Change-up

by John Feinstein

  “What happened to your cell?”

  She forced a smile. “Left it in the room. I decided I could live without it for an hour. Where did you guys go to eat?”

  Stevie paused for a second. He really hadn’t thought out what to say if Susan Carol didn’t volunteer the fact that she had been with David Doyle.

  He decided to tread softly and see where that led. “Faneuil Hall,” he said. “A place called Regina’s. Really good pizza.”

  She looked at him as if trying to learn something from the look on his face. At least, that’s what Stevie thought she was doing. “Nice,” she said.

  Stevie waited for her to say something else, but she didn’t. It was as if they were playing a game of chess, each trying to anticipate what the other’s next move might be.

  “So where did you walk?” he said after another long silence.

  “Oh, all over,” she said. “I walked through Faneuil Hall, actually. Isn’t it cool? Then I went over to City Hall, which is right across the street, and walked through the North End for a while to see some of the sights.”

  “Sights?”

  “Come on, Stevie, this is Boston. Our hotel is really close to Paul Revere’s house and the Old North Church, just for starters. Then there’s the Freedom Trail, which you can follow and see all these historic places.”

  Stevie liked the fact that she was talking to him in her “Stevie, you’re an idiot” tone. That felt normal at least.

  “‘One if by land, and two if by sea’? ‘The British are coming’? That Paul Revere?”

  “No, the other one,” she said, and laughed, making Stevie forget for a moment that she wasn’t telling him the whole truth about her afternoon. She might very well have spent the afternoon exploring the Freedom Trail. But she was leaving out a crucial part of the story.

  He decided to quit the chess game and just be honest. He took a deep breath and said, “So, did David Doyle join you on the Freedom Trail?”

  As soon as the words came out of his mouth, Stevie wished he could reach into the air and grab them back. Susan Carol looked stunned—and angry.

  “Excuse me?” she said, her tone having gone from teasing to biting in an instant.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “No, it’s not nothing,” she said.

  She was staring at him, waiting for an answer. Stevie felt stuck. If he told her what he had seen, she might blow up at him completely—which hardly seemed fair, since he wasn’t the one who had been withholding information. But she was already angry anyway, and if he didn’t plow ahead, he certainly wasn’t going to get any answers.

  “I’m sorry if you’re upset,” he said, trying to choose his words carefully. “But I saw you … with him … in Faneuil Hall, and—”

  “Were you spying on me?” she said, raising her voice, so that several people standing near them turned their heads.

  “No!” he said, whispering and shouting at once, wanting to be emphatic without drawing any more attention to the argument. “I told you, Bobby and I went over there for lunch. We were looking for a place to sit—”

  “And you saw me talking to David,” she said. “So now you’ve gone and drawn about twenty different conclusions—all of them wrong.”

  “You’re probably right,” he said, hoping against hope that she was about to give him a logical explanation that had never crossed his mind. “I’ll admit I was baffled when I saw you—”

  “So why didn’t you just come over?” she said, cutting him off.

  She had a point. That might have resolved things quickly. But the shock of seeing them there, along with the intense way they were talking, had thrown him.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It just looked, you know, from a distance, like you were talking about something really serious. I guess I thought you didn’t want to be interrupted.”

  She didn’t say anything for a moment, so Stevie pressed back. “Why didn’t you mention that you’d seen him?”

  She shook her head. “It’s complicated.”

  “So, explain,” he said. “I’ve got time.”

  “I can’t,” she said.

  “What do you mean you can’t?” he said, getting angry again. “You say I’m reaching the wrong conclusions, but you can’t explain the right ones?”

  “That’s right,” she said. “I can’t. I promised.”

  “Promised?” He was screaming now, drawing more looks. He dropped his voice. “Promised? You made a promise to someone you just met to keep some kind of secret from me? What is that about?”

  She shook her head. “I’m sorry, Stevie,” she said. “I just can’t tell you. I’ll tell you this much: there will come a time when you’ll understand. But please, don’t ask me about it again.”

  She turned and walked away. Stevie watched her walk behind the batting cage in the direction of the Red Sox dugout. At that moment all he wanted to do was go home. He didn’t even care what Susan Carol’s secret was.

  All he knew was that she and David Doyle had a secret and that he felt sick to his stomach. And it had nothing to do with the four slices of Regina’s pizza he had eaten that afternoon.

  8: SUDDEN STAR

  STEVIE WASN’T SURE HOW LONG he spent staring at the players in the batting cage without actually seeing them before someone put a hand on his shoulder. He turned to see Peter Gammons standing there.

  “Steve, I’m Peter Gammons, have you got a minute?” he said.

  “Sure,” Stevie said, wondering why in the world Gammons would want to talk to him. No one needed to confirm the Doyle story anymore, so what could he possibly want?

  “I was just talking to Bobby,” he said. “He was teasing me about the crawl this afternoon, saying I couldn’t confirm your story. I just wanted you to know I feel badly about the way it was worded and the fact that my network didn’t even give the Herald credit for the story.”

  Stevie was surprised. He had always been a fan of Gammons’s, but Kelleher had convinced him that just about everyone in TV was evil. Gammons was a print guy who had become a TV guy. Maybe that was different?

  “Don’t worry, Mr. Gammons—”

  “Peter,” Gammons interrupted.

  “Peter,” Stevie continued. “I never thought you wrote the crawl.”

  “I didn’t, but I still feel badly.” He put out his hand. “No hard feelings, I hope.”

  “Of course not,” Stevie said. “I know how these things work.”

  Gammons clapped him on the back. “You know a lot of things, apparently,” he said. He walked in the direction of the batting cage, where Terry Francona, the Red Sox manager, was standing, calling his name. Being Peter Gammons, Stevie decided, was a pretty cool thing.

  Alone again, he tried to act as if he was intently watching Dustin Pedroia, who had stepped into the cage. But his mind was still on his conversation with Susan Carol. What secret could David Doyle have told her that she couldn’t share with him? Why had David told her? Actually, that wasn’t too hard to guess. If Stevie were a fourteen-year-old boy with a secret to share, he’d certainly want to share it with Susan Carol. Well, he was a fourteen-year-old boy. He just didn’t have a secret.

  Mearns walked back over to him, her TV interview concluded. “You look like you just got terrible news,” she said. “Are you okay?”

  “Fine,” he said. “No bad news. I’m just a little bit tired.” The truth was he had no news at all. And in this case, no news felt like bad news.

  The night was about as perfect as one could hope for in late October in Boston. Even though the game didn’t start until 8:35, it was still sixty-two degrees when Daisuke Matsuzaka threw the first pitch. As he had done during game one, Stevie sat in the auxiliary press box, which was located way out in right field, with Susan Carol on his left and George Solomon, the Sunday columnist emeritus for the Washington Post, on his right.

  Solomon was short and had thick glasses. Tamara had explained to Stevie that he had been the Post’s sports editor for twenty-eig
ht years and had retired to write a Sunday column. Now he had been brought back from complete retirement for the World Series. He had been friendly on the first night but kept making football references throughout the game.

  “Fourth and ten for the Nats,” he had said when the Red Sox opened up their early lead. He had suggested late in the game that the Nats “drop back ten and punt” and, when the Nats put a couple of men on base in the eighth inning, had commented that they were “trying to score a consolation touchdown.”

  “I guess you’re more of a football guy,” Stevie had said after the last football reference.

  “Love baseball,” Solomon said. Even so, he had spent chunks of the game asking Barry Svrluga, another Post reporter who normally covered the Redskins, what he thought about that Sunday’s game in Green Bay.

  “Congratulations,” Solomon said as Stevie sat down for the start of game two. “Good story on Doyle this afternoon. There was some good spadework there.”

  Stevie had now been around reporters enough to know that spadework was a term that meant someone had done a lot of digging to get a story. The truth was the story had landed in his lap while he was eating breakfast. But he just said, “Thanks. Sometimes you get lucky.”

  “Based on past history,” Solomon said, “you and the young lady are more than lucky.”

  Susan Carol was, at that moment, engaged in conversation with Mark Maske, another Post football writer who had been assigned to the World Series. Mearns had mentioned earlier that the Post had a total of twenty-two people in Boston—fifteen sportswriters, two editors, three photographers, a writer from the Style section, and a writer from the Metro section who was assigned to write one of those awful stories on fans. The Herald “only” had sixteen people in town—including its own Metro reporter, who was doing what Stevie assumed would be an equally awful story on fans.

  He was extremely grateful that he didn’t have to wander the streets or the ballpark looking for people who had painted their faces Nats red and blue. Look at the glass as half full, he told himself, even though it felt quite empty at that moment.

  The Nats managed to score a run in the top of the first off Matsuzaka when leadoff hitter Austin Kearns singled, took second on a wild pitch, moved to third on a groundout, and then scored on another groundout by Ryan Zimmerman.

  “Guess the Red Sox figure they’re going to score off Doyle, so they can play the infield back,” Stevie said to Susan Carol, figuring he’d be safe keeping the conversation on baseball.

  “You never play the infield in this early in the game, no matter who’s pitching,” she snapped. “You should know that.”

  So much, Stevie thought, for casual baseball talk.

  Doyle trotted to the mound to some applause—Stevie guessed it was from the Nats fans scattered throughout the crowd—and a low murmur. Most of the Red Sox fans had apparently not been paying attention when the line-ups were announced, and when they saw an unfamiliar number—56—trot to the mound, they wondered who in the world it was.

  Doyle was clearly nervous at the start. He walked Kevin Youkilis on four pitches to start the game and then hit Dustin Pedroia with a pitch. Whatever Stevie’s thoughts were on David Doyle and Susan Carol, he didn’t want to see Norbert Doyle humiliated in front of millions of people. As David Ortiz stepped into the batter’s box and Jason Bay stood on deck, Stevie did a little math: two men on, no one out, postseason baseball’s best clutch hitter up, with another one-hundred-plus RBI man to follow. Stevie wondered if Doyle would survive the first inning.

  Everyone in the ballpark was on their feet as Ortiz stared in at Doyle. He was now thirty-four, and starting to slow a little bit: he had “only” hit twenty-nine home runs during the regular season. In postseason—Big Papi time, as it was called in Boston—he already had five home runs and fifteen RBIs.

  “This could get ugly in a hurry,” Stevie said.

  Susan Carol said nothing. Stevie was having about as good a night so far as Norbert Doyle.

  Doyle threw three straight pitches that were way out of the strike zone. They almost reminded Stevie of the scene in Major League when Charlie Sheen’s character, Wild Thing, comes into his first game and immediately throws a pitch that goes straight to the backstop, causing Bob Uecker, playing the radio announcer, to say, “Just a bit outside.”

  These pitches were nearly as far outside.

  Ortiz dug in, knowing that Doyle had to try to throw a strike rather than face loading the bases for Bay.

  “I’ll bet he’s got the hit sign,” George Solomon said. “Might as well go for the long pass right here.”

  Stevie figured that was a lock. On 3–0, Doyle was likely to groove a fastball, and Ortiz might hit it nine miles.

  Sure enough, Ortiz was swinging on 3–0. Doyle’s fastball looked right down the middle to Stevie, but instead of hitting it nine miles, Ortiz hit a wicked grounder right down the third-base line. For a moment Stevie thought it was going into the corner for a double. But Zimmerman, who hadn’t overshifted because of the runner on second, somehow stabbed it on his backhand side and in one motion stepped on third base and flicked a throw to second. Ronnie Belliard, the Nats’ second baseman, grabbed the throw and then turned and fired to first. The stunned—not to mention painfully slow—Ortiz was still two steps from the bag when the throw hit the first baseman’s glove.

  For a second Stevie didn’t even realize what had happened. Then, all at once, he noticed how quiet the ballpark had suddenly become, and he heard Susan Carol’s voice very clearly saying, “A triple play, oh my God, a triple play!”

  It was, in fact, the rarest play in baseball—three outs on one play. This one had been amazingly simple because Ortiz had hit the ball so hard. It got to Zimmerman so quickly it was actually an easy around-the-horn play from third to second to first.

  Stevie had never seen a triple play in his life. The Nationals high-fived one another as they jogged off the field. Doyle just put his head down and walked off as if it had been routine.

  “Unless my memory fails me, that’s the first triple play in the World Series since Bill Wambsganss,” George Solomon said. “Of course, I’m more a football guy than a baseball guy.”

  “No, you’ve got it right,” Svrluga said. “It was 1920. Unassisted.”

  “Unassisted?” Stevie said. “You mean he got all three outs by himself? How’s that possible?”

  “Easy,” Svrluga said. “He was playing second base. Men on first and second, no one out—just like this play. Except he caught a line drive hit right at him. He ran over, touched second base to force out the runner who’d been on second. The runner at first hadn’t realized he’d caught the ball and ran right into his tag. It was almost easy, it happened so fast.”

  “How do you know?” asked Maske.

  “Saw the replay on SportsCenter,” Svrluga answered with a straight face.

  “Pretty good break for your new friend’s dad,” Stevie whispered to Susan Carol while the discussion of Wambsganss and triple plays continued.

  “Stop it, Stevie,” she said quietly. “Don’t be a jerk.”

  “I’m a jerk?” he said, looking around to make sure no one was paying attention. “I’m not the one who sneaked off today, lied about it, and is now acting as if she’s protecting national security with some big secret.”

  “Stop it,” she said. “Stop saying things you’ll be sorry you said later.”

  Stevie started to say something else but realized she might be right.

  “Fine,” he said. “But it better be damn good, whatever it is.”

  “Don’t threaten me, Stevie,” she said. “You’re not my father.”

  “I know that,” Stevie said. “I thought I was your boyfriend.”

  “You are,” she said. “For now.”

  A chill went through Stevie. She wasn’t smiling when she said it. She was staring down at the field, where Adam Dunn was stepping to the plate to lead off the second inning for the Nats.

  Stevie was
at a loss for a response. She was threatening him now, and—as with everything else—she was very good at it.

  Both pitchers settled down after the first inning, and the game became an old-fashioned pitcher’s duel. Matsuzaka was good, allowing only three hits over seven innings. Remarkably, Doyle was better. He walked Jason Bay leading off the second and through seven innings had walked five batters in all, in addition to the hit batsman in the first.

  But he hadn’t given up a hit. The Red Sox appeared baffled by his pitches, best described by Svrluga: “Slow, slower, slowest.”

  He didn’t throw a fastball that was clocked at more than 82 mph. Every ballpark now had a radar gun behind home plate and a place on the scoreboard that showed the speed of each pitch. Matsuzaka was hitting 95 mph regularly, even occasionally getting to 96. Doyle was usually in the high seventies and low eighties, except when he threw his breaking pitches, which sometimes didn’t even crack 70.

  “Reminds me of Tom Glavine and Jamie Moyer,” Maske said at one point, talking about two superb lefthanders known for keeping batters off balance even though they couldn’t throw very hard.

  “Except that they’ve won about five hundred fifty-five more games than he has,” Svrluga said.

  “When was the last no-hitter in a World Series?” Stevie asked.

  For the first time in six innings Susan Carol said something to him. “There’s only been one,” she said. “Don Larsen’s perfect game in 1956.”

  Stevie remembered reading about when Larsen had pitched for the Yankees. He hadn’t been a star, but he’d had one great day. Doyle’s story was even more amazing. Not only was he pitching in his first postseason game ever, he had never won a game in the major leagues.

  “Here’s the question,” Svrluga said. “The guy has thrown a hundred twelve pitches. Normally, you’d go to the bullpen here.”

  “You’d take him out when he’s pitching a no-hitter?” Stevie said, almost gasping at the thought.

  “The manager’s job is to win the game,” Svrluga said. “This is the World Series, not some game in mid-July. If it was five-nothing, it might be different, but at one-nothing I think he has to take him out.”