Change-up (2 page)

“But … you’re on the team,” Stevie said.

“Well, yes and no,” Doyle said. “They brought me in at the tail end of the regular season. Started three games, relieved in three others. Didn’t get a win. I’m not on the postseason roster, but they let me hang around.”

That
was why Stevie knew the name. He remembered seeing Doyle’s name in the postseason media guide he had paged through on the train down from Philadelphia. If he remembered right, Doyle was kind of an interesting story: the Nationals had traded for him at the end of August
because two of their pitchers had been hurt and they needed someone to come up from the minors and make a spot start. What made the story interesting was that Doyle was in his late thirties and had never pitched in a major-league game prior to the trade. Then, suddenly, he’d been thrust into the middle of a pennant race.

“You didn’t win a game, but you pitched really well, didn’t you?” Stevie said, hoping he was right.

“I pitched okay,” Doyle said. “I was thrilled to be here. I just wasn’t quite good enough to make the postseason roster.”

“Hey, Norbert, come on over here!” someone was shouting.

“Sounds like a lot of guys think you
are
part of this,” Stevie said.

Doyle smiled. “They’re good guys,” he said. “I’ll tell you one thing. I’ll never forget a minute of this experience.”

He shook Stevie’s hand again. “Good luck with your story tonight,” he said. “My kids will be thrilled to know I met you.”

With that he was gone, and Stevie stood alone, still in search of a story. Too late, as Doyle was doused in champagne, it occurred to him that he had just let a terrific story walk away.

STEVIE WAS SOUND ASLEEP
on the train back to Philadelphia the next morning when his cell phone rang. He stared blearily at the number for a moment, then realized it was Susan Carol and answered.

“Are you still sulking?” she asked.

“Can you sulk when you’re asleep?”

She laughed. “Lazy bum,” she said. “I’m about to go to school.”

Stevie grunted. He knew she had more reason to be tired than he did. It had been after 1 a.m. before they left the ballpark, and she had caught a 7 a.m. plane back to North Carolina, which meant she’d had to be up at four. He’d been able to sleep until seven before catching a train home.

“I don’t know how you do it,” he said to Susan Carol. “Don’t you have swimming practice today too?”

“Adrenaline,” she answered. “Actually, swimming will feel good.”

Sometimes he wondered if Susan Carol was really a mortal or if she was from another planet. She was tall, gorgeous, smart, tough, and full of energy—sleep or no sleep. It was no wonder Norbert Doyle’s son had a crush on her. What was really amazing was that Susan Carol, with her pick of any boy she wanted, liked
him
. Even though he had grown steadily from five four when they first met to almost five eight now, she still had about three inches on him and still looked about eighteen to his, well, fourteen. But she told people that he was her boyfriend, and he liked that … a lot.

“So,” she repeated, “are you still sulking?”

“A little bit.”

After Norbert Doyle had disappeared to join the other revelers the night before, Stevie had been left to piece together a sidebar story from predictable quotes: “Greatest moment of my life … Guys really stepped up when they had to…. We’re a family…. Everyone in here gave a hundred and ten percent.”

He had been angry with himself for not asking Norbert Doyle how it felt to be part of the team but not part of the team.

“Don’t feel bad,” Kelleher had said when Stevie lamented his inability to think or act faster. “No one else saw it as a story either. He’ll probably be around for the
World Series. You can do a sidebar on him from there if you still think it’s worth doing.”

The World Series was scheduled to begin in Boston the following Tuesday.
If
Stevie got two papers done for English and did all right on his Spanish test on Monday, he would fly up there on Tuesday morning. His parents weren’t thrilled with the idea that he would miss yet another week of school, but he knew his dad would stand by him as long as he wasn’t falling too far behind.

“Look, this is what Stevie wants to do someday,” his dad had said to his mom when the chance to go to the playoffs had come up. “He’s already proven he’s good at it, so this is as much a learning experience as school is for him right now.”

“Bill, you’re rationalizing,” his mom had said. “He doesn’t need to cover
every
event.”

“I know,” his dad had answered. “But let’s be honest. How many kids have this kind of opportunity? He loves it and I think we should support him.”

His mother had finally bought in—at least enough to agree to let him go. Stevie knew his mom didn’t exactly understand his fascination with sports and sportswriting, and she hadn’t been thrilled at all by the various scrapes he and Susan Carol had gotten into, but he also knew that deep down she was proud of him. His father, on the other hand, loved every second of it.

“If you can’t be a great athlete, the next-best thing is getting to tell their stories,” Bill Thomas said. “Sometimes I wish I’d tried sportswriting instead of going to law school.”

Stevie wasn’t worried about a career path right now, just ninth-grade English and Spanish.

Susan Carol was talking, and he realized he’d been day-dreaming, looking out the window. “Just make sure you get your work done this weekend,” he heard her say. “I don’t want to go to the World Series without you.”

“Don’t worry,” he said, snapping back to attention. “I’ll be there for sure.”

“And don’t sulk,” she said. “You’ll get another shot at Doyle.”

Stevie wondered if Doyle would travel with the team to Boston. If not, he could try to talk to him when the series moved to Washington for game three.

“Yeah, you’re right,” he said finally. “I’ll be fine.”

“We’re pulling into school, gotta go,” she said, slipping into the Southern accent she tried to lose north of the Mason-Dixon Line.

“Talk to you later, Scarlett,” he said, unable to resist using the nickname he’d put on her when they first met.

She clicked off. Stevie closed his eyes again, smiling. But all he could see was Doyle being sprayed by champagne. Oh yeah, Steve Thomas, sportswriting genius … A moment later he was asleep.

The next few days crawled by for Stevie. After the excitement of the playoffs, being back at school was a complete bore.

The weekend was spent writing an English paper, which
wasn’t nearly as much fun as writing a sidebar on game seven—even a
bad
sidebar—Stevie thought. His spirits picked up on Sunday morning when he spotted a headline in the
Inquirer’s
“World Series Notes and Quotes” column. It read: “Doyle to Be Activated.”

Stevie read the three-paragraph item raptly:

That was it. Stevie was elated—for Doyle, who would now get to be part of a World Series as an active player, and for himself because he knew Doyle would be in Boston. Then it occurred to him that with Doyle on the active roster, he would be a natural story for anyone looking for a column or a sidebar. No one could resist the underdog-makes-good story line.

Still, he did have a little bit of an in with Doyle, if only because the pitcher had twins his age—one of whom had a crush on Susan Carol. All of that might help him once in Boston. He wouldn’t miss the story twice, that much he knew for sure.

When he wasn’t working on English or Spanish over the weekend, Stevie read everything he could get his hands on about the impending World Series. Once, the Red Sox had been baseball’s perennial hard-luck story: frequent contenders, never champions. Some years they simply collapsed in September. In others they made it to October only to break their fans’ hearts: they had lost the seventh game of a World Series four times—in 1946, 1967, 1975, and 1986.

The loss in ’86, especially, was a crusher. The Sox had had a three-games-to-two lead going into game six against the Mets and took a 5–3 lead in the tenth inning. When the first two Mets’ hitters in the bottom of the tenth were retired, the scoreboard operator at Shea Stadium, apparently forgetting there was still one out to go, flashed
“Congratulations Boston Red Sox, 1986 World Champions” on the board.

The third out never happened. The Mets got three straight singles, Bill Buckner made an infamous error, and the Mets won the game 6–5. Two nights later, with the Red Sox leading 3–0, the Mets came back to win game seven and crush Boston’s hopes once again.

It all changed in Boston in the fall of 2004. That October the Red Sox came back from three games down to beat the lordly New York Yankees in the American League Championship Series and went on to finally win the World Series for the first time in eighty-six years.

It was the end of the much-talked-about Curse of the Bambino. A year after winning the 1918 World Series, the Red Sox had traded the great Babe Ruth to the Yankees. Acquiring Ruth had turned the Yankees from a struggling franchise into a dominant one. Yankee Stadium was built in 1923, and it became known as the House That Ruth Built. From 1919 until 2004 the Yankees won twenty-six World Series; the Red Sox, none. The Sox’s long drought had begun with the trade of Ruth—and rumors of a curse were born.

But now the Red Sox were four victories away from winning their third World Series title in six years. In a sense, they had
become
the Yankees: the team with lots of money, lots of stars, and the swagger of past championships. The Nationals, on the other hand, were the quintessential underdog. They had been awful for years—first while playing in Montreal, then after moving to Washington in 2005.
They had been picked to finish last in the National League East before the season began and had shocked people by winning the division title.

They had won fourteen of their last sixteen games to sail past the Mets—who ended up making the playoffs as the wild card team—and the Phillies. The Nats’ young pitchers all seemed to come into their own at once, and they pulled out one improbable win after another, including a late-September victory in which Johan Santana pitched the first no-hitter in Mets club history, only to lose the game 1–0 when the Nationals scored in the ninth inning on an error, a stolen base, a sacrifice bunt, and a sacrifice fly.

In the playoffs they had trailed the Chicago Cubs two games to none in the best-of-five Division Series before rallying to win, and then had pulled off their miraculous seventh-game victory in the League Championship Series.

Now, amazingly, they were in the World Series. And Kelleher was interviewing Walter Johnson’s ghost for his Sunday column. Stevie wasn’t sure which story was more unbelievable.

He was engrossed in his research when he noticed an IM coming in on his computer.

“Did U C they activated Doyle?” Susan Carol was asking.

“Yeah,” Stevie replied. “Now everyone will write it. But I’m thinking maybe talking to his kids will give me an angle no one else has.”

“Great idea,” she answered. “Have U contacted Dever
to set something up?” she asked, meaning John Dever, the Nats’ PR director.

Stevie stared at the screen for a moment. As usual, she was a half step ahead of him.

“Not yet. U still have his e-mail?”

“Of course.”

“Y R U always smarter than me?” he asked.

“Because I’m a girl. Talk later. Bye.”

Stevie sighed. He sent Dever an e-mail asking if he could set him up with Doyle and the twins, then decided to take a break. He pushed back from his desk and went to join his dad watching the Eagles and Redskins—which reminded him it was late October. The sports seasons just got longer and longer.

BY THE TIME STEVIE’S DAD DROPPED HIM
at the airport Tuesday morning, Stevie had a breakfast scheduled for Wednesday with Norbert, David, and Morra Doyle. There had been one condition in Dever’s return e-mail: “He wants to know if Susan Carol can come too.”

Stevie laughed when he read that; David Doyle’s crush on Susan Carol was clearly pretty strong. “I think I can arrange that,” he wrote back. He then wrote to Susan Carol to make sure she was okay with it.

“Don’t say I’ve never done anything for you,” she had written back.

Stevie took a cab to the Marriott Long Wharf as soon as his plane landed. The cab ride was brief—Logan Airport was only a couple of miles from downtown, and at one
o’clock there wasn’t much traffic. About sixty seconds after emerging from the Sumner Tunnel, Stevie found himself in front of the hotel.

“Welcome to the Marriott, Mr. Thomas,” the doorman said as Stevie climbed out of the cab. Seeing the stunned look on Stevie’s face, he smiled. “This is Boston,” he said. “We’re all big sports fans. I’m Mike. Anything I can do to help, let me know.”

Stevie took an escalator up to the lobby level and found Kelleher waiting.

“Come on,” Kelleher said. “Tamara and Susan Carol are in the restaurant. We’ll get a bite to eat before we go to the ballpark so you don’t have to eat the box lunch.”

“They serve a box lunch at the World Series?”

“Yup. You can have the oh-so-appetizing dried-out apple for dessert.”

The restaurant overlooked Boston Harbor. Stevie could see planes taking off directly across the water. Susan Carol got up to give him a hug. Stevie could never completely get over just how pretty she was, even with her hair tied back in a ponytail. Her hair, he noticed, was wet.