The Only Game

by Mike Lupica

  “I’ll go with you,” Gus said.

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “I didn’t say that I thought I had to, I said I would,” Gus said. “Idiot.”

  “Okay.”

  Gus pointed at Jack’s bike and said, “You brought your glove.”

  “If you didn’t tell me to get lost, I thought maybe we could throw the ball around or something. Unless you wanted to throw one at my head after you heard me out.”

  Gus gave him a shove now. A playful one.

  “Meet me in the backyard. I’ll go get mine,” Gus said. “Do I even need to ask if there’s a ball in the pocket of that glove?”

  “You do not.”

  When Gus came back out of the house, they went to the far end of the Moraleses’ yard, not quite as big as Jack’s, but close enough, enough space to put some distance between them, and some air under their throws.

  Before long they were laughing the way they always had back here, trying to knock each other’s gloves off the closer they got to each other.

  It was like they were back to speaking their own language, through the game they both loved the way they did. They didn’t need words. Jack and Gus started to tell each other through baseball that things were going to be all right between them.

  Mrs. Morales asked if he could stay for lunch. Jack called his mom, who said, “Of course.” After lunch—Mrs. Morales’s cooking was even better than Jack remembered—he and Gus rode their bikes to Coach Leonard’s house. Mrs. Morales had called ahead. They sat with Coach Leonard in his living room, and then Coach was the one hearing out Jack’s story. Coach was the one hearing how much Jack wanted to come back and play.

  When he finally ran out of words—feeling like he’d run out of gas—Coach just said, “See you at practice tomorrow night.”

  “Thank you.”

  Coach smiled. “No,” he said. “Thank you. How’s the arm, by the way?”

  “Better than ever,” Gus said, answering for him the way he used to, and they all laughed.

  It was when he got home later that his parents said they had one last thing to show him. “Haven’t I had enough surprises?” Jack said.

  Then she walked him up the stairs and into his room.

  There on his bed, perfectly laid out, was his Rays uniform.

  Pale blue. Number 15. Pedroia’s number, of course.

  “You didn’t take it back when you said you did.”

  “Nope.”

  “It was here all along?” Jack said.

  “It’s like you always tell me,” his mom said. “Just in case a game broke out.”

  TWENTY

  You’re late,” Coach Leonard said when Jack showed up for practice Monday night.

  “But, Coach,” Jack said. “It’s only five thirty. Practice doesn’t start until six.”

  He looked around. Only about half the Rays were there. Even Gus hadn’t arrived at Highland Park yet.

  Coach Leonard grinned at the guys who were there and said, “I meant late for the season.”

  Jack had been worrying about how the rest of the Rays would react to him, but it turned out he shouldn’t have. They made it easy for him right away, even before the whole team was on the field.

  “No kidding,” Gregg Leonard, Coach’s son, said. “About time you showed up.”

  Scott Sutter, their catcher, said, “If you’d waited any longer, I was afraid we were going to fall behind girls’ teams in the standings. Now go get a ball. We need to start warming up that arm right now.”

  Jack looked at Coach. “Okay to start throwing?”

  Coach made a show of checking out his watch. “You’ve been here five whole minutes,” he said. “I was afraid you’d never ask.”

  When Gus showed up, he walked over to where Jack and Scott were throwing near first base. Ignoring Jack, he called out, “Hey, who’s the new guy?”

  “Some scrub,” T.W. Stanley said from the infield grass, where he was warming up with Gregg.

  Gus stood there and watched Jack throw for a couple of minutes and finally said, “Does this guy actually intend to pitch with that arm? I’ve seen more arm strength from guys brushing their teeth.”

  “Let’s see how you feel the first time I brush you back in batting practice,” Jack said.

  It went like that for the first half hour of practice. Jack’s teammates busted his chops every chance they got. Jack would occasionally come back at them with chirp of his own. Mostly he took it. Never in his life had he been happier to be the object of trash talk.

  It was as if this was a different kind of baseball language, his teammates’ way of letting him know how good they felt about him being back.

  Just not as good as he felt.

  Nobody asked why he’d quit the team in the first place. Maybe Coach had told them not to ask. Or maybe Gus had told the rest of them to leave it alone. It would mean Gus had Jack’s back the way he used to.

  When the last of the Rays, Brett Hawkins, showed up about ten minutes before six o’clock, Jack had gotten alone with Coach Leonard and asked if he should say something to the team.

  Coach said, “Everything that was needed to be said has been. What matters is that you are here.”

  Jack didn’t tell him, but it was a tremendous relief. On the way home from Coach’s house the day before, he’d told himself that he was never going to tell the story about Brad, and why he’d done what he’d done, ever again. If any of his teammates did ask, he was simply going to tell them, “My head wasn’t in it. Now it is.” Hopefully he would be able to leave it at that.

  Coach was right. He was here, that was what mattered. His head was back in it now. His heart was in it too.

  All in.

  Before batting practice started, he asked Coach where he wanted him to hit.

  “Third,” John Leonard said. “Right before Gus. Like always.”

  Gus heard that.

  “And you get you’re not facing a girl now, right?”

  “You heard about that?”

  “My sister said it was the only time in her life she was ever rooting for you to strike out.”

  “Believe me, I was afraid I was going to,” Jack said. “I have to admit, Cassie is pretty great.”

  “That was softball,” Gus said, giving Jack a playful shove. “Time for some old-fashioned hardball. Go grab a bat.”

  • • •

  As always, Coach started off pitching BP. Jack struggled with his timing at first. He kept telling himself that was to be expected. He hadn’t faced real live pitching—other than Cassie—since his one day of practice with the Rays before he quit.

  One day when he and Teddy and Cassie were on the field at school, Teddy had offered to pitch to him, but Jack had said, “Not without a screen in front of you.”

  “What about me?” Cassie’d said.

  Jack had smiled at her and said, “Your team needs you too much.”

  “I’m not afraid of you.”

  And Jack had said, “That is what I’m afraid of.”

  In the batter’s box now he told himself to stop pressing, to relax, just let it happen. He told himself not to squeeze the bat, because no matter how good a hitter you usually were, nobody could hit a baseball properly doing that.

  He’d completely missed the first three pitches, even though they were fastballs right down the middle, like Coach was trying to put the ball on a tee for him. At least he got a small piece of the fourth pitch, fouling the ball back.

  “Stop lunging,” he muttered to himself under his breath, stepping out of the box, knowing the rest of the guys were probably watching him more closely right now than they ever had.

  “I heard that,” Coach called to him from the mound. “Couldn’t have said it better myself.”

  Jack took in some air, let it out, took his stance, and tried to make his grip on the handle so light Gus could have walked over from the on-deck circle and taken the bat away from him with no problem.

  Coach threw one more
fastball over the middle of the plate, and this time Jack hit a line drive up the middle so hard that Coach Leonard nearly had to dive to get out of the way.

  “That is what I’m talkin’ about,” Gus said from behind him.

  When Jack finished, knowing he’d gotten a lot more swings than the rest of the guys usually got, Coach asked if he wanted to do some pitching from the mound.

  “Oh yeah,” he said.

  As he ran to get his glove, Gus yelled out to Coach, “Aren’t you worried that it might affect his confidence when I start hitting bombs off him?”

  “We’ll just have to risk it,” Coach said.

  Scott was already in his full catching gear behind the plate. Coach handed Jack the ball and said, “Go easy.”

  Jack grinned and said, “Not gonna lie, Coach. Going easy today is gonna be hard.”

  He knew, just from the throwing he’d done already, that his arm felt good. After a half-dozen warm-up pitches, Scott threw the ball back to him hard and said, “We good?”

  “Like they sing at Fenway when they sing ‘Sweet Caroline,’” Jack said. “So good, so good, so good.”

  Gus got into the batter’s box. Jack said, “This is batting practice. I am supposed to let you hit, you know.”

  “Not today,” Gus said. “Knock yourself out trying to get me out.”

  It had been almost a year since Jack had tried to get somebody out, so he wondered if he would be able to get his fastball to behave. This was just BP, this wasn’t a real game, but Gus’s challenge, even issued in good fun, meant this was a competition between them now. All eyes were fixed on both of them. Mostly those eyes were on him, his teammates wanting to see what he had with a ball in his hand.

  He wasn’t going to overthrow, wasn’t going to risk blowing out his arm before his season officially began. But he was feeling it now and he knew it, remembering how much he loved to compete.

  Realizing how much he’d missed competing.

  He went into his windup and promptly threw his first pitch over Gus’s head and over Scott’s head and all the way to the backstop on the fly.

  Before anybody else could say anything, Jack couldn’t help himself. He laughed.

  “Sorry,” he said to Gus after Scott retrieved the ball and threw it back to him. “For a second I thought they’d moved home plate over by the duck pond.”

  “Fear of the opposing hitter often does that to a guy,” Gus said.

  “You get six swings, right?” Jack said.

  “Right.”

  “Let’s see how many hits there are, and how many misses.”

  “Bring it.”

  Jack threw what he thought was a perfect pitch on the outside corner, but Gus went with it, lacing a clean single into leftfield.

  One for him.

  Jack came inside with the next pitch. Gus lined that one over T.W. Stanley’s head at second base.

  Two for him.

  He stepped out of the box. Then he patted his mouth with the blue batting glove on his right hand, like he was stifling a yawn. “This is getting kind of boring,” he said.

  He was enjoying this.

  “Don’t worry, though,” Gus said. “I can almost guarantee you’re still going to make the team.”

  Jack knew something that Gus didn’t know: He was really loose now and ready, really feeling it. Back in the middle of a baseball diamond, back in baseball, ball in his hand. He went into his motion again. This time he put a little something extra on the pitch. What the announcers liked to call giddyup. Gus had no chance, swinging right through the ball. It almost looked to Jack as if Gus didn’t even start his swing until the ball was in Scott’s mitt.

  One for Jack.

  He didn’t say anything or try to show Gus up. He just smiled. Gus smiled back. They both knew this was pure baseball, even if they were the only ones keeping score.

  Jack threw another fastball by him. The sound the ball made in the pocket of Scott’s catcher’s mitt . . . Jack knew he hadn’t made that sound in a long time. Too long. But man, it sounded sweet.

  Gus got him again on the next pitch, a fastball up, tomahawking the ball into centerfield. Jack watched it land, then turned and pointed to Gus. “Good lick,” he said.

  Three hits for Gus. Two misses. One more pitch. Scott set up low, telling Jack to put one at Gus’s knees if he could. They both knew that Gus was a classic low-ball hitter, the way a lot of lefty hitters were. But Scott was doing what good catchers tried to do, changing the batter’s eye level. Going low right after going high. Jack nodded.

  The ball felt as if it exploded out of his hand, looking like it was coming in belt high and then just knifing into Scott’s mitt, Scott barely having to move it. Gus swung and missed so hard he spun himself toward first base and nearly fell down.

  From behind him Jack heard T.W. Stanley saying, “Wow, wow, wow.”

  Gus was the one pointing at Jack now.

  “I think I missed you more than I just missed that pitch,” he said.

  “Missed you, too, brother.”

  Jack made a gesture with his glove that tried to take in their team, the whole field, everything. “Mostly I missed this,” he said.

  Coach came walking over to him and said, “Did I mention that you’re starting Wednesday night?”

  TWENTY-ONE

  The Rays had an earlier practice the next night, five instead of six. When it was over, Jack stayed at the fields because the Orioles had a practice of their own at seven.

  “You know,” Cassie said when she got to Highland Park, “you don’t have to help coach our team anymore now that you’re back playing.”

  “Don’t have to,” Jack said. “Want to.”

  “Let me get this straight. You’re going to practice with your own team, play games for your own team, and still be an assistant on my team?”

  “Correction,” Jack said. “Our team.”

  “Your parents are okay with all this baseball?”

  “They were getting sick of having me around the house.”

  “I’m being serious,” Cassie said.

  “So am I. I told your dad I’d be his assistant coach, and I’m sticking with that. And the only time I’ll miss one of your games is when I’ve got a game of my own.”

  “You really want to do this?”

  “Hey,” Jack said, “look at how well you’re doing now that I’m around to give you pointers.”

  Her answer was a punch to the arm.

  “Hey,” Jack said, “that’s my pitching arm.”

  “I forgot,” Cassie said.

  Cassie wasn’t pitching tonight; she was at shortstop. She got three hits, made a great running catch on a pop-up to short center, then turned and threw out a runner at home on the same play, the girl dumb enough to run on her arm.

  Play wasn’t even close.

  As soon as she got back to the bench, she came right over to where Jack was sitting.

  “Must have been all those pointers that nailed Emma at the plate,” she said.

  Jack put up his hand for a high five. She tapped it with her glove.

  “Were you, like, born this cocky?” Jack said.

  “Just make sure you are tomorrow night,” Cassie said.

  “I’m not feeling very cocky,” Jack said. “I haven’t started a game since last season.”

  Cassie gave him one of her biggest smiles.

  “No worries,” she said. “I’ll be there to help you.”

  • • •

  The game was on the front field at Highland Park, one Jack had always thought had better lighting than the back fields.

  “Tell me you don’t think the lights are better here,” Jack said to Gus before batting practice.

  “You just think they’re turned up tonight because you’re pitching,” Gus said.

  “Yeah, that’s me,” Jack said, “always bringing my spotlight with me.”

  “Just as long as you bring your A game, too,” Gus said. “’Cause you’re gonna need it. We all are
. These guys are good.”

  “These guys” were the White Sox, coming into the game with a 4–0 record, and everybody in the league knew that even before Jack had quit the team, they had just as good a chance to win the Atlantic and give themselves a chance at the Little League World Series as the Rays did. They were that good.

  If Jack had been the best pitcher his age in the league last season, Nate Vinton—starting tonight for the White Sox—was the next best. He was a tall right-hander, tall enough to play center in basketball, with a fastball as big as he was.

  He was also the White Sox’s best hitter, and their best outfielder, usually going out to left after he finished pitching. They also had a power guy behind him—Mike O’Keeffe, their catcher—and a centerfielder named Wayne Coffey, who Jack thought might be the fastest kid in their league.

  The White Sox seemed to have just finished their own batting practice. But then Nate jumped into the box for a few extra swings against his dad, who coached the team. He hit shots to left and to right, asked for one more, and absolutely crushed one that disappeared over the centerfield fence. The ball ended up rolling into center on the field behind them, where the Mariners and Angels were finishing warm-ups.

  “How lucky am I,” Jack said, “getting to open up against such a soft opponent?”

  “What, you thought this was going to be easy?” Gus said.

  “Hope I’m ready for this.”

  “Now you’re the one who sounds soft.” Gus turned to face him on the bench and said, “Are you really worried? You?”

  “My arm’s fine,” Jack said. “I just feel like I’m going from the first day of spring training straight to opening day.”

  “Guess what?” Gus said. “We all feel like this is opening day all over again. That’s why we need to show these guys—and you need to show these guys—that when we’ve got you, we’re still the best team in this stinking league.”

  He put out his fist. Jack bumped it. Scott Sutter came walking by and casually did the same thing. So did Gregg Leonard, and Hawk, and Andre, and T.W. Stanley. They had all practiced together for two nights as a team. But this was the real thing. This was a big game, even this early in the season, and they all knew it. And felt it.