The DH

by John Feinstein

  Bailey had practically skipped over to the lunch table on Friday to report that he was starting.

  “You going to be on a pitch count?” Jonas asked.

  “Yeah, like around eighty,” Bailey said. “That should be good for at least six innings.”

  He was joking. If he made it through five, it would make everyone happy and would mean the bullpen shouldn’t be too taxed.

  Just as they were getting off the bus, Alex saw a text pop up on his phone. It was from his dad: Just finished. Heading back. Depending on traffic, we’ll try to get to the game. If not, will let you know and we’ll meet at the Palm.

  He had made a point of telling the boys to bring a change of clothes with them since there was no point going back to school. The Palm was about a ten-minute cab ride from Ben Franklin. They were going to get their Palm dinner win or lose, but there was no doubt the steaks would taste a lot better after a win.

  The good news about Bailey Warner’s first start since the season opener was that he threw exactly eighty pitches and was pain-free. The bad news was it took him eighty pitches to get into the fourth inning and he had to leave with one out and the bases loaded. Standing in left field as Coach Birdy walked to the mound with the score tied, 4–4, Alex wondered if Coach Birdy might wave him in. This was a must-win, and the game the next Tuesday against Bryn Mawr Tech was probably winnable, even if Coach Birdy had to resort to the “all hands on deck” approach with the pitching staff again.

  That wasn’t what Coach Birdy was thinking. He waved Ethan Sattler in from the bullpen, and Alex let out a deep breath—he wasn’t sure if it was relief at not being given the ball at that moment or just nerves. Fortunately for the Lions, the bottom of Franklin’s lineup was coming up. Sattler gave up a sacrifice fly to give the Lightning a 5–4 lead, but he struck out the number nine hitter to keep the game close.

  Alex, due up third in the fifth, raced in from left field. For once, Matt Gordon’s assessment of an upcoming opponent had not been a hundred percent accurate: Franklin was a decent team—at least, facing Bailey Warner it was a decent team.

  Lucas Mann led off the top of the fifth and walked. Franklin’s starting pitcher, a kid named Oscar Flores, was tiring. Their coach went to the mound to talk to him. Two pitchers ran down the right field line to begin warming up. Jeff Cardillo promptly hit Flores’s first pitch into center field for a single, and Mann—who ran like the catcher that he was—stopped at second.

  Alex walked to the plate quickly. He sensed that Flores had little left, and he didn’t want to give the relievers any extra time to get warm. The catcher went to the mound, blatantly stalling, but was soon hustled back to the plate by the home plate umpire.

  Alex stepped in. He checked with Coach Birdy at third base just in case he wanted him to bunt—which he hoped wouldn’t be the case. In Alex’s mind, there was zero sense in giving up an out to a tiring pitcher. Coach Birdy was thinking the same thing. He went through all sorts of motions, but he never touched his ear, meaning there was no sign.

  Flores tried two breaking pitches, neither one close to the plate. Alex thought about backing out on 2–0 to check with Coach Birdy but decided against it. This was a hit-away situation, and he didn’t want to chance seeing a “take” sign. Flores had to throw a fastball, and he had to throw a strike.

  Stay back, Alex told himself, remembering his tendency to jump at pitches when he was overeager. Flores checked the two runners—who weren’t going anywhere, especially with Mann as the lead runner—and finally threw a pitch he didn’t want to throw.

  It was a fastball, and it was right down the middle. Later, Alex remembered actually thinking batting-practice fastball before he swung, because it was little more than that. He stayed back and met the ball solidly, making sure not to overswing. He didn’t need to hit the ball out of the ballpark; he just needed to hit it hard.

  In the end, he did both. The ball took off toward left-center field, and Alex, thinking triple, took off as soon as the ball left his bat. He was about to turn at first base when he saw the two outfielders stop running. The ball had carried over the fence for a home run. It was hardly a Matt Gordon moonshot, but that didn’t matter—it counted the same. Alex was rounding second base when he saw Franklin’s coach heading back to the mound. He had left Flores in one batter too long.

  The score was now 7–5, and the Lions didn’t look back. They scored two more runs before the fifth was over, two more in the sixth, and one in the seventh against Franklin’s very mediocre bullpen. Ethan Sattler gave up a run in the fifth and a run in the sixth before Don Warren came on to finish the game off in the seventh. The final score was 12–7. Hardly pretty, but plenty good enough.

  There were showers in the Franklin locker room, which was a good thing, because it had been the first really warm day of the spring and everyone was pouring sweat after the game.

  Christine and Steve Garland were there for the Weekly Roar, but there was little sign of the normal coterie of media or scouts who had been present before Matt’s suspension. That was fine with Alex.

  “So, Matt texted me and said he thought the hearing went well,” Christine said when Alex and Jonas walked out of the locker room.

  Instantly, Alex’s jealousy began to kick in, but he pushed it aside—if only in the name of self-preservation. “My dad texted too,” he said. “But he didn’t say anything about how it went.”

  “Guess we’ll find out more when we get to the Palm,” Jonas said.

  Alex’s dad, Matt, Max Bellotti, Stevie Thomas, and a very pretty girl with long dark hair were all waiting at their table when they arrived at the restaurant. Alex wasn’t surprised to see Max, but he was surprised to see Stevie. As if reading his mind, his dad said, “I thought maybe we could use a little bit of a push from the media the next couple days, so I asked Stevie to come and discuss strategy.”

  “And, as luck would have it, Susan Carol’s in town, and she’s much smarter than I am, so I brought her along,” Stevie said.

  He introduced them all to Susan Carol Anderson, his friend and fellow teenage reporter. When she stood to shake hands with Alex and Jonas, Alex noticed she was looking him right in the eye. He had heard she was tall but hadn’t realized how tall.

  “Great to meet y’all,” she said in a distinctly Southern accent. “Stevie’s pretty much filled me in on everything. I’m not sure if we can influence the state high school athletic association, but we’ve both got some ideas on how we can try.”

  She actually said “traa.” Alex thought the accent was charming. Of course, if she’d had a New York or a Russian accent, he probably would have found it charming too.

  As they sat down, Matt said, “You may not have heard, but KOP killed Chester this afternoon, eight to four.”

  “That’s not as bad as fourteen to two,” Jonas said, reminding them all of their loss to KOP.

  “Let’s not worry about that now,” Alex’s dad said. “Let’s get you guys menus, because I’m sure you’re hungry. And then I’ll fill you in on everything.”

  Alex liked that idea. Especially the part about getting menus and ordering.

  After they had ordered—all the boys and Alex’s dad ordered the porterhouse, the biggest steak in the house, while Christine and Susan Carol asked for filets—Alex’s dad got down to business.

  He told them that the appeals board had consisted of five people—four men and one woman, all athletic administrators. They had read his written appeal and had a lot of questions both for Matt and for him.

  “It comes down to two basic things,” he finally said. “One, Matt’s admission that he threw at Twardzik intentionally. From their point of view, that’s the smoking gun. He put the kid at risk by throwing high and inside, even if his intent was just to make him hit the dirt. Just inside would have been okay; if he’d said the pitch got away from him, that would have been okay too.

  “My argument on that was simple: They’re right. He should be punished. And he’s been punished. Today
was the fourth game he’s missed, and if the Haverford Station game is resumed, he’s been ejected already. So that makes five in all.”

  “What was the second thing?” Jonas asked. Alex was pretty certain he knew the answer.

  “The PEDs,” Alex’s dad answered, not surprising Alex at all. “They felt they cut Matt a lot of slack letting him play baseball this spring. As the chairman said”—he reached into his jacket pocket for a small notebook, took it out, and began reading—“ ‘We let him play because he confessed and was clearly contrite about what he’d done and because, technically, he never tested positive. What we’ve gotten in return is a player who required brain surgery because your client had a temper tantrum.’ ”

  That didn’t sound good to Alex. Apparently he wasn’t the only one who reached that conclusion.

  “Ouch!” Jonas said.

  “What he said,” Max threw in.

  “What did the other board members say when he said that?” Susan Carol asked.

  Alex’s dad pointed a finger at her. “I heard you were smart,” he said. “Two of them pointed out that Billy Twardzik was out of the hospital and, according to the medical report they’d received, might play again this season.”

  “So it’s not unreasonable,” Christine added, “to say that if Billy can play, then Matt should be allowed to play.”

  “No law school training, and you made the exact same argument I made,” Alex’s dad said.

  “My guess is she would have been more convincing,” Matt said, grinning.

  Everyone laughed except Alex—not because it wasn’t funny but because he wished he had been the one who had said it.

  Dinner was unbelievably good. Alex had never seen a bigger steak in his life, and all the sides his father had ordered for the table came on massive plates. Alex had noted the price on the porterhouse—sixty-nine dollars—when he ordered. He did a little math and realized his dad was picking up a huge check.

  By the time Alex had failed in his attempt to finish the largest piece of carrot cake—or any cake—he’d ever seen in his life, a plan had been pieced together.

  Matt was going to give an “exclusive” interview to Stevie and Susan Carol: Stevie for the Daily News; Susan Carol for the Washington Post. He would talk about how awful the past couple of weeks had been and how he knew he had only himself to blame. And about how incredibly relieved he was that Billy Twardzik was okay and how guilty he felt for putting his entire team’s season in jeopardy.

  “The good news is, that is the way I feel,” Matt said. “I don’t have to fudge it to make it sound better. I’ll be telling the truth.”

  Stevie would also talk to Dick Jerardi about getting Matt on Daily News Live. There wasn’t much going on at the moment: The Final Four and the Masters were both over, and neither the 76ers nor the Flyers were going to make the playoffs. They would shoot for Monday, hoping that the two newspaper interviews and the TV show would engender some sympathy and, perhaps, give the board members something to think about before they rendered their decision the following Wednesday.

  “What do you think, Dad?” Alex asked when they had talked it all through for the fifth time.

  His dad was signing the credit card bill for dinner.

  “I think it’ll be a three-to-two vote,” his dad said. “I just don’t know which side will have the three and which side will have the two.”

  Whether or not they’d have Matt back on Friday, there was still the matter of the rematch with Bryn Mawr on Tuesday. Technically, this game would put them at the midway point of the conference season, although they would have only seven results when it was over since the outcome of the Haverford Station game was still to be determined.

  Alex felt great when he took the mound. With each passing game, his confidence was growing. He was spotting his fastball better and was learning how to control his breaking pitches—an occasional curveball and the slider that Matt had taught him.

  It turned out the rest of the Lions were feeling good too. Jeff Cardillo hit for the cycle: single, double, triple, and home run. And Oliver Flick, who struck out often but could hit the ball prodigious distances when he made contact, made contact with a pitch in the fourth inning with the bases loaded for a grand slam that gave Chester Heights a 7–0 lead.

  Alex pitched solidly with the lead, but he was helped greatly by his defense. Early in the season, the Lions had had three very good defensive players: Jonas, who could run down almost anything in center field and had a very good throwing arm; Matt, when he was in the lineup at shortstop; and Jeff Cardillo, regardless of where he played.

  But the fielding drills Coach Birdy had insisted on were paying off. “I know you guys would much rather just take BP,” he often said. “But I promise you we’ll win as many games with our gloves as our bats if we work on this.”

  Lucas Mann had probably improved the most. He’d gone from struggling to stop breaking pitches—especially Alex’s curves and sliders, which could go almost anywhere—to almost never letting a pitch get past him. When Cardillo had moved back to shortstop, Brendan Chu had stepped in at third base and was just about as good as Cardillo—with a stronger arm. And Oliver Flick was now a very solid outfielder—not as fast as Jonas, but with great instincts that made him look faster than he actually was when running down balls.

  Early in the season, Alex had almost closed his eyes when he was on the mound and the ball was put in play. Now he was confident that if there was a play to be made, it would be made.

  “God bless you, Coach Birdy,” he said to himself when Chu dove toward the foul line to cut off a sure double, ending the sixth inning. That allowed Alex to get through the inning still leading, 8–2, even though he was tiring and was surrendering more rockets than pop-ups.

  Don Warren finished up. They were now 6–1 in the conference: a half game behind Chester, at 7–1, and a game and a half behind King of Prussia, which was 8–0. KOP would come to Chester Heights on Friday afternoon.

  “We gotta have Matt back to pitch that game,” Alex said to Jonas as they sat in the dugout in the seventh inning—Jonas had been pulled too, along with several other starters, to give some of the bench guys a chance to play.

  “Yeah, I know,” Jonas said. “Of course, he won’t have pitched for three weeks even if we do get him back, so who knows what will happen.”

  “I’d just like the chance to find out,” Alex said.

  “Amen to that,” Jonas said just as Warren threw strike three for the final out of the game.

  The media was back, but Matt was nowhere in sight. After he had done his Daily News Live interview on Monday as a follow-up to the Stevie and Susan Carol newspaper interviews, Alex’s dad had told him to stay away from Tuesday’s game.

  “You’ve made your case,” he said. “If you overdo it, the board might get upset.”

  As it was, Alex wondered if the mini publicity tour might have been too much. But he trusted his dad to know what he was doing.

  Even Matt had apparently wearied of the whole thing. He had called Alex the night before to tell him that.

  “I appreciate what your dad and Stevie and Susan Carol are doing,” he said. “But, boy, am I glad it’s over. I was beginning to feel like the biggest phony alive.”

  “You mean you don’t feel that bad—”

  “Of course I do,” Matt said, breaking in. “But after a while, you get numb. I got to the point where I almost wanted to say, ‘You know what? Whatever they decide, I probably deserve it.’ This was worse than the steroids, Alex. At least with the steroids, the only person I hurt was me.”

  That, Alex knew, was Matt the Old talking. He liked hearing it—even if there was pain in his voice as he spoke.

  With Matt not around, the media settled for talking to the rest of the Chester Heights players…about Matt.

  “This is the fifth game he’s missed,” Alex said. “That’s more than twenty percent of our season. I think anyone who has read or heard what Matt’s been saying knows how
sorry he is. People deserve second chances—especially good people. Matt’s a good person.”

  Alex wished he could have snatched the “second chances” line back almost as soon as it came out of his mouth. Matt had already been given a second chance. He was asking for a third chance now.

  Dave Myers flew to Philadelphia that night because he and Matt were due in Harrisburg at ten o’clock the next morning. The board required their presence when it ruled on the appeal.

  That meant that Alex and Molly and their dad went to dinner again. The kids decided it was time their father tasted a Tony’s pizza.

  “It’s not Regina’s, but it’s very good” was his verdict. “For Philadelphia, it’s excellent.”

  “When did Boston become the pizza capital of the world?” Alex asked, surprised that he found himself defending Philadelphia.

  “It’s not—New York is,” their dad said. “But we do have Regina’s.” He smiled. “And Fenway Park.”

  “Yeah, but Citizens Bank is pretty nice too, Dad,” Alex said. “And in Philly we don’t have to drive to Foxboro to see the NFL team play.”

  “You win that round,” their dad said, and they all laughed. It was almost like old times again, Alex thought. Or maybe it was the beginning of better new times.

  “So what do you think about tomorrow?” Alex asked as he was digging into his fourth slice.

  Their father shook his head. “When I plead a case before a jury, I can almost always tell after my closing argument whether I’m going to win or lose. Some of it is watching their eyes; some of it is body language; some of it is just knowing the facts of the case and whether the law is on your side or not.