CHAPTER 19

Dad wasn’t going to make the trip to San Diego. He would be two more days in the hospital and had strict orders to rest at home for at least a week after that. No shows. No strenuous exercise. I felt sort of guilty leaving Dad behind, but Lisa promised to keep an eye on him. Turns out the two of them got along pretty well.

On Wednesday the Runners got on a bus and headed to the coast for the Beach Blowout. We were about halfway there when Coach Harris came back to where I was sitting.

“What do you think, Trip? Do you want me to start Dave Teller at short?”

“I know you probably think I’m nuts, Coach,” I said. “But I want to play.” Lisa had been right. I didn’t hate baseball. I just hated the expectation that baseball was my one and only future. As long as I was playing for the fun of it, and for the team, it was great.

Coach raised his eyebrows a little. “You’re sure?”

I was.

As usual, the Runners had the classiest accommodations available. We were staying at a resort on the ocean in La Jolla, on San Diego’s north side. We opened Wednesday night against the Phoenix Desert Eagles, an old rival. We were the designated home team in that first game.

Standing at shortstop, with the weight of Dad’s dreams off my shoulders, I felt my focus return. My mind was sharp, my body felt fit, and I was excited to play.

 

. . .

We cleaned out the Eagles. There are times, for all teams, when everything seems to be working. You hope those times will happen when they matter most. This was the biggest tournament we’d played all year. There would be only one bigger contest, the Elite Series at the end of August, and a good showing at the Blowout would probably get us invited to that one. And that first night, we were stellar. Every one of us. Nellie homered twice; Nick threw out three runners at second; Danny was so spectacular in center that he didn’t look like a show-off; Sammy doubled twice and stole a base; Carson struck out ten; and I was three for four and made one stab that had people standing up to cheer.

The Force was with us as the week went on. By Saturday we had only one game to win in order to reach the championship on Sunday. We played Los Lobos de Guadalajara, a Mexican team that boasted four alumni of a Little League World Series Champion team.

A big variable at our level, where guys are still teenagers, is physical development. We’ve all got skills, but we’re still growing, so the guys who’ve developed more have an advantage. Los Lobos—that’s The Wolves—looked, most of them, like adults. Not tall, necessarily, but bearded and muscular. Nick joked that half of them were probably married with children. And they played like they were earning their living at baseball.

Coach was resting Carson for the finals, if we made them, so he started Travis Melko. Travis pitched relief sometimes and started sometimes. He had three good pitches, none of them overpowering, but he had mad control and was a smart pitcher.

Travis’s strength was also his weakness, though. The control that made him so effective sometimes deserted him. But I shouldn’t have worried. That semifinal night, Travis pitched like a champ. The Runners homered three times—one was mine—and Travis shut out the Wolves on five hits.