—I did need to take care of me, especially on the baseball diamond. I’d grown, and I’d gotten stronger, making my fastball faster. And for the first time, North Central had the makings of a decent team. My junior season had a chance to be my breakout season.
We started with a run of five straight wins. The defense was strong, especially up the middle. Dawit Senai, our center fielder, ran down every fly ball anywhere near him; catcher Tory Nelson was solid behind the plate. Antonio was a vacuum cleaner at shortstop, and he sparked the offense, rocketing a slew of doubles into the gaps and driving in runs by the handful.
On the mound, I wasn’t in the zone all the time, but I was there most of the time. And even when I was off, I was never way off like I had been other years. “This is going to be a special year for us,” Mr. Kellogg said after win number six. “A really special year.”
Then the North Central curse hit. Our right fielder, Trey Lister, flunked two midterms and was ineligible. James Xiong landed an afterschool job working at Century Link and quit the team. Cam Hinton moved to Renton without telling anyone, not even his girlfriend. By May, we were down to eleven players, and we’d lost six of seven games.
Even though the season had fallen apart, I still had one game circled on my schedule: Laurelhurst High, the defending city champions. They’d lost in the state playoffs to Tacoma’s Jesuit High, but only because Jesuit had a pitcher named Fergus Hart that the Seattle Times said might be the next Clayton Kershaw.
Laurelhurst had a future major-leaguer of its own, a center fielder named Ian Thurman. Thurman had been all-league as a freshman and all-state as a sophomore, and he had a good chance to be Washington State Player of the Year as a junior if Laurelhurst could beat Fergus Hart and take the state title.
Websites that covered high school sports posted articles and stats on Thurman. After lunch, I went to the computer lab and pored over them. I knew his height, his weight, how many pounds he could bench-press, how fast he ran the fifty-yard dash. His coach, an old guy named Pop Vereen who’d been at Laurelhurst for a million years, said that Thurman was the best high school player he’d ever coached. Top baseball colleges were recruiting him, and a major-league team was sure to draft him, probably in the first round.
Ian Thurman was such a big star that even when the lowly North Central High Eagles played Laurelhurst a Seattle Times writer would be there, and so would major-league scouts. They’d come to see Thurman, but if I could dominate, then one scout from one team might write my name down in his notebook, and that team might someday give me a chance to prove myself in their minor-league system. That’s all I wanted: a chance.
I couldn’t do it alone, though. I needed the guys behind me to play the way they had early in the season. I thought about calling a team meeting, pictured myself standing tall on a bench, rallying the guys to give it their best shot: We play hard and smart, and we can beat these guys!
Then I reran the film, the second time seeing how it would actually play out. We p-p-play hard and s-s-smart, and we c-c-can b-beat these g-g-guys.