by Dan Gutman
“He’s getting a little tired now,” he said. “He might have one good burst of energy left in him. I’m gonna let him run, wear himself out—”
Right after he said that, the most amazing thing happened. The fish came swimming toward us, leaped out of the water, and landed right in the boat!
I freaked out, falling backward and landing on the tackle box. Stuff went flying everywhere. Ted was right. It was a beautiful fish. Maybe two feet long. The boat was rocking back and forth, and I was afraid that Ted was going to fall into the river. The fish was probably as freaked out as I was. He didn’t know what was going on. Ted threw his head back and was laughing like it was the funniest thing he had ever seen.
“Grab him!” he yelled.
“I can’t! He’s flopping all around!”
“Get the hook out of his mouth!” Ted yelled.
“You get the hook out of his mouth!”
I must admit, I always thought it was kind of gross to take a hook out of a fish’s mouth. When I used to go fishing with my dad, he always did it for me because I found the whole process to be a little disgusting.
“Here, let me do it,” Ted said, dipping his hands into the water. “Trout are delicate. If your hands are dry, you might pull off his scales.”
The fish had stopped flopping around on the bottom of the boat. Ted picked it up and held it tenderly, like it was a baby. He carefully removed the hook and brought the fish to the side of the boat.
“You’re gonna let him go?” I asked.
“He put up a good fight.”
Ted lowered the fish into the river, turning it to face upstream, he said, so water could wash through its gills and revive it. He held it there.
“If you let it go too soon,” he said, “it won’t have the energy to swim. It’ll sink to the bottom and suffocate.”
After thirty seconds or so, the fish began to wriggle around in Ted’s hands.
“He’s gonna make it,” Ted said. “He’s all right.”
Ted let the fish go, and we watched it swim away.
He was calm again. Being with Ted was like hanging out with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I thought he was going to switch gears and start yelling at me because of my pathetic fishing skills, but he didn’t.
“You’re not half bad with a rod and reel,” he said. “How are you with a bat? You play ball?”
“Oh, yeah,” I told him. “Back home, baseball is the only game I play.”
“What do you hit?” Ted asked.
“Around .270.”
He spit in the water, a disgusted look on his face. I guess that to a guy who can hit .400, somebody who can’t even hit .300 must look really pathetic.
“How many homers?” he asked me.
“I only had a couple,” I admitted. “One of them was inside the park.”
“Inside the park?” Ted said, looking even more disgusted. “You’re a big, strong kid. You should be driving the ball over the wall. What’s your problem?”
“I don’t know,” I told him. “I strike out, ground out a lot.”
“Lemme see your batting stance.”
“Right here in the boat?” I asked.
“Of course right here in the boat!” Ted shouted. “Where else are you going to do it?”
I got into my stance, being careful to put my weight over the middle so I wouldn’t tip the boat. Ted looked me up and down, then shook his head sadly and spit into the water again.
“No wonder you hit .270!” he said. “You’re dancing around like you got ants in your pants. Who told you to hit like that?”
“My coach,” I said.
“Your coach is an idiot,” Ted declared. “What position did he play?”
“He was a pitcher,” I said.
“A pitcher?” Ted said the word “pitcher” as if it was something you scraped off the bottom of your shoe. “There’s only one thing in this world that’s dumber than a pitcher.”
“What?” I asked.
“Two pitchers!” Ted said. “Pitchers should never be allowed anywhere near a bat much less teach kids how to use one.”
I considered telling Ted about the designated hitter rule, but I didn’t want to push my luck.
“It’s about time you learned how to hit a baseball properly, Junior,” he told me.
“Right here?” I asked. “In the boat?”
“Of course right here in the boat!” he exclaimed.
I was about to get a personal hitting lesson from the greatest hitter in the world.
15
The Happy Zone
“HITTING A BASEBALL,” TED TOLD ME, “IS THE SINGLE MOST difficult thing to do in sports.”
We were sitting in the little boat, in a cove where the water was still. The air smelled clean, cleaner than I remembered it in my time. Birds were chirping. It was nice. Ted pulled a couple of packages of crackers out of his pocket and shared them with me.
“Think about it,” he said. “For starters, they give you a round ball and a round bat and tell you to hit it square. The difference between a line drive and a pop-up is just a fraction of an inch on the bat. To make things even more difficult, the pitcher could be throwing a fastball, curve, change-up, or some other !@#$%! pitch he’s got up his sleeve. He could throw it inside, outside, high, low; or he might just try to brain you with it. Then there are nine very athletic guys in the field trying to catch any ball you hit, and they’ve got big gloves on their hands. Plus, there’s thousands of idiots in the stands screaming that you’re a bum. That’s why the best hitters in the game fail seven out of every ten times they come to bat.”
“Or six, in your case,” I said.
Ted ignored my compliment. Maybe he didn’t like compliments.
“Because you’re a good kid, I’m going to tell you everything I know about hitting a baseball. Now, do you know what the Bernoulli principle is?”
“The what?”
“How do you expect to hit a curveball if you never heard of the Bernoulli principle?”
Ted told me that Daniel Bernoulli was an eighteenth-century Swiss mathematician who figured out why objects move through air or water the way they do.
“When a ball spins, the flow of air around it becomes turbulent,” he explained. “One side of the ball is spinning in the same direction as air rushing by, and the other side of the ball spins against the air flow. This causes a difference of air pressure between the two sides of the ball, and the ball moves in the direction of least resistance.”
I had no idea what he was talking about.
“You gotta know this stuff!” he hollered.
“Okay, okay!”
I couldn’t believe I was getting a physics lesson from Ted Williams. The guy never even went to college.
“There are three keys to hitting,” Ted told me. “The first one is that you need to get a good ball to hit. Now, do you know where your happy zone is?”
“Uh, that’s kind of personal,” I said.
“No, you idiot!” Ted exploded. “Look, home plate is 17 inches wide. That’s seven baseballs. Even a moron like you knows it’s easier to hit a pitch that’s over the center of the plate than one that’s on the corner. The middle of the plate is your happy zone.”
“But I can’t control where the pitcher is going to throw the ball,” I said.
“Sure you can!” Ted said. “That brings me to the second key to hitting: use your head. It’s not just about muscles and reflexes. You want to force the pitcher to put the ball in your happy zone.”
“How do I do that?” I asked.
“By refusing to swing at a bad ball,” Ted said. “If you swing at a pitch that’s one inch off the plate, the next time you come up, the pitcher will throw it two inches off the plate. Then three inches. Pitchers will learn they don’t have to throw strikes to you, and you’ll never get a good pitch to hit. So if you swing at bad pitches, you make trouble for yourself down the road.”
“Okay, I’ll only swing at pitches in my happy zone,” I sai
d.
“Right. Do you know why home run hitters strike out more than singles hitters?” Ted asked.
“Because they swing harder?” I guessed.
“No! Because they’re stupider,” Ted said. “They go after more bad pitches. That’s dumb. Don’t chase bad balls. Don’t give away strikes. Use your head.”
“Okay, got it,” I said. “Use my head.”
“That also means you need to use the rules of the game,” Ted continued. “You’ve got three strikes and four balls to make the situation into what you want it to be. So if the count is 0 and 2, you’re almost sure to get a pitch off the plate. Don’t swing at that junk. But if the count is 2 and 0, the pitcher doesn’t want to throw ball three, so you’re gonna get a fastball close to your happy zone. Bet on it. Know the count. Use the count. Use your head.”
At that point, Ted reached into his back pocket and pulled out a little black address book.
“What’s that?” I asked. “A list of your girlfriends?”
“No!” Ted yelled at me. “It’s a list of every pitcher in the American League. What they throw. When they throw it. Their strengths. Their weaknesses. If you want to be successful at something, you have to know everything about it.”
Ted told me he would notice the heights of the different pitcher’s mounds in various ballparks and write them in his little black book. He studied the wind patterns of every ballpark. He knew which batter’s boxes sloped up a little and which ones sloped down. While the other players would sit in the clubhouse playing cards before the game, he would sit by himself in the dugout and study the pitcher warming up. Every day, he pored over the box scores in the newspaper searching for some little tidbit of information that might help him when he came to bat.
“You gotta know this stuff,” Ted told me. “Is the wind blowing in or out? Is it a damp day? The ball won’t travel as far. And you have to constantly make adjustments. If you ground out a lot, that means you’re swinging too early. If you pop up a lot, you’re swinging too late. Use your head.”
He was throwing so much information at me, and so quickly, it was hard to absorb it. But it all made sense, and I was trying to take in every word.
“Okay,” I said, “so the first key to hitting is to get a good ball to hit. The second key is to use my head. What’s the third key?”
“The third key is to be quick,” Ted said. “Tell me, how heavy is your bat?”
“Thirty-two ounces,” I replied. My coach, Flip, had told me that was the right weight for my age and size.
“Are you out of your mind?” Ted sputtered. “I use a 32-ounce bat, and I’m a lot stronger than you are. Look, the pitcher’s mound is 60 feet and 6 inches away. If a pitcher throws 90 miles per hour, the ball will reach the plate about a half a second after it leaves his hand. So you have a fraction of a second to make up your mind whether or not to swing.”
“So you’re saying I should switch to a lighter bat?” I asked.
“Of course!” Ted exclaimed. “You can swing it quicker. And if you have a quicker swing, you can wait longer before deciding whether or not to commit. And the longer you wait, the less chance you’re going to get fooled by the pitch. Bat speed is everything.”
Ted told me to stand up and show him my batting stance again. When I did, he pushed and pulled at my arms and legs to get them into the proper position.
“Weight balanced,” he said. “Knees bent and flexible. Keep your head still. Hold your bat upright, almost perpendicular. It feels lighter that way. Grip the bat firmly. And when you pull the trigger, you want to swing in a slight uppercut.”
“My coach told me I’m supposed to swing level,” I said.
“I already told you, your coach is a moron,” said Ted. “The pitcher’s mound is 15 inches higher than home plate. The pitcher releases the ball a foot over his head. And gravity makes the ball go down. How are you gonna hit it squarely if you swing level? You have to swing up at it.”
Everything Flip had taught me, it seemed, was wrong. Flip never pretended to be an expert in hitting. His advice usually boiled down to “See the ball. Hit the ball.” But Ted was analytical, even scientific, about hitting a baseball. He was the same way about fishing, and he would become the same way about flying a fighter plane. Probably, it was the same way he was about everything.
“One last thing,” he said. “Did you ever hear that joke about how to get to Carnegie Hall?”
“Practice,” I said.
“It’s the same thing with hitting,” Ted told me. “There are thousands of kids out there who have natural ability. Practice is what separates good players from great ones. There’s no substitute for hard work. When I was your age, I practiced until my blisters bled.”
My batting lesson was over. Ted yanked the cord to start the motor. My head was spinning from all he had told me: the Bernoulli principle…Get a good pitch to hit…. Use your head…. Be quick…. Use a lighter bat…. Swing up at the ball…. Practice until your fingers bleed.
“Let’s get out of here,” Ted said as we putt-putted upstream. “We have to get to Washington to tell the president about that Pearl Harbor thing, and I hear he goes to bed early.”
16
Visiting a Friend
TED STEERED THE BOAT BACK TO THE DOCK AND TIED IT UP. He tucked a dollar bill into one of the seat cushions to pay for the gas we used. We climbed out and stashed the fishing gear back in his car. Soon we were off the dirt road and back on Route 1 heading south.
There wasn’t much to look at for a few miles. Farms and farm stands mostly. We didn’t talk much. As I looked out the window, I imagined that in the twenty-first century, this road would probably be jammed with fast-food joints and strip malls. Maybe Route 1 wouldn’t even exist anymore. A superhighway might cover this area. It was kind of sad.
After a while, we began to see some houses, businesses, and bigger buildings. From reading the signs along the road, I realized we had reached the city of Baltimore.
“I gotta make a quick stop here,” Ted said suddenly, pulling off the road.
What is it this time, I wondered. Was he going to take out his shotgun for some target practice? He seemed to impulsively stop and do something completely different whenever he felt like it. It was getting late. Maybe we’d never get to Washington.
Ted pulled into a parking lot. The sign said ST. LUKE’S HOSPITAL.. As we got out of the car, he grabbed a baseball from the backseat.
“What are we doing here?” I asked.
“I need to visit a friend,” he replied. “It won’t take long.”
There was no security guard in the lobby. Ted and I walked right in, and he led me down a series of hallways. He was looking for a room number.
“What’s wrong with your friend?” I asked.
“Nobody knows,” Ted replied. “He’s dying.”
He stopped outside Room 125 and opened the door a crack.
There were two beds in the room. One was empty, and a boy was lying in the other one. He looked younger than me, probably nine or ten. His eyes were closed, but he opened them when the door squeaked. He brightened when he saw Ted.
“Hey, knucklehead!” Ted said. “What’s buzzin’, cousin?”
“Nothin’,” the boy answered weakly. I could barely hear him.
“This is my pal Stosh,” said Ted. “Stosh, this is Howie.”
I went to shake hands with the boy, but he could barely raise his arm. I picked his hand up for him and shook it.
“I brought you something, big guy,” Ted said, picking up a pen from the little table next to the bed. Then he signed the baseball and put it next to Howie.
“I heard on the radio that you did it,” Howie said.
“Did what?”
“Hit .400.”
“Oh, yeah,” Ted said. “.406. But who’s counting? Hey, did they say anything on the radio about the alligator?”
Howie started laughing.
“It bit some kid’s leg off!” Ted said, shaking his head.
“Awful thing. At the knee. The kid’s in terrible shape. Have you seen that alligator around here?”
Howie laughed some more.
“You always say that,” he said.
“What’s this?” Ted said as he picked up some papers from the table. “Your homework? I see you left some of the answers blank.”
“What’s the point?” Howie asked.
I knew what he was saying. Homework is a drag. I don’t like doing it either; and if I knew that I was going to die soon, I sure wouldn’t want to bother spending the time I had left doing homework.
“This stuff makes you smart,” Ted told Howie. “You don’t want to grow up and become a dummy like me, do ya?”
Howie didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. They both knew he wasn’t going to grow up.
“I’m tired,” he said, taking Ted’s finger in his little hand.
“Hey, you got a good grip on you,” Ted said cheerfully. “How do you expect me to hit .400 next year with a crushed finger?”
Howie laughed. He kept holding Ted’s finger. Ted reached into a pocket with his other hand and came out with a ten-dollar bill. He put it on Howie’s bed next to the baseball.
“Tell your mom to buy you something nice with this,” he said.
Howie closed his eyes, still gripping Ted’s finger. Ted told him about the World Series coming up between the Yankees and the Dodgers. He discussed the pitching matchups, and which hitters he thought would come through in a big game. He said he was rooting for the Yankees because they were the American League team, and besides, Dom DiMaggio’s brother played for them.
Howie looked like he was asleep, but I wasn’t sure. He kept holding on to Ted’s finger, and it didn’t look like he was planning on letting go anytime soon.
Ted kept talking softly—about baseball, the weather, food, movies he had seen, anything he could think of. Howie didn’t respond, but he wouldn’t let go of Ted’s finger. At some point, I noticed a tear come out of Ted’s eye and roll down his face.
Soon after, Ted fell asleep in the chair, with Howie still attached to his finger. It looked as though we would be spending the night there, so I climbed into the other bed and went to sleep.