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pain. The next batter hits another grounder to Rocco and this time he fires it at the lead runner at second base. The second baseman, Brian Sorenstag, never wants to catch a throw from Rocco. He’s already caught a few and it always hurts. Now he just gets out of the way. He is saving his hands for basketball. This means that the runner will be safe on second base or, worse, that Rocco has thrown so hard the ball will end up in the outfield and the runner gets to third. So I run in to catch the throw from Rocco that Brian did not want to touch. Then I understand why. The pain in my hand is so sharp I completely forget about tossing the ball to second.
    Of course, our best player is Donnie LePine at shortstop. He never makes fielding errors, his throws are always on target, sometimes he goes to the mound and pitches a few innings, and he has a perfect swing without ever taking batting practice. What makes this even worse, everybody likes him best.
    Even the coach, Mr. Bradley, likes LePine best. You can tell. He tries to let everyone play, so players are constantly being taken out. Only Donnie LePine plays all nine innings of every game.
    Mr. Bradley is interesting to me. For one thing, he knows absolutely everything about baseball. If you talk about Sal Maglie, he will tell you his earned run average. Mr. Bradley used to be a pitcher and knows everything about all the pitchers. He is younger than the other teachers and one of the few adult men I know who has never been to war. He has never even been in the military.
    All his scars are from baseball and he has quite a few. He was a pitcher for the Pawtucket Red Sox in Rhode Island but “threw his arm out.” That is the phrase everyone uses and whatever it means, it must have hurt. One day in the locker room I see his right shoulder. It is misshapen, with a strange dent in the middle covered with long whitish scars. “Oh, my God,” I think with horror. “That’s what it means—you literally throw your arm out of your body. Then they have to stick it back somehow.” I keep thinking about that scarred-up shoulder.
    The revenge for the 1956 World Series finally comes. It is four years later and there aren’t any Brooklyn Dodgers anymore. This year the Yankees and the Republicans lose, both in very close contests. The World Series comes down to the last inning of the last game, the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Yankees tied. Suddenly a Pittsburgh batter I’d never heard of and who is not known to be much of a hitter smashes the ball out of the park. It is reported that Mickey Mantle cried.
    Mickey Mantle cried! I love that. I will always like the Pirates for that, the team that made Mickey Mantle cry. Adults don’t cry very much. The only crying adults I have seen were my family one Saturday when they were listening to a broadcast of Tosca with Leontyne Price. It was my parents’ favorite opera. I didn’t really understand it but it seemed to involve love and torture, and the performers sung these amazing songs with so much feeling. After one song I looked over at my parents and their eyes were shining. They had been crying. Leontyne Price had made them cry. And now the Pittsburgh Pirates had made Mickey Mantle cry. When adults start crying, it’s usually important.

Chapter Five
    Paying the Price
    The big thing is that John Kennedy has been elected president. You may not think this is such a big thing. But I’ve just turned twelve years old and the only president I can remember is Eisenhower. It seemed like he always had been president and always would be president. He was the General, the one who had led all our fathers to war, and had won the war, and so he would be president forever. He was old and he talked the way old people talk, like from a different time. He was all about a world that happened before I was born.
    Now he is gone. We all knew Richard Nixon, who ran against Kennedy. If Nixon had won it would not have