The Batboy

by Mike Lupica

  A year after that Brian was born.

  Cole Dudley never lasted more than a season or two with one team. And Liz Dudley finally announced she wasn’t going to tour the American and National Leagues anymore, not with a baby. She moved back to the Detroit area, first to her hometown of Perrysburg, Ohio, about an hour away from Detroit, and then to Bloomfield Hills after she got her current radio job.

  By the time Brian was old enough to go to school, the only time he saw his dad was between the end of the season in October and the beginning of spring training for pitchers and catchers in February.

  “For most of our marriage,” Brian’s mom said to him one time, “I looked at baseball as the other woman.”

  “You know what I really felt when he finally left?” she’d said that day. “Relieved. Because I didn’t have to compete with baseball anymore.”

  So now it was just the two of them, the table set permanently for two, Brian and his mom having dinner together on the unmentioned anniversary, his dad not calling her today because he never called her. He was in Japan now working as a pitching coach. Neither one of them had heard from him in months, not even on Brian’s birthday. The dad he knew was never coming back.

  Sometimes Brian wondered if his dad still loved baseball as much, even on the other side of the world. More often, he wondered if his dad ever missed him.

  His mom had come up big tonight with dinner, made him all his favorite stuff: cheeseburgers on the grill, fried onions to go on top, homemade french fries, even mashed potatoes, maybe his favorite dish in the whole world, on the side. She had timed it out perfectly, too, putting the food out about five minutes after the end of the game, the Tigers having hung on for a 6-4 victory, closer Brad Morley pitching them out of a bases-loaded jam in the bottom of the ninth.

  “I can’t believe you doubled down with mashed potatoes on top of the fries,” Brian said.

  “Think of it as a hearty postgame meal,” she said. “Even with the postgame buffet in the clubhouse, your father used to come home and eat like he’d just ended some kind of fast.”

  They didn’t talk much about him anymore. He wondered why she did so now. Maybe it was because of the anniversary.

  He smothered the fries in some hot sauce, saw his mom wince as he did. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m just trying to put a little hair on my chest.”

  “Better you than me,” she said. “I used to wait for your father to pour hot sauce on his breakfast cereal.”

  Brian didn’t know how he was supposed to respond to that, never knew if his mom even wanted a response when the subject of his dad came up, so he did what he did a lot.

  Changed the subject.

  “I still can’t believe we got Hank Bishop back!”

  “He’s pretty old now, isn’t he?” his mom said.

  Brian said, “Not really. In fact, he’s not even as old as . . .” He knew he had stopped himself too late.

  “As old as your sainted mother?” Liz Dudley said.

  “You know, that just came out flat wrong,” Brian said. “The two of you are practically the same age. He turns thirty-six later this summer.” He grinned at her, sighed, and then said, “Moving right along.”

  Now they both laughed.

  “Let me ask you something, though,” his mom said. “Weren’t we still hating on him not long ago because of the whole steroids thing?”

  “Sort of,” he said. “He was totally stupid, no doubt. Twice stupid, as a matter of fact. But he’s cleaned up his act now.”

  “And we know he’s cleaned up . . . because?”

  “Because,” Brian said, “the Tigers wouldn’t have signed him if he hadn’t. And because if he ever tests positive again, he’ll be banned from baseball for life.”

  She smiled now, mostly to herself, and said, “That’s what I keep trying to be. Banned from baseball for life.”

  Brian leaned forward, hands out, almost like he was reaching for her. “Mom,” he said, “you get why this is a totally cool thing, right? What a cool thing this can be for Hank and the Tigers? Because if he has a good season, then all the drug stuff and the way he’s messed up won’t be the last thing people remember about him. This is a way for him to get people to remember how great he used to be.”

  “The way you do,” she said.

  “Well, maybe not exactly the way I do,” he said. “I just don’t want him to go out with the whole world still hating on him for steroids.”

  She nodded and said, “Honey, if you’re happy, then I’m happy.”

  Brian knew she wanted to mean it.

  “So how did practice go today?” she asked.

  Brian reminded her about how his first games with his travel team would be played at home next weekend.

  And then it was quiet at the table, the way it often was when his mom finally ran out of the questions she felt she was supposed to ask about baseball. When they both ran out of things to say to each other. It was happening more and more, them having so little to say to each other when the subject wasn’t baseball that Brian wondered if it used to be the exact same way when she and his dad sat at this same table.

  When he got up to his room, Brian went into his closet and got out the box labeled “Hank Bishop.”

  It was all in there. The issue of Sports Illustrated with Hank on the cover from the summer when Brian was eight. The autographed ball that his mom had bought for him at a Field of Dreams store in Indianapolis when she’d been at a radio convention there last summer, the one that Brian had taken off his desk and put in the box with the rest of the Hank stuff when he’d gotten suspended for drugs the first time. There was the autographed picture the Tigers’ public relations department had sent to him, one that read, “To a future Tiger! All the best! Hank Bishop.”

  Then there were the game programs, from every game Brian had ever seen Hank Bishop play in person. There was the shoe box inside the bigger box with all of his Hank Bishop baseball cards. His first glove, too small for him now, a Hank Bishop model TPX.

  And at the very bottom of the box, in a manila envelope, were the Comerica ticket stubs.

  Brian went through them now and found the stub from the very first game he’d watched Hank play, eight years ago against the Yankees, on July 27, the first time he’d ever seen a big-league game in person. Hank Bishop had hit two home runs that night, the last a walk-off job to win the game in the bottom of the thirteenth.

  And, all this time later, Hank Bishop was back. He really had come back into Brian’s world. And he knew, even in his great baseball heart, that he shouldn’t be this stoked about it, as stoked as he’d sounded at dinner with his mom. But he was. He just was. He remembered how hurt he’d been when he’d found out Hank Bishop—his guy—had been enough of a dope to start using dope.

  Not hurt the way he had been when his dad left. But hurt by sports in a way that Brian never thought it could.

  Now the fan in him couldn’t wait for the Tigers’ road trip to end, couldn’t wait for them to get back to Comerica, couldn’t wait to be in the same dugout with Hank Bishop, in the same clubhouse. The same field.

  He wished he could have explained it better to his mom at dinner—why this was so important to him. He wished he could have made her understand. She had tried, the way she always tried, in those moments when he knew she was trying to be both mother and father to him at the same time. She just didn’t get it. And Brian understood that, he really did. She couldn’t be everything to him, and he wasn’t going to love her any less because she didn’t love baseball the way he did.

  But sometimes he couldn’t help himself, no matter how hard he tried, no matter how dumb he told himself he was being, no matter how mad it made him to open the door even a crack.

  Sometimes he missed his dad.

  CHAPTER 5

  During the regular season, Brian and Kenny had played in the thirteen-fourteen division of Bloomfield Little League. Now they were with the Sting, playing in a travel league called the North Oakland B
aseball Federation. The winner of their league would head to the state tournament, which this year would be played about twenty minutes away, at Liberty Park in Sterling Heights, at the end of August.

  Sometimes they’d play a three-game weekend series against the same team, either the Motor City Hit Dogs or Clarkson River Rebels or Lake Orion Dragons. Sometimes they’d play in Bloomfield, occasionally in Birmingham, going over to Memorial Park in Royal Oak for a night game, because Memorial had lights. Before the regular season was over, they’d have played thirty games.

  Brian had already gotten his batboy job when it came time to try out for travel ball, and before he did, he told Coach Joe Johnson that even if he made the team, he would have to miss some games because of his job. But when Coach Johnson heard what the job was, he smiled.

  “I was a batboy with the White Sox the summer I turned sixteen,” he said. “Best summer of my whole life.”

  Then Coach Johnson had said he’d check with the board of directors for Bloomfield Little League about adding an extra player this summer, giving one more kid a chance to play with the Sting.

  “Nothing a coach likes better than a win-win situation,” Coach said. “I feel like I just won a doubleheader.”

  Brian checked with Mr. Schenkel, who said that a lot of his batboys played on travel teams and tournament teams in the summer, and that he was sure he could get together with Coach Johnson to come up with a schedule that would work for everybody, especially since Brian wouldn’t be traveling with the Tigers.

  When Coach Johnson got the preliminary schedule for the Sting, he e-mailed it to Brian’s mom, who e-mailed it to Mr. Schenkel. By the end of that week they had all come up with a way for him to play the five weekends when the Tigers were on the road during the Sting’s season and get enough time off from the Tigers when the Tigers were at home to play at least twenty of the Sting’s thirty games.

  Brian told Mr. Schenkel that he wanted to miss as few Tigers games as possible, that as much as he loved playing travel ball with his friends, his job was his first priority. He just wanted to make sure that Mr. Schenkel understood that he’d spend every day and night of the summer at Comerica if he could.

  The first series of the season for the Sting was against one of the two teams from Rochester, the Rockies, who had made the state finals the year before. But Kenny had shut them out on Friday night, and now the Sting seemed to be on their way to an easy win at the West Hills field on Saturday afternoon.

  It was 5-0 after three innings, but that was when things started to fall apart behind Brendan DePonte, their number-two starter. And the trouble actually started because of their number-one starter, Kenny Griffin, who played shortstop when he wasn’t pitching.

  With two outs in the top of the fourth, bases loaded, the score still 5-0, the Rochester cleanup batter hit what looked like the dream double-play ball of all time right at Kenny, who wasn’t just the best arm the Sting had, but the best pure hitter and the best fielder. Sometimes Brian thought Kenny had even better hands than Willie Vazquez, the Tigers’ shortstop.

  Not this time.

  Kenny came up and out of the ball way too soon, as if he could already see himself flipping the ball to Kyle Nichols, coming over to second. So instead of his fielding the ball cleanly, it bounced off the heel of Kenny’s glove, rolling to his left. Then, when he hurried to pick up the ball, he managed to kick it into short center instead. By then the score was 5-2, runners on second and third for the Rockies.

  The inning turned into a nightmare after that, as Brendan completely lost his composure. The Rockies got four more hits and scored five more runs, and by the time the Sting got back to the dugout, they were losing, 7-5. Different day, different game. It was one of the beauties of sports, how fast things changed.

  Except you didn’t think it was so beautiful when it happened to you, especially after ringing up the kind of lead they’d had against one of the best teams they were going to see all summer.

  Kyle hit a home run in the bottom of the seventh to get them back to 7-6, but that was the way it stayed until the bottom of the ninth. Brian was batting seventh tonight and had gone 1-for-3. He’d doubled down the left-field line in the second, knocking in a run and then coming around to score himself. He’d lined out twice after that, and walked right after Matt’s home run in the seventh, never moving off first.

  And now, with the Sting up to bat for last licks, the lineup had worked itself around to him.

  Kenny had walked with two outs. Then Andrew Clark, their catcher, managed to squeeze a ground-ball single between the first and second basemen. The Rockies’ right fielder charged the ball like a champ, holding Kenny to second. But still:

  Tying run on second, winning run on first, game on Brian’s bat if he could hit one hard someplace.

  Game on him, in the first big weekend of travel ball.

  He didn’t expect it to happen this way very often. Brian knew he wasn’t one of the real stars on this team, and he almost wished it was Kenny or Kyle who had this chance to win the game. They were the ones who were supposed to be up with the game on the line.

  Yet it was Brian up at bat. Against the Rockies’ closer, the biggest kid in the game, a real load, but one who could throw just as hard as Kenny could.

  He dug in and locked eyes on Kenny’s as Kenny took his short lead off second. And Kenny must have been thinking right along with him, because he pointed at Brian now with the index fingers of both hands and mouthed these words as he did:

  Be the man.

  Brian nodded, got himself set, and then proceeded to swing right through strike one. Stepped out, rubbed some dirt on his hands, took a deep breath, stepped back in, set his bat.

  And looked even worse swinging through strike two.

  The man? Brian felt like a little boy. But then he caught a break. The Rockies’ closer tried way too hard to strike him out on the next two pitches, like he was Brad Morley of the Tigers trying to amp up the radar gun to 100 mph. He missed wild and high both times. Only a great reach by the Rockies’ catcher on the second one kept Kenny from advancing to third.

  There were no stats for Brian to fall back on now, no matchup numbers. All those decimal points inside his head were totally useless. The only numbers that mattered were these: 2-2. The only thing that mattered was finding a way to do something all hitters tried to do in moments like this:

  Figure out a way to catch up with the other guy’s fastball.

  Brian guessed that the next pitch would come right down the middle. One of those hit-me-if-you-can pitches.

  Brian did.

  He kept his head on the ball, made sure not to pull off it, kept his hands back when the impulse was to rush them through.

  And when he did bring his hands through, he gave the ball a ride.

  For one split second he thought this was finally the one, thought he had hit it hard enough to clear the left-field fence. Not just get a real jack finally, but a walk-off jack at that. But as much of a rope as it was, the ball didn’t have the elevation. What it did have was enough smash to split the left fielder and center fielder and roll all the way to the wall, scoring Andrew with the run that gave the Sting an 8-7 win.

  Brian wasn’t sure how to act at first.

  By the time he got to second, it was as if he’d forgotten all the rules of baseball, which he knew as well as he knew all his numbers. So he put on the brakes and stopped right there, afraid to leave the bag, even after Andrew had crossed.

  And it was there, at second base, where Kenny Griffin got his arms around him and his momentum sent them both tumbling onto the outfield grass at West Hills.

  Before the rest of the Sting got there, Kenny yelled, “Bro, you know what you are today, right?”

  “Get off me, you lunatic,” Brian said, enjoying the moment even as Kenny crushed him.

  “Bro,” Kenny said, “you’re the Bishop of Bloomfield!”

  Bishop. As in Hank Bishop. It was a name Brian didn’t mind one bit.
r />   CHAPTER 6

  Brian had come early his first day of work at Comerica, had his mom drop him off at two in the afternoon for a seven o’clock game, and even then he’d seen that manager Davey Schofield was already there, all his coaches were already there, and so were most of the players.

  The players didn’t have to officially be there until three o’clock, but even that first day Brian could see the looks guys who showed up right on time got.

  Like: Where have you been?

  So from that first day, Brian knew something: Even big-league ballplayers wanted to be here as much as he did.

  It was as if they couldn’t wait to leave their real homes for their baseball home, to get here and be part of the team—despite all the time they’d already spent together, beginning with spring training.

  His mom said it used to be the exact same way for his dad. Once Christmas was over, she said, it was like he kept checking his watch, waiting for it to be time for him to leave for Florida or Arizona.

  No matter how late a night game ended, even if it went deep into extra innings, they would be back early the next day, ready to do it again. Another day of the longest season in all of pro sports. It had taken only a couple of weeks, but Brian was beginning to understand what it was like to be a part of this world within a world: the world of the clubhouse, the dugout, the game, of baseball.

  Some of these players had been only five or six years older than Brian when they’d first gotten to be a part of this world, and it was as if once they did, they never wanted to leave. As if this was a place where they never had to grow up.

  The Tigers had returned from their road trip, ready to start a four-game series, all night games, against the Angels. Brian asked his mom if he could show up real early.

  Like it was the first day all over again.

  “This wouldn’t have anything to do with your man Hank coming home today, would it?” his mom said.

  “Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t,” he said.