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one time when my best friend, Joe Pizzica, threw a no-hitter against my team, the Orioles. “They broke my stones about that,” Joe said. “Everybody told me that was the only reason I pitched a no-hitter.”
    When I was fourteen, I was invited to go on the road with the Dodgers to Shea Stadium. My mom was upset with my dad for letting me do it, but Mark Cresse, the Dodgers’ bullpen coach, took me under his wing and put me up in his hotel room. Tommy and most of the coaches had actually taken a limo to Atlantic City and then another limo to New York, so I rode up with Bill Russell, the Dodgers’ shortstop, and his wife. Billy saw to it that I got checked into the Grand Hyatt in New York. The next day, Cresse and I went out on the number-seven train to Shea. I hit a little there, checked out Darryl Strawberry in the cage, and then ventured into the clubhouse . . . where most of the team was watching a porno film. There was one little TV in the training room, and they were all crowded around it. I have to admit that, coming from the straightlaced, deeply Catholic background that I did, it was a little unsettling. I didn’t tell my mother.
    Back at the Vet, I was determined to hit a ball into the seats during batting practice, and finally, that year, I popped one over the fence. It almost made me feel like I belonged there. For that matter, the players did, too, for the most part—guys like Mike Marshall, Greg Brock, Ed Amelung, and Bob Welch.
    Steve Sax, however, was another story. The Dodgers used to play little games in batting practice, and occasionally I got to be on one of the teams. Mark Cresse would decide whether the ball you hit was an out or a double or what. One day, Saxie was on my team and I played like shit, made a bunch of outs. After I chalked up another one, Sax said, “That fucking kid never gets a hit!” Or something like that. He didn’t mean it in a malicious way—he really didn’t—but I was devastated. I mean, I was ready to cry. Jose Morales was a pinch hitter for the Dodgers, and he had this warm-up bat with the handle sawed off and a can on the end, filled with lead to make it weighted. Vince came down before the game and I was so mad that I was swinging that thing around with a vengeance, nonstop. Finally, a player named Lemmie Miller, a cup-of-coffee outfielder, walked up and consoled me. He said, “Don’t let Sax get you upset.” It wasn’t profound advice, but it was enough.
    I was sixteen, in 1985, when a Dodgers pitcher named Alejandro Pena—who had won the ERA title the year before—was rehabbing from shoulder surgery and Tommy told me to grab a bat because Pena was throwing a simulated game. Pena wasn’t a hundred percent at that point, but he wasn’t taking it easy on me, either. There were some breaking pitches involved. I hita few balls hard, then banged one off the wall. Some of the coaches were exchanging glances. There was a little note about it in the local paper.
    That was when Tommy started talking me up, telling everybody about this kid hitting a double off the ERA champ.
    • • •
    Among the baseball friends my dad accumulated over the years—most of them through Tommy—was Eddie Liberatore, a longtime scout for the Dodgers who lived in Norristown and was a consort of Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams.
    To me, Ted Williams was pretty much the head honcho of hitting. By the time I was sixteen, I’d read his famous book, The Science of Hitting , enough times to have it nearly memorized. I can still recite his three keys: one, proper thinking; two, get a good pitch to hit; and three, have a quick bat. As you might expect, I had tried to copy Mike Schmidt’s batting style, but I gave it up when I realized how different it was from Ted Williams’s—almost the antithesis. Schmitty stood deep in the box with a closed stance and his elbow up; then he’d step forward, dive into the ball, and practically hook it to left field. Williams was more about staying back,