THE RAIN DRUMMED on the barn roof. It beat down hard, puddling up at home plate and around the feed-sack bases at Fenway. On the mountaintop it began to freeze into sleet, glazing over Long Tom. Then it changed into snow. A snowstorm in July.
Teddy stood in the entranceway of the barn, the huge sliding door open to let in light, and watched as E.A. gave the treadless tire off Earl’s eighteen-wheeler a push to start it swinging from the thick rope attached to the overhead hayfork rail. E.A. went back to the entrance. As the truck tire continued to swing back and forth, he went into his wind-up, calculating where the tire would be when the ball arrived, like a hunter leading a flushing grouse. He pitched. The baseball sped through the center of the swinging tire, into the backstop of hay bales. Three times E.A. threw. Three times he split the center of the tire.
He glanced at Teddy, standing behind him, the cold rain sweeping in and spattering his old suit jacket and shoes.
“How long did it take you to learn that?” Teddy asked.
E.A. shrugged. “A long time.”
Teddy nodded. That was all. But the next time he appeared he had with him a folded square of heavy brown canvas tarpaulin and a paper grocery bag. It was a hot day, a good day for throwing off the mound at Fenway, the heat fine for keeping a pitcher’s arm loose. Instead, Teddy jerked his head toward the barn.
Inside the hayloft a million dust motes danced in the sunlight streaming through the entryway. The air smelled hot, like haying time. Teddy unfolded the tarp on the barn floor. It was about the size and shape of one of the kitchen windows in Gran’s farmhouse. From the paper bag he removed, one by one, ten paintbrushes and ten pint cans of bright-colored paint: apple red, orange, light green and dark green, lemon yellow, pale blue, ocean blue, grape purple, cotton-candy pink, and black. He shook the little cans of paint. With his jackknife blade he pried off the lids, then took a photograph out of his shirt pocket. E.A. recognized it immediately. It was a photo of Ted Williams’s strike-zone chart, which they’d seen in Cooperstown: a frame the size of the strike zone, filled with colored baseballs, each inscribed with a batting average in sharp black numerals. The number on each ball represented the average the great Teddy Ballgame estimated he hit when he swung at a pitch in that part of the zone, from the blue ball on the low, outside corner, inscribed with .250, to the red ball that read .450 in the heart of the frame.
With great concentration, Teddy began painting colored baseballs on the canvas tarp. As he worked he talked to E.A. “See, Ethan, what a pitcher wants to do, he wants to throw strikes. But he don’t want to be wild in the strike zone.”
“What’s wild in the strike zone?”
“Throwing too many pitches belt-high out over the heart of the plate. Even if you’re quick and mix up your pitches, the better hitters’ll get to you if you let ’em see too many good pitches. This’ll teach you how to nick the comers, move the ball in and out, up and down. But”—he rounded out the orange ball, in on the fists of a righty—“mainly you want to keep the ball low. You’ll see why when the colors dry here, and we take and paint in the averages in black. The lower down in the zone you throw, the harder the pitch is to hit.”
The dust motes danced in the sunlight. The air smelled like old hay and paint and a faint hint of manure. Overhead in the cupola, pigeons muttered and cooed. Teddy frowned, made a few finicky brush strokes to round out a light blue ball, grinned at his son. Later, after they’d inscribed the averages and hung the canvas from the top bale of the makeshift backstop, Teddy presented E.A. with two dozen brand-new baseballs to throw at the simulated strike zone.
Well before the end of the summer E.A. could hit any individual spot on the canvas more often than not. But he never felt any better than he had when Teddy looked up from the canvas with the baseballs painted on it and grinned at him. That was a moment he’d remember forever.
“Ethan.”
Teddy stood up and headed out toward the mound at Fenway. It was midsummer, and he was working out with Ethan every evening that the boy didn’t have a town-team game.
“Remember what I told you about getting an edge on that pitcher? Old Ichabod? Finding his weakness?”
E.A. nodded.
“Well,” Teddy said, “it’s the same with a hitter. You can usually figure out his weakness. If you can’t figure it out, you can create one. Keep him off balance. Get him guessing and make him guess wrong. Say the first two, three times you throw him your hook you drop down to three-quarters arm. Then in a critical situation, come at him from three-quarters with pure heat. Or come straight over the top, so he thinks it’s heat, and throw your bender.
“Another way,” Teddy continued, “when you come to your set, watch for the split second when the hitter ain’t quite ready for you to pitch. That’s when to throw the ball. Don’t take the same amount of time to get your sign, get set, and go into your motion with every pitch. Watch your batter a little. Let him get uneasy. Catch him off-guard.”
“How can I tell when he’s off-guard?”
“Oh,” Teddy said, “he might move his hands different. Wave the bat a different way, shift his front foot, jerk his head. Watch his face. You’ll sense it more than you’ll know it. Every hitter has a weakness, Ethan. It’s a hard proposition, hitting a baseball. A good pitcher makes it just a little harder. Once in a while, try to make eye contact with the hitter. The split second you catch his eye, pitch.”
“That sounds pretty hard,” E.A. said.
“Why, Ethan, don’t you know how hard all this is? Baseball’s the hardest game there is, man. Hard for the pitchers, hard for the fielders, hard for the hitters. Especially hard for the hitters. Hitting a baseball coming at you ninety miles an hour or more? That’s the hardest thing there is to do.”
By the end of the summer, E.A. had a pitching record with the Outlaws of 9–1 and was throwing well over 80 mph. “Phenomenal” was the word Editor James Kinneson had used in the Kingdom County Monitor to describe his pitching.
One afternoon in early September E.A. pitched a no-hitter against Memphremagog, striking out twenty of the twenty-seven batters he faced and having some fun, too, by pitching the last inning like the New York Mets’ twenty-game-winning submarine pitcher from Japan, Suzika Koyoto, scaring the opposing batters out of their socks with his sidewinding motion. Immediately after the game a heavyset man in a rumpled suit, with a florid face and a meaty handshake, introduced himself as a scout on retainer with the Red Sox. E.A. had seen him earlier, standing behind the screen with a hand-held radar gun.
“I clocked you at ninety-four on two, three pitches,” the big man said. “For a thousand dollars, I can get you a tryout.”
“My father’s over there,” E.A. said, pointing at Teddy standing under the elm, watching.
“I’m not offering the tryout to your father, kid. I’m offering it to you. A thousand dollars gets you a real good look. I’ll set it all up.”
How Teddy got there so fast was a mystery. One moment he was leaning against the elm tree, watching the man in the suit talk to E.A. The next he was between E.A. and that man.
“Hey,” the man who’d identified himself as a scout said. “Who the hell are you?”
“I’m his father,” Teddy said. “And he’s sixteen years old. It’s illegal for you to talk to him. What’s more, you don’t represent the Red Sox or anybody else. I ever see you around here again, or hear you’ve bothered my boy, I’ll kick your ass back to whatever hole you crawled out of.”
“You and whose army?” the man sneered.
Teddy continued to stand between E.A. and the big man.
“So,” the man said to E.A., around Teddy. “We’ll talk.”
E.A. shook his head. “No,” he said. And he headed up the common with Teddy.
“It’s your career going south,” the man called after him.
“Don’t you ever, never think of paying nobody a cent of money to play baseball, Ethan,” Teddy said to E.A. “Time’s coming when people are going to be paying you to play. You just keep working like you have been. It’ll all fall into place for you.”