Screaming at the Ump Read Online Free PDF Page B

League in our town, until the parents, like Chris’s dad, made him so crazy he stopped. It was the same year I stopped playing. But this one year, Dad was overseeing the umps in a big statewide baseball tournament. I guess Chris had always played with older kids—he was that good—but the tournament rules very clearly said that you had to be a certain age to play. Chris’s coach pretended he hadn’t known that, wouldn’t show Dad Chris’s birth certificate, and everyone was furious with Dad when he said Chris couldn’t play.
    Chris had been a jerk to me ever since.
    Did Chris Sykes think I had something to do with my dad enforcing rules? We were on the same bus route then, going to Clay Coves Elementary. And he told everyone that my dad ran a vampire school. He got all his friends to open their mouths really wide and hiss whenever I walked down the aisle of the bus.
    It didn’t last long, though. Maybe because I thought it was pretty funny. Or funny for something that was supposed to be mean, at least. Right? Tell me you can’t picture a vampire school! There would be classes like How to Avoid Mirrors, and Perfecting Neck Angle, and Fang Care. I loved picturing the fieldwork (at night, of course)—all those guys out there on the same field we used, except instead of wearing their umpire shirt and pants, they’d all be in black capes, learning how to swirl them in a sort of villainy vampire way in the dark of night. For a mean kid who was trying to annoy me, he had come up with a pretty funny idea.
    At the assembly, I couldn’t find Zeke, so I sat with this kid I sort of knew, Juan. He took notes about everything. Even things like when the girls’ soccer tryouts were. I wondered if he thought there were tests on assemblies. I wondered if maybe there were.
    When someone walked onstage to read a list of all the different nonsport school activities and clubs, I almost let out a loud WOO HOOO! at the mention of the school newspaper.
    I had big stacks of filled-up notebooks on the shelves in my room. When I watched games on TV, I wrote down the great plays. I tried to write them in as interesting a way as I could, not just describing what happened, but also using words that let the reader feel the same excitement I did, or any fan did, watching the play actually take place. I didn’t know if the middle-school newspaper had a sports section. If it didn’t, maybe I could start one, reporting on the different school teams. Or maybe I could write
and
be the sports editor.
    So okay, then, maybe I
should
have written down when the girls’ soccer tryouts were too. Maybe Juan was a little sharper than I thought.

Play Ball
    O N the bus home, Zeke talked about last night’s episode of
So You Think You’re the Biggest Idiot?
“There was this one guy, right? He was jumping on a trampoline, but of course he didn’t know anyone was filming him? So he started taking off his clothes. I mean, they couldn’t show anything, they had this blurry thing going on the screen, so you couldn’t see, but there were people—his neighbors, I think—who came out and were watching him? And they were describing what they saw, and he didn’t know they were there. And it was, like, one of the funniest things I ever saw in my entire life. It was sick!”
    â€œSounds like it,” I said. I never saw the point of wanting the title of Biggest Idiot.
    â€œAre you going to watch tonight?”
    Zeke still couldn’t accept that I just wasn’t into those shows. There was one time when he swore I would love this new show, and from the title, I thought he might be right, so I decided to give it a try. I watched the first-ever season of
Reporter Standoff
. Contestants had eighteen hours to find, research, and write a different kind of story each week. Sometimes it was for a newspaper, sometimes radio, or broadcast TV. I loved it! There was this guy,