Screaming at the Ump (10 page)

“Important and dangerous things,” Zeke said and began to walk away. I didn't follow.

“I'll help,” she said.

“Do you want Sly to help?” I asked Zeke in an innocent voice. “That's a pretty good idea. Sly could totally help us.”

“No, that's okay,” Zeke said. “Come on, Casey, let's let her, uh, do homework.”

“No, listen,” Sly said. “I have no homework, which is weird, but I'm really happy. So let me help you guys.”

“No,” Zeke said.

“Well, I'm coming,” she said, and started walking toward him.

“Whatever,” he said.

And they both took off.

Great.

So now I was following two clowns instead of one and wondering if it was even possible to keep this from turning into a huge disaster. Like it wasn't bad enough getting in trouble with Zeke—now I had to be responsible for turning Mrs. G.'s granddaughter into a criminal.

“I got a cat,” Sly said. The kid was random. I usually enjoy random. I like Zeke, don't I?

“If you're coming, you have to be silent,” Zeke said.

“No, I don't,” Sly said.

“Then don't come.”

“I'm coming, and I'm talking, and I got a cat.”

“Great,” I said, speed-walking to catch up.

Zeke walked into the back door of the dorm. “Which room?” he asked me. I was pretty sure it was on the second floor, somewhere in the middle, but I wasn't about to make this easy for him.

“So when we first got Tiny—that's my cat's name, because he's tiny? So when we first got him, my mom was sneezing a lot, and I was just thinking that it reminded me so much of that
Brady Bunch
episode? The one where Jan keeps sneezing whenever she's near Tiger? Do you know the
Brady Bunch
? My grandma got me all the DVDs. Except on that
Brady Bunch
episode? It's not Tiger she's allergic to? It's Tiger's flea powder? Except they don't realize that until it's almost too late? And the dog's going to have to leave the family? But then they—”

“Sylvia?” Zeke said.

“SLY!”

“If you're coming with us, Sly, you must accept that this is a silent mission.”

She made a face.

“But I want to talk to you about your cat later. Would you like to try to get your cat on TV?”

I saw Sly's jaw drop, and at that moment, I saw a way out, like a lit-up neon arrow pointing away from trouble. “Why don't we talk about that now?” I said.

“You know what? Forget it. I don't need help here. Casey, you and Sly can hang here. I'm going to go up by myself and see if I can figure out which room is his, and—”

“Which room is whose?” Sly asked. “My grandma knows all this stuff. I can help.”

Oh, great. So now Sly was starting to understand what we were doing. “Nice work,” I said. “Listen. Let's just say Mission Aborted, okay? This is a bad idea. I can feel it, you know?” I tilted my head toward Sly, raising my eyebrows. I realized my shoulders were practically in my ears—I was all scrunched up with nerves and fear. Fear of my best friend.

“What? I don't get what you guys are talking about.”

Zeke turned and headed up the stairs, but I called after him, “I have a better way of finding out, but you have to stop what you're doing now.” After a few seconds, I heard his feet slowly coming back down.

“What's your plan?” he said.

“Yeah,” Sly said.

Excellent question. I had no plan. This was what was known as bluffing. “Not now,” I said with a slight tone of mystery in my voice. Zeke nodded knowingly.

Then I asked, “Sly, how old's your cat?”

“I don't know,” she said. “He's a baby to me, because we just got him, but the vet says he's three, which isn't really a baby.”

Zeke's eyes were about to roll back in his head—he was never known for his patience.

“So Zeke,” I asked, “how are you going to get Tiny on TV?”

A
FTER
Zeke left, with plans made for me to help him shoot video of Sly's cat, I went to talk to Mrs. G. about You Suck, Ump! Day. She was pouring a ton of white powder—fake milk, I think—into a big cup of coffee.

“Dad said you could order the You Suck, Ump! Day flyers for me. Do you know how many and stuff?”

Mrs. G. nodded and looked through a file cabinet. “I'll take care of that. And you might want to look through this,” she said, handing me a thin file with a few papers in it.

“Thanks. Do you know how I can reach Steamboat?”

She frowned. Then nodded again. “I have his phone number somewhere.” She opened a couple of drawers and then closed them. “It should be . . .” I expected her to reach into her bun and pull something out, but she turned to a bulletin board and found a crumpled piece of paper with lots of names and numbers. “Here it is,” she said, copying the number onto a piece of paper for me.

“Thanks.”

I went back outside. Students were working on different fields, reviewing angles for viewing plays and taking turns making the “He's off the bag!” call. On field two, Jorge Washington and the guy I thought was Lincoln Cabrera were standing next to each other, watching students race down the line.

A lot of people believe the most important umpiring goes on behind the plate. Of course balls and strikes, and calling them right, is a big deal. But the most important part of being an umpire is being in the right position to make the call. You need to get to where the play is going to be made and pretty much stand at a right angle to that exact spot—close enough to see, but not so close that you get in any player's way.

Pop had a friend, when he was umping in the majors, who missed a call. That happens sometimes, of course. But this guy called a player safe when he was out, and it was the only at bat scored as a hit in the entire game. So that pitcher's only shot in his whole career at throwing a no-hitter was taken away from him all because Pop's friend missed the call. Pop told me that when I was a little kid, and it stayed with me, how important it is to make the right call. How you only get one chance.

Today Pop wasn't even trying to hide how disgusted he was with some of the students' techniques. He kept yelling, “You can't make a long-distance call! Hustle faster!” or “Tell your happy feet to stay still.” I could see his hand practically crushing a ball and strike indicator.

I looked over at field four, empty, and wondered what that meant for next year. It was hard for BTP to compete. If you had to choose between spending five weeks in Florida or five weeks in New Jersey—well, do the math.

On field one, students were in all player positions, except Lorenzo was pitching, and Bobbybo was batting. He was hitting shots to different field positions with the fungo bat, seeing if the field and base ump would remember where to go to make the call.

He hit one to right field, and the guy who was playing there caught it and gunned it home. I mean, he really gunned it. A few guys whistled, and Lincoln and Washington started slow-clap applauding and then did some long and complicated high-five, complete with wiggly fingers. The student working as base runner, trying to score from third, was out by a lot, and he looked shocked. We didn't usually see arms like that here.

“That was some throw!” Bobbybo called out. “You've got a major league arm!”

The right fielder tipped his cap. It was Patrick MacSophal.

I
SHOULDN'T
have been on the stairs in the first place. I hardly ever got hungry in the middle of the night, but I was starving. Like crazy, could-never-fall-asleep-if-I-didn't-eat starving. Almost chew-off-one-of-my-own-limbs starving. So I started heading downstairs. I knew it was really late—the last time I'd looked at my clock it was after midnight.

Dad was talking to someone. I thought it was Pop, since, well, he was the only other person who lived here, but that was weird. I mean, Pop hadn't been up after eleven (except for postseason games on TV) for as long as I could remember. Then again, I wasn't usually up after midnight either.

I moved down a few more steps, but didn't go near the one right before the landing—that one squeaked no matter where you stepped.

I sat and listened. And I'll never forget what I heard.

It was Dad. Talking. I figured out pretty quickly that the person he was talking to was “Patrick” MacSophal.

“Baseball's been my whole life,” MacSophal said. “I love the game. It's all I've ever wanted to do. So when it ended, I didn't know what to do with myself. I had enough money that I didn't really need to decide right away. I went home, spent some time with my folks, my girlfriend. Tried to figure out what my next step should be. In some ways, I think I'm still trying to figure that out.”

“A lot of us could say the same thing.” Dad said.

“What do you mean?” MacSophal asked. “It seems like you've got everything in order here. A pretty good life.”

Yeah
, I thought.
What do you mean?

“Don't get me wrong,” Dad said. “I love what I do. I love my life. What I don't love is . . . not being more successful at it.”

“I still don't get what you're saying.”

“Well, why did you come here, to
this
school, instead of one of the Florida schools?” Dad asked.

“So what you're saying is you wish this place was one of the top-ranked schools?”

“Answer
my
question,” Dad said.

He always sounded like a teacher. And like a dad. He wasn't letting this guy get away with anything. If he'd been standing, he'd have been rolling back on his heels.

“I'll answer yours if we can get back to mine.”

There was one of Dad's famous teacher pauses and then he surprised me with, “Okay. Fair enough.”

“I came here because I thought I had the best chance of flying under the radar.”

“I suppose that makes good sense. And to answer yours: Of course I wish my school were more successful—who wouldn't want to be successful?” It was quiet for a minute and then Dad asked, “So when did you start thinking about umpiring?”

“When I couldn't find any other way back into baseball. I couldn't even get a college coaching job back home. My name's mud.”

If Zeke had been there, he'd have been unable to resist putting out his hand and saying, “Hi, Mud. Nice to meet you.” But that's not exactly right, because what he would really have been doing was jumping up and down on the creaky step, screaming, “I TOLD YOU THIS DUDE WAS J-MAC!!!”

“And no offense to your school intended, but I figured I had a better chance of being recognized if I went to one of the Florida schools.”

“Even if you used this new name?”

“I used my given name on the application. My father's a Patrick, too, so everyone always used my middle name, called me Jimmy. The J-Mac thing sort of happened in the papers when I had that great streak. I pitched seventeen scoreless innings, and I guess that's when the papers decided I needed a nickname. But here, I wanted people calling me Patrick, not MacSophal. I want to stay out of the spotlight, you know?”

“There's one thing I don't understand, Patrick: Why didn't you ever try to clear your name?”

“You want the truth?” MacSophal said.

I held on to the step. I did not want to fall. I did not want to make a noise. I did not want to risk this moment not happening. Imagine the headline:
KID MAKES STEP SQUEAK, MISSES STEROID-USER'S CONFESSION
.

Dad must have nodded or something, because MacSophal kept talking. “I couldn't. I've used. And I have a lot of friends who have too. Steroids, growth hormone, amphetamines. I probably know more players who did than who didn't.”

Dad was silent.

“Getting myself into a whole lot of trouble—that I could handle. Maybe. But I could not bring down my friends. So when Rhodes named me, it seemed like the honorable thing to do was just disappear.”

My mouth was literally open. I wanted to yell,
Honorable? How can a drug-taking cheater be talking about what's honorable and what isn't?

“But enough about me. Tell me what you think about having the third-ranked school in the country.”

“Out of three,” Dad added.

MacSophal laughed a little.

“It's how my life works right now,” Dad said.

“Do you dream of more?”

“Sometimes,” Dad said.

“Why don't you move the school to Florida, compete head-to-head with the others?”

“My life is here.”

“You mean your kid?”

“Among other things.”

“But what if you did Academy down there and kept the other classes, the school, your life here the rest of the time?”

“Five weeks is a long time for a kid.”

“He's not really a little kid. Isn't there someone who could take care of him for five weeks?”

There was a very long pause while I waited for my dad to explain that Pop would need to come to the school with him too, so really, I'd be all alone at home, and of course he couldn't do that. And then Dad said, “You know? There might be.”

He didn't have to say that it was Mrs. Bob the Baker. I knew. I also knew it could never, ever happen.

I
DIDN'T
sleep. Or at least I didn't think I did. My brain was all over this MacSophal thing. How could my dad allow that cheater to attend his school? And how could this cheater be telling my dad it was okay to go to Florida for over a month, every year, without me?

I wanted to talk to someone about this, but I couldn't tell Zeke. The potential for him to do something stupid with this information was too great, so I decided to wait and keep thinking. Which I would have liked to do at home. But Zeke had decided this would be the day we filmed Sly's cat.