Alive on Opening Day (11 page)

This last bit was directed
at Griffey again, and Kluszewski disappeared down the
steps.

Griffey stared at Dan for
a moment, then bobbed his head.

“
Yeah, well, thanks for
the advice, kid,” he said.

Then he was gone,
too.

Dan and David looked at
each other and burst out laughing.

“
Say, Dan,” David said in
the sly voice that Dan always knew meant a razzing was in the
offing. “Maybe we should forget about you playing baseball this
summer. Looks like maybe your future is in coaching!”

The same idea had occurred
to Dan during the exchange with Griffey, but it hadn’t seemed quite
so funny in his head. If he couldn’t play for some reason, maybe
he
could
become a
coach somewhere along the line. He wasn’t ready to hang up his
spikes just yet, though.

“
Actually, Dad,” Dan said.
“I was thinking I might take you up on your offer to play for the
company team this summer. Near as I can tell, coaching is for old
farts … like you!”

The two Hodges laughed
again and hugged each other before heading out of the stadium, into
the growing evening, each man eager for more time on the road
together.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Spikes On

It didn’t take Dan long to
realize maybe David was not quite the old fart he had made him out
to be. In fact, after a couple of weeks of spring ball, it
was
Dan
who felt
like a geezer.

By the middle of April,
Dan and David had put together the HBM Blue Crew, a collection of
12 guys ranging in age from 18 to 55 and in fitness level from high
school athletics reject to “have an ambulance ready in case I have
to run to first base.”

Even though he still
thought of himself as an athlete, Dan had to admit after their
first “practice” that he was sadly out of shape. All those months
in bed, dead to the world, had left his muscles flaccid and his
heart and lungs a far cry from the racehorse blast furnaces they
had been a year earlier.

As Dan lay on the outfield
grass gasping for air and trying desperately to keep his McDonald’s
hamburger — whose idea had that been? — in his stomach, David
plopped down next to his son.

The two Hodges had decided
to stay later than the rest of their teammates and run some laps
around the diamond. For David, it was a good opportunity to spend
more time with his son and get in some exercise. For Dan, it was a
chance to see just how far out of prime condition he was, and it
was much further than he would have admitted beforehand.

“
How you doing, kiddo?”
David asked, and Dan could hear the amusement in his father’s
voice.

“
Ugh,” Dan replied,
followed by, “I suppose you think this is pretty funny,
huh?”

David shrugged. “Well, it
is sort of ironic you’re having problems keeping up with your old
man on the ball diamond. Who woulda thunk it, huh?”

Dan replied with a quiet,
“Yeah, I guess so.”

A wave of
self-consciousness washed over David, and he felt guilty for
teasing his son about the physical weakness brought on by his
lengthy illness. The older man blushed and tried to reassure his
boy.

“
Look,
Dan,” David said. “You know you’re just having trouble today
because you’ve been out of the game awhile, right? I mean, you were
in a bed for
nine
months
, son, and yet you still managed to
come out here and run around the field. That’s darn near a miracle
in my book.”

Dan frowned and looked at
David. “Hmmm, I guess you’re right, Dad. I never really thought
about it that way. It’s just so frustrating!”

“
I know it is, boy, but
you know what?”

“
What, Dad?”

“
You’re going to get
stronger every day, and I’ll help you do it. We’ll stay late every
night after practice to run laps and throw the ball around, and we
can get up early for extra work,” David said.

“
I’m not sure I can get up
early tomorrow, Dad,” Dan said. “Or at all, for that
matter.”

“
Well, then, the next day,
or the day after that. The point is, we’ll get through this
together and, before you know it, you’ll be running circles around
me again.”

At this, Dan propped up on
one elbow and managed a grin. “Maybe you should give me a more
challenging goal, Dad,” he said.

“
I’ll give you a
challenging goal, alright!” David replied with false
anger.

He smacked his son over
the head, gently, with the baseball glove he still wore on his left
hand. Finally, he gave Dan a sly sideways look.

“
How about joining me for
a jar of raw oysters and some cold peas?”

“
Awww, Dad!” Dan exclaimed
as he clutched his belly and rolled away from his
father.

—

On May 1, the Blue Crew
took the field for their first game of the season, against the
Coca-Cola Red Rage. Most of the Coke guys had jobs that were
physical in one way or another, so they had a definite advantage
over the HBM’ers when it came to svelte physiques and
cardiovascular conditioning.

The Blue Crew, led by
crafty David Hodges, though, felt like they had a decided edge in
the area of strategy and tactical maneuvers.

Sometimes, sheer force and
youthful exuberance can trounce any sort of plan that more seasoned
competitors might devise, and that turned out to be the case in
Coke v. HBM.

By the bottom of the
seventh inning, with the Blue Crew coming to bat for the last time,
they trailed 10-1. They had managed just a couple of hits and a
walk, and they scored their only run when the Rage left fielder
bobbled a ball Jack Rady popped into the outfield with a runner on
first.

The good news, at least
for Dan, was that he had played center field the whole game and
managed to NOT have his legs start shaking during the long innings
when the Cokesters were batting.

The Crew’s pitcher, an
accountant named Teddy Teagarden, had been hammered all afternoon
long, but he stayed in the game and had one last chance for
redemption as the first hitter in the ninth.

Teddy struck out on three
pitches.

That brought up leadoff
man Ed Hacker, who worked the count to 2-2 before popping out in
foul territory.

And THAT left Dan as the
Crew’s only hope for any kind of fireworks. He had managed a bunt
single in the fifth inning but had not seen the ball well all game.
Part of the reason for his struggles, Dan knew, was that Jamie
Gordon was on the mound.

Gordon was 20 and had
played for Rosedale in high school. He and Dan had faced off maybe
15 times before, and Dan had collected only a couple of hits that
he could remember. The problem was in Gordon’s windup, during which
he cocked his hands behind his right hip as he reached his full
coil, before springing forward to deliver the pitch.

This had the effect of
hiding the ball almost until his release point, and that gave Dan
fits in terms of trying to figure out what type of pitch was coming
his way, and how fast it was coming.

But as he stepped into the
box with two outs, the spring sun was already falling behind the
line of trees at the far side of the field. Dan’s eyes, accustomed
to the blinding light that had kissed the diamond for most of the
afternoon, focused easily on Gordon in the relative
darkness.

As the big right-hander
went through his motions, Dan never completely lost sight of the
ball, and he instantly recognized Gordon’s powerful overhand pitch
as a fastball. Dan waited as the fat white sphere spun toward him,
red seams whirring in the cooling evening air.

His stomach fluttered as
his mind flashed back to his last meaningful at-bat when a Jim
Jackson curveball ended his life for nine months. He shook his head
hard without taking his eyes off the ball and came back to the
moment.

With a powerful foot-plant
and a fierce, compact swing, Dan made contact with the pitch,
generating a report that echoed off the buildings on the school
ground. Dan trotted toward first base and watched as Gordon whipped
around to follow the trajectory of the ball, which arced high into
the air toward dead center field.

By the time Dan rounded
second base the ball was bounding beyond the outfield fence, maybe
350 feet away.

His teammates whooped and
hollered as Dan finished his home run trot, and David hugged him as
he stepped on home plate.

“
Way to go, son,” David
whispered in his ear. “I’m proud of you.”

Dan returned his father’s
hug, but waved off the praise with just a nod, and a pat on the
shoulder for Frank Buis, who was waiting on deck.

“
Go get ‘em, Frank,” Dan
said as he headed back to the dugout.

It was no big deal,
really. Just a lucky hit off a former high school
pitcher.

But Dan had to admit it
felt pretty good to get hold of one. Just to know he still
could
get hold of
one.

Yep, things were looking
up, even if Frank Buis did strike out to end the game.

—

While David kibitzed with
his co-workers and a few of the Coca-Cola guys, Dan patrolled the
field, retrieving forgotten equipment and any debris that the game
generated.

It was a habit he had
picked up as a Little Leaguer, and he considered it his duty to
leave each green baseball cathedral in at least as good shape as he
found it in.

He finished looping
through the outfield and cut back over second base, trotting toward
home. As he neared the backstop, a voice growled out from the dim
home dugout.

“
Is that all the hustle
you got, son?”

Dan stepped on home plate
and squinted into to the growing darkness. The bill of a ball cap
flashed from under the dugout roof, followed by a
blue-satin-jacket-clad belly. Dan looked from the paunch to the
attached face and broke into a wide grin.

“
Coach Croft!” he called,
running forward to greet his high school coach.

“
Dan Hodges!” Croft
bellowed.

The big man pumped Dan’s
arm and pulled him in close for a rough one-armed hug. Then he
pushed the younger man back to arm’s length and looked him up and
down.

“
Well, now,” Croft said.
“You don’t look anywhere near as bad off as your Daddy told
me!”

Just then, David joined
the other two, having finished his post-game
socializing.

“
Now, don’t listen to him,
Dan,” David said. “You know how pretty I’ve always thought you
are.”

Dan looked from David to
Croft, mouth hanging open and not sure what to make of the scene
unfolding before him.

The two older men
exchanged glances, then burst into laughter.

“
Oh, come on, Dan,” Croft
said. “Is it too early in the season for you to take a little
ribbing?”

Dan allowed himself a
timid smile and said, “Ha, ha. You guys are a riot. But really,
coach, what are you doing here?”

“
Well, your old dad here
told me that you’d be back on the diamond tonight, and I wanted to
see for myself. You looked pretty good, kid. Of course, I suppose
you have to consider the competition!”

“
Yeah, that’s true,” Dan
said.

“
Dan,
he’s
kidding
,” David said.

Dan chuckled sheepishly.
“Oh, well. I guess maybe my sense of humor
is
still warming up.”

“
That’s all right, kid,”
Croft said. “We’ve got all summer. I gotta head out now, but I’ll
see you around, OK?”

“
You betcha, Coach!” Dan
said.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Cup of Coffee

The morning after the game
against Coca-Cola, Dan woke up sore from the exertion of seven
innings, but also feeling stronger than he had since coming out of
hibernation a month earlier.

The next day, he felt
stronger still, and that trend continued throughout the first half
of May. Dan attributed his improved spirits to playing baseball
twice a week and practicing three other nights -- to getting his
groove back. But when David commented on his improving bat speed
and bulging biceps, Dan felt he really was making big strides
toward regaining his physical peak.