September 2000

Ann Arbor, Michigan
Singer Park

The under-seventeen WABA travel team warmed up on the field at Singer Park before their last practice of the year. The team was scheduled to take part in a season-ending tournament in Albany, New York, that weekend. The tournament brought together some of the top travel teams in the Northeast and it was considered the crown jewel of the autumn baseball season.

The nucleus of the team was basically unchanged from previous years, although some new additions filled out the roster. The coaching staff was still intact, with Dave Kinsey at the helm and Michael Mattis as his second-in-command.

Gord, reassigned as a reliever, was relegated to mop-up duty on the pitching staff. He entered only games that were no longer in doubt, with his team either way ahead or way behind. Gord understood that some people were born with God-given, natural ability, and some weren’t. He knew he was in that second group.

An example of a player with that natural talent was Reggie Gosselin, one of the aforementioned new additions. Gosselin, a pitcher from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, had moved to Ann Arbor earlier in the summer with his family.

For a sixteen-year-old in Michigan, Reggie threw straight gas. During his first practice with Gord’s team, the coaches clocked him at eighty-two miles per hour. That rose more than a few eyebrows around Ann Arbor minor baseball circles. From that point forward, Gosselin was the team’s workhorse. Dave Kinsey ran him out to the mound every chance he could, at the expense of Gord and some of the team’s other lesser lights.

Not surprisingly, Gosselin was the crown jewel of the team, and the coaching staff treated him as such. All players were required to show up ninety minutes before each game and were expected to attend all games, regardless of playing time. That meant Gord spent the majority of his summer vacation nailed to the right side of the unforgiving aluminum bench.

Of course, these rules did not apply to a prodigious talent like Reggie. He operated under terms similar to Roger Clemens’s playing contract from the middle of the decade. Gosselin showed up only for the games he pitched and he always threw within a twenty-mile radius of Ann Arbor. There were no weary, soul-sapping road trips for Reggie the Rocket.

However, the special treatment didn’t alienate Gosselin from the rest of the squad; he was a genuinely nice kid who was well-liked by his teammates, and such treatment of a star pitcher was fairly typical in the annals of organized baseball. Pitchers were considered a rare breed and were usually given more leeway — when it came to following team rules and regulations — than position players. As long as Gosselin kept stringing lines of zeroes together on the scoreboard every week, the coaching staff, to put it eloquently, didn’t give a shit what he did when not on the mound.

Michael Mattis definitely took a shine to the young Gosselin. Gord assumed it was because Reggie had the talent he sorely lacked. Whatever the reason, Gord looked on with envy at the burgeoning baseball relationship between his father and his teammate.

As the practice wound down, and before Dave Kinsey could initiate the post-workout hell known as wind sprints, the team split into pairs for some long toss. Since there was an odd number of players on the team, a coach normally joined the fray to make things even. Much to Gord’s chagrin, this long-toss session partnered Reggie with his dad.

Gord, a few pairs down from his father, was partnered with the team’s fifth outfielder and his closest friend on the team, Andrew Montgomery. They bonded primarily over their lack of playing time and their jealousy of team stars like Jason Hamilton. Montgomery tried to initiate conversation, but the attempt fell on deaf ears as Gord’s focus was glued to the interaction between his father and Reggie.

As each group increased their throwing distance, Gord heard a steady stream of superlatives emanating from his father’s mouth. “What an arm!” “You’re really throwing some smoke, Reggie.” “Christ, we’re 200 feet away and he’s still bringing it on a line.” “He throws a heavy ball; it just explodes into the glove!” “To throw faster, you have to train the muscles to throw faster.” “I wish more guys threw long toss to improve their arm strength — especially pitchers.”

This last comment shot out the side of Michael’s mouth. The words seared through Gord like a razor-sharp spear slicing through a sheaf of paper. The air whooshed out of his lungs and his shoulders sank in disappointment.

After the tournament in Albany, in which Gord pitched exactly two innings at the end of a 15–2 drubbing, Michael Mattis was still singing the praises of Gosselin’s right arm at the end-of-season banquet. Before presenting the Cy Young Award — given to the top pitcher on the team — Michael delivered a flowery, overwrought speech telling the players and their parents what a pleasure it was having Gosselin on the team. He remarked that Gosselin “led by example and provided a blueprint to the rest of the staff on how to reach their potential on the mound.”

Gord was hurt by his father’s words. He wanted nothing more than to hear his dad speak so glowingly about his talents. Unfortunately, Gord knew such praise was unlikely to ever come.

The rest of the awards ceremony was a painstakingly boring affair for Gord — primarily because he was stapled to his seat while the trophies were given out. He had no chance of winning the most valuable player, top hitter, or top fielder awards. In fact, Gord couldn’t even win the much-maligned most improved trophy, which was always given to a player who was terrible at the beginning of the year and just slightly turned down the suck by the time playoffs rolled around.

On the car ride home after the banquet, Gord sat in silence in the passenger seat, deep in thought. Growing up, he had always heard horror stories of young pitchers blowing out their arms due to overuse. Amateur baseball was littered with cautionary tales of torn rotator cuffs and shredded elbows from poor mechanics, throwing too many breaking balls, and throwing too many pitches in general.

There were only so many bullets in a pitcher’s arm. Pitching was one of the most anatomically stressful activities in sports. Each time a pitcher threw, the arm wanted to fly out of the socket. The only mechanisms in place to prevent that from happening were the tendons and ligaments of the shoulder girdle.

Therefore, Gord had always been reticent to really let loose and throw as hard as he could. In fact, he babied his arm to an obsessive degree. He would throw only fastballs and changeups. To that point in his career, he had flatly refused to throw breaking balls.

Gord avoided heavy lifting with his left arm and shoulder whenever possible. He always carried his book bag on his right side and even brushed his teeth with his right hand to avoid unnecessary strain on his left arm.

His reluctance to use his pitching arm in non-baseball-related activities carried over to the realm of self-gratification as well. But, as he soon discovered, the use of his non-dominant hand was actually a blessing in disguise.

As Michael pulled into their driveway, Gord realized he was at a crossroads in his baseball career. What was the point of going to such lengths to preserve his arm when it didn’t translate to success on the field? He had watched his peers — who threw breaking balls every other pitch and threw their fastballs as hard as they could — rocket past him in pitching talent and ability, while he languished at the bottom of the coaches’ depth chart.

Sure, Gord wouldn’t be able to play baseball at a higher level if he hurt his arm, but he sure as hell wasn’t going anywhere with the way he pitched now. Seeing the way his father fawned over an arm like Gosselin made him think that throwing hard would be a way to make his dad proud.

Gord unbuckled his seat belt and looked at his father. “Hey, Dad, do you wanna throw some long toss?”

“Why?” Michael looked at his son dismissively. “What’s the point? The season’s over.”

“Come on. It’s still light out. I really want to throw.”

Intrigued by his son’s assertiveness, Michael agreed to the long toss session. They walked to a small parkette adjacent to the family bungalow. From the first toss, Gord threw like he had something to prove.

Instead of lightly floating balls into his father’s mitt to warm up his arm, Gord peppered rockets into Michael’s glove with a vengeance.

“Take it easy. You’re going to hurt yourself.”

“My arm feels fine. I can handle it.”

Gord flicked his glove toward his father, indicating that he wanted Michael to move back, increasing the distance between them. Gord’s audible grunts of exertion that followed each of his throws were surpassed only by the THWOCK of the ball into Michael’s mitt.

Gord furrowed his brow in concentration as he geared up for another toss, a trail of perspiration sliding down his back.

Each throw was a purge of years of pent-up frustration for Gord: frustration at his lack of athletic ability, frustration from the taunts of his teammates, and frustration from the perceived disappointment of his father. A boiling rage fuelled every frozen rope he rifled to Michael.

Again and again, he launched the ball at his father with an animalistic ferocity. Finally, after fifteen long minutes, Gord, overcome with emotion and exhaustion, lobbed one last throw to his father, turned on a dime, and stalked back toward his house.

“Where are you going?” Michael inquired. “You were doing well.” He jogged to catch up to his son.

“So, now you’re talking to me, Dad. Am I one of your favourites on the team now because I showed you I can throw hard?”

“What do you mean? I don’t have any favourites.”

“Oh bullshit! I see how embarrassed you are when I pitch. How you wish I was more like Reggie.”

“Reggie? What does this have to do with Reggie?”

“I see the way you drool all over him. How you always give him encouragement. You barely talk to me after I pitch. You just sit there with a pissed-off look on your face.”

“I do not — ”

“Give me a fucking break!”

Gord snatched the ball out of his father’s glove, turned, and heaved it into the woods encircling the field. He took off at a run toward their house, entered, and slammed the front door in fury. Michael was left to stare wordlessly at the ball’s final destination and contemplate the stinging words and new-found cojones of his only son.