The Youngest Hero (12 page)

“But how about when kids play their music or talk about the movies they’ve seen?”

He nodded. “Sometimes I wish I could see what everybody else is seeing, but I know we can’t afford it.”

That hurt. How I wished I could afford whatever this child needed and wanted!

Elgin slid to the end of the booth but stopped before he stood to leave. “There’s something I want more than any of that stuff,
though.”

“What’s that?”

“A letter from Daddy.”

B
y the end of the regular season, when it came time to choose the all-star team, I had had a great year. I wasn’t the best
player or even the best hitter on my team. But my average was almost five hundred, fourth among all players and second on
the Tigers only to the leading hitter in the league.

I had played every inning of every game and had made just two errors, one on a fly ball and one on an overthrow of home from
in front of the foul pole. Though it was an error, it was the play of the game; nobody believed a kid my age could throw a
ball that far.

Elgin had moved up in the batting order to second and finally to lead off, where he had a great on-base percentage. He hardly
ever struck out, and it seemed to me that every time I turned around, Elgin was spraying a single or double into the gap.
He faced only a few left-handed pitchers, but when he did he was nine-for-twelve from the right side of the plate.

Barry Krass had shown well for his age. He wound up hitting in the eighth spot in the lineup, starting at second base, and
hitting just over .250. He did not make the all-star team.

Best of all, especially to me, there had been little trouble. Ralph had taken his son out of the program because the league
refused to force Coach Rollins to start him, and they wouldn’t put him on another team either. And no one was saying that
Elgin hit the ball so hard that their sons were in danger. He wasn’t hitting home runs left and right the way he would have
in the younger league. And he wasn’t pitching, so no one was making any noise about that.

After my great throw to the plate, even though it was an error, Coach took me behind the stands and watched me pitch.

“Your dad didn’t teach you much in the way of mechanics, did he?” he said.

“No, sir. He wasn’t a pitcher.”

“Well, you’re not either, but you could be next year. There’s a pitching instructional book at the library.”

I named it.

“Get it.”

The next time Coach Rollins watched me pitch, he said, “Difference between night and day, kid. You’re gonna pitch for me some
next year.”

“And play short some, I hope.”

“No question. For now, do your best in the all-star tournament. You should have a lot of fun and get some good experience.”

Experience was an understatement.

“What I love most about this team is the uniform,” Elgin told me.

He savored everything from stirrups to sanitary hose to colored-sleeve undershirt. He padded out in stocking feet to show
me. He looked like a major leaguer, all red and gray and white from head to toe.

“I only wish I could afford to get you new shoes,” I said.

“That’s all right. Hardly anybody else has new ones either.”

Elgin’s teammates were all city kids, most barely able to afford the registration fees. When they traveled to the suburbs,
they faced teams that had the latest equipment, bat bags, gloves, wristbands, batting gloves, glove pads, even weighted rings
for swinging a heavy bat in the on-deck circle. Even more impressive, they had warm-up jackets made of brightly colored nylon
that made them look professional. To me, Elgin and his teammates looked intimidated when the other teams ran in a line onto
the field, circling the home run fence, displaying all their fancy stuff, doing exercises, singing, and chanting. One team
chanted, echoing their leader:

“Everywhere we go… (echo) People want to know… (echo) Who we are… (echo) Where we come from… (echo) So we tell them… (echo)
Who we are… (echo)!” Then, in unison, “We are Granger! Mighty, mighty Granger!”

They also practiced a chant for when they got runners on base. They would say of the hitter, “Billy is a friend of mine, he
can stroke it down the line. Stroke-it-down-the-line, stroke-it-down-the-line!”

In the event of a rally, they’d practice, “Rip, a-rip-city, rip-a-rip-a-rip-city, come on now, rip!”

I felt self-conscious, and not in a good way. Our team didn’t look like more than a bunch of guys with pretty uniforms and
old gloves and shoes. A couple of them even had high-top black tennies, which made the Granger guys laugh. We didn’t have
any chants or routines.

Coach called us around him before infield practice.

“Listen up. Some of you guys are finished already. I can see it in your eyes. Are these kids older than you?”

“No!”

“Yes!” I called out, and everyone laughed.

“Okay,” Rollins said, “but they’re not older than the rest of us!
And you know what? All that stuff, the chants, the equipment, none of it wins ball games, does it?”

No one responded.

“Well, does it?”

The players shook their heads.

“I don’t know if you guys are scared or just jealous. You want cool stuff or you want to win?”

“We want to win!”

“Then let’s show em how a real team plays ball! Take the field!”

But we were tight, and we didn’t show much during infield practice. Granger didn’t just laugh at our shoes and gloves, they
cackled when we goofed up.

“Fortunately,” Coach said when we came back in, “we’re batting first. There’s no science to this. They throw their best kid;
we swing the bats. The team that scores the most runs still wins. There are no runs added or taken away because of how you
look.”

When I dug in left-handed against the Granger right-hander, the other coach moved his outfielders back.

“This is him!” he shouted. “This is Woodell!”

That quieted the crowd. There was a low buzz as everyone stared. I had stepped in and stared at the pitcher as he took the
sign, so I stepped out.

“Atta boy! Atta boy, El!” Coach hollered. “Good thinking! A heads-up kid!”

I wasn’t sure why Coach Rollins thought I showed such wisdom and maturity by stepping out. He said later I had put the pressure
on the pitcher and took some control.

I almost always took the first pitch of a game, because I wanted to see what the live game-situation fastball looked like.
This one was straight and hard at the waist, and it split the plate. That would be good news for my teammates. If this guy
grooved it, no matter how fast, they would do some hitting.

Because I hadn’t even hinted at a bunt, the first and third basemen backed up even with their bases. I had a spot picked out
in left center where I wanted to hit an outside pitch, and another
in right center where I wanted to hit an inside pitch. Another plate-slicing fastball I would try to send back up the middle.

The big right-hander seemed to hang on to the ball a fraction of a second too long, and the next heavy fastball came right
at my middle. I spun and dropped, and it just missed me. The whooping and laughing from the Granger bench told me it had been
thrown on purpose.

I stood and brushed myself off, looking for the signal from Coach. I was on my own. I was to get on any way I could. I dug
a deep hole for my left foot, trying to show the pitcher he hadn’t scared me. There was no hitting a pitcher like this if
you bailed out.

This time he tried to catch the outside corner with an off-speed pitch. The speed fooled me, but the location didn’t. I figured
the pitcher thought I would be shy about diving across the plate, but I expected a fastball. That’s why I was a little early
about squaring around for the bunt, and here came the fielders from the corners.

The first baseman was almost on top of me when I let the ball hit the bat and directed it between the pitcher and the second
baseman, who had darted toward first. It was perfectly placed. No one would get to it in time to even attempt a throw. But
as I raced to first, I noticed the shortstop had come over to field the ball on the first-base side of second.

He swiped at it and tossed it to the pitcher, then turned his back to me to trudge back to position. No one was covering second,
so I never slowed. I was halfway to second before the shouting started.

“Second! Second! He’s going!” The shortstop whirled and tried to get to second in time for the throw, but the pitcher tossed
it wildly. It had been only a flip, so there wasn’t enough on it to get it far into center field. There it sat, with the center
fielder coming in and the shortstop racing out as I slid in headfirst, squinting toward the outfield. As soon as my fingers
touched the bag I pulled my feet up and headed for third. It was
a long shot, probably foolish, but it would take a perfect throw to get me.

Coach wildly pointed down, so I went into another headfirst slide. The throw was a couple of feet high, and I was safe. I
saw a look in the pitcher’s eyes like the one that was in ours when we first saw the Granger team. With nobody out, we had
a fast man at third, leading off, faking, distracting, looking for a passed ball to score on. It never came, but with one
out, a grounder to second was deep enough, and we scored first.

It wasn’t much of a game after that. We broke it open with a five-run second inning that included a home run, a double, and
two errors. Granger had stopped chanting. The fancy equipment looked silly. We were just shabby-looking kids from the city,
but suddenly we were the team to beat in the tournament.

Three days later, we finished second, losing 2-1 in the championship game to the defending state titlists. I made the all-tournament
team and had two homers in four games, the last one our only run in the final game. All the way home we pestered Coach Rollins
about getting into another tournament.

“If I can get some money from the league,” Coach said, “I’d love to see what you guys could do.”

The league told Coach that we would have to pitch in several dollars apiece to get into another tournament, but not enough
of us could afford it. I could hardly believe the season was over already.