The Fourth Stall Part II Read Online Free PDF Page B

to be only for pitchers and catchers, kind of like how they always report first for Spring Training in the majors. The position player tryouts weren’t for another month or so, when the temperature outside would warm up a little.
    We were both especially curious to see how this would go, considering how we’d now heard two completely different versions of what the new coach was supposedly like. Mr. Kjelson generally had a good reputation, but after what Trixie Von Parkway told us earlier, I wasn’t too sure what to expect.
    I did not expect him to look so small, that’s for sure. That’s the first thing I noticed when we stepped inside the gym. He was just barely taller than some of the seventh and eighth graders around him. There was a pile of catcher gear in the middle of the floor and a bag of baseballs at his feet.
    â€œCome on in here, guys.” Mr. Kjelson waved us over. We walked over and joined the group of kids standing around him.
    Other than being fairly short and small, Mr. Kjelson was a pretty normal-looking guy. He seemed to be a little younger than my dad and had short hair that looked like it hadn’t been combed in a while. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and he did not have a whistle like most coaches do, which I was pretty happy to see. Seriously, most coaches abused their whistles worse than the Cubs general manager abused his payroll, which could get annoying really quickly.
    I scanned the other kids in attendance. It was pretty tough to make the team as a sixth grader. In fact, there was only one other sixth grader there, a kid named Tazaharu Matsuko, a foreign exchange student from Japan. Everybody at our school just called him Taz.
    â€œOkay, everybody, this is the first day of tryouts for pitchers and catchers. Today I just kind of want you all to take it easy. Don’t worry about blowing me away with your ninety-mile-per-hour gun. Just focus on hitting your spots and getting loose. No pressure today, right? Now, let’s have the pitchers all group over here and the catchers here.”
    There were about seven of us catchers and more than twenty pitchers. He said we’d be rotating. Kjelson lined us catchers up along the gym on one end where he had laid down some rubber mats, then took the pitchers the correct distance to the other end. He had placed a piece of red tape earlier that he must have measured as the fifty-four feet between the plate and mound.
    He explained how the rotation system would work. Five pitches per catcher then switch. Just light throwing for the first twenty or thirty minutes. Try to hit the glove, nothing more, nothing less.
    â€œAnd remember, we’re all trying to make the same team, so I don’t want to see any Barrett and Zambrano action, okay?”
    A few of us chuckled. I raised my hand. “You’re a Cubs fan, Coach?”
    He smirked at me, the kind of empty and sad smile that only another Cubs fan could recognize. “Unfortunately I am.”
    I shook my head in sympathy, but really I was pretty happy. Being a Cubs fan was like a sacred bond. It was like a lifelong connection to every other Cubs fan that was almost stronger than being actual family because real families usually don’t suffer as much together as Cubs fans do. Being stuck in crappy situations seems to bring people together for some reason, so being Cubs fans brought us all together each and every year. It was good to have that connection with our potential coach.
    And I had to admit it . . . there was no way a Cubs fan could be as awful a guy as Trixie had said Kjelson was.
    Tryouts went well, I thought. Some kids were clearly rusty, and so we catchers spent a lot of time blocking balls and retrieving the ones we missed, which bounced all over the hard gym floor. It was pretty painful and difficult trying to block bad pitches in that gym, but none of us complained.
    The pitchers did some light throwing and then moved on to fastballs. No