The Batboy Read Online Free PDF Page A

next weekend.
    And then it was quiet at the table, the way it often was when his mom finally ran out of the questions she felt she was supposed to ask about baseball. When they both ran out of things to say to each other. It was happening more and more, them having so little to say to each other when the subject wasn’t baseball that Brian wondered if it used to be the exact same way when she and his dad sat at this same table.

    When he got up to his room, Brian went into his closet and got out the box labeled “Hank Bishop.”
    It was all in there. The issue of Sports Illustrated with Hank on the cover from the summer when Brian was eight. The autographed ball that his mom had bought for him at a Field of Dreams store in Indianapolis when she’d been at a radio convention there last summer, the one that Brian had taken off his desk and put in the box with the rest of the Hank stuff when he’d gotten suspended for drugs the first time. There was the autographed picture the Tigers’ public relations department had sent to him, one that read, “To a future Tiger! All the best! Hank Bishop.”
    Then there were the game programs, from every game Brian had ever seen Hank Bishop play in person. There was the shoe box inside the bigger box with all of his Hank Bishop baseball cards. His first glove, too small for him now, a Hank Bishop model TPX.
    And at the very bottom of the box, in a manila envelope, were the Comerica ticket stubs.
    Brian went through them now and found the stub from the very first game he’d watched Hank play, eight years ago against the Yankees, on July 27, the first time he’d ever seen a big-league game in person. Hank Bishop had hit two home runs that night, the last a walk-off job to win the game in the bottom of the thirteenth.
    And, all this time later, Hank Bishop was back. He really had come back into Brian’s world. And he knew, even in his great baseball heart, that he shouldn’t be this stoked about it, as stoked as he’d sounded at dinner with his mom. But he was. He just was. He remembered how hurt he’d been when he’d found out Hank Bishop—his guy—had been enough of a dope to start using dope.
    Not hurt the way he had been when his dad left. But hurt by sports in a way that Brian never thought it could.
    Now the fan in him couldn’t wait for the Tigers’ road trip to end, couldn’t wait for them to get back to Comerica, couldn’t wait to be in the same dugout with Hank Bishop, in the same clubhouse. The same field.
    He wished he could have explained it better to his mom at dinner—why this was so important to him. He wished he could have made her understand. She had tried, the way she always tried, in those moments when he knew she was trying to be both mother and father to him at the same time. She just didn’t get it. And Brian understood that, he really did. She couldn’t be everything to him, and he wasn’t going to love her any less because she didn’t love baseball the way he did.
    But sometimes he couldn’t help himself, no matter how hard he tried, no matter how dumb he told himself he was being, no matter how mad it made him to open the door even a crack.
    Sometimes he missed his dad.

CHAPTER 5
    D uring the regular season, Brian and Kenny had played in the thirteen-fourteen division of Bloomfield Little League. Now they were with the Sting, playing in a travel league called the North Oakland Baseball Federation. The winner of their league would head to the state tournament, which this year would be played about twenty minutes away, at Liberty Park in Sterling Heights, at the end of August.
    Sometimes they’d play a three-game weekend series against the same team, either the Motor City Hit Dogs or Clarkson River Rebels or Lake Orion Dragons. Sometimes they’d play in Bloomfield, occasionally in Birmingham, going over to Memorial Park in Royal Oak for a night game, because Memorial had lights. Before the regular season was over, they’d have played thirty