The Big Field

by Mike Lupica

  “Do you think I’m thick or something?” Cody said, then quickly added, “Wait, don’t answer that.”

  Somehow Cody the free swinger worked the count to 3-2. He stepped out for a moment, turned around, caught Hutch’s eye, grinned. Then he got back into the box and maybe for the first time in his entire life laid off one of those in-your-eyes fastballs he loved more than chocolate ice cream, and the Pirates’ big righty issued his first walk since he’d come into the game.

  “Yes!” Hutch said.

  Alex Reyes up next, top of the order. He tried to bunt for a base hit and nearly beat it out, the third baseman’s throw getting him by a step. Cody moved to second on the play. Not good enough, Hutch thought. Somebody needs to smack one off this kid. He’d had things pretty much his way for four innings now.

  If somebody didn’t hit a ball hard, and soon, they were going to lose.

  Brett was up now. He grounded one that somehow was a foot to the left of the third baseman’s glove and a foot to the right of the shortstop’s glove, and made it into short left. It looked like Cody might have a chance to score, but the third-base coach wisely held him up at third.

  First and third, still one out.

  Darryl at the plate, batting third tonight with Hutch not in the lineup.

  Only problem? Darryl had done nothing against this pitcher his first two times up against him, acting as impatient as everybody else, popping out on first pitch, high fastballs both times. It had driven Hutch crazy from the bench.

  It was why he’d practically begged Cody to go up there looking for a walk.

  But D-Will wasn’t going to be looking for a walk here—he was going to be swinging away, looking to be a hero.

  He and Hutch hadn’t said a word to each other since they’d talked before infield, somehow managing to avoid each other in the bench area all night long. But when the Punta Gorda coach called time-out and jogged out to the mound, probably to tell his pitcher to be careful with Darryl whether he’d popped him up twice or not, Hutch got off the bench and walked toward the on-deck circle.

  When he was halfway there, Darryl said to him, “Not now.”

  Hutch remembered Tim McCarver talking one time on TV about how when he had been catching for the real Cardinals, Bob Gibson would try to glare him away from the mound when McCarver would want to talk to him, but how if McCarver had something important to say, he’d suck it up and keep going.

  Hutch kept going.

  “Seriously? This is not the time to mess with me,” Darryl said.

  “I’m not messing with you,” Hutch said. “I’m trying to help you.”

  “Then go sit your butt down. I told you before: Go captain somebody else.”

  Hutch stood his ground, kept his voice low, and said, “Just listen to me for one minute. This guy’s sequence is exactly the same when one of our guys works the count: high fastball, sinking fastball, change, high fastball again. Every single time. Nobody expects the change because they’re fixed on catching up with his high heat.”

  The Punta Gorda manager was jogging back to the bench.

  Darryl said, “And this matters to me because…?”

  “Because the change just sits there, that’s why. He only throws it to set up the next fastball, make it look like it’s coming in about a thousand miles an hour.”

  Darryl wasn’t saying anything now.

  Or maybe he was actually listening to what Hutch was trying to tell him.

  Hutch leaned forward, whispering now. “The change is your mattress ball, dude.”

  This time Darryl took the first pitch.

  For strike one.

  The second fastball was the sinking one, the kind of pitch that always looks like a fat one until it dives toward the catcher’s mitt, or the dirt, like a seagull looking for food. Most of the time the big righty had thrown it in the dirt.

  This time there was hardly any late break.

  Darryl took it. Strike two.

  0–2.

  He stepped out of the box, messed with his batting gloves for a second, turned and tried to stare a hole right through Hutch.

  Hutch didn’t move a muscle.

  Please, he thought to himself.

  Please don’t change your sequence now.

  The Pirates pitcher went into his stretch, checked Cody at third, looked over his shoulder at Brett taking a short lead off first.

  Then he threw his changeup.

  Threw his do-nothing changeup and watched Darryl Williams put that effortless swing of his on it, heard the same sound everybody else heard, the sound of the fat part of the bat on a ball that was just about the sweetest sound in this world.

  He knew and Darryl knew and everybody in the park knew.

  This time when Darryl stopped to watch a few feet out of the batter’s box, he had a home run to look at.

  To dead center.

  No-doubter all the way.

  Cardinals 5, Pirates 3.

  It ended that way because Pedro Mota struck out the side in the ninth.

  When the Pirates’ leadoff man swung through strike three for the final out of the game, Hutch led the charge toward the pitcher’s mound, trying to get there first, even before Brett made it there from behind the plate.

  But Darryl cut him off.

  For a second they just stood there in the middle of the infield, third-base side of the mound, like it was one more staredown between them, neither one of them saying anything.

  Until Darryl said, “Good call.”

  “Better swing,” Hutch said.

  “Doesn’t change things between us,” Darryl said. “Just so’s you know.”

  “Didn’t expect it to,” Hutch said.

  19

  WHEN HUTCH WOKE UP THE NEXT MORNING, IT FELT LIKE THE first day of summer all over again.

  He wanted to play some ball, even though Mr. Cullen had given everybody the day off.

  Just to be a good guy and a good friend, he waited until a few minutes before eleven before riding his bike over to Cody’s. He was pretty sure Mrs. Hester was gone, but Hutch rang the doorbell just in case she was still there, knowing that wouldn’t wake Cody, since Mrs. Hester liked to say doorbells weren’t made to wake the dead.

  When nobody answered, he walked around to the kitchen door, the one on the carport side of the house, knowing from experience it was always open if somebody was in the house, even if the somebody was still asleep.

  Then he walked back to Cody’s room, loudly opened the shades and yelled, “Rise and shine!”

  From under his pillows Cody said in a muffled voice, “Aw, man, this is wrong.”

  “C’mon, dude, you can’t sleep all day,” Hutch said.

  “But that was my plan,” Cody said, wriggling himself deeper under his covers. “What time is it, anyway?”

  “Eleven.”

  “So wrong,” Cody said.

  “We got to get out and play some ball.”

  “Not on our day off,” Cody said.

  He poked his head out from under the pillows and covers now, squinting.

  “We’re in the finals,” Hutch said. “We got to get after it.”

  “Friday,” Cody said. “Friday we’re in the finals. Today is Monday. Please let me go back to sleep. I’ll pay you.”

  “C’mon,” Hutch said, pulling him up into a sitting position. “I won’t even make you go all the way to Fallon Park, we’ll just go over to the Community Center and play on the football field.”

  Fallon Park was about twenty blocks away. There were two baseball fields there, one for Little League and one for Babe Ruth, and a fenced-in batting cage with a ball machine that the coaches had keys for during the season. The fields weren’t the best around, and there was always talk about tearing them up and building new ones if the city would ever come up with the money. But they were baseball fields. And because Cody’s dad had once coached them in Little League, he still had a key to the batting cage.

  “Nice of you,” Cody said.

&nb
sp; “Soooo nice,” Hutch said. “I’m even going to buy you breakfast.”

  Cody got out of bed, as a form of surrender, mumbling, “I think I liked you better when you were suspended.”

  They stopped at the Kwik Stop, two blocks down from the corner of Gateway and Seacrest, for what Cody called “the real breakfast of champions,” which for him meant powdered doughnuts and purple Gatorade. Then they rode their bikes the rest of the way to the Community Center, went around to the back, past the outdoor basketball courts that were always patrolled, day or night. It was a good place for kids of all ages, they knew, but the policemen you usually saw there were a reminder to Hutch and Cody that their Palm Beach County wasn’t the one with mansions on the beach.

  Past the basketball courts and seldom-used tennis courts was the football field used by the Boynton Beach Bulldogs, who played in the South Florida Youth Football League. There was a sign before you got to the field that read SUPER BOWL CHAMPIONS, because a few years ago the Bulldogs had won their big tournament, against the best teams in the country, up in Jacksonville.

  “Next week, I’m putting a sign like that on our front lawn after we beat Orlando,” Cody said.

  “We’re only playing for the state championship, Codes,” Hutch said.

  “From the best state in the country at producing athletes,” Cody said.

  “I thought that was California.”

  “Florida,” Cody said, “and I have the stats to prove it.”

  “Where?”

  “Right here,” Cody said, pointing to his head.

  They soft-tossed at first, then kept backing up, the way Hutch would see guys doing at Marlins games when he was lucky enough to go to Marlins games, until they were throwing balls as far as they could. In this case, that meant from one twenty-yard line to another, even though Hutch knew he could have gone deeper than that if he’d wanted to.

  There was no infield and no outfield and no bases. But they had green grass under their feet and a blue sky over their heads. The temperature was not only down in the seventies today, it felt as if somebody had thrown a switch and turned off the humidity.

  The only thing that would have made the day better was having Game 1 be tonight. When they started throwing, even the smack of the ball hitting the pocket of his glove sounded better than ever.

  “I think your arm got stronger in the last two days,” Cody yelled.

  Hutch yelled back, “Second basemen don’t need an arm. I learned that watching you.”

  He uncorked his biggest throw yet, watched it sail over Cody’s head.

  “Sorry!” he yelled.

  “No, you’re not.”

  “You’re right.”

  They had each brought a bat and hit fly balls to each other now, trying to outdo each other, even having a contest to see which one of them could be first to hit one through the goalposts.

  Hutch won.

  Cody said, “You hit it, you shag it.”

  Hutch said that was fine with him, he was just going to pretend he was running out a game-winning home run.

  This was one of those days, he thought, when he could play baseball all the way until dinnertime.

  It was when he reached down for the ball that he noticed the black town car in the distance, parked on North Seacrest.

  Hutch didn’t know if his dad was caddying today or driving, mostly because he hadn’t done much talking to, or about, his dad the last couple of days.

  Was that his dad’s car?

  Hutch knew there were always a couple of times a week when he drove mornings and then tried to caddy in the afternoon.

  Was this one of them?

  Another thing he didn’t know about his dad.

  But if it was his dad in that car, what was he doing here?

  Why would he be watching him and Cody goofing around on a football field?

  Hutch started walking toward the car, thinking if he got a little closer he might be able to see who was behind the wheel. Knowing he was probably being crazy, that there were probably more car-service cars like the one his dad drove around in than he could even imagine.

  As he did, the car eased out behind a passing truck and pulled away.

  His dad wasn’t around for dinner that night. Hutch asked his mom if he’d been driving today and she said she actually wasn’t sure, he’d been gone when she woke up.

  “Why do you want to know?” Connie Hutchinson asked.

  “Just wondering.”

  His mom said, “You never ask about your dad’s work. Why tonight?”

  Hutch pushed some food around on his plate. “I was just wondering why he wasn’t here, is all.”

  “Are things any better between you two?”

  “Same,” Hutch said, not looking up.

  “Well, that’s not good,” she said.

  Hutch looked up at her now. “The other night Dad told me he’d been lying about his shoulder injury, that when he got to the minors he just wasn’t good enough.”

  His mom had started to pick up her water glass. Now she put it down. “He told you that?”

  Hutch nodded.

  “That must have been very hard,” she said.

  “Me hearing that from Dad, you mean?”

  “No,” his mom said. “Him saying it.”

  “He could have told me before,” Hutch said. “I don’t know why he had to treat it like some kind of big family secret.”

  She said, “Maybe because only he knows what it was like going from what he’d been here to what he turned out to be there.” She looked off and said, “And then ending up back here.”

  Usually Hutch helped her clear the table. Tonight she said she could handle it alone. So Hutch went upstairs to listen to the Marlins game, which is where he was when he heard the front door open and close.

  He waited a whole half hour before he came down the stairs, hearing the television announcers broadcasting the same game against the Braves that Hutch had been listening to on the radio.

  His dad was on the couch. If he had been driving earlier, he’d already changed out of his white shirt and tie and into a blue Florida Gators T-shirt and some khaki shorts.

  The beer can was on the table next to him.

  Hutch had planned to ask him whether he’d been at the Community Center, but somehow the sight of that beer, the force field being in place, made him change his mind.

  Or lose his nerve.

  And what did it matter, anyway?

  His dad noticed him and said, “Hey.”

  “Hey.”

  It was about the normal length of the conversations they’d been having since Emerald Dunes.

  Hutch stood there a little longer, knowing this night was going to be like all the rest, that he wasn’t going to be invited to join him. Knowing at the same time he was never going to ask to join his dad, that if his dad wanted company he could just say so.

  “’Night,” Hutch finally said.

  “’Night,” his dad said, and took a sip of beer.

  Hutch went back up the stairs, hearing the Marlins’ announcers from his radio now, Dave Van Horne’s voice rising as he described Hanley Ramírez trying to beat a throw home. Same game, same house, different broadcasts. Maybe it figured.

  It was weird, Hutch thought to himself.

  Two other shortstops in his life.

  His dad was one, Darryl was the other.

  And right before the biggest games of his life, he was barely on speaking terms with either one of them.

  20

  THE NIGHT BEFORE GAME 1, THEY GOT TO PRACTICE UNDER THE lights at Roger Dean Stadium.

  Hutch and Cody had both been there before to watch spring training games, and once in a while would get a chance to watch the Jupiter Hammerheads minor league team play after spring training ended. So they knew their way around, basically. Most of the time when they did get to come watch games, especially ones involving the real Cardinals or the Marlins, their favorite spot was this grassy area in foul territory down the righ
t-field line known as The Berm.

  It was underneath a picnic area known as the Party Deck at Roger Dean, and tickets to watch from there cost only ten dollars during spring training. When they did get a chance to go, they’d always ask Mr. Hester to get them there in time for batting practice—since they always went with Cody’s dad, never with Hutch’s—so they could go straight out to The Berm and compete with other kids for long foul balls.

  And every time they were out there, Hutch and Cody would tell each other how they were going to play on that field someday, way before they ever knew you could do that in American Legion ball when you were only fourteen.

  Always when Hutch had imagined himself out here, playing for the real Cardinals or Marlins or even the Yankees, he imagined himself at shortstop. That’s what he was, after all. A shortstop.

  Tonight, and tomorrow night, and all weekend, he would be a second baseman. Hutch knew as soon as he stepped out of the dugout on the first-base side, got on the grass and stared out at the Budweiser scoreboard and the huge Bank of America video board in left center, that playing second base here would do just fine for now.

  There was still plenty of daylight left when they took the field after Orlando finished their practice. But the lights were on anyway, just so players on both teams could get used to them, according to Mr. Cullen. Good thing, Hutch thought when he looked around. These lights weren’t the ones they’d played under at Santaluces, as good as those were for town fields.

  These were spotlight-bright. They were big-time. And somehow, playing on this field under the lights made everything feel even more big-time.

  But then Hutch and Cody had been feeling pretty big about themselves from the moment they got out of the bus in front of the main entrance and walked across the little patch of green grass cut into the shape of a diamond, walked across that and between the two tall palm trees that felt like goalposts and underneath the huge white lettering that read ROGER DEAN STADIUM.

  They had gone through their normal pregame drills, not changing their routine, and were finishing with batting practice now. Mr. Cullen had picked the order randomly tonight, Darryl going first and Hutch scheduled to go last. Cody had just hit and was standing on second base now, making his way around the bases every time Alex Reyes put a ball in play.