4. Chapter 4
The ice on my arm was melting fast, water sliding over my elbow and onto the carpet. It numbed the pain but not the panic. Coach Berrios would be picking me up any minute now, and if he caught even a whiff of an injury, he’d shut me down.
A quick beep from his car reached me before I got too deep into my head; I tossed the ice bag in the garbage can and rubbed my bicep as I walked downstairs, stopping before I got within Coach’s vision outside.
He didn’t understand what baseball meant to me, not only how little in my life I had outside the game but also what it meant to my future. Without baseball, I didn’t have one.
Coach drove a Toyota Corolla; the sun reflected off the gray paint job as I opened the passenger-side door, climbed in, and slipped my bat bag between my feet.
Coach Berrios’s dark skin contrasted with his white shirt.
Tanner had told me once never to ask him his ethnicity, that it was Puerto Rican or Mexican.
Apparently, whenever somebody asked him, Coach Berrios called them an idiot and said the opposite of what they’d guessed.
Nobody had ever gotten a direct answer out of him in his twenty-plus years of coaching.
“Thanks for driving, Coach,” I said, the smell of dirt from my bag filling the car.
“Not a problem. Zach and Joe shocked me not wanting to go,” he said, his head turned behind him as he reversed out of the driveway, ignoring the rearview camera.
“Joe had to work, and Zach... I’m not sure,” I lied, knowing fully well Zach had been less and less into baseball recently, meaning I’d been spending most of my time this summer with Gavin and Jake.
“We may have to have a talk with them,” Coach said.
His voice sounded pleasant enough but still had a hint of annoyance because he’d put in the effort to get the three of us invited to this showcase just for me to be the only one to attend.
“This is the year colleges start to look at baseball players, and this showcase is important. Blows my mind you guys can’t realize that. ”
“I do,” I said, fidgeting with the zipper of my bag. I knew it better than he did. My gut settled like wet cement with how much I knew it. At least fifty college coaches were attending the showcase today, watching us run, throw, and hit, and wondering if we’d fit into their program.
If I wanted to go to college, I had to impress a coach. I didn’t have parents who would not only help pay for school but also pay for an apartment like the Quinns did for Tanner. If baseball didn’t work out, my options were limited: army or factory work.
I looked over at Coach, remembering the first time I’d met him. He’d burned for the game the way only one other adult had—my dad. At first that scared me. Over the last year I figured out it wasn’t really about baseball; he just couldn’t stand losing at anything. That was why we gelled.
A part of me wanted to apologize to him like I had to Tanner about losing the state finals; he’d been to two now as a coach, having lost the first one by the ten-run rule.
But that seemed like a child apologizing to their dad for not having dinner ready when he got home; sure, maybe, but also weird?
Plus, he and Tanner were too similar and would never admit how much it’d pained them to lose that game, correctly blaming me.
Instead, I asked him for more details on the showcase, and the conversation centered on baseball for the next hour as we drove to a small Division II college I’d barely heard of before today.
The first hour of the event I worked as an infielder; I got ten swings at the plate (knocking one out of the park and seven to the gaps) and five ground balls, and I ran the sixty-yard dash. I put up a good showing. But so did everyone else—that was the problem.
Plus, when I’d made my throws across the diamond from short, my arm had throbbed, and I’d barely stopped it from shaking.
I’d dug my toe in the dirt, trying to induce pain somewhere else in my body so I could focus on anything other than my shoulder.
Every movement we made was watched by someone at all times—how we jogged between stations, whether we paid attention to the people in front of us, and whether we hit the ball a mile.
Showing off arm pain was an instant deal-breaker.
Next came the pitching. I didn’t want to throw—I was a better position player—but Coach had convinced me to say I was a pitcher as well. His reasoning was it could never hurt for a coach to want you for more than one position.
I chomped on a piece of gum, trying to focus on the taste of the Green Apple Big League Chew as I stood in line with the rest of the pitchers, the pulse of my shoulder bouncing throughout my body, begging me to rub it and ease the pain.
Instead, I stood in near silence, not talking to the kid behind me who had tried to start a conversation three separate times about where I lived. Sweat dripped beneath my hat as we neared the front; I wiped it off with my left forearm, unsure I could lift my right arm high enough.
Tanner would tell me to walk away. To live to fight another day.
But Tanner had a fallback plan. A family that supported him. A ticket to college, even though he wasn’t good enough to play baseball for a Division 1 school. He always said he’d make a better coach than player, anyway.
Finally, it was my turn to step onto the mound. The rubber felt the same as every other one I’d thrown on this year, the red clay of the dirt leaving marks on my cleats. The sun was bringing more heat than I thought I could muster.
On top of the maybe dozen pitchers still ready to throw behind me, there were three dozen coaches behind home plate.
They all looked robotic to me, wearing the same styled team jackets with a radar gun in one hand and a pen and notebook in the other, scribbling notes after every pitch.
Freaking clones, the lot of them, with radar guns instead of eyes.
I still had to impress them. Or, at least, one of them. That was all it’d take.
I yanked on the string of my glove with my teeth as I stepped onto the mound, the mix of dirt and leather hitting my tongue.
I signaled a fastball to the catcher, going through my windup and grunting as I let go of the pitch.
That was the first time I’d ever grunted throwing a ball, but nobody here knew that.
The ball came out of my hand quickly, and my arm stung even more before it was tossed back to me. Seven more pitches, and I was done.
The next two pitches—both fastballs—weren’t much better, but the coaches watched their radar guns instead of pitch location, which may have been the only thing saving me.
I managed to land the next three pitches (one fastball, one slider, and a changeup) in the strike zone where I wanted them, but I did not know how hard the pitches were being released.
I threw strikes, though, and a couple of coaches seemed at least mildly interested.
The last pitch of the day was always a fastball. I flicked up my glove, letting the catcher know what was coming, and released the ball as hard as I could, keeping nothing left in the tank.
This time, I didn’t just grunt; I yelled a way-too-loud “Fuck” as the ball soared toward the catcher, the wedge of metal between my shoulder and bicep wrenching as if the throw had finally ripped it loose.
Somehow, the pitch ended up a strike, but I got multiple looks from the guys behind the plate.
I threw up my glove hand and smiled at them, acting like that was a normal thing to do, and said, “Sorry!” before walking off the mound. My hand shook, my shoulder tingled, my bicep stung, my mind raced. Had I faked it well enough?
When everything had ended, I made my way over to Coach, letting him tell me I’d done well today and he wouldn’t be shocked when a couple of the schools contacted him.
I barely listened to what he said; instead, I focused on keeping the pain off my face in front of a guy who knew me well enough to never believe I’d swear while delivering a pitch.
Mercifully, we got home, and I escaped to my room after covering my bicep and shoulder with every piece of ice we had left in our freezer.
The pain started to subside, but the mental torment of knowing this would not end soon made me want to puke almost as much as the pain. I wouldn’t be allowed to be hurt until I got to college, after I’d already locked in a scholarship. There was a Plan B, but in reality, it felt more like a Plan F.
No matter how well I pretended, I knew the truth. I was breaking. And nobody could afford to know.