The Batboy (2 page)

The Indians were already walking off the field. Game over. The Tigers in the dugout were pouring out onto the field. Even though it was only June, everybody already knew it was going to come down to the Tigers and the Indians in the American League Central this year. The Tigers had just swept the first series of the season between the two teams—their biggest wins of the young season.

Brian was on his feet now.

He saw Davey Schofield grinning at him from the other end of the dugout.

“Lay one down?” Davey said.

Brian said, “You heard?”

Davey said, “Man, I think the
peanut vendors
heard. Now I even got a
kid
knowing all my brilliant moves before I make ’em. Must be because your father played.”

“Must be,” Brian said, the sense of celebration suddenly leaving.

“Where’s he now?”

“Japan,” Brian said.

Davey motioned to Brian, letting him know that it was all right for him to join the celebration on the field.

“You wear the uniform, you’re part of the team now,” Davey said, putting an arm around Brian’s shoulders.

Brian walked that way with the Tigers’ manager toward home plate, picking up Curtis Keller’s bat when he got there. Doing his job.

As far as he was concerned, the best summer job ever invented by mortal minds.

Batboy for the Detroit Tigers.

He was part of the team now.

H
e still couldn’t believe he’d gotten the job, over all the other kids in the Detroit area who wanted to spend their summer getting paid to be at Comerica for Tigers home games.

Now that he’d been doing it for a week, Brian realized he’d never really understood as a fan what the job meant. The hours you had to put in every day—eight usually and sometimes nine. All the work you had to do in Equipment Room No. 3 next to the Tigers’ dugout before you ever got near the field. Before you could even wear your uniform with “Batboy” on the back instead of a number.

He’d always just assumed that being a batboy meant collecting foul balls and handing players new bats if they broke one.

He never knew how many pine tar rags were required for every game, how many rosin bags. He didn’t know that the Tigers actually employed four batboys: one for the Tigers’ dugout and clubhouse, one for the visitors’ side, one each to sit down near the stands behind first and third base to collect foul balls.

Brian Dudley, rookie batboy, didn’t know that one of his most important jobs once the game was over would be shining shoes for the next game.

He was the son of a pitcher, one who’d survived fourteen seasons pitching in the big leagues, and yet he didn’t have a clue what batboys actually did.

And wouldn’t have cared a lick if he had.

The way he didn’t care that he was being paid $7.50 an hour.

Because the truth was, Brian would have paid them to have this job, if he’d had the money, paid
them
to be on the inside of what had once been his father’s world.

Pretty much his father’s
whole
world.

It was as if he’d climbed down out of the stands and into a dream, climbed down from where he used to sit with his dad for Tigers games before his dad had walked out on him and his mom for good.

At fourteen, Brian was a decent enough ballplayer, good enough to be the last kid picked for All-Stars this summer from Bloomfield Hills, where he and his mom lived. He was a righty hitter who could hit to all fields, using the whole ballpark the way his dad had taught him, even if he still hadn’t hit a home run at any level he’d ever played. And he’d made himself into a solid outfielder even if what he really wanted to be was an infielder. Third base was his spot—the position his man Hank Bishop had played when Brian was old enough to first fall in love with the Detroit Tigers.

But Brian was a realist. He knew he was never going to be an actual big-leaguer himself, and would probably be lucky to make the varsity in high school when the time came.

So this summer was going to be his summer to be a big-leaguer, to be on the inside. Be a Tiger.

It all happened because of a letter he wrote.

Two, actually.

He’d written the first one the summer he’d finished sixth grade. It was the summer his dad left them, even though it felt like his dad had been leaving them for a long time. Until then, baseball and the Tigers had been about the only thing he’d been able to share with Cole Dudley, who’d been one of those specialty left-handed relievers who seem to be able to find work in the big leagues until they finally had run out of arm or run out of stuff. Cole Dudley had pitched for ten different teams in ten different cities in his fourteen years before finally retiring—“about five minutes before baseball retired me”—when he was forty, after one last half season with the Seattle Mariners.

He wasn’t bitter about his career ending, or about never having been a star. It was simply that he loved the game too much, and when he tried to live a life without it, with Brian and his mom in the house in Bloomfield, he just couldn’t do it.

Brian was eight when his dad retired, and as sad as his dad was about it, Brian was happy, because he would have Cole around all the time then, or so he’d thought.

And for a while, it
was
great for Brian, because baseball was finally something he could share with his dad in
person.
His dad bought them two season tickets up behind the Tigers’ dugout on the third-base side with amazing views. Yet for his dad, the seats never seemed close enough. He always looked uncomfortable being so near to the field yet not being
on
it. The game was all he’d known since he was a boy Brian’s age.

Even now, Brian could remember the nights when it seemed like he could call every pitch the pitchers were going to throw.

He didn’t know how to be a dad with anything else, didn’t know how to
talk
to Brian about anything else. But he could talk about baseball and talk about pitching, and when he was gone, it was as if those nights at the ballpark were all he left behind.

That and the note he left on Brian’s desk, the one he found when he got home from school one day.

That was the summer Cole Dudley took his first job as a pitching coach, traveling the West Coast as a roving minor-league instructor for the Diamondbacks. He didn’t even bother to file for divorce. Brian’s mom would do that later.

The very next day Brian went on his computer and found out the name of the Tigers’ clubhouse and equipment manager, Jim Schenkel, and wrote him a letter applying for the job of Tigers’ batboy.

A few days later he received a letter back from Mr. Schenkel, on Detroit Tigers stationery, telling him that he appreciated the interest, but that twelve-year-old boys were too young to work for the Tigers, and that Brian should get back in touch in a few years. And in the meantime, Mr. Schenkel wrote, Brian had better keep up with his schoolwork, because the big thing he looked for in his batboys was A’s.

“And I don’t mean the Oakland A’s,” was the way the letter ended.

Brian didn’t tell him that he was Cole Dudley’s son, because that summer he didn’t feel much like Cole Dudley’s son.

That was two summers ago.

Brian knew by now that most batboys in Major League Baseball were sixteen, but he couldn’t wait any longer, couldn’t bear the idea of having another summer go by and looking out on the field and seeing other kids doing his dream job.

So in April he had written Mr. Schenkel another letter, not a handwritten note this time, typing it out on his computer, his mom making sure the form was exactly right.

The way Brian made sure the words were exactly right.

When he didn’t hear back right away, the way he had the first time he’d applied, he just assumed that he was too young and that was that, end of story.

Ten days later, though, the letter came telling him he had the job.

Mr. Schenkel told him he’d made a copy of Brian’s letter and sent it to the commissioner of baseball, Mr. Bud Selig, and that Mr. Selig had called the day he received it and said, “We need more kids like this in baseball, not less, whatever their age is. Whether their dads played in the big leagues or not.”

Then, according to Mr. Schenkel, the commissioner of baseball had said to him, “This boy is the boy we all were once.”

At the end of the letter Mr. Schenkel asked for Brian’s mom to get his school transcript, and explained how she could go online for the rest of the forms she needed to fill out.

At the very end, Mr. Schenkel wrote, “See you when school’s out in June, batboy.”

His mom didn’t like it at first. She talked about what a hassle it would be getting him back and forth from the ballpark, and how it was going to mean rearranging her work schedule—
if
she could even do that. Yet Brian knew it wasn’t the hassle that was bothering her, it was that he was getting a job around a Major League Baseball team.

She had thought her life had stopped revolving around baseball a long time ago, and now Brian wanted, more than anything, to go spend a summer working at Comerica Park for the Tigers.

They went around and around on this one night at the dinner table until finally he had said, “Mom, this is my dream.”

And she had looked at him hard and said, “Couldn’t it be a dream about something else?”

He’d shaken his head.

She’d sighed heavily then, rubbing her temples with her fingers and closing her eyes. Finally, after the longest moment of Brian’s life, she said, “Then go for it.”

He had the job. And after what felt like about 400 years, especially once the Tigers’ season started in April, school had finally ended and summer had arrived.

Now every day and night when there was a home game—and when Brian didn’t have a game with All-Stars—his mom would drop him off on Montcalm Street on her way to her job as producer and news writer at WWJ, Detroit’s all-news radio station. Brian would walk underneath the pedestrian bridge that connected a parking garage to Comerica, walk through the security entrance to the ballpark, slide his official Tigers’ employee card with his picture on it into the time clock—he
never
got tired of doing
that—
and went through the lobby and into the elevator that took him down to the service level.

Once he got down there, Brian would turn left, feeling every time as if he was walking toward the Magic Kingdom of baseball, and travel the thirty or more yards to the Tigers’ clubhouse entrance. Then he would walk through the double doors, poke his head into Mr. Schenkel’s office on the right to see if he was there, to let him know that he’d arrived for work.

This was usually around three thirty in the afternoon.

After that he’d walk down the steps to the field level. And before he’d go into Equipment Room No. 3 to change his clothes, he’d go into the dugout and walk up the steps and stand on the edge of the green grass of Comerica Park.