Batting Order

by Mike Lupica

  “C-c-cat got your tongue?” Joey said.

  Matt was holding the ball bag in one hand. José was holding their bats and gloves. Matt dropped the bag now, and moved a little closer to Joey than they already were.

  When he spoke, the words came right out of him. He could even feel himself smiling.

  “Want to take a swing?” he said.

  “A swing at you?” Joey said. He shook his head. “Can’t. I only pick on guys my own size.”

  He waited. So did Matt. Maybe this one time, he wanted someone to think that he was stuck.

  But he wasn’t.

  “No,” he said finally. “I mean swing a bat. I pitch to you. One at bat. Then you pitch to me. Longest ball wins.”

  Now he wanted to play Home Run Derby.

  “You’re not a pitcher,” Joey said. “Neither am I.”

  But Matt could see something in his eyes. Maybe he wasn’t so sure of himself now. So sure he could back up his big talk.

  “If I’m not a pitcher,” Matt said, “it ought to be easy for you to take me deep.” He nodded at José. “You can use my bat, or my friend’s.”

  “C’mon,” Joey’s cousin Sam said. “Let’s do this.”

  Suddenly it was Joey who had no place to go.

  “I’ll go first,” he said.

  José handed him both bats. Joey swung one, then the other. José’s, Matt knew, was a little heavier. Joey went with that one.

  “Your cousin can call balls and strikes,” Matt said. “José will catch. Three strikes and you’re out.”

  He turned and walked out to the pitcher’s mound, feeling as if he’d won something here already, because he hadn’t choked on his own words, not in front of this guy. Not even after the guy had made fun of him.

  José went into his crouch behind the plate, and called out to Matt, “You need any warm-up pitches?”

  “Nope,” Matt said.

  Sarge always said people were surprised, when Matt would put a charge into a ball, how much power he had, because of his lack of size. But only Matt’s teammates knew, because he only had to make a short throw from second base most of the time, how strong his arm was. Sometimes he could show it off when he had to make a relay throw to the plate from short right field, but not very often.

  When he had to, though, Matt could throw what the announcers called peas.

  He got his arm from his mom.

  Joey took a few fast, hard practice swings.

  “You good?” Matt said.

  “Bring it,” Joey said.

  Matt poured a fastball past him for strike one. Joey was late on the pitch and swung underneath it, trying to end the game between them, at least in his mind, with one swing of José’s bat.

  José stayed in his crouch, hardly having had to move his glove, and fired the ball back to Matt.

  Matt took a short windup and threw another high, hard fastball past Joey, the ball making a sweet popping sound in José’s glove.

  Two strikes.

  Joey stepped out. He didn’t look at Matt, just over at his cousin. “This one is mine,” he said.

  Nah, Matt thought.

  You’re mine.

  Matt gave Joey time to step back in, take his stance. He didn’t want him complaining that Matt had quick-pitched him, that he wasn’t ready.

  Matt took some air in, let it out. It was an exercise to relax himself that Ms. Francis had taught him. Count to four as you take the breath in, hold it for four, let it out the same way.

  Then he threw the next pitch as hard as he’d ever thrown a baseball in his life, right down the middle. But it didn’t matter. Joey had no chance. He took his biggest cut yet. Missed.

  Strike three.

  Matt didn’t say anything. Neither did Joey. Nothing to say. Joey might act like a jerk. But he was a player, too, and knew he’d just gotten beaten, badly.

  Matt walked to the plate. Joey went to the pitcher’s mound. Matt handed him his glove and the ball and went to get his own bat. José stayed behind the plate. José asked if Joey wanted any warm-up pitches.

  “Don’t need any,” he said.

  Matt remembered from the Glenallen game that Joey had a pretty good arm himself. There had been a pitch that briefly got away from him and Denzel, on first base, had taken off for second. Because of Denzel’s speed, Joey shouldn’t have had a chance to throw him out, but nearly did.

  Matt nodded at Joey to let him know he was ready. Joey went into a short windup of his own and came with his own high, hard heat.

  And Matt hammered the ball.

  To dead center.

  No sound in José’s glove this time. Just the sound of the ball on the sweet part of Matt’s bat. If this had been a real game, Matt would have been running hard out of the box. But this was a different kind of game. All he had to do was watch the flight of the ball, same as Joey was after he’d turned to watch. But he was a player. He was a catcher. He knew that sound.

  All four of them watched as the ball disappeared over the center field fence.

  Matt turned to José and jerked his head toward the bikes. José nodded. He was the one who walked out to the mound to collect Matt’s glove. Matt already had the ball bag over his shoulder.

  It was one ball lighter than when they’d shown up.

  Joey was still standing on the mound.

  “Aren’t you going to say anything?” he called out to them.

  Matt didn’t turn back. He just shook his head. José had the bat bag over his shoulder, with their gloves inside. Matt stuck the ball bag into the basket on the front of his bike. The two of them rode away. They didn’t hear another word from Joey.

  Maybe the cat got his tongue.

  THIRTY-TWO

  The Astros won their next game, and the one after that. Then the one after that. Suddenly they were 11–1 in their fourteen-game regular season. The postseason tournament to decide the league champion was simple enough after that: The top four teams made it. The top seed played the fourth seed in the semis, the second seed played the third. Then the championship game.

  By now the Astros had won their rematch with the Cubs, the only team to have beaten them. They beat the Glenallen Giants again, with hardly any chirp out of Joey. He called Matt “little dude” on Matt’s first trip to the plate in that one, but his heart didn’t seem to be in it.

  Everything that needed to be said between them had already been said. At least Matt hoped so. He’d always wanted to let his play do the talking, and not just with a guy like Joey.

  Ben Roberson had never mentioned what had happened that night with his dad, not one time. Not in practice, not when the Astros were winning their next several games. It was as if it had never happened, even though they all knew it had. Ms. Francis liked to talk about bells that couldn’t be unrung. But it seemed Ben sure was trying to unring a big one.

  But what he wasn’t trying to do, as far as Matt could tell, was be anything more than Matt’s teammate.

  They were back to being teammates, not friends.

  Ben hadn’t stopped talking to Matt. If you didn’t know, you wouldn’t have thought things changed between them. But they had. Ben never asked if Matt wanted to hang out. As a result, Matt didn’t ask Ben to hang out. Ben was still trying to hit baseballs over the wall. But he had built a different kind of wall around himself. At least that was the way Matt looked at it.

  Ben’s dad had managed to turn down the volume at Astros games. He didn’t talk to Matt’s mom. He didn’t talk to Sarge. Once he arrived at Healey Park, or at some road field, he really didn’t talk to anybody except Ben, whom he kept telling to give the ball a ride, just not quite as loudly as before.

  This deep into the season, things were pretty much the way they had been at the start: Matt and Ben weren’t close. Ben was still trying to hit big flies, every time up, still striking out a lot, still willing to trade all those strikeouts for the occasional home run. But then, an awful lot of guys were willing to make that trade in the big leagues, Matt knew
. It was why there were both record numbers of strikeouts and home runs at the exact same time.

  But the team was winning. Matt didn’t want that to change, even if he’d given up on Ben Roberson ever changing.

  There were still times Matt would stutter at a game, often when he least expected it. It had happened in their most recent one, on the road, against the Roland Orioles, in the sixth inning of a game the Astros were winning 3–2. The last two runs that night had come as a result of a line-drive, two-run homer from Matt over the left field fence.

  But the Orioles had a runner on first, the potential tying run, in the bottom of the sixth with Pat McQuade trying to close out another win for them. Matt called time and headed for the mound. José was sick tonight and so Kyle was playing shortstop, not his natural position.

  Matt thought if there was a comebacker to Pat, the simplest was for him to take the throw at second, even though there was a left-handed hitter up and usually the shortstop covered second when there was a left-handed hitter.

  And even though Matt wasn’t going to say this to Pat, he thought his arm would give them the best chance at a double play, because he knew the hitter, the Orioles catcher, wasn’t much of a runner.

  It wasn’t a big thing. But in a one-run game, Matt just wasn’t taking any chances. He wanted everybody on the same page. Sarge always told them to be thinking one move ahead, instead of one behind.

  But when Matt got to the mound, he locked up.

  All he wanted to say was this:

  “Ball back to you, I got the throw.”

  Just that.

  Simple, right?

  Not so much, not right now.

  “B-b-b . . .”

  That was all he had. He felt as if his lips had suddenly been glued together.

  Now? he thought.

  Now?

  He could feel his face getting red. But he couldn’t just walk away without saying anything. He tried to breathe through his nose, another exercise Ms. Francis had taught him.

  Nothing.

  Pat McQuade didn’t say anything either, respecting Matt’s wishes about guys not finishing his sentences. But this was one of those times when Matt wanted to tell Pat there were exceptions to every rule.

  “B-b-b . . .”

  He could see the ump coming out from behind home plate, wanting to break up the meeting, even if it hadn’t been any kind of meeting at all. Matt looked over to Ben at first base, hoping Ben could see the helplessness in his eyes. But Ben just turned and walked back to the bag and stood next to the Orioles runner. Maybe he knew what was happening, maybe not. If he did, he wasn’t doing anything about it.

  “Hey, guys,” the ump said now, “we about done here?”

  Matt nodded.

  Finally, finally, he said to Pat, “Throw to me on a ball back to you.”

  “Okay,” Pat said. Then, “You okay?”

  “Now I am,” Matt said.

  He ran back to second, breathing way too hard, as if he’d just run around all the bases. And then didn’t have to worry about a ball being hit back to Pat, or to anybody else, because Pat struck out the next two Orioles batters to end the game.

  When Matt got to the mound to congratulate him, he was able to speak properly, and smile.

  “Thanks for pitching me out of a jam,” Matt said.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Matt and Ms. Francis were in her office the afternoon after his brief melt at the end of the Astros–Orioles game.

  “What were you feeling in that moment?” she said.

  “Dumb as a rock,” Matt said.

  “Now, you know better than that,” she said, and smiled at him. “The only thing that’s ever dumb is thinking of yourself as dumb. This isn’t dumb. This is you. This happens to you. We just need to be as smart as we can understanding it.”

  “Okay, I didn’t feel dumb,” he said. “I felt frustrated. And angry. It’s like when I was walking over to talk to Pat I got tackled from behind.” He felt himself biting on his lower lip. “And you know who tackled me? Me.”

  Matt told her about Pat waiting for him to get the words out, thinking that’s what he was supposed to do. He told her about looking over at Ben, and Ben turning away.

  “You think he knew you were stuck?” she said.

  “No clue,” Matt said. “If he did, maybe he thought he was just following my rules, too.”

  “Did you ask him about it afterward?”

  Matt shook his head.

  “Well,” she said, “let’s look for some positives. As painful as the moment was, you managed to power through.”

  “Barely,” Matt said. “Maybe I should carry a pen and paper in my back pocket, so I can write a note next time.”

  She was still smiling. She was the one who always seemed to power through.

  “Come on,” she said. “You know we don’t talk nearly as much about melts, as you call them, as we used to.”

  “I guess.”

  “You know.”

  He looked over at the wall to his right, at the poster Ms. Francis loved and so did Matt, of the Astros running on the field to celebrate after they had taken Game Seven from the Dodgers and won their first World Series. The last ball that night, he always told himself, had been hit to José Altuve, smallest guy on the field. The MVP of that World Series, he reminded himself constantly, was George Springer, who accepted the MVP trophy without stuttering one time.

  “I don’t want to be like this!” he said, the words coming out of him hot, and embarrassingly loud, followed quickly by, “I-I . . . I’m sorry.”

  Sometimes it was like that for him. A quick stop and start.

  “You can yell your head off if it makes you feel better,” Ms. Francis said. “It just won’t change who you are. A great kid. A great baseball player. A great friend, when people give you half a chance. That’s you. That’s Matt.”

  She always had a glass of water for him. He drank some now.

  “Getting back to last night,” he said, “I think that maybe some of it had to do with being pressed for time. You go to the mound, you know you don’t just get to stay there and chat for as long as you feel like it.”

  She grinned. “Maybe you should start the conversation on your way to the mound next time.”

  “Great,” he said. “When I can talk, people will think I’m talking to myself.”

  “But talking!”

  “Funny,” Matt said.

  “I have my moments,” she said. Then she said, “If Ben had come over to the mound, what would you have said to him at that moment?”

  “Help,” Matt said in a quiet voice.

  “Everybody needs some from time to time,” she said.

  “What, you’re telling me I should still be trying to help out Ben?” Matt said. “He never asks.”

  “Not everybody does,” she said.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  With one game left in the regular season, the Astros were 12–1. So much had happened across those thirteen games, on and off the field, not all of it good for Matt, not all of it good for Ben Roberson. Even their parents had become a big part of the story of the season, in a good way with Matt’s mom, not so good with Ben’s dad.

  But Matt’s mom had always said that parents were never supposed to be a big part of the story in Little League.

  For as long as he could remember, her message about that had never changed:

  “The games aren’t about us. They’re about you.”

  Even after Matt’s latest session with Ms. Francis, he hadn’t done anything to reach out to Ben. At their game the next night, the one that got them to 12–1, they had only talked about the game, and not very much about that. But Ben had hit a long home run in the sixth inning, in a game the Astros were already winning 7–2.

  “That’s the swing we’re looking for,” Ben’s dad said when Ben was rounding first base, the ball already over the fence, him into his home run trot.

  Matt knew what Mr. Roberson was saying, and knew that his mo
m knew, as well. This was the swing he’d taught his son, not the one Matt’s mom had tried to teach him. What Matt really heard from Mr. Roberson was this:

  Do it my way, not hers.

  It didn’t matter to Mr. Roberson that Ben had struck out all his other times up tonight against the Newbury Royals. Or that he’d left runners on base every time he did strike out. Or that when he finally did hit one out, it was a solo home run in what was already a blowout game. That didn’t seem to matter to anybody in the Astros family after the game was over.

  They just wanted to talk about how far Ben’s ball had gone.

  Matt was happy for him. He was starting to look at Ben the way Ben looked at his dad: He wanted baseball to make him happy. Hitting home runs was obviously a huge part of that. Maybe the only part.

  As Ben crossed home plate, Matt decided he was going to ride his bike over to Ben’s house and see, once and for all, if the two of them could figure things out, no matter which way Ben wanted to swing at baseballs.

  Once and for all, he wanted to find out if they could be friends.

  • • •

  Matt knew that Ben lived on Lenox Avenue, on the other side of Healey Park from where Matt and his mom lived, much closer to downtown South Shore.

  It was a longer bike ride than the one to Healey, but not crazy long. When Matt told his mom what his plan was, she said, “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  “Wait a second,” Matt said. “Aren’t you the one who’s always telling me that guys don’t share their feelings and stuff?”

  “That would be me,” she said. “But I think that the real reason Ben has pulled back from you, and maybe everybody, is because of his dad. And if that’s the case, and no matter how good your intentions are, I think you might be talking to the ocean here.”

  “I just want him to know I have his back off the field, too,” Matt said.

  “Even though you’re not always sure that he has yours?”

  Matt shrugged and put his hands out to the side, palms up.

  “I don’t know, Mom,” he said. “Maybe we’ve just got as different ideas about what it means to be a friend as we do about hitting a baseball.”