The Game Player (6 page)

“Well,” he said, glancing at me with a self-knowing smile, “I wanted to give you the exact figure. Here it is. Point four-seven-zero.”

Despite being prepared for something astonishing, I had to fight my impulse to scream with surprise. “It figures,” I mumbled.

“I'm hitting four-seventy in thirty-four games, one hundred and thirty-one at bats, sixty-two hits, nine walks,
twenty-six
doubles—that's impressive, I must admit—one triple, ten home runs, twenty runs scored, and twenty-two runs batted in. Also, fifteen stolen bases.” He turned to face me and looked apologetic about his outburst of self-congratulation. “It's really not that big a deal.”

“It's not?” My tone barely made it a question. I was slouched against the wall that my bed was next to and I looked at him in mock disgust. “What bullshit.”

“Seriously,” and he was in earnest now, “it's not that amazing. My runs batted in is quite low considering my hits. And I don't have many home runs. Danny's got sixteen, Bill's got nineteen, and George has
twenty
-three.”

“Yeah, but who's hitting four-seventy? Who else is hitting four hundred?”

Brian looked expressionless.

“Anybody, besides you?” I continued. “Who's closest to you in average?”

“George. He's hitting three fifty-eight.”

“So enough of this modesty.”

He propped his head on one of his hands, cupping his chin, and stared at me. “You don't understand,” he said listlessly. Brian was ready with a speech but he only allowed his eyes to communicate—I would have to demand it.

“What don't I understand?”

He didn't release the search of his gaze. “You don't understand, like the rest of them don't, that I hit for such a good average because I know that I can't hit home runs like George. There are other players who could hit for my average, but they keep trying to hit it over the fence. So they fly out. Or they strike out. Or they pop up.” He broke his pose, his body gathering the energy explaining gave him. “They all stand at the plate like pull hitters.” He put his hands around an imagined bat and imitated the hard yanking motion of someone trying to pull a pitch. “They don't lean over the plate or move into a pitch and try to hit it the other way. They're fools. They try and pull pitches that you have to go with.” He paused to emphasize this last point: “They just don't accept their faults.”

“Brian, that's the point. You do.”

“So? They act like it's some special God-given talent. It's not. I'm just willing to work hard.”

I thought, Maybe this isn't false modesty. Perhaps he really thinks it is just discipline that makes him great. “Could you teach me how to hit the way you do?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said immediately, happily. “You should even be able to hit to the opposite field better than me. I have a big strike zone. You can ham me if I move into the plate too quickly, but your body's more compact.”

So we stood in the center of the room for an hour or more, Brian showing me how to stand and step into pitches. He told me to move my hands farther up on the bat so that I would have better control. He cured my tendency to hit the ball from underneath, the way a power hitter would, and, instead, to level the bat on the ball. “You want to spray line drives all over the field,” he said, and I fell asleep that night to a vision of blurred white lines, like netting, dropping silently between frustrated fielders.

The thirty-fifth game of the year was my first as a starter. Brian's judgment to use me immediately went unquestioned by his players. He also had me bat second in the order, directly behind him in the lineup. He explained this to me while we walked to the field. “I get on my base more than half the time. If you try and hit to the opposite field, or work out a walk, the worst we should do is get me to second. So don't worry about getting a hit, just try to advance me.”

I spent the time it took to prepare playing noticing what I did
not
feel: no insecurity about my lack of height, no anxiety about my ability to hit the ball, no tension over the taunts that my team was doomed to lose. I searched for them as if they were articles of clothing I had lost, a wallet I had misplaced. The first familiar concern I had was when Brian stepped into the batter's box. I wouldn't know how to bat unless he were on base and I was scared that he might fail. But I calmed down after the first two pitches to him were balls. He stepped out of the box after each of the umpire's calls and surveyed the field with such casualness that his competence seemed beyond doubt. The third pitch was so hittable that our whole bench leaned forward with excitement. Brian swung hard and the impact brought Frank to his feet. “Wow!” he said, but that seemed like an overstatement since Brian's line drive to left was just a single. I looked at Brian while walking to the plate and felt the cool of his manner become part of myself. While the pitcher began his motion I swung the bat slowly, menacingly, feeling sure that I was armed with a purpose and knowledge he couldn't have.

There was a moment of panic as I swung and I blamed it for the fact that all I did was hit a grounder to the second baseman. I was thrown out at first but I shouldn't have felt too bad because I had fulfilled Brian's request: he stood safe at second, in scoring position.

He did score eventually and he walked up to me to say, “Good job.”

“What position do I play?” I asked, since I didn't think I should seem satisfied with my Pyrrhic victory.

“Right field,” he said, and busied himself with advice to other players. I borrowed a glove from a small pile below the bench. All of them were too small since they were left over from the players' earlier years, and I decided that I should have to buy one of my own. Being an outfielder was glamorous, I thought. I was playing the position of Babe Ruth and Roger Maris.

Nothing was hit to me, however, during the two innings that intervened between my first and second at bats. The score was tied at two-all when I came to bat in the third inning. There were men on first and third with two out. Brian had just singled, driving in a run, and he had not instructed me about this situation. With two out, I thought, there's nothing I can do except try to get a hit. The first pitch was slow and strange, curving and dropping altitude at the same time. I didn't swing and was stunned that the umpire called it a strike.

I couldn't hit that pitch if he threw it again, so I waited reluctantly and fearfully. My teammates called out encouragement with confidence. After all, I had driven in a run in just this circumstance the day before. I wanted to turn and tell them it had been an accident. Just as my nemesis began to throw I told myself to feel confident. Wait on that curve ball like Brian would.

When I realized that this was a straightforward fast ball coming at me it was too late. I assumed it was a strike and swung randomly. From the groans behind me I figured it must have been an obviously high pitch that I should have ignored.

The catcher returned the ball, my teammates still called out encouragement—though more feebly—and I watched the fielders glance at the sun with an abstracted air that told of my coming doom. There was hardly any energy in my swing at the third strike and certainly no contact.

During the mixing of teams switching sides I saw Brian wave at me to join him. “Take over the scoring. Billy will be coming in for you,” he said without emotion.

“Cause I blew it?”

“No!” The force of this word ended after it was spoken. His next remarks were said casually. “You were coming out even if you hit a home run. I told you yesterday that everybody had to get a chance to play.”

Then why wasn't I told at the start of the game that I would only play three innings? And if I hit a home run, there would be no reward? But I asked none of these questions. “Okay,” I said. “I'm sorry.”

“Don't be,” he said, leaving me with my unresolved feelings. I was grateful for the scoring job since it occupied my mind, forbidding replays of my humiliation. But the game made my task routine since inning after inning went by without a hit or a run. It was as if the failure of each batter made it less possible for his successor to achieve. Even the best hitters degenerated: swinging late, taking fat pitches, or popping up. Brian walked in the sixth inning and stole second but he died there. And in the ninth, he again walked, stole second, moved to third on a grounder, but only crossed the plate while the third out was landing in an opponent's glove. Twice Brian had given us the edge: a man in scoring position with less than two outs. He berated no one for failures and that silence was terrible. The players didn't joke or talk much while on the bench and they accepted their instructions from Brian without meeting his eyes or asking for any explanations.

As the game went into the tenth inning because of the tie, our opponents smelled blood. This was a game we had thrown away and it was natural to conclude that they had momentum. It was a kind of respect: for us, a tie was almost losing. They cheered their hitters on every pitch and yelled at our fielders as they attempted plays. After their first hitter grounded out, the second hit a fly ball toward left field. It was high enough for both the center and left fielders to reach it and I had my pencil ready to write either seven or eight. I listened with patronizing amusement to their bench screaming that the ball was going to be dropped. “Blow it! Blow it!” Danny yelled, his cheeks puffed and his face red from the effort.

The center fielder noticed that his colleague was closer to the ball and he stopped his chase. And a moment or two later, mysteriously, the left fielder suddenly halted and looked questioningly toward his fellow. “The ball!” Brian screamed from his position at first, and quickly broke toward second, where the hitter was headed. The ball landed almost directly between the two outfielders and, despite a moment of confusion during which they both tried to pick up the ball, the center fielder threw it toward third.

The batter was between bases and, after feinting a run to third, he trotted back to second, safely, while the ball bounced twice on its way to the third baseman's glove.

Danny put his arms around two of his teammates and they jumped up and down, laughing and yelling, with aggressive joy. 2B-E7, I wrote in the notebook. “You can't do everything yourself,” Danny yelled at Brian. “Jerks!” He screamed out toward our outfielders. “I love ya!”

George was their next hitter, the huge fat-faced boy whose twenty-three home runs led our league, and Brian instructed our pitcher to walk him intentionally. This brought even louder and more obscene jeers from the enemy bench. When George reached first, Brian patted him on the back and smiled. His calm was apparently genuine. He put his arms up and called out, “Okay, okay. Let's settle down. The only way they can win is if we give it to them.”

“Listen to that horseshit,” Danny said as he selected a bat and approached the plate.

Brian went to the mound and talked with our pitcher while Danny impatiently and contemptuously swung his bat and tried his footing in the batter's box. The conference was too short to arouse the ire of their bench and before I had a chance to consider the seriousness of our predicament, the pitch was on its way to the plate.

Danny swung hard and the ball raised a small cloud of dust in the infield just beyond second base. The whole scene was in motion: the center fielder charging in, the enemy from second running so vehemently that his hair was continuously blown back into a pompadour, our catcher crouching at the plate ready for the throw. Our opponent was rounding third just as the center fielder reached the ball, and I watched its flight home. For a moment it and the runner seemed destined to intersect, but then it bounced well in front of the plate while he crossed home and defeated us.

I got a notion of how unbearable the opposition would be if their winning were more frequent. “What a choke!” Danny said over and over as he ran in from second. They congratulated themselves as if this one victory wiped out our decisive advantage overall, and the temptation to argue this fact with them drove several of my teammates to answering their taunts. Adam even got into a scuffle with one of them and Brian rushed in to stop it. He then called out: “I want everybody at our bench right now! I want a meeting.”

“Oh, the crybabies have to talk about it,” Danny said.

“Come on! Move it!” Brian shoved Adam in the direction of our bench. He caught him unawares and off-balance. Adam stumbled, his face landing into the gravelly surface. The hubbub ceased instantly.

Our third baseman, a mild moon-faced boy, reached down to help him up but Adam, surprisingly, kicked him in the shins. “Leave me alone,” Adam said, and I got a glance at his tearful face, scratched and bleeding from his fall.

I have thought about what Brian did next many times. He explained it to me only an hour after its occurrence and I think that's what surprised me: he maintained this act was not passion, but just a way of calming Adam. And his desire to quiet Adam, he told me, had nothing to do with compassion—Brian wanted him out of his slump.

In any event, when Brian bent down to help Adam up and Danny said, “Yeah, let Daddy change your diapers,” Brian's quick turn and leap at Danny seemed perfectly spontaneous. It was a wholehearted diving tackle, Brian's arms hugging Danny's belly, his right shoulder driving into Danny's chest. We heard a groan and two boys standing behind Danny scattered, but one of them got a leg pinned under Danny when he hit the ground. It was pathetically comical to watch this boy pulling at his leg, his face contorting more and more with each frantic movement. He was freed when Brian sprung (and I mean sprung) to his feet and pulled Danny up by his arm. Brian yanked him up and stuck out his leg so that Danny's momentum forward became a vicious trip that sent Danny sprawling and we heard the same sickening sound of gravel crunching as when Adam fell.