Long Shot Read Free Page B

turned out, he went big-league around the same time Tommy did.
    That’s when they became inseparable, as long as the Dodgers were in town. After a game at the Vet, my dad and Tommy would meet back up—along with a couple of cars full of Tommy’s players and coaches—at the Marchwood Tavern, the Italian restaurant and bar that the Lasorda brothers opened up in Exton. For whatever reason, my father just couldn’t get enough baseball—never could—and Tommy was his connection to it, the only guy he could truly and completely share his passion with.
    Until I came along.

CHAPTER TWO
    Little League was available when a kid turned eight, and to get me good and ready for it, my dad set up a mattress against the basement wall so I could fire baseballs at it from my knees. He also requisitioned a few highway cones for me to use as batting tees. I’d take a mighty rip and smack the ball into the mattress.
    But that was just the opening act. The batting cage went up piece by piece, in the corner of the backyard, beginning when I was eleven.
    First, it was merely a home plate underneath some netting draped around poles that my dad set in concrete. He was the pitcher. But he worked long hours and wasn’t the least bit comfortable with the thought of me not hitting all that time, so he bought a JUGS machine with an automatic feeder. (Ironically, I would later do endorsements for JUGS.) Of course, the machine needed protection from the weather, so he installed a little shed over it. Then a roof over the whole shebang, like a carport. Then metal sheeting on the sides. After a while, the batting cage had morphed into a monstrosity so big and unsightly that a zoning inspector came by and asked my father what the hell that thing was. Dad said, “It’s my son’s ticket to the big leagues.”
    He even hooked up lights, and I’d be out there still hitting late at night. It’s amazing that the neighbors never complained. They probably noticed that I took a lot of pride in the groundskeeping. I had a little rotor mower and tried to stripe the grass between the pitching machine and the plate, like the big leagues. I’d rake in sand around the plate. In the winter, I shoveled the snow out of there. The batting area would still be all messy and slimy, so we covered it with plywood. Other than that, the cold was not a problem. We wrapped my bat—an aluminum Bombat, made in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania—with insulation tape so it wouldn’t sting my hands. (I always wore gloves, anyway, after reading that Ted Williams used to hituntil his hands bled.) In the morning, I’d set the baseballs next to the stove in our rec room, and later on my mom would light the fire in time to have them all warmed up when I got home from school. Eventually we put a little portable heater out by the cage. It was crazy.
    After school, I’d have some apple Fig Newtons—then they came out with strawberry—and a glass of milk, watch Inspector Gadget or Gilligan’s Island reruns, then go hit for a few hours. Vince would be on his Stingray, delivering the Evening Phoenix , and I’d just whale away in my own little world. I rigged the feeder so that the pitches came out every six seconds. Mainly, I hit fastballs, but now and then one would act like a little bit of a knuckleball. One time I got hit in the nose. Never knew what happened. It fucking hurt.
    Home plate was only a few feet from the dirt road that separated a cornfield from our lot on South Spring Lane. Invariably, an older guy named Blaine Huey would walk past on his way to Pickering Creek Reservoir (“the Res”), where everybody else hung out—there were docks, rafts, rope swings, bonfires, the whole bit—while I was whacking eighty-mile-an-hour fastballs into a net. Blaine would glance over at me, shake his head, and mutter something like “Look at this guy. Thinks he’s gonna be a big baseball star.”
Thunk. Dink. Thunk. Dink. Thunk. Dink. You could hear it all the way down the street.