Team Players

by Mike Lupica

  She ran, even though Sarah had a good lead on her.

  Sarah crossed the kids’ playground at Highland Park, cut across the big field where the Walton High School team played its games, then through the soccer field next to the duck pond. If Sarah had started to get tired, or slow down, Cassie didn’t see it, because as far as Cassie could tell, she hadn’t made up any ground, and might have lost some.

  At their second-to-last practice before the season had started, Sarah had run down another ball that Cassie had thought was uncatchable when Brooke hit it. But when Sarah did catch it, Cassie’s dad said, “That girl can run all day.”

  Cassie hoped that wasn’t actually true.

  If Cassie could just catch her, she could tell Sarah what she should have told her on the field, even in front of their teammates:

  That she believed her.

  • • •

  Sarah was running in the direction of downtown Walton.

  When she got there, she finally stopped, as if she weren’t sure where she wanted to go next.

  She had run past the bookstore, and Rosie’s Café, and Fierro’s, and Cold Stone. By the time she did stop in front of a clothing store called Family Britches, Cassie was a block behind, but didn’t call out to her. Cassie had never seen Sarah look back, so she couldn’t know that Cassie had been chasing her since Highland Park. But Cassie was afraid that if she did call Sarah’s name, the girl might just take off again.

  Sarah had her hands on her hips, staring across Main Street, as if she were deciding where she was headed next. Or maybe she was the one who’d finally gotten tired, and was just catching her breath.

  Cassie stopped running, getting her own breath under control, until she was a few feet behind her.

  She made sure to keep her voice under control too.

  “Sarah,” she said.

  Sarah wheeled around, eyes wide, and Cassie really was afraid she might bolt all over again. But before she could, Cassie smiled at her and said, “Please don’t make me chase you again.”

  “What do you want?”

  “To talk to you.”

  “Why?” Sarah said. “Nobody believes me.”

  “I do,” Cassie said.

  Sarah frowned. “Then why didn’t you say so back at the field?”

  “I didn’t get the chance before you turned into Usain Bolt.”

  “I’m not lying.”

  “I know.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because you were the one who stopped and she was the one who kept running,” Cassie said. “If you called her off the ball, it should have been the other way around.”

  “I know,” Sarah said, almost as if she were in pain.

  Cassie was afraid Sarah might start crying again, and watched now as she took in deep gulps of air as if doing everything she could not to cry.

  “But what difference does it make?” Sarah said. “Even if you do believe me, nobody else on the team does. And now they’re not going to want me on the team more than ever.”

  She was right, and Cassie knew it. Not all of their teammates were going to think that way. Enough of them were, though.

  But Cassie wasn’t going to tell that to Sarah.

  “We can’t do anything about that right this minute,” Cassie said. “And a lot of things get said after you lose a game like that.”

  Actually, Cassie couldn’t even remember what it was like to lose a game like that, because it had been so long.

  Sarah didn’t respond at first, so Cassie kept going. “For now, the first thing we have to do is let your mom and dad know where you are. Do you have your phone with you?”

  “It’s in my bat bag back at the field.”

  “Do you know their number?”

  Cassie knew it was a dumb comment as soon as she’d made it. Sarah picked right up on it.

  “You think I don’t?”

  “No,” Cassie said. “But there’s plenty of numbers I don’t remember. It’s why they invented contacts.”

  Sarah slowly recited the number.

  Cassie had her phone with her, having grabbed it from her own bat bag as soon as the game had ended. She tapped out the number, and when Mrs. Milligan answered on the first ring, Cassie told her where they were, and that Sarah was fine.

  Mrs. Milligan said that she and Mr. Milligan had driven to their home, which was only about six blocks from Highland Park. But she said they’d come pick Sarah up in a few minutes.

  Cassie said there was no rush, because she and Sarah were headed for Cold Stone.

  “We’re going to Cold Stone?” Sarah said after Cassie had stuck her phone into her back pocket.

  “Ice cream fixes almost everything,” Cassie said.

  Well, maybe not everything, she thought.

  But it couldn’t hurt.

  • • •

  Cassie thought there might be another melt when Sarah said she just wanted a bowl of plain vanilla ice cream.

  “But this is Cold Stone,” Cassie said. “Don’t you want lots of cool gooey stuff on it?”

  “I like vanilla,” Sarah said.

  Cassie told the boy behind the counter, and he said, “Really?”

  “Really,” Cassie said, and then ordered Oreo Overload, one of her favorites, for herself.

  Cassie paid, having remembered she still had a ten-dollar bill in the back pocket, because she and Jack and the guys had planned to go for ice cream themselves after the game. Then she and Sarah took their bowls and sat at a table by the front window.

  Sarah didn’t say anything, or even look up, until she’d eaten all of her ice cream, looking as intensely focused on eating ice cream as she did everything else.

  When Sarah was finished, Cassie said, “We can get past what happened today.”

  “No . . . we . . . can’t.”

  Cassie didn’t want to argue with her. So all she said was, “It’s just the first game.”

  “I don’t care,” Sarah said. “Basketball was fun. This isn’t.”

  “It wasn’t fun today,” Cassie said. “But losing is never fun.”

  Sarah looked down at Cassie’s bowl. “You’re not eating your ice cream.”

  “I’d rather talk to you.”

  “She lied,” Sarah said.

  “Yeah,” Cassie said, “she probably did.”

  Sarah looked so hard at Cassie that she felt as if she were getting shoved again.

  “Not probably. She did.”

  Cassie nodded, and just pushed her ice cream around with her spoon. “She made a mistake in the game and then felt like she had to try to cover it when the game was over. That’s what I think happened.”

  “But . . . but that’s wrong.”

  “I know it is.”

  “Nobody stopped her.”

  “Nobody got the chance,” Cassie said. “And even if I believe you, which I do, Sarah, it’s still your word against hers.”

  “And the others will take her word.”

  “Not all of them.”

  “A lot of them,” Sarah said. She paused and said, “I don’t want to do this anymore.”

  Cassie had placed her phone on the table in front of her, and kept waiting for it to vibrate, and see that Mrs. Milligan was calling. She didn’t know how long she had before Sarah’s parents got here. But she was going to make the most out of the time she had.

  “You’re too good to quit,” Cassie said. “Not only are you too good, you’re only going to get better.”

  “If it’s not fun, I don’t want to play.”

  “Everybody feels like that from time to time. But things will get better.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  Cassie felt a smile come all the way up from inside her. She couldn’t help it, or stop it.

  “Because they can’t get any worse!” Cassie said.

  About a minute later Cassie’s phone did vibrate, and she saw it was a text message from Mrs. Milligan:

  Parked in front of bookstore.

 
“Your mom’s here,” Cassie said.

  Sarah started to get up. Cassie gently placed a hand on her arm. Sarah stared down at it. But sat back down.

  “Just show up for our next game against Moran,” Cassie said.

  “Why, because you think you can make things all better?”

  “No,” Cassie said. “But my dad will. You can trust him even if you’re not ready to trust me.”

  “How can he fix things?”

  “It’s a coach thing,” Cassie said. “Okay?”

  She reached across the table with a closed fist. For a moment she thought Sarah might leave her hanging.

  But she didn’t.

  When Sarah touched Cassie’s fist with her own, she did it so lightly, it was like she was afraid she’d break Cassie’s hand if she hit it any harder.

  “Okay,” Sarah said.

  Cassie didn’t say what was in her head. She just thought it.

  Okay, Dad.

  You’re up.

  ELEVEN

  The next day Cassie went to watch the next-to-last practice for the Cubs before their season started.

  She thought that if she could just sit in the stands and watch her friends play ball, it would take her mind off all the drama with her own team. It did.

  Just not for the reasons she thought it would.

  As little fun as Sarah Milligan said she was having on the Red Sox, the guys on the Cubs seemed to be having even less. Jack and the guys had told her what the new coach was like. But he was even worse than Cassie had imagined.

  And was starting to make Cassie be the one who was afraid of loud noises.

  Mr. Anthony somehow managed to keep a smile on his face even when he was chewing somebody out for not taking an extra base, or for throwing to the wrong base, or missing a sign, or even forgetting to take a strike. It was apparently a new rule on the Cubs that every hitter had to take a strike every single time up.

  “How many times do I have to tell you that you’re not a hitter until you take a strike?” Ken Anthony yelled at Teddy at one point, even though Teddy, obviously having forgotten the rule, had just ripped a vicious foul ball just wide of third base.

  “Sorry, Coach,” Teddy said.

  Cassie was watching Teddy’s face, and could see that he wanted to say something more, but she was hoping he wouldn’t. And he didn’t.

  Mr. Anthony was doing the pitching. When Teddy ripped the next strike he saw from him into right field for a clean hit, Mr. Anthony pointed at him and yelled, “That’s what I’m talking about!”

  Cassie had no idea what he was actually talking about. She just had this growing sense that this guy thought he had invented baseball, and that everything on the team somehow revolved around him.

  Loudly.

  Yeah. He was one of those Little League coaches. Having played on her own teams, and having hung around on Jack’s and Gus’s even before Teddy became a player too, Cassie knew that there weren’t as many of them as people thought.

  Her dad agreed with her.

  “I know coaches like that are the cliché,” Chris Bennett had said to her one time.

  “Like in the movies,” Cassie had said.

  “In the movies and even in books,” her dad had said. “But the truth is that most of the coaches I’ve either coached with or against get it. They really do. They understand that it’s not about them, that it’s always supposed to be about the kids. But too often people watching can’t see that—or maybe can’t hear that—because of the one or two percent who don’t get it, who really do think it’s all about them, and make such a spectacle of themselves.”

  Ken Anthony was clearly in the 1 or 2 percent.

  He wasn’t just having the guys on the Cubs practice like they were playing. He had them practicing like they were playing game seven of the World Series for the real Cubs.

  At one point he even decided that Jack, playing shortstop, had been slow covering second base on a potential double play, even though anybody could see that the ball had been hit too slowly to the Cubs’ second baseman, J. B. Scarborough, for them to have had any chance at turning two.

  “Game of inches!” Ken Anthony yelled at Jack. “Game of inches. And one of those inches can cost you a run, a game, maybe even a championship. So next time let’s get rid of that ball a little sooner.”

  Cassie was alone in the bleachers, starting to think she was watching more of a baseball detention than practice. But out loud, no one there to hear her, she pretended that she was talking to Coach Ken Anthony.

  “What planet are you from?”

  In that moment it was almost as if Jack could hear her, or just read her mind, something he did a lot. Because when Cassie looked back at him, he was looking straight at her, grinning, eyebrows raised, as if to say back to her, Can you believe this guy?

  Cassie shook her head.

  No, she could not.

  He was absolutely as bad as Teddy had said he was. She really started to think, after less than an hour of watching this, that maybe things on her team weren’t nearly as bad as she’d thought they were.

  The only time Mr. Anthony managed to calm himself down was when his son, Sam, took the mound. Cassie knew who he was, because Jack had pointed him out to her when she’d showed up after one of her practices last week.

  Sam Anthony was tall, the tallest boy on the team, and looked more like a football player to Cassie than a baseball player, even though big-league baseball players were looking more and more like football players to her all the time. But as big as he was, and as hard as he tried to throw, he didn’t look like he had what announcers always called “overpowering stuff.”

  Cassie frankly didn’t think he could throw a ball as hard or as well or as accurately—or even as gracefully—as Jack Callahan did when he was on the mound.

  But his father acted as if he were watching a future Hall of Famer when Sam struck out J.B., and then struck out Gus. It wasn’t a scrimmage. But there were enough players on the team that the coach could put seven fielders behind Sam, and Teddy behind the plate. Sam’s dad, calling balls and strikes, had announced that they were all supposed to pretend that Sam was pitching in a tie game.

  Jack came to the plate after Gus.

  Cassie knew that Jack wasn’t going to help the pitcher out by swinging at the same borderline strikes that J.B. and Gus just had. Jack, even if he did have to take a strike, was going to make Sam Anthony work, waiting for his pitch.

  Sam threw a pitch that looked to Cassie to be nearly a foot outside.

  “Strike one,” his father said. “Caught the corner.”

  Jack didn’t even turn around. Didn’t step out of the box. Just stayed in his stance.

  The next pitch was farther outside, and Mr. Anthony had no choice but to call it a ball. Same with the next pitch. The count was 2–1.

  “How about giving me a better target,” Sam called in to Teddy behind the plate, as if missing as badly with the last two pitches was Teddy’s fault. Or his mitt’s fault.

  Teddy had been yelled at enough by Sam’s dad today. Cassie could see he wasn’t going to take it from his son. He didn’t get up, or flip back his mask, and stayed in his crouch. He just put his glove out in front of him, directly behind the plate, the same height as Jack’s waist.

  “I’m sorry,” Teddy called out to Sam. “I didn’t realize I was hiding back here.”

  Cassie heard Mr. Anthony say, “Cool it, Madden. The pitcher always knows best where his target should be.”

  Now Teddy was the one who didn’t turn around. He just nodded and left the mitt exactly where it had been before Sam had chirped on him.

  But Sam missed again, enough inside that his dad had no choice but to give a little shake of his head and say, “Ball three.” And Cassie felt herself smiling, because she was a pitcher, and could see what was happening here. This guy was afraid of Jack, even in a glorified batting practice. He was pitching around him, but wanted that to be anybody’s fault but his own.

  “
What are you waiting for, a perfect pitch?”

  Now Sam was talking to Jack. But Cassie knew that he could talk to Jack Callahan forever and not get a response out of him.

  Jack ignored him. Just took a quick step out of the box with his front foot, adjusted his batting helmet, stepped back in, took his stance, set his hands. Cassie knew that he wasn’t waiting for a perfect pitch. Just a strike.

  Sam threw one now. Jack put a perfect swing on it, level and lethal. As sweet as the sound of a softball was coming off Cassie’s bat, or Sarah’s when she really smashed one, this sound, the sound of a hardball, was different.

  It had to scare Sam Anthony as soon as he heard it.

  Cassie knew this sound, knew the ball was gone as soon as Jack connected. It ended up going high over the left fielder’s head, high over the left-field fence. In the distance, Cassie could see the ball finally stop rolling just behind second base on the field on the other side of the outfield fence.

  Jack did nothing to show up Sam. He just rounded the bases at a normal speed, not too fast and not too slow. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was that when he got to home plate, Teddy gave him a hard low five, a big smile on his face.

  As soon as he did, Sam yelled at Teddy, “What, you think this is funny?”

  Jack turned around, thinking that Sam might be talking to him again. But then he saw Sam pointing his glove at Teddy.

  “What the heck are you talking about?” Teddy said. “We’re all on the same team here. I was just congratulating a teammate.”

  “No, you weren’t,” Sam said. “You were dogging me. And you can’t catch me if you’re rooting for the batter, even when we’re just messing around.”

  Teddy Madden had clearly heard enough today, from the whole family. He took a step in front of the plate, flipped back his mask now, and said, “I’m not your catcher. I’m this team’s catcher. Is that some kind of brain buster for you?”

  Cassie noticed that Mr. Anthony had come out from behind the plate and had positioned himself between Teddy and Sam. But he didn’t talk to his son. He talked to Teddy.

  “You need to shut this down right here, son,” he said.

  Teddy took his mask off. Cassie could see how red his face was. Never a good sign.

  “I need to shut it?” he said. “I’m not the one who threw that pitch, so we could all see a fastball turn into a lost ball.”