Zeke and I looked at each other, like What was that? “I kind of wanted to say to her, ‘Yeah. We’ll stay out of the street. And maybe you’ll remember to pick her up after Brownies next time.’”
“You should have!” Zeke said. “She was acting like we were terrorists or something.”
Sly’s mom was a weird mix of protective and . . . whatever’s the opposite of protective. Absent, maybe? I knew a lot about absent moms, but Sly’s mom was kind of in a category all her own.
Just then, Sly came outside with her hands up, like she was showing us she wasn’t holding Tiny’s box. Or a weapon. “I told you I don’t want to play that video thing anymore with Tiny.”
“Yeah, I know,” I said. “There’s something else I wanted to ask you. Do you want to help us at Behind the Plate? You’d be totally in charge of an important part of security at a big, important day.”
She just looked at me, silently, like she was waiting for the bad-news part. So I kept talking. “It’s this sort of crazy day, and we need extra people to help, and I thought you’d be really good at helping us with this one thing.”
She put her hand on her hip. “What one thing?”
“Produce control,” I said.
“Yeah, I don’t know what that means. What do I control?”
Zeke sighed—loudly, theatrically—then sighed again and sat down, like he had tons of important plans and we were keeping him from them. This kid who had dragged me out of bed when I was sleeping.
“We have this day when hundreds of people come to the school and watch the umpire students. And they yell at them too, but it’s okay, because we want them to do that.” I never realized, until I started explaining it out loud, how incredibly stupid You Suck, Ump! Day sounded. “Anyway, we need to make sure that no one brings in any fruit or vegetables to throw at the students, and I thought you could help us with that.”
She gave me a look like she was waiting for me to say “Just kidding!” But I didn’t, and so she said, “Wait a sec.” She ran into the house, screaming, “Grandma! Grandma!”
“You sure this is a good idea?” Zeke asked. Honestly, I was shocked. He did so many things that were not good ideas that I hadn’t even known the concept of good idea was one he was familiar with.
“Well,” I said, “to quote every cartoon ever, ‘What could possibly go wrong?’”
Sly came running back. “I can do it,” she said. “I’m, like, totally in charge of the fruit, you said, right? Like I’m the fruit boss?”
“Yup.”
She smiled. And then she saluted.
Playing Hardball
THE day before You Suck, Ump! Day was my favorite. Because it was when my dad was so not my dad.
Students were now all more confident than when they had arrived. The ones who could tell they were doing well were strutting a bit. The better students hung out together, and the not-so-good students stayed in their own groups.
Dad and Pop called all the students and staff out onto field one. Dad explained, kind of, what was going to happen over the next two days. But not completely. I never missed this speech. Even though it was one of those gray, heavy-air, humid days, the kind that usually make me move slowly, I ran home from the bus to make sure I was there in time.
“You guys have done a lot of great work out here so far,” Dad said. “But these haven’t been real baseball conditions, have they?”
He paused, but it was just to let them think. He wasn’t waiting for an answer.
“Baseball’s not a quiet game. When you’re in a ballpark, there are people selling beer, there are loud and rowdy fans, there are managers unhappy with the calls you’ve made, there are hecklers screaming at you, there are players grumbling or eyeballing you for a called third strike. It is not a classroom setting.
“Over the next two days, you’re going to get a taste of that. Today you’ll mostly deal with playing-field situations. You’ll see a little later on. And tomorrow, we invite some of our town’s good people to fill these stands and, well, yell at you.”
There was a laugh that sort of rippled through the students.
“Okay, let’s break down into our assigned areas. Groups H and J, you’re in the cages. The rest of you, those who were on field two, can head over there now with Soupcan and Pop.”
Dad walked off the field and I followed. He went into the small office he had off a classroom and called out to Mrs. G., “Is it ready?” I noticed he hadn’t shaved—that was part of the show . . . It helped him feel like a manager for some reason.
She brought in a Braves uniform and smiled. “I feel like this session just got started.”
“Any calls?” Dad asked.
“Yes. There was one from someone with the Phillies about Florida? Something like that.”
Dad sneaked a look at me and then nodded quickly at Mrs. G. He slipped the uniform over his clothes, then slowly walked back out to the field.
Before I could ask her, “What was that about Florida?” the phone rang, and she answered it. I followed Dad to the field.
Bobbybo was calling situations, and students in the plate ump and base ump positions were trying to remember everything they’d learned about what position they were supposed to be in, how to spot and call a balk, the infield fly rule . . . baseball is so complicated. And Dad was about to make it a million times worse for them.
“Ball,” the student called, just like he’d been instructed to do.
“Whatzat?” Dad called out from the dugout in a weird, fake southern accent.
“I said ball,” the student said, not looking at Dad. Just looking out at the mound.
“You called that strike a ball?”
“Quiet now,” the student said. He sounded terrified.
Dad was near home plate now. The student looked a little freaked out. Who wouldn’t, with a deranged-looking not-clean-shaven version of my dad, talking in a crazy southern accent and wearing a Braves uniform instead of his usual umpire blue?
“Listen,” Dad said, “you’re giving all the calls to the other team. I don’t know if you’ve got something going on with them—” Here Dad stopped talking and poked his finger in the student’s chest.
The student should have already thrown Dad out of the game. Instead he said, “I’m sorry. I thought it looked like a ball,” sounding like he was about to cry.
“Whatzat, son?”
“I thought it was a ball.” Seriously, about to cry.
Dad turned around to all the students watching. His body language changed at once. He was no longer a slouching, slow-talking, somewhat-deranged-looking manager. He was Ibbit. Instructor Ibbit. “That, boys and girls, is how not to be an umpire.” He turned to the student and said, “I’m sorry you had to be the first one. It’s hard. But you need to work on conveying authority. And not letting a manager walk all over you. If you think this was hard, wait until the crowds are screaming at you tomorrow.”
And how lucky he was, I thought, that Zeke and Sly and I would be on hand to protect him from having tomatoes hurled at his head.
Full Count
AFTER dinner I went outside with a notepad and pencil, and I waited. I was out of my comfort zone, but there are some things you can’t prepare for.
I knew what I had to do.
I sat on the bench between the cafeteria and the dorms, trying to calm the sloshy feeling in my stomach. The night grew dark around me.
I heard steps on the path. “How’s it going, Case?” Bobbybo lifted my baseball cap and slapped it back down. “I’m going to Clay Coves Cones. You wanna come?”
“No, thanks,” I said. I actually did want ice cream—I always wanted ice cream—but I wanted what I was there waiting for even more.
I couldn’t see much in the darkness, but I heard a car door open and shut, Bobbybo’s motor starting up. The wheels worked against the gravel in the lot until it grew quiet again. Just the buzz of New Jersey insects and the dim light of the moon.
More steps on the path
, not him. Not him. Not him. Groups of people who weren’t him. Not him. Lone guys strutted along who weren’t him. Not him. Not him.
I thought about having to go back to Mr. Donovan without an interview. With one of the not-yet-exactly-great revisions I had written in my notebook. Maybe there were some old interviews online I hadn’t found yet. Maybe if I looked harder, I’d find some good information I could use to make my article better. Did I really need an interview for this to work, just because Donovan said I did?
And then, finally, one more person, passing with a quick “Wassup?” MacSophal was about to walk right past me, back to the dorms.
This was it.
“Could I talk to you for a few minutes?” My voice was loud, maybe too loud.
In the darkness, I could make out the shrug of his too-big shoulders. “What’s going on?”
One deep breath. “I was wondering if I could interview you.” I’d been focusing on his shoulders, then his chest, but I shifted, looked him in the eye. It was dark, but we could see each other well enough.
“I don’t think that would be such a good idea,” he said, turning toward the dorms. As he started to walk away, there was a quick sound, and then a sudden shock of brightness. The field lights came on. Like something brought back to life, the bright summer green of the outfield grass shone where an instant earlier it had been dark. J-Mac turned. There was something about a diamond under the lights. It reminded you of what you loved about baseball. It stopped J-Mac right in his tracks.
“You’re not just looking to interview some run-of-the-mill umpire-school student, right? This is about me? My life?”
“Yeah. For the school newspaper.”
“What does your dad think about you interviewing me?”
I shrugged, since he didn’t know anything about it at all. My dad had his secrets, and I had mine.
A motor started up and drowned out the sound of chirping insects. A lawn mower rolled out to center field. Ralphie-O sometimes came to mow the fields really late here, as BTP was his only client with nighttime lighting.
J-Mac turned back to me. “Your dad’s a really good guy, Casey. I’ll talk to you, but just for a little while, okay?” He sat down next to me on the bench. I could feel it shift from his weight and thought about how if it were a seesaw, I’d be flying up into the sky.
I took another deep breath. I wanted to start with the juicy part—the minute he heard that Reggie Rhodes had ratted him out. But I knew it would be a better strategy to get him talking about the good times. I asked, “What’s your best memory of playing in the major leagues?”
He leaned back and rubbed the back of his neck, the start of a smile at the corners of his mouth. “The time I came in for the eighth inning in a tie game and mowed down three batters with nine pitches,” he said. “Nine easy strikes. Or maybe the first time my parents saw me play at Wrigley. No, you know what the best was? When I realized I could throw this cutter. That it worked. This crazy pitch that most other guys couldn’t throw. You should have seen the looks on coaches’ faces when I had my stuff working, when the cutter had all that late movement.”
I was taking notes as fast as I could, not wanting to miss one word of this.
“Have you ever seen a good cutter, Casey? It’s a magic pitch. It’s not a fastball. It’s not a slider. When your cutter’s working, you get guys chasing pitches. And when they do connect, they break their bats. One game, Brady Burnett broke three in a single at bat.”
One story led to the next. I hoped he’d never stop.
“My first time in the show, first major league game, I faced two batters. And I walked each one. On four pitches each.” He paused for a long time, and I was afraid he was going to stand up and head for the dorms. There was a low rumble of thunder in the sky. I kept waiting, and finally, he started talking again. “It was a long flight back to Phoenix. I wanted to cry the whole way.”
But the best was when he talked about his playing time with other players, guys I’d heard of—Billy Bolter, Orlando Williams, Pedro Francisco. Even Jackson Alter! I told him Alter was my favorite, and he told me about the year they played together on the Phillies.
“Alter ate a cheesesteak after every single home game. Cheesesteaks with pepper and onions. That’s something I hope never to smell again.”
“What’s he like?” He actually knew Jackson Alter!
“He’s a rock-solid guy. I never heard him say a bad word about anyone. He works really hard. A good teammate. There’s nothing not to respect about Jackson Alter.”
I knew that. It was the kind of thing you just knew, watching Jackson Alter play ball, listening to him talk, seeing how he acted with his teammates.
“I miss it so much,” J-Mac said, his eyes on the brightly lit field.
The sound of Ralphie-O’s mower grew louder as it worked its way from the outfield toward the infield.
“So what happened?” I asked, remembering what I was really after. Not great stories. An explanation. A confession.
The happiness of those memories had been lighting up J-Mac’s face, but it faded fast, a screen turned off. “I guess to you it looks like there was one minute when everything changed. But it didn’t feel like that.” He paused, kicking at the grass in front of the bench. “This might surprise you, Casey, but I didn’t know too many guys who played naked.”
I burst out laughing.
He shook his head. “Not that naked,” he said. “No, I mean back then we’d all take some pills, you know, so we’d have the strength to get out there and play hard every day. It’s not as easy as it looks.”
As I wrote down every word he said, something was crackling beneath my skin, almost like a lie detector going off. No! That’s bull. That’s just bull. No! They didn’t all take pills. That was a lie.
“Are you saying every player took steroids?”
He looked at me like I was some stupid little kid. “I didn’t say anything about steroids. I’m talking about other stuff, like greenies, you know, stimulants.”
“Legal pills?”
“Well, not exactly. But they weren’t banned by Major League Baseball at that time, either.”
I couldn’t sit next to this guy anymore. I jumped up from the bench and stood in front of him. I wanted to get right in his face. “But that thing with Reggie Rhodes, where he said he got stuff from your locker, wasn’t that steroids? And then why didn’t you speak up? Why did you run away and hide?”
“Hold on, Casey. Slow down. It was complicated. Reggie Rhodes was a user. He used steroids for years. And he took greenies too, all that stuff. And, yeah, he probably got something from me. Not the steroids, though.”
“So you’re saying you never used steroids?”
“I’m not saying that. I’m saying he didn’t get them from me.”
I sat back down. “But I just don’t understand. Why would you?”
He closed his eyes for a long time. The sky continued with its low rumbles, though I didn’t see any lightning.
“It got to this point where if you weren’t taking something—whatever kind of drug you want to call it—good luck keeping up with everyone else, because all your teammates were. And all your opponents were. Is it fair for a clean pitcher to have to face a juiced-up power hitter? It wasn’t like you were trying to get some unfair advantage. You were trying to keep up with everyone else.”
Every tendon and muscle and nerve in my body was tense and angry, because I knew what he was saying was wrong. It was completely wrong. You couldn’t say, I did it because everyone was doing it. Rules govern the game of baseball—rules govern everything!—and you don’t get to pick which rules you want to follow. There’s integrity to the game. And the rules apply to everyone.
But.
I hated that there was a but. I wasn’t even sure what that but was, but there was a part of what he was saying that I almost understood. I didn’t like it. I didn’t think he was right. But I wasn’t sure he was completely not right.
And i
t definitely wasn’t the story I had thought it was.
“So if Reggie Rhodes was lying,” I said, “if he didn’t get steroids from your locker, why didn’t you defend yourself?”
“I’m trusting you not to tell anyone this, not that anyone would necessarily believe you anyway. This is off the record.”
Whoa. I put my pad down. When someone says something is off the record, there’s no messing around. It’s serious and important, like an oath: the person is talking freely, willing to say things he might not other-wise say. A reporter is never allowed to use anything said off the record.
“I wasn’t exactly innocent. I’m not saying it was right, but I had taken steroids. I’d been off for a while by the time this happened. But like I told you, I was still taking other drugs, nothing big, just some little stuff, and so were a lot of players. The thing is: I knew who was taking. And if I came forward and ended up being questioned, I was going to bring down a lot of other people. Really good players. Good men. Good friends.”
“If they were guilty, they should have paid the price.” Pop would have been proud; there was strength and conviction in my voice. I sounded like the best kind of umpire, confident in his call.
J-Mac shook his head like I had no idea what I was talking about. “You sure about that?” he asked.
“No doubt,” I said. “There’s no place for drug-taking cheaters in baseball.” I couldn’t believe I’d said that to his face. I felt like a tiny mouse from a fable or something, taking on a giant elephant.
“So I should have brought them all down, Casey? Really? All the players I knew who had been taking drugs, I should have sold them out, named their names.”
I nodded my head, hard.
“Do you feel any different knowing that Jackson Alter was one of the people I’d have had to name?”
It felt like he had reached down my throat and pulled my lungs right out of my body. I could not breathe in the same way I’d always been able to breathe before.
He shook his head, put up his hand, and said, “I’ll deny ever having said that. I didn’t say that, okay? Just—I didn’t say that.” Then he stood up and walked away.
Screaming at the Ump Page 12