Change-up Read Online Free PDF

how crowded postseason clubhouses were, but the visitors clubhouse in Fenway was so tiny he could barely move from locker to locker. He managed to scrounge a couple of quotes from several players about Beckett—Kelleher had suggested he write his sidebar on how good Beckett was in postseason—but couldn’t get close to Ryan Zimmerman, who was surrounded by at least ten cameras, not to mention all the notebooks and tape recorders.
    It was already midnight, and Stevie had to file his story by 12:45. There was no time to hang around until the crowd around Zimmerman began to disperse. Stevie was heading for the door when he saw Norbert Doyle. He was standing at a locker near the door with one reporter talking to him. Seeing Stevie, he waved.
    “Eleven o’clock tomorrow?” he said.
    “Absolutely,” Stevie said. “We’ll be there.”
    “Great. My kids are really looking forward to it.”
    Stevie was tempted to say, “You mean David is looking forward to meeting Susan Carol,” but he resisted.
    “Us too,” he said, and raced back upstairs to try to write. Once again he knew what he was writing wasn’tparticularly inspired. The quotes were hardly brilliant. “The guy’s got great stuff and great control,” left fielder Adam Dunn had said.
    Great, Stevie thought, like anyone watching couldn’t figure that out. Kelleher often reminded him that some nights you just do the best you can and make deadline. Stevie knew that was true, and he knew everyone else was dealing with the same banal quotes. Still, it didn’t make him happy to file such a nonstory.
    He was even less happy when he found Susan Carol writing away with a big smile on her face. “What are you so happy about?” he asked.
    “Me? Oh, nothing,” she said, still smiling. “I’ll tell you later.”
    “Give me one sentence,” he said.
    She shrugged. “I got lucky,” she said. “Bill Buckner was in the Sox clubhouse, and he recognized me, I guess from when we were doing
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. They had told everyone he was off-limits until the off-day press conference, but he talked to me.”
    Stevie stared at her. In the middle of a packed World Series clubhouse, she had gotten an exclusive story. Buckner was famous for the error he had made in the 1986 World Series when Mookie Wilson’s ground ball darted between his legs, allowing the New York Mets to score the winning run.
    For years Buckner had been the symbol of Boston’s postseason futility. Stevie remembered being at lunch one time with Kelleher and Esther Newberg, his literary agent. Newberg was one of those crazed Red Sox Nation fans.
    “Watch this,” Kelleher had said quietly to Stevie while Newberg was going on about how much she hated Buckner.
    “So, Esther, do you remember what the score was when Buckner muffed the ball?” Kelleher said.
    “I don’t know,” she said. “Was it six to five, five to four? I know we were ahead by a run.”
    “No, you weren’t,” Kelleher said. “The score was tied. All you Red Sox fans act like Buckner lost the World Series for you, when even if he makes the play, the game just goes to the eleventh inning.”
    “I don’t care,” Newberg had answered. “I hate him. I don’t want to hear this.”
    Stevie remembered wondering what it was like to be Buckner, with so many people hating him so passionately. Buckner had been “rehabilitated” after the Red Sox finally won the World Series in 2004 and then again in 2007. That was why he was in Boston—as an invited guest of the team. And Susan Carol had gotten to talk to him—alone.
    “I should have known,” Stevie said. “Everyone else has zilch, and you’ve got Bill Buckner.”
    “Stop it, Stevie,” she said. “I got lucky. Now go write.”
    He did, but he wasn’t happy. Susan Carol had once called him the most competitive person she had ever met, and he knew she wasn’t far wrong. He wasn’t a good enough athlete to shine that way, so journalism was the way he competed. And his girlfriend