Out of Control Read online

  Text copyright © 2012 by Lerner Publishing Group, Inc.

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  The images in this book are used with the permission of: © Kelpfish/Dreamstime.com, p. 109; © iStockphoto.com/Jill Fromer, p. 112 (banner background); © iStockphoto.com/Naphtalina, pp. 112, 113, 114 (brick wall background). Front Cover: moodboard/CORBIS. Back Cover: © Kelpfish/Dreamstime.com.

  Main body text set in Janson Text 12/17.5.

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  Jasper, Rick, 1948–

  Out of control / by Rick Jasper.

  p. cm. —(Travel team)

  ISBN 978–0–7613–8323–9 (lib. bdg. : alk. paper)

  [1. Baseball—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.J32Ou 2012

  [Fic]—dc23 2011027948

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  1—BP—12/31/11

  eISBN: 978-0-7613-8733-6 (pdf)

  eISBN: 978-1-4677-3059-4 (ePub)

  eISBN: 978-1-4677-3060-0 (mobi)

  TO MY GRANDMOTHER, WHO

  BOUGHT ME MY FIRST GLOVE

  “ The way a team plays as a whole

  determines its success. You may have the

  greatest bunch of individual stars in the

  world, but if they don’t play together, the

  club won’t be worth a dime.”

  —BABE RUTH

  CHAPTER 1

  If you had attended the baseball game between the Las Vegas Roadrunners and the Boise Bulls on that steamy June afternoon, you would have seen something unusual. Both summer travel teams were at the elite level, which is to say that both teams had teenage players under seventeen years old with college or even professional potential. But that afternoon you would have seen something that looked more like a scene from a Little League game.

  It began simply enough. The Roadrunners were down by two in the bottom of the eighth inning. Thanks to a walk, they had a runner on first with nobody out: their shortstop, Carlos “Trip” Costas. Trip was speedy, so the expectation was that he would try to steal second, and indeed he was taking a generous enough lead to draw the attention of the pitcher.

  The Bulls’ pitcher was good enough, or well-coached enough, to expect the steal. But even if he had been unaware, the screaming of one of the Roadrunners’ fans would have alerted him.

  “STEAL! STEAL, CARLOS! Jeez, move your butt! This guy’s got nothing!”

  A few people in the crowd looked around, but most of the Roadrunners’ faithful knew without looking that the screamer was Trip’s father, Julio. Like Trip, they ignored him.

  The game slowed down considerably with the next batter, center fielder Danny Manuel. He was a good match for the pitcher; both of them were—to put it nicely in a word often used by sports broadcasters—“deliberate.” They took their time. The pitcher would fool around with the resin bag, make a couple of throws to first, fool around with his cap, and then again go to the resin bag. Once he was finally ready to pitch, Danny would call time and step out of the batter’s box.

  When a pitch actually managed to occur, Danny would foul it off. The afternoon was warm, the sun was bright, and the sky was a monotonous, cloudless, desert blue. What should have been a tense situation was becoming nap-inducing.

  Julio was still awake, though. He was still yelling for the steal. And he was still being ignored, as the attention of the other fans and, as it turned out, some of the players waned. The count drowsed its way to 2–2, and Danny kept fouling off pitches—over the backstop, tipped into the dirt, down the line, high, low. It was after about seven of these that the Bulls’ catcher noticed Trip’s overlong lead.

  The next pitch was outside, on the first-base side of the plate. The catcher gunned it to first and Trip, as he admitted later, was caught napping. The first baseman tagged him out, the Roadrunners’ fans groaned, and Trip headed back to the dugout.

  From the seats came an outraged bellow, and suddenly Julio was on the field, heading for his son. What transpired looked like a coach-umpire altercation, with Julio in the role of coach, cursing in Spanish and waving his arms, while Trip stared at him with little expression while trying to walk away. That’s when the shoving started. Julio grabbed the teenager by the shoulder and started shaking him. Trip was four inches taller and pushed his dad away, but Julio kept grabbing him and getting in his face.

  “What were you thinking? You had that guy! You could steal standing up!”

  Finally, Trip started backing his dad up, shoving the heels of his hands against Julio’s chest.

  Before things got really ugly, the umpires converged on the two and the Roadrunners’ bench emptied. The resulting spectacle consisted of a baseball team separating father from son, handing Julio over to security and shielding Trip as they ushered him to the dugout. Trip hadn’t said anything to that point, but as his dad was escorted out he turned and yelled, in a voice as impressively loud as Julio’s, “Happy freakin’ Father’s Day!”

  When the game finally resumed, Danny flied out. Zack Waddell singled, but he was then thrown out on Nick Cosimo’s subsequent grounder. The Roadrunners went quietly in the ninth and lost by two. But by then the game itself seemed like a sideshow to the main event. When people left the field that night they were talking not about who won or lost, but about crazy Julio Costas.

  My father.

  CHAPTER 2

  Yes, my dad is the Julio Costas. Your parents probably have some of his records. Maybe they’ve even seen him perform in Vegas, where he pretty much stays now except for when he has TV appearances and recording sessions. He never liked touring, and now he doesn’t need to.

  Here’s a description from Wikipedia: Julio Costas is a Venezuelan singer who has sold over 200 million records worldwide in fourteen languages. He has released forty albums and is one of the top twenty best-selling musical artists in history. He became internationally known in the early ’80s as a performer of romantic ballads.

  His story is more interesting than that, and he’s very fond of telling it, so I know it by heart. Dad was born in the La Dolorita barrio of Caracas. He took me and my brothers on a trip to Caracas once, but we didn’t go near La Dolorita. It would have been too dangerous. The dream of the people who live in its violence and dirt is to get out, but the options for escape are limited. Some choose crime. A few with the talent try sports, and that was Dad’s dream.

  Venezuelans are crazy about baseball, the way Brazilians are crazy about soccer, and the amateur leagues there have been attracting major-league scouts for years. The country produced a Hall of Famer in the ’50s in Chicago White Sox shortstop Luis Aparicio, plus a lot of other stars along the way. Today you could point to Bobby Abreu or Magglio Ordonez or Carlos Zambrano. Anyway, Dad also had talent. He’s a lefty, and he could pitch.

  By the time he was thirteen, baseball scouts had noticed him, but he’d also been noticed by a scout of another kind. Dad and a few of his buddies would make extra money singing on downtown street corners—traditional Latin stuff and songs from movies. One day a music executive named Domingo Villa stopped to listen, and he was sure he heard something special in Dad’s voice. In two years, with Villa as his agent, Julio Costas had a bestselling album and an international tou
r, and the two men began to get rich together. Dad left baseball behind. Well, not entirely.

  When he was twenty-five, my dad married his second wife, a nineteen-year-old Spanish tennis star who gave him three sons, my older brothers and me, before she and Dad split. I was only two when the divorce happened, but apparently there was some bitterness because she has never tried to involve herself with us. She married a Swiss doctor and is now raising a second family in Europe.

  Meanwhile, Dad has married three more times, most recently a Vegas dancer seven years older than me. None of Dad’s wives have really been “moms” to us, but it hasn’t seemed like an issue. We’ve had nannies, Dad has always paid plenty of attention to us, and there’s been baseball since we could walk.

  Dad still dreams of sports glory, but now it’s for his sons. So we’ve had private coaching, the best equipment money could buy, and constant encouragement. Well, “encouragement” is putting it mildly. Dad has always been pretty over-the-top about our working hard and succeeding in his favorite sport.

  And, by and large, we’ve made him happy. My oldest brother Julio Jr. (J.T.) plays Triple-A in North Carolina, while Alex, the middle son, is getting attention as a catcher at UCLA. And Dad has the biggest ambitions of all for me. He thinks I’m the most athletically gifted of the three of us, and he wants results.

  All three of us have played for the Roadrunners. In fact, Dad is probably the biggest financial backer of the team. He makes sure the team is what he calls a “class act.” We travel in comfort, and we stay at the best places when we’re away. When we’re at home, we have chartered time at a high-end gym and a part-time trainer to give individual attention to every team member.

  It sounds like a great deal. But there’s one problem. I am sick of baseball.

  CHAPTER 3

  I’ve been playing baseball almost every day for a dozen years. And not just playing—training and practicing too. When I’m not on a field, I’m looking at videos.

  Even when we were really little, it was all about baseball. On Monday nights when Dad wasn’t performing, he’d sit J.T., Alex, and me down in front of the screen in our home theater for ESPN Monday Night Baseball. He would turn off the sound because he had no patience for the broadcasters. And he would comment on every play himself. We had to be ready for questions.

  “J.T., pay attention. Why is the outfield playing in?”

  “Alex, how come that pitch got by the catcher?”

  “Can you believe it, Trip? The guy threw to first! What was the right play?”

  This wasn’t all crap. Dad knows baseball. And the three of us, by the time we were ten, knew it too. We’d been lucky enough to have talent and training, and we were all grateful and eager to please Dad.

  It wasn’t until I was thirteen that I expected anything more out of life than becoming a major-league star. When I did, it was because of Dad. Next to baseball, the biggest thing in our house, naturally, was music. Musicians came to see Dad, to jam with him, all the time. These guys were millionaires whose names weren’t known outside of the small print on album credits, but they were legendary instrumentalists sought out by vocal stars like my dad who knew their value.

  Music was a different world from baseball. I don’t mean to say there isn’t creativity in sports, but baseball—and I would think most sports—is about dependability, repetition, and routine. There is no situation in baseball that hasn’t happened before, and for every situation there’s a time-tested, reliable strategy for handling it. But music is full of surprises. In music there are no “percentage plays.” Genius gets to play. Doing the unexpected is a good thing. I feel like I’ve always known this.

  When Dad and his friends played around, if I wasn’t at baseball practice, I would find a place to listen. I picked up keyboard and guitar pretty early. I practiced whenever I had a chance. Kinda funny—you hear about kids wanting to bolt music lessons so they could play outside. I was the opposite.

  A couple of years ago I even started a band with three guys I know at school. We call ourselves Four. Dad was okay with it as long as it didn’t interfere with you-know-what. We do covers of pop stuff, and we’ve actually played at a few school dances and some parties.

  But baseball was fun too. I thought my brothers were heroes, and I always expected to play for the Roadrunners. When I was old enough and realized Dad was right about my talent, I was happy in a kind of unthinking way. And I loved that Dad was happy about me.

  So when did it all change? It wasn’t clear-cut. I guess baseball just lost the element of surprise, and that was something I valued. The closer I got to choosing baseball as a profession, the more I started to feel closed in. Trapped. Everyone I talked to seemed to be talking about my future in baseball, like it was all decided. But I didn’t decide. Shouldn’t it be my decision? Maybe it was like an arranged marriage, and I was starting to feel like a runaway groom.

  I still play and work at playing, even though my teammates and coaches sometimes tell me I don’t look too aggressive at the plate. “You’ve got a good eye, though.” Which means I walk a lot. Which means I score a lot. At shortstop—that’s my position—I get recognized. Shortstop allows for most of the very limited creativity available in baseball. After the catcher, the shortstop is the playmaker.

  There was this one game. We were ahead by one. The other team had runners on first and second with no outs. The batter slashed a grounder deep to my left—deep enough that the runner on second was off for third. There was a force at second, but the batter was speedy—no double play. So I’m going for the ball and out of the corner of my eye I see the base runner stumble a step on his way to third.

  Our third baseman, Nellie Carville, is smart and powerful. The stumble happened, and I knew Nellie saw it too. When the ball got to me, I wheeled 180 degrees and gunned it to Nellie. His throw to second just nailed the guy sliding in. It was pretty. It was surprising. Was it genius? Probably not, but it made me happy.

  That play, by then, was an exception. I was playing, but I wasn’t looking forward to it. I could feel that something was wrong. I could feel some kind of pressure building. What would Dad say if I quit?

  CHAPTER 4

  If I really didn’t know the answer to that question, I got it in the game on Father’s Day. Dad’s jumping onto the field to yell at me was really the climax of something that had been building for a while.

  For example, I already missed two practices. I really did feel too sick to play those days, but I can’t say part of it wasn’t mental. And when I did play, even when I tried to concentrate, there were times when I wasn’t all there.

  Coach Washington, whom we all call Wash, was the first to notice. We were playing in Salt Lake City against a good team, the Salt Lake City Bobcats. In the second inning I picked up a routine double-play ball and threw to first instead of second. Gus Toomey was so surprised at first that he almost missed it.

  Wash was on me as soon as I got back to the dugout. “What’s up, Trip? Catchin’ a few winks out there?”

  In the seventh I batted second. Sammy Perez had walked ahead of me. We were a run up, but we needed more. On the first pitch I grounded into a double play. Wash was on me again: “Didn’t you see the bunt signal? Wake up, man!” The fact was I missed the signal, but heck, I didn’t need someone to tell me it was a bunt situation. My head just wasn’t in it.

  I know you’ve heard this exchange before:

  Sportscaster to athlete: So, Joe, what’s your team’s plan for tonight’s big game?

  Athlete: We just want to go out there and have fun, Marv.

  But I got to the point where baseball wasn’t fun anymore. My automatic skills kept me in the lineup, but I was making more and more mental mistakes.

  If Dad hadn’t jumped onto the field when he did, he probably would have done it the night before. Luckily, though, he was doing a show then. Because I lost the game for the Runners.

  We were a run up on the visitors in the top of the ninth inning, but our relief p
itcher, Shotaro Mori, was struggling. By the time we had two outs, they had men on second and third.

  The next guy up hit a very high fly to short left. I automatically yelled, “I got it!” and started back to catch it. “Automatically” was the problem. I was watching the ball but not listening to Darius McKay, our left fielder, who was coming up behind me, yelling, “Get out!”

  In situations like this, the outfielder has priority over the infielder. Just to be sure, when two guys are calling for the ball like we were, the center fielder can yell “You!” to the guy who is supposed to get the ball. And Danny, our center fielder, was doing just that. It was Darius’s ball, but all I was thinking was, “Catch it and the game’s over.”

  At the last minute I heard Darius, and at the last minute I turned around and backed off. But Darius had seen that I was sleepwalking, figured what the heck, I’d catch it, and at the last minute he stopped coming in.

  The result was two players looking at each other while the ball dropped between them. Since it was their last play of the game, both runners had taken off at the sound of the bat, and they both crossed the plate before Darius had even picked up the ball and tossed it to second.

  The next batter grounded out to second. Wash didn’t say a word when I got back to the dugout. Neither did Darius or Danny. It was Nellie, our captain, who came over to where I was sitting alone and sat down next to me. Just sat, without saying anything, but it meant something. I was grateful.

  I held out hope that we would come back in the bottom of the inning, but we went down in order. Visitors 5, Runners 4. I should have felt terrible; I did feel terrible. But to be truthful, the bad feelings I had were only partly because I had let down the team. They were mostly because I just wanted to be out of there.