Inning 5: Devon was falling apart on the mound. And TOTALLY BLAMED ME. “You just wanted to pitch,” she said, looking like she might growl.
“No, that’s not it at all! I swear, the guy usually can’t hit a slider, at least not mine.”
“Ugh, Gaggy, give it a rest with the bragging,” Mario said, patting Devon on the shoulder.
And everyone seemed to feel sorry for Devon, like my advice just ruined her life. But it wasn’t my fault!
Inning 6: Coach said she was going to put me in. This was good, even if I was worried Devon would be angry. She was already angry.
It was also when I could make or break myself. I folded the sides of my mitt one-two, one-two, making the sides touch.
“You’re going in?” Johnny said from the bench, where he’d been manning the score book.
I smiled, BIG, but checked to make sure not too many people saw it, like I was happy for Devon’s mess-up. “Seems like it!”
“Sweet, you’ll be great,” Johnny said, and gave me a thumbs-up. His thumbs-ups had a way of making me feel pretty good.
Until Madeleine sauntered by, getting a cup of water. “You’re pitching?”
I nodded. “Yup!”
“Well, I hope they have strong noses.” She was never going to get over that.
But that made me think of all that blood gushing from her face and then . . .
Between Devon’s anger and the visions of blood, I started to sweat. Then I pictured the whole Dalton Dynamite team just coming at me like bleeding zombies (do zombies bleed or do they ooze?).
And then, the yips.
Yup, the yips were BACK.
Just as Coach Hollylighter went to the mound to tell Devon I was coming in.
Devon came out and huffed past me, “Good luck out there,” but not in a voice that meant it at all. “Hope that slider works for YOU.”
Because the Dalton batter who’d homered on Devon was up again.
And I had the YIPS.
Then I looked right at the batter’s face and I knew he knew I was going to throw the slider.
What happened next was awful. I didn’t throw a slider. Nope. I threw a meatball.
A meatball—the biggest, juiciest, easiest-to-hit pitch imaginable. And my pitch was such a giant meatball that I might as well have been standing on a huge plate of spaghetti.
Ugh, I knew the batter was going to take such a big bite out of that stupid meatball. My legs felt like spaghetti standing on a pile of spaghetti.
Crack!!
The hit was a perfect line drive to center, not a high fly ball but just high enough to whiz right over my head. It was up to Madeleine to catch it.
For a second, I imagined she was going to jump out of the way, since everything I do injures her somehow. But she was running for it, and she dove with her glove stretched out in front of her and snagged the ball out of midair.
If Madeleine hadn’t been there, it could have been a lot worse.
But it didn’t matter. Every pitch I threw after that was a nightmare. Everything was awful. And the team that was waiting for me in the dugout was not one that I had any rapport with.
We lost. Stats-wise, the loss went to Devon. But all my hopes for starting a new win streak were ruined.
It got worse.
I was packing my equipment bag quietly. None of us were talking. It was the Penguins’ first loss, after all. I looked around for someone to talk to and tell me it was no big deal, but even Johnny Madden, who I thought was a fan, or my friend, or something, was quiet. He gave me the saddest of smiles and said, “You know, it’s not a big deal.” But it was a big deal. The biggest. I could tell he knew it. He’d been my first fan and I’d let him down. I’d let everyone down. The first game I played in and the Penguins’ winning streak was no more.
AND THEN I heard Devon say to Mario, “We should have won that game.”
And Mario said, “Yeah, it’s all Gaggy’s fault.”
And Devon said, “Is it her fault she’s a JINX??”
A JINX????
A JINX is worse than a LOSER. A jinx not only loses but rains down losing on everything around them.
FAMOUS SPORTS JINXES AND CURSES
•Billy Goat Curse: The reason why the Chicago Cubs hadn’t won a World Series between 1908 and 2016. They failed at their last chance in 1945, when the owner of the Billy Goat Tavern put a curse on the team after he was told to leave a World Series game because his pet goat was too smelly to bring to the ballpark. (But now you can’t even bring a water bottle to the ballpark, so it seems like he was getting away with a lot.)
•Madden Cover Curse: It’s said that whatever NFL player is on the cover of this video game (which is no relation to Johnny Madden) will get hurt, have a bad season, or quit.
•Heisman Trophy Curse: Another football one. Whatever college player wins the Heisman screws up in bowl games or is just no good when they’re recruited by pro teams.
•Sports Illustrated Cover Jinx: Athletes who get the cover of the magazine often are injured or lose important games after appearing on it. It happened to my all-time fave, Mo’Ne Davis. After she was the first girl to ever throw a shutout game in the Little League World Series, she lost a crucial game to Chicago, ending her team’s championship run.
JINXES ARE REAL! AND NOW I’M A REAL-LIFE JINX!
I wouldn’t want to play with a jinx, no offense to the jinxes of the world.
WINS 1: (but probably a lie)
LOSSES: 6 (times a thousand because I’m a JINX)
WITS ABOUT YOU
Post-Day Analysis:
April 26
The Wits About You is a SURPRISE play. It happens in baseball, a lot. Like, I can’t always necessarily strategize or plan because I don’t know what’s going to happen. Maybe a batter who always swings for the fences suddenly bunts. Or a ball looks like it’s going to make it over the outfield wall for a homer but it stops just short and I can make a diving catch.
To be prepared for these plays, I need my wits about me: to be alert, observant, ready for anything. Like a lion ready to strike. (Except lions sleep 20 hours a day, so they only have their wits about them for four hours a day. Lazy.)
So there I was, the day after the lousiest lousy game I’ve ever played. I was a jinx. I wanted to quit everything.
JINX EVIDENCE:
•On the way into school, I tried to hold the door for some eighth graders but smashed the door into Ms. Pluhar’s face because I didn’t see her standing there.
•In English class, everyone who was sitting near me had pens that ran out of ink.
•My shoes came untied, and when I went to retie them, the laces snapped. On both.
•Of the three people who actually smiled at me today, all three of them had stuff in their teeth and didn’t hear me when I tried to tell them.
Being a jinx made me feel not like myself. I did not like feeling not like myself. I LIKE MYSELF. Other people like myself. Diego called me a force of positivity, even when we were arguing about something. I used to get bonus french fries and invites to every birthday party. I had a cheering section. Now I was a colossal bummer.
I didn’t even know if I should go to practice. Devon hated me, and Mario already hated me, and Madeleine was scared of me. Johnny was disappointed in me. And Coach Hollylighter had never wanted me on the team in the first place. So, pretty much, I had the opposite of rapport.
At lunch, I avoided the baseball team and went to one of Piper Bell’s “atriums.” They’re just big, glass-windowed rooms that get superhot, so most students steer clear of them. Except me and Johnny Madden, it turned out.
Of course, his face was buried in a textbook. And I still felt so lame for him witnessing my jinxiness that I started to turn around—maybe I could find a supply closet to sit in and eat my lunch.
“Hey, Gabby,” he said. Darn. I couldn’t just walk out now.
“Hey,” I said, and sat down with my history textbook, opening my lunch sack on the small table
next to me. I didn’t say anything else because I couldn’t think of anything. So I flipped through my book. Somehow I’d become a person who ate lunch quietly reading my history textbook. (I was pretending to read it. I hoped I wouldn’t find out Louie was wrong about that “no real letter grades” thing, because I hadn’t exactly been focusing on my studies. It’s a hard thing to do when you’re having an identity crisis.)
But I ate my turkey sandwich (switched from a Tupperware container of mushy leftover enchiladas that Dumpster had eaten in seconds) and stared at facts about the Revolutionary War.
“How’s it going?”
I looked up and saw that Johnny Madden was talking to me.
“That game was awful, huh? I really jinxed everyone.”
I didn’t even try to make some kind of pleasant conversation because—Hey! Jinx over here—and who cared what a jinx had to say? Plus, it was the only thing on my mind.
“It wasn’t all your fault,” he said. “The whole jinx idea is stupid.”
“You don’t believe in jinxes?”
“Mathematically, no. The team was due to have an off game and it just happened to coincide with your arrival.”
“Sounds like a jinx to me.”
“Or just randomness and chance and some errors,” he said. “I think you’re being too hard on yourself.” He leaned back over his books then, and even though I didn’t feel better, I was glad at least one person wasn’t completely against me. Maybe I hadn’t disappointed him too badly.
“Thanks,” I said. I wanted to ask him something else, but I couldn’t think of anything good. Instead, I managed to read a whole chapter of my history book and finish my sandwich before the bell rang for the next period.
I was surprised when Johnny waited for me at the atrium entryway. “I’ll walk with you to algebra.” He was brave, to be willing to be seen with a jinx.
As we walked down the hall, my thoughts bounced back and forth: 1. I was a jinx. 2. Did Johnny LIKE me?
Why else would he be trying to reassure me by talking about how even so-called bad professional players are still pretty good overall because statistically they might only get on base two out of every ten at bats but all told blah blah blah . . . I wanted to listen, I did. He was smart and kind of interesting and I got the sense that not many people listened to him. But I was having a problem staying focused.
Whatever Johnny’s deal was, I believe in jinxes as much as I believe in math. They are FACT. And they’ve probably been around longer than math, when I think about it.
“Besides,” he was saying, “there’s no such thing really as a perfect season. Unless you’re not playing. But then you’re not doing anything.”
He was a little right on that, but shouldn’t a person AIM for a perfect season? And not be a JINX? I wasn’t about to argue with Johnny’s math, but I still thought that if I was a jinx, I’d ruin the baseball team. And they had had a perfect season, until me.
I was sure I would never feel like a winner again. Baseball was my sport, right? I needed to make it work for me, didn’t I? But how did I do that when everything was just not working?
I still had no plan when I walked into algebra the next period. The classroom was CHAOS. All the thinking I was doing was taken over by just trying to process what was going on.
And then I understood: we had a substitute.
It was Coach Raddock, who the school called a “floating sub.” Which makes me think of a ghostly submarine, but I don’t come up with these crazy names. Coach Raddock was the opposite of Coach Hollylighter, at least appearance-wise. She was short, with a fuzzy puff of curls pulled on top of her head and the kind of face that looked like she was always about to smile. Even now, when things weren’t going well.
The class was not being kind to Coach Raddock. To be honest, a ghost submarine would have gotten their attention way better.
No one was in their seats. And the reason came down to Mario and some of his goon squad. They were batting around Mr. Patler’s Albert Einstein action figure from one end of the room to the other, trying to get him into the wastebaskets on either side of the room.
Meanwhile, the other students were cheering and jumping around like crazy, counting how many times Albert flew back and forth. (The action figure, not the real Einstein. I would hope the true discoverer of relativity would get more respect.)
Coach Raddock was at the front of the classroom, waving around Mr. Patler’s lesson plan, saying, “Look, I don’t know what you all ate for lunch today, but we have work to do.”
She saw me and I guess she knew who I was because she said, “Garcia, can you please erase the board?”
In that moment, I knew I had a choice.
I could join in with everyone else in the Einstein game. Or I could do what Coach Raddock had asked. She knew my name and was being nice to me. I should go with Coach Raddock.
So I stepped up to the whiteboard and started to scrub away the marker from a few days ago. I finally managed to conquer a stubborn equation and was about to put the eraser down and go to my seat, even as the other chaos took place around me.
But then Albert Einstein came flying at my head. Tiny action-figure Albert, just to be clear, but he was FAST. Before I knew what was happening, I swatted him away with the eraser and he traveled directly to the wastebasket behind Mario, whose head swiveled as he watched the toy cruise by.
Albert landed with a clunk in the trash basket and the whole room burst into applause.
After the game the day before, and yeah, everything else, it felt really good. Good and very unjinx-like.
Mario, of course, was sulking about it. But then he got his mean-Mario face on and said, “Too bad your reflexes don’t work on the field, Gaggy.”
Which didn’t even make sense, because it wasn’t like my reflexes had been bad in the game. It was just that everything I did had been bad.
“Too bad your brain doesn’t work anywhere, Mario.” It wasn’t the insult he deserved, but it was an answer.
“Calm, calm,” Coach Raddock said, but she looked relieved that the Mario and Gabby trash-talk session had somehow quieted the class. Then she looked at me. “That was a nice goal, Gabby—like someone who plays field hockey.”
Wait. Field hockey.
Hmm, field hockey.
Was Coach Raddock telling me I should think about field hockey?
Of course she was, after that goal.
But I’m a baseball player, I thought. Through and through, forever and always.
Well, I was a baseball player. I wasn’t sure I was really much of one lately. JINX JINX JINX, the tiny Gabbys cried as announcers Bob and Judy just held their heads in their hands.
But then . . .
Whoa. I was going to think about field hockey. I NEEDED to think about field hockey. Maybe that was what I should have been doing all along. If my sport wasn’t working, maybe I needed to change it.
As we took our seats, Johnny Madden said, “She’s right; the field hockey team is pretty weak. Statistically speaking, one good player would make a huge difference. One good player would be 100 percent more good players than that team has.”
A huge difference?
Like a BEST-SEASON-EVER difference?
I could imagine it all now, me, Gabby Garcia, singlehandedly changing the fate of the doomed team. A doomed team with a coach who had—kind of—suggested I join, like I was WANTED. For my WINNING abilities.
Maybe the solution to my jinxiness wasn’t waiting for a bunch of math-y statistics to turn in my favor.
Maybe it was accepting my field hockey FATE.
WIN!
WINS: 2
LOSSES: 6 (that’s starting to look better already!)
FIELD HOCKEY FANTASTIC
Goal: Try to be awesome at my new sport and make the team.
Action: Play hard, don’t be full of myself, and try my best at a totally new sport I’ve never played!
Post-Day Analysis:
April 29
So I felt like Michael Jordan. I’m usually on the Mo’Ne Davis trajectory but today I can’t not think about Michael, “Air” Jordan, my dad’s favorite athlete. Dad said there’s no one better. He won’t shut up about it.
But once upon a time, Michael Jordan switched sports.
He tried to play baseball.
Here’s the thing: Michael Jordan is an elite athlete.
But he was not elite at all at baseball.
THINGS MICHAEL JORDAN HAS PROBABLY NEVER DONE THAT HE WAS PROBABLY BETTER AT THAN BASEBALL
•Tightrope walking
•Giving guided tours of museums devoted to strange things, like eating utensils or birdcages
•Being quizzed on the Dewey decimal system
•Making butter from scratch like they do in Colonial Williamsburg
So who knew what was going to happen with me and field hockey? I mean, I WANTED to be good. I expected that I could be good. And, from what I’d heard, the field hockey team was not that good. So I could be the best person on a bad team, maybe? Or maybe make the team good? I would love to make a bad team good.
But first I needed to know something about field hockey. There was only one person for that: Diego. And, as luck would have had it, we’d been scheduled for a phone call night. So, after he told me that jungle life was getting lonely and we counted the days up until he was supposed to be back (forty-two, if all went as planned—and there happened to be an Atlanta Braves home game the day after he returned, so we decided to go), I told him about my JINX status and about my field hockey plans.
He’d been skeptical at first. “But you’re a BASEBALL PLAYER. The best one I know.”
“But I think the universe is trying to tell me something, Diego. Maybe I need to try this. As part of my story.”
(Diego loves athlete life stories, especially ones with twists and turns. Michael Jordan didn’t make his high school varsity basketball team when he first tried out, for example. Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams were great baseball players who missed seasons in the prime of their careers because they were called to military service. My girl Mo’Ne Davis actually thinks of herself as a basketball player first, and a baseball player second, even though she’s clearly awesome at baseball.)
Gabby Garcia's Ultimate Playbook Page 6
