Still Pitching (21 page)

On the first day Kerchman announced that he had ten spots to fill. Two would be pitchers. Then tryouts began. Standing less than twenty yards away, Mr. K swatted rubber-covered batting-range baseballs at would-be infielders. When he ripped a hard grounder, the rubber-coated ball would skip off the basketball court's polished wooden surface and spin crazily across the floor. If the fielder missed the ball, it would rocket into the gym's brick wall with a loud “thwack,” then ricochet back. The terrified rookies, myself among them, watched from the oval running track above the gym, while Imbrianni, Hausig, Berman, and Gartner—the veterans who'd already survived this ritual—got to stand right behind the coach, horsing around and heckling the newcomers. While I watched the drill, I couldn't help but wonder what kind of ordeal Kerchman had devised for the new pitchers.

We were the last group to tryout. Kerchman placed eight of us in a line across the width of the basketball floor. We each had our own catcher and one varsity hitter to pitch to. There were no nets or batting cages to separate us. No pitching screens to protect us. Kerchman and his veterans stood in safety, up on the running track, and when he blew his whistle all the pitchers simultaneously threw to the hitters. It was rough enough trying to concentrate on throwing strikes to varsity hitters, but as soon as you let go with a pitch, line drives and ground balls went whizzing past you. It was a scene right out of a Keystone Kops movie.

The drill, of course, was designed to unnerve us. Our job was to screen out everything else and concentrate on each pitch we threw.

That night, my arm was so sore that I slept with a heating pad wrapped around it. Every hour or so I'd get up and wander around the house, wondering if I should even bother going back the next day. But when the sun rose I was eager to get right back at it.

By the last day my arm throbbed with pain every time I threw a pitch. I had no zip left. I was sure I'd never make the cut. I tried to prepare myself for the worst. At home and in school I brooded and moped around, continually reassuring myself that I'd done the best I could under the circumstances. I slept in fits and starts. Late at night, a persistent voice would wake me up. “Who would you be without baseball?” it said. “If you don't make it, what will become of you?”

Two days later Kerchman
posted the final squad list. One spot was sure to go to Mark Silverstone, a cocky, Jewish lefthander from Neponsit. I disliked him, yet I envied his arrogance. The first time I went over to his house he pulled a copy of Machiavelli's
The Prince
off his bookshelf and pointed with pride to a sentence that read, “It's better to be feared than loved.” It couldn't have epitomized our differences better. Was he serving me some sort of notice?

A former prep school kid with a chip on his shoulder, Mark was handsome, a good athlete, a ladies' man, and an honor student.

Silverstone kissed no one's ass. He was a lot like Kerchman in that way. Either you dealt with him on his terms or he simply ignored you.

My hands were shaking as I scanned the alphabetically listed names. Right below “Silverstone” was “Steinberg.” At first I thought there must be another Steinberg, and when I read my first name I was too stunned to even speak. My first impulse was to telephone everyone I knew.

I was still a little wobbly when I went over to the equipment cage to pick up my uniform. I could barely wait to hold that Dodger jersey in my hands. Lenny Stromeyer, the student manager, scanned his list and abruptly informed me that “batting practice pitchers don't get uniforms.” Nor, he said, did they travel to road games with the rest of the team. Then came the kicker: “At home games,” Lenny said, “your job is to stand at the entrance behind the backstop and chase the foul balls that are hit out of the park.”

He was openly gloating—letting me know in no uncertain terms who had more status than who around here. But who the hell was fat Lenny to be telling me this stuff? My gut burned. A batting practice pitcher? A ball chaser? I wanted to march right into Kerchman's office and protest. But I had to remind myself that he'd cut at least three or four pitchers who clearly had more talent than I did. I wondered what that was all about.

On the bus ride home I kept telling myself that at least I'd made the team. I remembered my PAL season and how surprised Bleutrich was by my progress. Maybe the same thing would happen again.

When I pitched outdoor
batting practice Kerchman was always egging me on.

“That's the way to do it, Stein-berg. Nothing fancy, just throw it right down the pipe,” he'd say.

At first, I mistook his remarks for encouragement. But they were nothing of the sort. This was his way of reminding me of my role—that is, to be cannon fodder for the hitters. It was the varsity players' confidence he was concerned with, not mine.

In the beginning, most of the veterans teased me because I wore my old VFW uniform at practice.

“Are you with this team, rook?” our catcher, Mike Hausig, yelled out.

“Hey water boy, toss a big fat one up here,” Imbrianni said.

“What's VFW stand for, anyway?” Frannie Cooper asked. A beer bellied pitcher, Cooper was the team's self-appointed buffoon. Before I could reply, he looked at the rest of the guys and said, “Personally, I think VFW means ‘Virgins fuck wimps.'” Then he laughed.

Just wait till these assholes have to hit against me. Two years of summer league had taught me that big, free-swinging sluggers—like Imbrianni, Hausig, and Cooper—were usually the most impatient hitters. They wanted to crank everything out of the park. So, when Mr. K wasn't watching, every half dozen pitches or so, I'd sneak in an off-speed slider or a sinking curveball.

Just as I'd figured, most of the big hitters over-swung and either topped the ball or popped it up. But it still didn't stop them from ribbing me.

“Man, can't you throw any harder than that?” Imbrianni said. “The fuckin' ball takes forever to get up to the plate,” Hausig said. To mask his frustration, Imbrianni added, “Yeah, I just got too tired of waiting.”

It's exactly what I wanted. Maybe it would get Kerchman's attention, even if it was just to chew me out for not being a pitching machine. But when I looked to Mr. K for some kind of acknowledgment, he'd say things to the hitters, like “What's with you guys? If you let a little pissant like Stein-berg here make you look like a monkey, what's gonna happen when you face a really good pitcher?”

I knew what he was doing, but I hated to have to stand there in front of the whole team and take it.

Then there were those afternoons when I'd have to stay late and pitch batting practice to the rest of the scrubs. And I dreaded the miserable Saturday mornings in March when the stiff ocean breezes blew winter's last snow flurries across still frozen turf. The rest of the team would sit huddled in parkas, while me and Henry Koslan, another scrubbie, threw batting practice. An added indignity was having to listen to the varsity players complain about how hard Mr. K was driving them. Those guys didn't know how good they had it.

By midseason I was feeling so demoralized that I had to do a heavy psych job on myself just to get to practice. The team was good, I rationalized. They're on the way to winning the league championship. Imbrianni was leading the borough in hitting and Stevie Berman and Jack Gartner, both still juniors, were two of the best pitchers in the Public School Athletic League. Even Mr. K's protege, Silverstone, only got to pitch the last few innings of a blowout.

It's only your first year, I kept telling myself. Remember how long it took the Dodgers to get there. Just hang on and wait your turn.

The worst of it, though, was chasing those goddamn foul balls, while my classmates in the stands ragged on me. It was just like the humiliation I felt as a water boy or stretcher bearer. Couldn't Kerchman at least have spared me that indignity?

By season's end, I was just putting in time. We won our last five games and cruised into the playoffs. But just when it seemed we might go all the way, in the borough finals, Berman had his only off game of the season. Bryant High eliminated us 4-1. Silverstone told me that on the gloomy bus ride home Kerchman really reamed the guys out—told them that they played like girls. For once, I was happy not to have been there.

The season ended, as always, with the awards banquet. The local media, school bigwigs, and our families all attended. Just as everyone predicted, Imbrianni, a four-year letterman in two sports, won the top prize, the John Kelly Award. I got a minor letter, as expected, and I watched with envy when each member of the “big team”—including that bastard Silverstone—received his varsity R.

For the past three years
, summer break had been anything but a vacation. And this year promised to be no different. As soon as school let out, I was running my two miles a day and working out with weights. I was going to Dodger games, playing American Legion and Teener League ball, delivering prescriptions for the pharmacy, and working in a canning factory, lifting heavy boxes of pineapples and peaches. I hated those long, boring days, doing the same repetitious jobs. And on the nights we didn't play ball, I was too tired to even hang out at Art's.

“Is it worth it?” I'd ask myself over and over again. Wasn't vacation a time for having fun? For hanging around at the beach, pursuing a summer romance, going to sleep away camp?

I wanted to blame my family's circumstances for my hardships. My parents couldn't afford to send me to camp or give me much of an allowance, so I had to work at menial jobs I didn't like. The real truth was that I was terrified of looking foolish in front of the other kids on the beach, and of feeling like an outcast at parties. So, I retreated into the familiar world of baseball, the one place where I could walk the walk and talk the talk.

One day I made the mistake of whining to my mother.

“Somehow, you manage to find time to play ball,” she said.

I had to scramble to find a rebuttal.

“If I don't practice, how will I ever make the team?”

“That's your problem,” she said. “Instead of enjoying yourself, you worry too much about impressing those dreadful coaches.”

She was right. I'd been so driven to make one team or another that I'd sacrificed just about everything else.

Over the past few months
, I'd started to feel a little bit better about myself. Last year I'd grown a couple of inches, bulked up, and even lost a lot of my baby fat. When I looked in the mirror, I no longer saw a short, chubby, homely kid. Maybe it was time to start coming out of my shell.

What first drew me out was a series of unexpected postcards from Ronnie Zeidner and Rob Brownstein. I'd envied those guys from as far back as sixth grade. They had it all: money, popularity, and athletic ability. Both were already starting on the varsity baseball and basketball teams at Poly Prep and Woodmere Academy. And I'd recently heard that they were part of an exclusive crowd of guys who were hosting wild parties in their parents' plush Manhattan apartments.

Ever since I'd read
The Catcher in the Rye
I'd been ambivalent about that whole milieu. Like Holden Caulfied, I'd always resented the spoiled rich guys he calls “phony bastards”—the preppies who paraded their entitlement. Yet, I couldn't help but wonder what it was like to be a part of that scene. Lately I'd even been thinking about someday attending Columbia, so I could hobnob with the Ivy League types and urbane Barnard coeds. It was a universe that seemed so far beyond my means.

I was reminded of all this when I started receiving those postcards. Both guys were junior counselors at a sleep-away camp in the Adirondacks. On the front of the cards were color photos of rustic-looking cabins surrounded by impossibly blue lakes and abundant woods. Scribbled on the back were descriptions of lazy afternoon swims and moonlit canoe rides over to the girls' camp, where Ronnie and Rob would romance their counterparts. Or so they claimed.

If that wasn't enough to fire my imagination, the lyrics to summer love songs like “In the Still of the Night,” “You're a Thousand Miles Away,” and “The Great Pretender” were continual reminders of what I longed for and didn't have. Even thirteen-year-old Frankie Lymon was crooning about why fools fall in love.

It had been two years since my mortifying encounter with Karen. Since then, I'd dated only one girl, Carole Wertheimer; and she was strictly a platonic friend.

We'd known each other since our Hebrew school days. Our parents were officers in the Temple. Initially they tried to play matchmaker, but that only made the two of us more self-conscious.

We each had a secret crush on the other, but, neither of us wanted to risk declaring our real feelings for fear that the other wouldn't reciprocate.

So we settled into a routine where Carole would listen to my litany of complaints about girls. I tried to do the same for her whenever she asked for advice on boys. God knows I was no authority on that subject. Lately I'd been whining so much about not being able to get a date that Carole offered to set me up with Donna Kaufman, a girl who used to baby-sit for her kid brother. When I cross-examined Carole, all she'd tell me is “You'll like her. She's different.”

Thinking about a blind date
is like preparing to pitch against a team you've never faced. You rehearse your repertoire; you worry about how you'll match up; and you wonder if you'll be able to get it together enough to keep your composure. In both instances you have to be prepared for your game plan to go wrong and be ready to make split second adjustments—all of which came a lot easier to me when I was pitching than when I was dealing with girls.

As it turned out, Donna was just as Carole had predicted. She was attractive in a Bohemian sort of way—dark disheveled long hair, no makeup, and a little portly. She wore all black and liked jazz, modern art, and poetry. Her demeanor attracted and intimidated me. In some ways, she reminded me of Sarah and Rita, the old yearbook editors. It's too bad Peter Desimone wasn't interested in girls; Donna would have been a perfect match for him.