Heavy Hitters

by Mike Lupica

  And his nerve.

  “Easiest game in the world,” Ben’s dad had always said after Ben had a big day or night at the plate. “See ball, hit ball.”

  Something that had always seemed as simple as it sounded until it wasn’t. Ben had decided that he wasn’t going to spend the whole season worrying about hitting instead of wanting to hit, wanting to practically run to the plate when it was his turn to hit.

  In football, he wanted to be the quarterback because that meant the game was in his hands, he didn’t have to hope somebody else made a play, he was the one in charge of that, at least until he handed the ball off or threw it. Same in basketball, why he loved being a point guard. The game had to run through him, the ball was in his hands until he gave it to somebody else.

  You couldn’t pass the bat in baseball, and right now he wanted to. And he just wasn’t going through the whole season feeling this way. Was. Not.

  His dad had a key to the cage, so did Mr. Brown. All he had to do was ask his dad for it. And if his dad asked him why he wanted it, he’d tell him enough of the truth to get by. He wanted to get in some extra hitting. True. Felt his timing was off. Totally true.

  Nine o’clock Saturday morning, his dad in the kitchen, having just come back from his long Saturday morning run, still in his Boston College maroon T-shirt and shorts and running shoes, newspaper opened in front of him, tall iced coffee next to the paper.

  Looked up at Ben and said, “How can I help you?”

  “Can I borrow the key to the batting cage?”

  His dad smiled. “My son the perfectionist,” he said. “After the second game of the season you need to practice even though this was going to be a baseball-free day?”

  “Just want to work on some stuff, is all.”

  Trying to make it sound as normal as if he were telling his dad he was on his way over to Lily’s.

  “Can I ask what stuff?”

  “Stuff.” Ben shrugged. “Thought I missed a couple of pitches the other night I shouldn’t’ve.”

  Still smiling, Jeff McBain said, “Everybody misses pitches they think they shouldn’t miss. Every game. From Highland Park to Fenway Park.”

  “You’re the one who just said I was a perfectionist,” Ben said.

  “A blessing,” his dad said, “and a curse.” Took off his reading glasses and said, “Hey, I could go with you, if you want. Your mom won’t be back from the farmers’ market anytime soon, which means I’m exactly where I want to be for the next hour or so.”

  “Where you want to be,” Ben said, smiling back at him, “means you have nowhere you need to be.”

  “Exactly!” his dad said, slapping a palm on the table. “I could take a look at your swing, see if I can spot any fatal flaws.”

  “Dad,” Ben said, “you know sometimes I like to figure stuff out on my own.”

  Jeff McBain slapped the table again and said, “You’re kidding, I hadn’t ever noticed that!”

  “Dad? The key?”

  “Drawer next to the fridge,” he said. “Do not lose it.”

  Ben grabbed the key, thanked his dad, headed out the door to the garage to get his bat bag, the one he could sling over his shoulder as he rode his bike, wondering why he was afraid to tell his dad the real reason he was going over there.

  Maybe because right now he was afraid, period.

  He was on his bike, on his way down the driveway, when he felt his cell phone buzzing. Stuck a leg down to stop, reached in, figuring it was Sam or Coop or Lily wanting to know what time he was getting to Shawn’s.

  Wasn’t any of them.

  The name in the screen was Justin Bard’s.

  “Hey,” Ben said.

  “Hey.”

  “How you doin’?”

  “Great,” Justin said in a sarcastic voice. “Nothing better than letting your team down in one game, getting kicked out of another, and then getting suspended from the next for being a bonehead.”

  “Dude,” Ben said, “it’s over, let it go.”

  “You mean like I did my bat?”

  There was a long pause, Ben not knowing how to respond to that. Before he had to, Justin said, “Are you doing anything right now? I thought maybe I could come over or whatever.”

  Ben couldn’t remember another time when Justin had called and asked to come over, not one time since they’d known each other, certainly not since they started playing sports together. They were boys, for sure. Just not that kind of boys.

  “I’m a little jammed up right now,” Ben said. “But can I hit you back in like an hour?”

  “Yeah, sure, whatever,” Justin said.

  “Call you in an hour,” Ben said. “Okay?”

  No answer.

  “Okay?” Ben said again.

  He realized then he was talking to himself, nothing unusual about that, he felt like he’d been doing that a lot this week. He put his bike back in motion and headed up the street toward town, and the park, thinking that he was sorry Justin Bard had his problems right now, but for the next hour he needed to work on his own.

  * * *

  Nobody was in the cage when Ben got to the park. Not much baseball being played anywhere at Highland Park, at least not yet. Just one dad pitching underhand to his son on one of the fields, two kids who looked to be a little younger than Ben playing catch in the outfield of the other one. Other than that, Ben didn’t see anybody he recognized. And was happy about that, he wanted to be alone in the cage, alone with the ball coming at him, just him and baseball on this morning.

  Hit it and stop thinking so much before you did. What did his dad always say about sports? Paralysis by analysis. That was exactly where Ben was two games into the season: Baseball actually feeling like the summer job that his coach said he didn’t want it to be.

  Ben knew how to operate the new pitching machine called The Pro, they’d all learned how during the Little League season in the spring. He opened the door to the cage, hit the power switch, set the dial to fifty-five miles per hour, the speed of a good fastball in their league if not a Robbie fastball, let the machine throw a couple of pitches to make sure he had the height right.

  When he had that the way he wanted to, he filled the whole bucket with balls, ran back to where the plate was in the cage, picked up his bat, took his stance, told himself to make a nice, level swing at first, not try to kill every pitch he saw.

  It took him awhile to get into a groove, find his rhythm. He popped a couple of balls straight up, topped a couple, even swung through one pitch when he did try to drive it all the way through the fence behind The Pro.

  First bucket wasn’t so great. The second bucket, though, was much better. There were a couple of line drives Ben drove right at The Pro, would have knocked the machine right over, he was pretty sure, if there wasn’t a fiberglass shield protecting it.

  “Yeah,” Ben said after a line drive made a sound off the shield like a firecracker going off in there. “Now you got this.”

  Chatter only for himself today.

  There was a third bucket, and then a fourth. He lost count. At some point he dialed the sucker up to sixty miles per hour. See what he could do with that. Hit the first one at sixty right over the top of the shield and over the top of the machine. Best swing yet. He felt himself starting to sweat now, felt his breath coming faster into this, focused totally on the ball coming out of the slot at the front of the pitching machine.

  If he’d get underneath a pitch, or get out in front of one too much, he’d concentrate harder on the next, put a good swing on the next.

  Feeling no pain.

  When his arms finally started to get tired, he checked his cell phone, saw that he’d been there two hours. Put the phone back in his pocket, loaded up another bucket, told himself that the next pitch he really drove would be the last one of the day. Like telling yourself you were going to drain one more outside shot when you were by yourself shooting hoops.

  He’d dialed the speed up to sixty-five by then, knowing it was m
ore speed than he was likely to see all season, just crushed the second pitch he saw, like someone had drawn a target on the shield.

  He stepped out, walked up to the machine, set it back to fifty-five, raised the height just a little, changed the direction slightly, went back to the plate, picked his bat back up, did something he told himself he’d do when he got there.

  Made no move to get out of the way now that he’d aimed The Pro right at the batter’s box for a right-handed hitter, just let the ball hit him.

  He’d planned to have it hit him in the butt, but he hadn’t pushed the machine far enough to the right, and when the ball was on him, it wasn’t headed for his backside, it caught him square on the left wrist.

  It didn’t hurt the way Robbie’s pitch had, even though it had hit a bone instead of the fleshy part of his arm.

  But it hurt enough.

  Ben wanted to cry out in pain — again — but at that moment he heard Lily’s voice in the distance, Lily on her bike, heading toward the cage, Lily calling his name and waving at him at the same time.

  “Don’t think you can hide from me, McBain,” she said when she got to the cage. “It can’t be done.”

  “I wasn’t hiding from you,” he said, “and would never try to hide from you. I’m not an idiot.”

  “Most of the time,” she said. “And not nearly as often as most guys.”

  “Stop it,” Ben said, “all this praise will go to my head.”

  “You didn’t get enough baseball this week?” she said.

  “How did you know I was here, by the way?”

  “Your dad told me,” she said, “that you were here grinding away.”

  “I stink at hitting right now,” he said. “I was trying to un-stink.”

  “This is what you’re like when you have one bad shooting game at basketball,” she said. “You have to go off by yourself and shoot, like, a thousand shots.”

  She was on one side of the chain-link fence, fingers hooked through the holes. He went over and leaned against the fence, too, and forgot about his wrist.

  And winced.

  “What?” she said.

  He knew he was caught, but tried to bluff his way out.

  “What what?”

  “What’s wrong with your wrist?”

  “I did something to it right before you got here,” he said. “No biggie.”

  “Looked like it to me,” she said. “What did you do to it?”

  Ben lowered his voice, even though it was just the two of them, no one else around, and said, “You promise not to tell?”

  “If you’re asking me not to tell you know I won’t tell.”

  Ben said, “I let the ball hit me.”

  Lily pulled back from the fence, came around to the door of the cage, walked right up to him, and said, “I’m sorry, I couldn’t possibly have heard you right. Because what I thought you just said was that you let a ball hit you on purpose and now you’ve got a sore wrist because of that.” Lily put her hands on her hips — never ever a good sign — and said, “Are you crazy?”

  “Please don’t tell Sam and Coop and Shawn,” he said.

  “We did the part about me not telling already, McBain. What I’m telling you is that it’s taken one week of the baseball season for you to turn into a raving lunatic.”

  Before he could say anything Lily said, “Do you need to ice your wrist?”

  “It’s feeling better already.”

  “Sure it is.”

  She shook her head. “You let the ball hit you? I think I’ve got it. You didn’t want to come here and hit today. You wanted to be hit? Brilliant, McBain. I can’t believe guys aren’t doing this to themselves in the big leagues.”

  “Can I explain?”

  “May I explain?”

  “Sorry, Miss English Teacher,” he said. “May I explain?’

  “I can’t wait to hear this.”

  Ben said, “I just wanted to prove to myself that I didn’t have to be afraid of getting hit again in a game.”

  She put her hand on his wrist, didn’t squeeze hard. Just hard enough for him to say, “Ow?”

  “Obviously, it worked out great for you,” she said.

  “You know that expression about getting back up on a horse when you fall off?” Ben said. “If you think about it, that’s sort of what I was trying to do.”

  “I think the part of the horse we need to be talking about is that back part,” Lily said.

  “Very funny,” Ben said.

  “It’s a good thing I got here,” Lily said. “No kidding, McBain. You would have been better off taking one off your hard head.”

  “I’m fine,” he said. “Really.”

  “Really?” she said.

  His wrist was actually starting to hurt more — hurt a lot — but he would have been willing to take a pitch off the helmet before he was going to admit that to Lily Wyatt.

  “But since you think I’m in such terrible pain, you probably want to help me pick up balls, right?”

  “No,” she said. “But I’m willing to watch you do it!”

  “Have you talked to the guys about when we’re supposed to go swimming?”

  “Sam and Coop are on their way to Shawn’s as we speak.”

  “I just need to run home and get my bathing suit,” he said, thinking it would give him at least a quick chance to ice his wrist.

  “Already got it,” Lily said.

  Great, he thought, loading the balls into the bucket, making sure he’d shut off the power on the machine.

  “So we’re clear on this staying between us?”

  “If you ask me again,” Lily said, “I may have to violate the sister version of the Bro Code.”

  “Honestly, Lils, it’s nothing,” he said.

  “Really? When was the last time you were in this cage by yourself?”

  “Maybe I was in the cage by myself,” Ben said, “to stop my hitting from becoming a thing.”

  “You mean like the thing you had about Chase during basketball?” she said, raising an eyebrow at him, one of her many skills. “When you turned into a complete lunatic trying to make yourself better than him?”

  “But I got over that.”

  “Yeah,” she said, “but it took a world of hurt — for all of us — before you did.”

  “But I did get over it.”

  “Just don’t make this thing with your hitting turn into something you have to get over,” she said. “Deal?”

  “Deal,” he said.

  “I mean it,” Lily said.

  “When was the last time you said something you didn’t mean, Lils?”

  “Excellent point.”

  After the balls were picked up and he’d locked the door to the cage, Ben bumped Lily some knuckle with his left hand, just to show her he was feeling better, forcing a smile as he did, his way of showing her that he was feeling better already.

  Even though he wasn’t.

  He’d come here to hit and gotten hit instead — had basically found a way to hit himself — and now his wrist hurt worse than his arm had hurt after Robbie got him.

  Lily didn’t know how right she was.

  Totally crazy.

  By the next morning, after he’d bluffed his way through Saturday afternoon with his friends, Ben’s left wrist was swollen to twice its normal size. He tried to grip a bat even before he had breakfast, see if he could do that without it hurting.

  No shot.

  He tried to keep his left wrist in his lap when he was eating his cereal, but his mom noticed it right away.

  “Left hand off the table?” Beth McBain said. “You’ve suddenly decided to use proper table manners.”

  He grinned. “I knew how much it would mean to you.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “C’mon, Mom,” Ben said. “How many times have you told me elbows off the table?”

  “How about we make an exception?”

  “I like it this way,” he said. “It’s the new me.”

>   “You, sir, are hiding something,” she said. “You know what they say on the cop shows: Put your hands where I can see them.”

  He lifted his left hand, gave her a little wave with it.

  “Whoa,” she said.

  “Had a little accident in the cage yesterday I might have forgotten to mention.”

  He wasn’t going to admit to her, or his dad, that he’d actually let a baseball hit him on purpose, it was bad enough having Lily know, she kept giving him looks at Shawn’s pool every time she thought the guys weren’t watching.

  “What happened?” his dad said, putting down the sports section of the paper.

  “We need to have it looked at,” Ben’s mom said, “even if it is a Sunday. Look how swollen it is.”

  “No, Mom!” Ben said. “It’s not like I broke it or anything. I wasn’t paying attention and took one square off the top of the wrist.”

  “Says young Dr. McBain,” she said. “There should be a show about you on television: Ben’s Anatomy.”

  “Good one,” Ben said.

  “I thought so,” she said.

  Jeff McBain made Ben wiggle his fingers, had him make a fist, gently manipulated it one way and then another, had Ben put his palm out and push against his own.

  “I basically think it’s a bone bruise,” Ben’s dad said. “He’s got too much range of motion for there to be any real damage, far as I can tell. But I am going to ask you to consider full body armor for your next game.”

  “Maybe an Iron Man suit,” Beth McBain said.

  “TV and now the movies, Mom,” Ben said. “You’re on a roll.”

  “When is your next game, by the way?” she said.

  He told her tomorrow night, at Hewitt against the Giants.

  “Listen,” Ben said. “I know I’ve had a couple of bad breaks to start the season. But they’re not real breaks.”

  “Despite the fact that I’m living with a couple of orthopedic specialists,” Ben’s mom said, “I’d still like to have a doctor look at my boy.”

  “Mom, I’m telling you, nobody knows my body better than me,” Ben said.