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There is no cool side of the pillow when you strand the tying run at second base. Hours after Fort Myers fell to Sarasota on Opening Night, Del lay in bed envisioning the fastball he’d skied to right to end the game. He’d worked the count by exercising patience and fouling off two tough sliders. He’d gotten his pitch, middle in. And he knew as soon as it left the bat that he’d come up short. The right fielder barely had to move, corralling the ball a good ten feet in front of the warning track.
Del did a U-turn after passing first base, jogging with his eyes fixed on the infield grass as he returned to the dugout. “Tanner,” someone called. He glanced up to find Chad Skeen, the runner he’d failed to chase home, holding his right bicep in a curl. He grinned at Del and lifted the knotty mass of muscle to his lips, then laughed as he descended the dugout steps.
Skeen’s antics stung, but the vision haunting Del now was Don Dallimore mouthing, “You need some muscle, boy.” Per Dallimore’s advice, he had scheduled some one-on-one time with the team’s strength coach. What would they do and how different would it be from the exercises he’d done in the past? He’d find out in about ten hours, if he could ever fall asleep.
He flipped his pillow, kicked the sheets untucked, and rolled from his right shoulder to his left. Slowing his breathing, he concentrated on the in and out, feeling his chest rising and falling, willing himself to drift off. Just as he reached the threshold of sleep a sharp peal of laughter broke the spell. Edsell was home. Through the cardboard-thin wall separating his room from the living area, Del could make out his roommate’s voice as well as that of Bear Lupin’s kid sister, Ginny.
Checking in around half the size of her brother, Ginny shared little with him physically outside of her green eyes and the wrinkles that accented them when she smiled. Her tanned and freckled face was punctuated by a slightly turned-up nose and framed by an auburn bob. The remaining vestiges of her tomboy days were mostly owing to her obvious athleticism, Peppermint Patty blossomed into womanhood. She had just finished high school the first summer she came to visit her brother up in Elizabethton, and it had taken a stern warning from Bear to keep the guys on the team out of her pants. He had reiterated the threat last summer when she came to stay with him for a week in Iowa. Now two months short of completing her sophomore year at Florida Gulf Coast University, she was slipping beyond the shadow of her brother’s protection, even while sunning herself with her girlfriends just outside the chain-link fence surrounding the training camp diamonds.
Bear’s admonition to Edsell the afternoon before their first date was delivered with a smile that only underscored the older brother’s earnestness. With a meaty arm wrapped around the second baseman’s shoulders, he said simply, “If you hurt her, I’ll hurt you.”
Message received. This marked their fourth date, and they still hadn’t slept together. Given the pace at which Edsell had worked his way through the girls of the Midwest League last summer, Del remained skeptical of this chivalrous turn. The deed was inevitable. Desirable even. The more time they spent in Edsell’s room the less conversation Del would have to endure through the living-room wall. He wished they’d give in to their urges already so he could sleep in peace.
She was gone when Del woke Friday morning. Edsell’s door was cracked, and he was alone, snoring into his pillow. Del spread his Twins-issued strength-and-conditioning binder on the table in their tiny dining nook and flipped through the pages, studying diagrams of muscle groups and charts containing sample workout regimens as he ate his cereal.
At nine he left for the park, stepping timidly into the fitness center. Three long rows of free-weight stations dominated the vast floor. All stood empty, as did the brand new cardio machines lining the back wall. At the far end, racks of dumbbells were spaced every eight feet in front of floor-to-ceiling mirrors. The hum of a vacuum cleaner echoed through the otherwise quiet complex. Hank Mattison sat on the arm of a leather chair near the door, a bemused smirk creeping across his face as he skimmed a copy of Muscle & Fitness.
“I don’t get some of these clowns.” He tossed the magazine onto the chair as he stood. Broad-shouldered, with a trunk that tapered down to a waist not much bigger around than Del’s, he sported a tight Twins golf shirt and matching sweat pants.
“Who?” Del asked.
“Guy on the cover, for one. There’s just no practical value in getting that big.” He uncapped a plastic bottle half filled with a chalky yellow liquid and took a quick swig. “All that’s good for is stage competitions.”
“I could use some of that.”
“No you couldn’t,” Mattison laughed. “Trust me, that’s not what we’re looking to do here.”
Del glanced again at the shiny-chested fellow on the cover. Thick veins bulged from each bicep, like giant worms tunneling under his skin. If he ever hit a baseball it would go a long way, but he probably was not much of a ballplayer. “Well, I need to add some muscle. Quick.”
“We’ll do what we can, but you kind of missed the window on building up. That’s really an offseason job. What we want to do now is maintain what you’ve got, keep yourself strong and flexible to avoid injuries. Adding mass can get taxing on the body, and you guys need to be ready to go every night. There’s no time to recover from overexerting yourself in here. Push yourself over the winter and you’ll find yourself coming in next spring with a little more oomph.”
“If I don’t come up with some oomph before then, there might not be a next spring for me.”
“Let’s just see where we get with this program.” Mattison took another hit of his drink. “Give it a chance and you might see a difference.”
“What is that?”
“What? This? Protein shake. Before and after every workout.”
“You get that at, like, GNC?”
“You can. But you have to be very, very careful what you get there. Those places are full of stuff that will flunk you out of your next drug test. You have your workout binder?”
Del fished into his gym bag and produced the black notebook.
“In the second appendix there is a list of approved supplements. Do not, under any circumstances, take anything that is not on that list. You will almost certainly regret it.”
Mattison thumbed through Del’s binder and recommended a couple of products that were well within the budget of an average A-ball player, then flipped to the next appendix and circled a list of protein-rich items, only a handful of which Del could honestly say were staples of his diet. The coach’s easy tone took on a harder edge when he leafed beyond the next divider to check Del’s workout logs. The pages were clean and white and clung together like new dollar bills.
“There’s no notes in here.”
“I kept track on some other sheets I had at home.” It was a lie, and Del knew Mattison knew it. He wished he’d taken Edsell’s advice and scribbled in some figures for show.
Mattison tapped his pen against the open binder. He lifted the first sheet in the log, scanned the next page, and shook his head. “Well, we better put something in here. We need to set some baselines for the weights and reps you should be hitting. Let’s start at the start. Leg press, what have you been doing there?”
Del mulled it in his head. His offseason workouts had focused primarily on his chest and arms. The leg machine at the gym back home was too short for him to comfortably fit into. He’d only seriously worked his Big Bird legs a couple of times all winter. “About three hundred, usually,” he finally said.
Mattison smiled.
“What?” Was that too high or too low? That’s what they usually did last year, though once when Edsell challenged him he’d gotten up to 380 pounds. Probably best not to mention that part.
“Just go ahead with your three hundred. Give me a set of twelve.”
Del lifted a couple of plates into place. After recalculating the weight, he crouched down and folded his body into the leg press. With a low grunt he pushed the lift upward with his heels, conscientious of his form. He paused briefly when his legs were extended, then let the weight down and started up again. His pace remained steady for the first seven lifts before slowing. By the end of his set he was huffing.
“How’d I do?”
“About how I figured you would. That’s too much weight.”
“Really?”
“Really. You should be getting through your sets without straining. Remember: reps not weight. You’re not trying to find the maximum you can lift. Your goal is to knock out four or five sets on each exercise.”
“I thought we were supposed to push ourselves.”
“I’ll be pushing you to get in here and get through your program on a regular schedule. Over time we’ll slowly bump some of these weights up. But first we need to figure out what you should be targeting for each of these exercises. Because what your buddy is doing isn’t going to be the same. You guys all have different bodies and you need individual workouts.”
“Oh.” Was Mattison going to report all this to someone? That was the last thing he needed. He wished he had waited for someone else to volunteer so he could have known what to expect. “That’s not how we did it last year.”
“Forget last year,” Mattison laughed. “That’s why you’re here, right? We’re starting over. Now let’s try some squats.”
Del proceeded through each station in the gym, Mattison jotting notes as he went through his sets. By the end of the hour most of the entries on the workout chart in his binder were filled in with target weights. As they were wrapping up, Chad Skeen and Dante Mendenhall, the club’s center fielder, filed in.
“’Bout time you sought some help, Tanner,” Skeen kidded.
“Morning, fellas,” Mattison greeted them. “You guys will all be doing this. Del’s just the first to get it out of the way.”
“I’m good,” Skeen replied.
“Yeah?” Mattison asked.
“Uh-huh. I been lifting since high school. I know my way around here.”
“That’s great. I hope you’ll humor me and sign up for a one-on-one anyway, just so we can get a baseline on everyone.”
“Whatever you need, coach.” Skeen smirked and puffed out his Barney Rubble chest. “I’ll be glad to help you whip some of these guys into shape. We got us a couple a pitchers that are a little on the soft side.”
“That’s quite all right. I’ll get the pitchers, too. But thanks for offering.”
“Always happy to help.” The left fielder chuckled as he hefted a plate onto the barbell in the bench-press rack. “Hey, Mendy, scout out another couple fifties for me, will ya? There’s nothing on here. Tanner must be working off the girls’ chart.”
Hunched over the drinking fountain on the wall, Del rose and wiped the back of his wrist against his mouth. “I can lift more than that. That’s just what he set it at.”
“Don’t listen to him,” Mattison said. “That’s what you ought to be at for now. You just do what we talked about and you’ll be fine.”
Del nodded, his eyes still fixed on the prone Skeen, sounding off each rep as he thrust the bar above his chest. Cocksucker. We’ll see who’s laughing at the end of the season.