by Tim Green
Seth nodded at the signal and shouted the play to his defensive teammates, cupping his hands over his mouth. The center snapped the ball. The defense blitzed. The quarterback dropped and threw the slant.
Seth Halloway leaped in front of the receiver and snatched the ball, securing the Falcons’ fourth win in a row.
Troy jumped almost as high as Seth. So did every other player and coach on the Falcons’ sideline. The defensive coach hugged Troy. Players smacked his back and hooted with joy. Some of them called out his name, and Troy’s face burned with pride.
They knew him and they knew what he did.
Even though officially he was a ball boy, the players knew.
Troy saw Seth in the mayhem and grinned, but Seth didn’t grin back.
“Come quick,” Seth said, leading Troy by the arm and pushing through the crowd of NFL players and into the dark tunnel.
“Why?” Troy asked, searching Seth’s face. “Let’s celebrate!”
“That reporter, Peele, he saw you. We’ve got to get you out of here before he ruins everything.”
Excerpt from The Big Time
Chapter One
ALL HIS LIFE, TROY dreamed of meeting the father he never knew. Never once did he imagine it would turn into a nightmare. Still, the rage oozing from his mother’s voice when she saw his father’s face wasn’t a complete surprise. But when her hateful glare scorched Troy, too? That was a shocker.
She acted as if Troy had invited the man to show up on Seth Halloway’s front steps when, in fact, the appearance of his missing father shook Troy to the core.
“We don’t want you here,” Troy’s mom said.
Seth, the Falcons’ star linebacker, appeared behind her and stepped onto the front porch of his stone mansion as if to protect Troy and his friends, Tate and Nathan, from the intruder. Noise from the party by the pool out back filtered up over the slate roof and into the night sky. The entire Duluth Tigers football team—which Seth had coached as a favor to Troy—and the players’ parents were celebrating the team’s victory in the Georgia Junior League Football State Championship.
“Can I help you?” Seth asked, the cords in his muscular neck now dancing in the porch light.
Troy’s father stood an inch or two over six feet—as tall as Seth—with a handsome face worn from weather and worry. He laughed a soft, friendly laugh, and he stuck out a big hand with a slim gold watch on his wrist.
“I’m Drew Edinger; I’m staying with a client who lives a few streets away,” Troy’s dad said, extending his hand even farther until Seth had no choice but to shake it. “I know who you are. I admire the way you play.”
“I said we don’t want you here,” Troy’s mom said, crossing her arms and jutting out her jaw.
“I’m the boy’s father.”
“You’re not his father,” Troy’s mom said.
Drew looked at Troy, gave him a sly wink, and said, “You’re saying he belongs to someone else?”
Excerpt from Rivals
Chapter One
WHEN THE SUN CAME blasting in through the hotel room curtains on Sunday morning, Josh pulled aside the shades and felt the thrill of being in a championship game wash over him like the sunlight. The feeling quickly sank into a sea of doubt. Being considered a great player by the Titans was one thing, but the better their team did, the better the competition became. There were other kids out there—not many, but they were there—whose skills rivaled Josh’s. Josh’s father—a mountain of a man who’d been a first-round draft pick out of high school but spent all of his thirteen years as a pro in the minor leagues—told Josh that if he wanted to be truly great, he had to relish the thought of a rivalry.
“Great players always want to go up against the best,” his father would say, “even if they don’t win. A real rivalry is when teams or players go back and forth between who wins and loses so when they play each other, both are at their very best.”
It bothered Josh that he didn’t relish the thought of a good rivalry. He just couldn’t help wishing for the kind of games where they swamped the other team. That’s how it had been in this qualifying tournament so far, but Josh knew that it wouldn’t be true today. He’d be up against the tournament’s best pitcher, and the sickening dread smothering the thrill made him feel that he was something less than what his father wanted him to be.
These were the kind of feelings he could only talk about with one person—Jaden Neidermeyer. Somehow, her being a girl let him speak freely, and her perky reply hadn’t made him sorry.
“Everything you do, Josh,” she had said, “you do well. You work to be the best. If having a rival you look forward to is part of what it takes to be great, don’t worry, it’ll happen. Just be you, Josh. That’s all you have to do.”
Benji, his other best friend and roommate on the road, rolled over in his twisted pile of sheets and groaned.
“Turn it off,” Benji said, blindly swatting the air.
“Come on,” Josh said. “The Toledo Nighthawks are the only thing between us and the Hall of Fame Tournament in Cooperstown.”
“Hall of Fame Tournament?” Benji asked, scrunching up his face.
“It’s supposed to become the biggest thing in youth baseball!” Josh said. “It’s the first major tournament of the summer. My dad said that this year they’re going to have more people watching on TV than the Little League World Series. He said the teams are going to be the best of the best.”
“You don’t have to tell me how big it is; I’m a Cooperstown veteran,” Benji said, pulling a pillow over his head that muffled his words. “You’ve seen my Babe Ruth paperweight, haven’t you? The one where he’s in a Red Sox uniform? That’s how I like to think of him, the Red Sox being the greatest franchise in baseball history and all.”
“But you never played there,” Josh said, yanking Benji’s covers off the bed. His oversized friend was wearing white boxer shorts spotted with red hearts.
Josh laughed, thankful for something to lighten his mood. “No wonder you wanted to undress in the dark. Where’d you get those things?”
“I can’t help it if I’m a ladykiller,” Benji said, his face turning as red as the hearts. He slipped sideways into the bathroom, covering as much of his shorts as he could.
“Ladykiller?” Josh said.
“Girls love a man with good taste in underwear,” Benji said from behind the bathroom door.
“What are you talking about?” Josh said, still laughing. “No one’s going to see your underwear—not any ladies, anyway—unless you’re planning on flashing someone at the pool.”
“It’s not about what they see,” Benji said, bursting forth from the bathroom with his baseball pants hiding the hearts. “It’s an attitude. Women can smell it on you.”
Josh could only shake his head as he ran a comb through his hair.
“Look at you,” Benji said. “I know you’re working yourself over in that mirror pretty hard for Jaden.”
Josh rolled his eyes. “Cut it out. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”
“Everyone knows she’s crazy about you,” Benji said, pulling on the rest of his uniform and pitching his voice like a girl’s. “Oh Josh, you’re so strong. Is it even a challenge for you to hit a home run with those two-hundred-foot fences after playing all those games in U14?”
Benji made kissing noises.
“Would you rather I didn’t smack them over the fence?” Josh asked.
What Benji heard Jaden say was true. Until Josh and Jaden exposed his former coach, Rocky Valentine, for steroid dealing, Josh had been part of a U14 travel team. He’d gotten experience playing with kids two years older than he was on a field that was much bigger. The fence for U14 was at about three hundred feet instead of the two hundred feet for Little League, or U12. The bases, too, went down from ninety feet apart at U14 to sixty for U12. It was Josh’s incredible vision—being able to see the ball the instant it left the pitcher’s hand and read its spin—as well as his unusual size and str
ength for a twelve-year-old that let him keep up with the older kids.
With the strength-training program he’d been on with his old team—even though Josh never did use his old coach’s steroids—he’d been able to hit home runs over the three-hundred-foot fence, so, more times than not, when Josh got all of the ball against a U12 pitcher, he put it out of the park. Josh’s dad had kept the strength-training regimen as part of his own U12 team’s preparation, only without the steroids. Along with Josh’s incredible scoring ability, it had a lot to do with the Titans being so successful.
“Honestly?” Benji said, his eyebrows disappearing up underneath his dark bangs. “It gets a little disgusting.”
“You like winning, though,” Josh said with a grin as he pulled on his uniform.
“Everyone likes winning,” Benji said. “Don’t change the subject. Jaden is crazy for you, man, riding out here with the team, staying at our hotel. I know she’s supposedly writing for the paper, but I think there’s a lot more than Pulitzer Prizes on her mind. She probably has your name tattooed on her butt.”
“Stop it. She’s a nice girl, she loves baseball, and you know it. And I’m not the one with the hearts on my underwear,” Josh said, zipping up his overnight bag and heading for the door. “I’ll leave the girl stuff to you. I got baseball games to play. Come on. We’ll be late for breakfast.”
They took the elevator down and, to Josh’s embarrassment, the first thing they saw when they walked into the restaurant was Jaden, a tall, pretty girl with honey-colored skin, green eyes flecked with yellow, and frizzy hair that she kept pulled back tight off her face. She sat at a round booth just inside the hostess stand calling Josh’s name and waving frantically for them to come and sit down. Josh looked around and hung his head before slipping into the booth. Jaden was as good a friend to him as Benji, and he wasn’t going to stop being nice to her just because he hated Benji’s teasing.
“Sit down,” Jaden said. “Listen to this! I was checking out this Toledo team, and you guys can’t believe what I heard.”
“They’ve got Sandy Planczeck, the best pitcher in the state of Ohio,” Benji said, yawning and picking up his menu. “He throws a seventy-five-mile-an-hour fastball. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we know. Josh could barely get to sleep last night. How’s the pancakes in this joint?”
Jaden scowled at Benji and said, “He throws a seventy-five-mile-an-hour fastball, yes, but it’s what he’s planning on doing with it.”
“Yeah,” Benji said from behind the menu, “he’s gonna strike out Josh. Oooh, now we’re all scared. Josh’ll knock it into the river.”
In the park where they would play, beyond the fence was a road, and if the ball went another hundred feet or so past that, it would hit the Genesee River.
“No, he’s not going to try to strike out Josh, you goofball,” Jaden said, pulling Benji’s menu down. “If the Nighthawks need it to win, he’s going to throw a beanball at Josh.”
“You’re kidding,” Josh said, setting down his water glass without taking a drink.
“No,” Jaden said, “I’m not. I was scouting them out in the semifinals yesterday, and I met his girlfriend.”
“Planczeck’s got a girlfriend?” Josh said.
Jaden nodded. “She didn’t know who I was and started bragging about him. I said I’d seen the Syracuse Titans, and they had a really great player named Josh LeBlanc who was almost six feet tall. That’s when she told me they already knew about you and that if he needed to use it, her boyfriend had a surprise for you. She said it exactly, a beanball.”
“Beanball? What is that?” Benji asked, crinkling his face. “Like he farts in the middle of his windup?”
Jaden rolled her eyes. “You are so lame. A beanball. This guy’s a headhunter.”
Josh turned to Benji. “She means he’s going to try and hit me with that seventy-five-mile-an-hour fastball.
“Right in the head.”
Excerpt from Best of the Best
Chapter One
A SILENT STORM OF moths, June bugs, and mosquitoes swarmed the powerful light high above Josh and his father. It was a hot, dark night. Heat radiated up from the blacktop surface of the batting cage, warming the bottoms of Josh’s sneakers. The rest of the team had already gone home, but not Josh. Extra work was something he hungered for, especially under his father’s trained eye.
His father pointed to the knob on the pitching machine that controlled its speed and said, “I think you’re ready for ninety.”
Josh swallowed. Ninety miles an hour was a fastball you might see in college or even the pros, and even though he stood nearly six feet tall, he was still just twelve. He stepped back and tilted the brim of his batting helmet with a thumb.
“That scare you?” his father asked. “It’s okay if it does. It should.”
“A little,” Josh said. “’Cause I won’t see anything like it for five or six years.”
“Oh, it might be a bit sooner than that,” his father said. “I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t think you could handle it.”
“Could you hit a ninety-mile-an-hour ball when you were twelve?” Josh asked.
“Me?” his father said, his eyebrows disappearing up under the blue shadow cast by the brim of his hat. “No. I was your size when I was twelve, but I didn’t have your skills. That’s why we do this. I want to make sure you develop everything you’ve got. I want you to go further than me.”
“You were a first-round pick,” Josh said.
His father waved an impatient hand and said, “That doesn’t mean anything. It’s about the majors, and I never made it. Relax, I’m okay with it. I’m beginning to think I was cut out for coaching anyway. You, though, you can make it all the way.”
“You really think so?” Josh asked, not for the first time.
“I know so,” his father said. “Everyone who sees you knows you’ve got it. Now we have to bring it along. That’s why I want you to try this. Think about it: if you can hit a pitch going ninety, there isn’t a pitcher you’ll see for the rest of the year whose fastest ball won’t look like it’s coming at you in slow motion.”
Josh nodded and tightened his grip and stepped up to the plate. When the first yellow rubber batting cage ball came at him, Josh didn’t even swing. He had grown used to seeing the pitch leave the machine—or a pitcher’s hand—and being able to read the spin of the ball. This was something else. It was almost like he had blinked, even though he knew he hadn’t.
His father chuckled. “It’s okay. You’ll get used to it. Watch a few first.”
Two balls later, Josh clenched his teeth and readied his bat. Plunk went the machine, and the pitch came like a bullet. Josh swung, and nicked it.
“That’s it,” his father said.
Josh got a decent piece of the next two.
“Almost there, Josh,” his father said with real excitement ready to burst from his throat.
Josh felt the thrill of his father’s praise and the next ball he hammered, driving it past the pitching machine and into the back of the net.
“Excellent!” his father crowed.
Josh heard a delicate clapping and turned to see Jaden—one of his two best friends—sitting atop her ten-speed bike, balancing against the outside of the cage with one toe jammed into the space between two fence links. Josh gave her a smile and kept at it. It wasn’t long before Josh was banging them steadily. When the bin of balls stood empty, Josh’s father, a mountain of a man, crossed the space between them and hugged Josh tight.
“That’s my boy,” his father said, and Josh beamed. “All right, let me see ten bunt steps.”
“Dad,” Josh said with a groan, “I just hit a ninety-mile-an-hour fastball.”
“Never forget your basics,” his father said, extending the bat Josh had leaned against the fence. “You never know when you’ll have to bunt. You’ve got to stay sharp, even with the small stuff.”
“Can you at least pitch some balls at me?”
“Basics,” his father
said. “Footwork is the key.”
Josh could only nod. He took the bat, stepped up to the plate, and executed the step he’d take across the plate if he were to bunt.
“Loosen your shoulders just a bit. You’ve got to absorb the energy of the ball. That’s it.”
Finally Josh finished.
“Good,” his father said, grinning. “Now let’s go get an ice cream. Jaden? How about you?”
“Thanks, Mr. LeBlanc,” Jaden said, wiping her brow with the back of one hand.
Josh stuffed his equipment into his bat bag and shouldered it before following his father out of the cage, where he froze in his tracks. Walking toward them from the parking lot was a woman who was pretty enough to be on TV. She had shoulder-length glossy dark hair and pale blue eyes that sparkled at Josh’s father.
“Hello,” she said, holding out a hand that Josh’s father took before kissing her cheek.
Josh’s stomach clenched with the fear of a nightmare coming true.
The woman glanced at him and said, “This must be your son, Josh.”
Josh’s father cleared his throat and said, “It is.”
“So nice to finally meet you,” the woman said, extending a hand that Josh reluctantly shook before watching the woman do the same thing to Jaden.
“Josh,” his dad said, “this is Diane. She’s the one who’s been showing me all the new houses.”
“Oh,” Josh said, and he knew the hatred in his eyes must be burning like the flame from a welding torch.
“And there’s something that just came on the market you’ve got to see,” Diane said. “I think it’ll move right away, and I want you to see it before anyone else.”
“It’s nine-thirty,” Josh’s dad said.
“I’ve got friends in high places,” Diane said with a wave of her hand. “Come on, you can’t say no.”
