”

  The Yankees starter must have sprinted to the mound as soon as the ump at first made the out call. Hutch recognized him as the No. 5 hitter in their batting order, and could see that he was easily the biggest pitcher they had faced all season.

  “Well, you know what they say,” Hutch said. “The bigger they are, the harder they fall.”

  “Tell you what,” Cody said. “Find out who ‘they’ are and see if they want to grab a bat against the Hulkster.”

  The Hulkster struck out the side in the first. He got Alex Reyes, then Brett, then Hutch on a 2-2 pitch that looked pretty sweet coming out of the guy’s hand—he’d heard the infielders calling the Yankees pitcher Ronnie by then—and then just exploded up into Hutch’s eyes when it got to the plate.

  He looked totally helpless, clueless really, swinging right through it.

  When he came back to the bench to get his glove, Cody knew enough not to say anything.

  All Hutch said was “Next time,” and ran out to second.

  Next time was the bottom of the fourth, the Yankees ahead 5–0 by now. By Hutch’s count, Ronnie had struck out eight and hadn’t given up a hit. But Alex beat out a bunt to start the Cardinals’ fourth and Brett worked a walk by laying off the high stuff, watching as the last four pitches Ronnie threw him sailed out of the strike zone like Frisbees.

  Hutch’s turn.

  He knew he wasn’t going to bring the Cards all the way back with one at-bat. He just wanted to be ready if the Hulkster threw one in the strike zone, put a good swing on the ball, drive it somewhere and give Darryl a chance to do the same thing behind him.

  Hutch did more than put a good swing on a 1-1 fastball.

  He put his best swing on the sucker.

  Caught it right on the sweet spot. Now it wasn’t a fastball exploding up and in on him. It was the ball exploding off Hutch’s bat, making him think in that moment of something guys said shooting hoops:

  Butter.

  Hutch knew he had caught it, knew he had hit it high and deep toward the alley in left center, knew it might have the legs to get out of the park, knew he had the power to do that at Santaluces, even to the power alleys. He still ran. Hutch never stopped to admire the flight of the ball, never posed at home plate.