by Mike Lupica
“You can’t take him out,” Ben’s dad said.
Matt’s mom turned to look at him. But then, everybody at Healey Park was looking at him now.
“You’re not the coach of this team!” Mr. Roberson said, his voice rising a little more.
Matt’s mom stood now, and began walking over to where Mr. Roberson was standing on his side of the fence. Matt knew his mom. He knew how much she hated loud voices. She had told him once that her own father had been too loud, because of a bad temper. She never yelled at Matt. She hated drama, and she hated scenes. The kind of scene that Ben’s dad was making now.
Matt walked a little closer to them and heard his mom say, “I’m the coach tonight.”
“You wouldn’t take your own son out of the game for making one mistake on the bases,” Mr. Roberson said.
“First of all, I would,” she said. “And my son knows I would. And second of all, I don’t appreciate being yelled at this way.”
“And I don’t appreciate what you just did to my son,” he said. “Not that I signed up to have a . . .”
Somehow they all heard him stop himself before he said he hadn’t signed up to have a woman coach his son’s baseball team.
“. . . to have somebody other than Sarge coach this team,” is the way he finished the sentence.
“I’m only doing what Sarge would have done if he’d been here,” Matt’s mom said. “You were at the practice when he told us all his rule about the consequences of not running out balls. It’s part of being on this team. It’s Sarge’s rule, not mine.”
“Dad,” Ben said.
He had walked over and was standing behind Matt’s mom.
“Shut up, Ben,” Mr. Roberson said.
Then he turned back to Matt’s mom and said, “Mike hasn’t thrown a pitch yet. So Ben is technically still in the game. So put him back in.”
At this point Matt saw the home plate umpire walking up the first base line, clearly having heard enough. Or seen enough. Or both.
“I’m afraid I can’t do that,” Rachel Baker said.
Standing her ground. His mom.
Standing tall, if you thought about it.
“You’re being an idiot,” Mr. Roberson said. His face was very red. His voice was still very loud.
“One of us is,” Matt’s mom said.
“So you’re telling me Ben’s out of this game?” Mr. Roberson said.
“You both are,” the home plate umpire said.
“Wait a second,” Mr. Roberson said. “You’re telling me to leave?”
“Yes sir,” the ump said. “And if you leave, and that means leave quietly, none of this will extend beyond tonight’s game.”
“You think you have the right to do that?”
“I know I do, sir, and so does the other umpire and so do the two coaches,” the ump said. “Now, I am asking you as respectfully as possible to leave and let the kids finish the game, which happens to be what the night is supposed to be about.”
Mr. Roberson opened his mouth, then closed it. He looked at Matt’s mom again. He looked at the ump. Finally he looked at Ben and said, “Let’s go.”
Don’t do it, Matt thought.
Matt tried to call out his name. He just wanted to say, “Ben, stop.” He wanted to tell him to stay.
But he couldn’t get the words out, even though he knew this was important, even if this was Ben’s dad giving him an order, he knew it was important for Ben to stay and be a part of the team. Ben couldn’t control how his dad was acting. Just how he was about to act.
Ben put his head back down and walked to his right, toward the gate. Then he went through the gate and over to his dad, who by then had gone to fold up his lawn chair. The two of them walked in the direction of the parking lot. Mr. Roberson, Matt saw, tried to put an arm around Ben’s shoulder. Ben moved away from him far enough that he couldn’t.
The next thing anybody heard at Healey Park was the home plate ump saying, “Play ball.”
Then he added, “Finally.”
At second base, only loud enough for himself to hear, Matt finally said, “Ben, stop.”
Just too late, for both of them.
TWENTY-NINE
The Astros ended up winning the game. Pat McQuade, who didn’t just replace Ben at first but in the cleanup spot as well, got a big double with two outs in the bottom of the fifth and the bases loaded, scoring Denzel and José and Matt as the Astros were breaking the game wide open.
Matt ended the game with a neat diving stop to his left, covering himself with dirt in the process, throwing out the Mariners third baseman from his knees. Nothing better than not only winning the game, Matt thought, but ending it with the dirtiest uniform on the field.
It just didn’t feel quite as good as it normally would have, because of what had happened all the way back in the first inning with Ben’s dad.
Matt’s mom addressed the team almost as soon as the game was over. It was right after she’d thanked the home plate umpire for the way he’d handled the situation.
Some of the Astros players sat on their bench. Some stood behind it. Some sat on the grass in front of it. Matt’s mom walked up and down in front of them, still keeping her voice down. This wasn’t for the benefit of the parents. This was for the Astros.
“I’m truly sorry about what happened with Ben,” she said. “But I am not going to apologize for my decision to pull him from the game. I’ll say it again: He knows Sarge’s rules, you guys know them, I know them. Your parents all know them. Respecting his rules is another way of respecting the game.”
Matt gave a quick look around. She had their attention, the way she always had Matt’s when something important was being discussed.
“And I can promise you that what I told Ben’s dad is true,” she said. “If it had been Matt who’d done it, he would have been coming out of the game too.”
She stopped now, clasped her hands together, put them under her chin. That usually meant she was wrapping things up.
She smiled.
“Sooooooo,” she said, “there was a lot going on tonight. But what I want you guys to remember is what happened on the field, not off it. Just about everybody on our team did something to help us win tonight.” She pulled her hands apart and clapped them loudly in front of her. “And the best part is, I didn’t do anything to mess you up!”
José was seated next to Matt on the bench. He raised his hand.
“Well,” he said, “you did send me home on that ball that Kyle hit in the sixth and I got thrown out.”
“Zip it, José!” she said.
They all laughed.
If you added it all up, Matt thought, it had been a pretty good night for the team.
Just not everybody on it.
• • •
When they got home Matt asked his mom if she thought he should text Ben or call him to see how he was doing.
“I’d give him some room, just for tonight,” she said. “I’m sure he’s embarrassed. Give him a chance to put a little distance between himself and what happened.”
“He and his dad both have a lot going on,” Matt said.
“I may have mentioned this once or twice in your life,” she said. “But being a parent isn’t for the faint of heart.”
“Mr. Roberson was there the night Sarge told everybody what he expected from us this season,” Matt said. “So why did he act that way with you?”
“I don’t think he cared about any of that in the moment,” she said. “He thought he was looking out for his kid, but he just couldn’t get out of his own way.”
“You’re being pretty nice about it,” Matt said.
They were at the kitchen table eating ice cream.
“This may sound silly,” she said, “but I pride myself on being a nice person. And you can’t pick your spots with that. You know what I always tell you, champ. You’re supposed to do the right thing, whether everybody is watching or nobody is watching.”
“But you didn’t bac
k down,” Matt said.
She winked at him. “No, I did not.”
“Mr. Roberson found out how tough you are,” he said to her.
She stood up. They’d both cleaned their bowls. She picked them both up.
“Wasn’t doing that for him,” she said. “I was doing that for me.”
She went up to her room to watch another TV show with English accents. Ben went to his to watch baseball on his laptop. The Astros were playing the Yankees at Yankee Stadium. Almost as soon as he had the game on his screen, Aaron Judge hit a ball to right field that the announcers thought might be a home run. But Judge, Matt noticed, took nothing for granted. He ran hard out of the box, and ended up with a stand-up double.
When he got to second base, he was standing next to José Altuve.
The television camera did a close-up on the two of them, and Matt thought Judge looked even more than a foot taller than Altuve. Two of the best players in baseball. Two guys who had finished first and second that time in the MVP voting. And one of them looked like a giant and one of them looked like he was twelve years old.
Judge leaned down and said something to Altuve. Altuve smiled and patted Judge on the back with his glove. He said something back. Judge smiled. They were just speaking baseball with each other. They both wanted to win the game, obviously. But in that moment, they both looked as happy to be playing as if they were both Little Leaguers.
Matt wished things had been like that tonight for the biggest guy on his team.
After the third out for the Yankees, he turned the volume on his laptop down all the way, so he could no longer hear the announcers. He was going to quietly do some play-by-play. Matt knew he didn’t really have to keep his voice down. His mom knew by now that if she heard him talking he wasn’t talking to himself, just to baseball.
Altuve was leading off the top of the third for the Astros.
But alone in his room, his favorite player in the world digging in at home plate, Matt was suddenly stuck. It never happened when he was alone like this with a game. It was happening now.
He opened his mouth, all right. But nothing came out.
Altuve put a charge into one, and sent a home run high over the left field wall.
Matt opened his mouth again.
Nothing.
He finally closed his laptop, got up, washed up and brushed his teeth, shut off his bedroom light, and got under the covers, even though it was way earlier than his usual bedtime, even in the summer.
But all he could see after he closed his eyes was Ben standing there while his dad made that scene, and then following his dad to the parking lot.
Throughout the whole thing, all Ben had said was one word:
“Dad.”
It was almost as if Ben were the one at the front of the line at the ice cream truck, with no place to go.
No place to hide.
Matt had always thought of baseball as safe place. Not for Ben. Not tonight.
THIRTY
He waited until the next morning to send Ben a text, asking him if he wanted to hang out again, not mentioning everything that had happened at the game.
No reply.
“Give him some room,” his mom had said. “Don’t crowd him.” Matt knew that if he sent another text or called—or even just rode over to Ben’s house on his bike—that would be crowding him big-time.
José was already at Matt’s house by the time Matt had texted Ben. José’s parents had gone into the city and didn’t want to leave him alone. So he was going to spend the day with Matt. Matt’s mom had told José’s parents not to rush back, she was inviting him to dinner too.
“You can’t just stare at your phone all day,” José said to Matt. “Ben’s probably doing fine.”
“The other times I’ve texted him, he hit me back pretty quickly,” Matt said.
“Maybe,” José said, “he just doesn’t feel like talking.” He tilted his head at Matt, and grinned. “Dude, I know you can relate to that.”
“All of a sudden,” Matt said, “I feel like I spend more time talking—or talking about talking—than I do playing baseball!”
“Guy just needs his space,” José said.
“You sound like my mom,” Matt said.
“It’s like she always says,” José said. “Can she coach or what?”
They talked about riding their bikes into town and seeing an afternoon showing of the new Avengers movie, but then decided it was way too nice out for that. But then they decided to do what they both knew they’d wanted to do all along:
Go over to Healey, just the two of them, and play baseball.
“We won’t have my mom to pitch to us today,” Matt said.
“So I’ll pitch to you if we want to hit and you can pitch to me,” José said.
Matt’s mom was spending a few hours at the Dispatch office. When Matt texted her to tell her that he and José were heading over to the park, she did respond right away:
But I want to come out and play!
Matt answered by asking if she wanted him to send pics of them playing. This reply came more quickly than the first:
Now you’re just being mean
Healey was close enough to the house that Matt and José could have walked over. But they had bats and gloves and a bag of balls and water bottles, so it was easier to take their bikes.
When they got there they saw that they had the back field to themselves. They started out just soft-tossing, slowly moving farther away from each other until José was out in deep center field and Matt was standing at home plate. And even with that kind of distance between them, Matt barely had to move for the ball. It was because José had some arm. Sometimes in a game when José had to make a throw from the hole, Matt thought José threw the ball harder than the pitchers in the game.
“I know I’ve told you this before,” Matt yelled out to him after another throw home, “but you should totally pitch.”
“My father was a shortstop when he was a boy in Santo Domingo,” José yelled back. “So was his father. We think of shortstop as our family business.”
When they were ready to hit, they came up with a game they called line drive derby. Sarge said trying to hit home runs, even for a home run hitter like Ben, only screwed up your swing. So today Matt and José came up with a scoring system for line drives: You got three points for a line drive to left, right, or center. You got four points for any ball that made it all the way to the wall.
You only got one point if you hit a ball that cleared the wall.
Matt finally won, coming from two points down, last time up, when he hit one to right-field that one-hopped the wall.
“It was like you drained a three-pointer to win a basketball game,” José said.
“My mom always taught me to use the whole field,” Matt said.
“Seems to me she taught you a lot more than that,” José said.
“What’s the Spanish word for star?” Matt asked.
“Estrella,” José said.
“My mom,” Matt said, “is the real estrella in our house.”
They flopped down in the grass and were drinking water when they heard, “Hey, look. It’s the little dude.”
Mat turned around, but had already recognized the voice.
It belonged to Joey.
The Glenallen catcher with the big mouth.
THIRTY-ONE
Joey was halfway between first base and the right field wall, so there was some distance between him and where Matt and José sat in the grass near home plate.
But they could hear him fine.
“If we ignore him,” José said, only loud enough for Matt to hear, “do you think he’ll go away?”
“Doubtful,” Matt said.
It was getting to where he hated loud voices and loud people as much as his mom did.
Joey was with another boy about his same size, whom Matt didn’t recognize. Now the two of them were walking past the bench on the first-base side of the back field, toward home plate.
Joey had a big smile.
“Hey, little dude, remember me?” Joey said.
How could I forget?
They walked through the small opening in the gate behind the bench. Joey actually looked smaller than he did in catcher’s gear. But his voice, his attitude, were as big as ever.
There was clearly no way to ignore them, so José said, “What are you doing in town?”
“This is my cousin Sam,” Joey said, as if that was all the explanation they deserved.
Matt didn’t say anything.
“Still not talking to me?” Joey said to him.
José stood up and said to Matt, “Let’s go.” He reached down and began tossing their old baseballs into the bag. Matt stood and helped him.
He thought of one of his mom’s favorite expressions: “Do not engage.” He told himself to be as cool with Joey as his mom had been with Mr. Roberson.
By now Joey was only a few feet away from them. His cousin still hadn’t said a word, or acted as if he wanted to be a part of this, whatever this was.
“Sam and I were thinking about getting some ice cream from that truck over there,” Joey said. “But then I see two guys playing ball, and when I get closer, I realize one of them is my friend, the little dude from the Astros.”
He turned to his cousin Sam. “He’s the one I told you about, who said he got hit by a pitch even though he didn’t.”
“The ump said he did,” José said.
José was speaking for Matt. Matt was happy to let him.
“The ump’s not around now to protect him,” Joey said.
They’d finished putting the balls in the bag while Joey kept talking. Their bikes were leaning against the fence. All we have to do, Matt thought, is walk over there, get on them, ride away.
Joey grinned.
“W-w-what’s the matter, little d-d-dude?” he said. “You don’t want to talk to me? Or you c-c-can’t?”
There it was.
He knew what had happened during their game.
He knew.
Joey laughed, as if cracking himself up.
No one Matt knew made fun of his stuttering. No one made fun of him, in class or on the Astros, when he couldn’t get the words out. But now Joey was.