I was about fifty foul shots in when Trip showed up that morning, dropping his bike on the curb in front of our yard. Trip lives only a few neighborhoods over—maybe a mile or so—and he used to show up all the time on his bike, especially in the summer. Given how small he is, I liked to imagine the dialogue inside the cars he passed along the way. Look at that little bastard go! He doesn’t even need training wheels! Which I also liked to yell as he pedaled away in the evenings, to which he’d either flip me off or swing around and attempt to run me over. Good times.
It was only about a month into the school year—we were big seventh graders now—so it didn’t take long for us to fall back into the rhythms of summer.
Trip headed straight for our garage, putting his hand up in front of my face as he passed—a token shot-block attempt that was more of a hello than a challenge to play—and stopped in the middle where Mom’s car usually sat. He stood, hands on his hips, staring at the pile of toys and sports equipment we kept in the corner.
“Dude, we should cork a bat.”
Trip’s dad had told us once about this baseball player from the seventies and eighties named Graig Nettles, who had been caught using a corked bat in a game. He played for the Yankees at the time—figures, filthy cheaters—and during a game against the Tigers, Nettles’s bat exploded, rubber Super Balls spilling out the end of the broken barrel.
“I don’t get it,” Trip had said to his dad, who sat on the Fogles’ gargantuan sofa watching a Phillies game, his legs stretched out in front of him, a beer resting on his stomach. “What’s the point of corking it—or stuffing it with Super Balls or whatever?”
Trip’s dad took a swig from his beer without looking away from the screen. “Makes the bat lighter. More bat speed, more power. Plus, the Super Balls add more bounce-back. Hit that sucker a mile.”
Nettles—who happened to crush twenty-two homers that year and later held the American League record for career home runs by a third baseman—was automatically called out on the play and ejected from the game for cheating. To Trip and me, the message was clear: we needed to cork some bats.
Trip and I corked four different Wiffle ball bats that day, though our understanding of the physics behind bat-corking was at best spotty. We sawed the tops off of skinny, hollow, bright yellow Wiffle ball bats and stuffing them with anything we could find: rocks, acorns, balled-up newspaper—we even squeezed three bottles of Elmer’s glue into one of them to try to fill in all the gaps. After duct-taping the tops back onto the bats, we ended up with what were more of twenty-pound death clubs than functional bats. Within a half hour we had cracked every Wiffle ball we had, forcing us to move on to acorns. Tabby’s dad even joined us for a few hacks, hopping out of his truck before he backed out of his driveway. “Beautiful craftsmanship,” he told us after launching an acorn halfway to the bus stop at the end of the street.
The four corked bats now stood leaning in the back corner of the garage—monuments to our genius in the field of sports science. But Trip…well, Trip pushed boundaries. He still stood staring, but not at the mess of sports equipment in the corner. Instead, I followed his gaze to the sandbox tools and little-kid toys heaped in a box close by. Resting on top of the pile was another bat. One of those giant red Wiffle ball bats with an enormous barrel that are modeled more after caveman clubs than baseball bats, so that even the tiniest slugger can crank a few—the tiniest slugger in this case being Murray.
“Dude, that’s Murray’s bat. We can’t cork Murray’s bat.”
Trip’s eyes locked onto mine, a smile playing on his lips. I looked back at the bat, imagining the finished product and the incredible damage it could do.
“He is only two, I guess.”
Trip cocked an eyebrow.
“I’ll go get my dad’s duct tape.”
It took us nearly two hours to construct our masterpiece, most of that time spent arguing over what to cork it with. With the top of the red plastic bat and Dad’s hacksaw on the garage floor next to us—like the discarded remains of some gruesome experimental lobotomy—Trip and I regarded the sheer volume of the bat. In scientific terms, this was one big-ass bat.
“You could fit all four of those yellow bats into the barrel of this one,” I said, staring into the opening. Trip, pondering this for a second, picked up all four yellow bats at once, his fingers straining around the shifting handles, and attempted a few practice swings.
“Dude, we’re not gonna be able to swing that thing. It’ll be like trying to swing a Buick.” Trip dropped the bats in frustration, the debris-filled barrels thudding to the floor around him. “Are you sure you don’t have any Super Balls anywhere?”
“We already looked when we made the first ones,” I said, shaking my head, pointing to the yellow bats around his feet. “And besides, even if we find some, we’d need like a thousand of them to fill this thing up.”
And that’s when I remembered Dad’s golf stuff collecting dust in the basement.
“Hold on, I’ll be right back.”
Dad got it in his head one summer that—as a responsible grown man—he should take up golf. After spending a ton of money on custom clubs—“I’m six four,” Dad reasoned as Mom stared at the receipt in disbelief. “The guy at Dick’s said I’d be wasting my money on clubs that weren’t fitted for my height!”—he found that he enjoyed scavenging lost golf balls from the woods and the water hazards more than he liked endlessly hitting his own balls into them. By the end of that summer, he’d filled two five-gallon buckets with golf balls. I’m not even sure he was paying to play anymore, instead just walking out onto the course and pretending to search for a ball he’d shanked.
When I returned to the garage with a full bucket, the handle straining with the weight of the golf balls, Trip’s eyes lit up.
“Oh, shit yeah.”
“Graig Nettles, baby,” I said, smiling.
“Graig Nettles.”
The very first swing broke our only Wiffle ball—presumably the one that came with Murray’s bat—clean in half. Trip, who stood on our makeshift mound in the center of the circle—All right, Matty, let’s see you hit the knuckleball!—swore and flailed in self-defense. On contact, the top half of the Wiffle ball flew a couple of feet before taking a nasty hook to the right, while the bottom half sliced toward Trip’s head like a ninja star.
“Dude, that was awesome!” Trip said after checking himself for marks.
“Yeah. Looks like we’re back to acorns, though.”
After scouring my yard for acorns, Trip and I fell into a nice rhythm, reviving our endless summertime home run derbies, each of us taking turns sending acorns across the circle, over the fence into the Hodgsons’ yard (I’m pretty sure they weren’t home).
Not long after Tabby’s dad gave our newest creation an appreciative nod as his truck pulled away, Tabby emerged from her house, barefoot with soccer shorts on and a tie-dyed T-shirt, her red hair pulled back in a ponytail. She sat down cross-legged in the sun at the edge of her yard to watch us, her phone resting in her lap.
Just like that. Perfect summer day again.
At some point, though, after sending two acorns nearly to the Hodgsons’ porch, I looked over at Tabby—head down, laughing to herself, texting away on her phone, completely oblivious to my power display. Which, you know, who cares? I’d never been worried about impressing Tabby before. She was just Tabby. My buddy. Part of the neighborhood. But for some reason, it killed me that she wasn’t watching. That she wasn’t impressed.
Now, in hindsight, I understand that the scene was probably not that awe-inspiring: gangly twelve-year-old holding a ridiculous red plastic bat that’s twice as wide (okay, three times as wide) as his arms, pretending to be a real-live big-league ballplayer while swatting acorns tossed by a pigeon-toed half-pint with a penchant for swearing. Okay.
But in the moment—in that moment—I was a fucking hero. I mean, you should have seen some of those shots.
Tabby wasn’t impressed. She was perfectly happy doing what we always did, hanging out, being kids. But, for the first time, that wasn’t good enough for me. I couldn’t explain it or understand why it mattered. It just did.
In my mind, if I could hit the acorns even harder, Tabby would have to notice, would have to put that stupid phone down to witness the awesome spectacle that was me.
So I swung harder. I gritted my teeth, crouched down in my big-league stance, spit—why the hell did I spit?—and bore down, waiting for Trip’s windup. I could almost hear the movie sound track playing in the background, building up to my big moment. I could see the slow-motion end of that movie The Natural, where this baseball player actually hits the cover off the ball as it explodes into the stadium lights beyond the outfield wall. Only it’s me, my acorn sailing like a comet, smashing through the Hodgsons’ upstairs window, Trip and Tabby watching in stunned silence.
And I swung hard, already watching the Hodgsons’ window.
I barely nicked the acorn. While I nearly fell over with the force of my swing, the acorn went straight down, bouncing once and skittering off to the side.
“Wow, dude, maybe you should swing harder.” Trip chuckled, but I made no reply. Just got back into my stance as Trip scooped another acorn out of the bucket and went into his windup. I stole a glance at Tabby, still engrossed in her phone.
And I did swing harder, again barely nicking the top of the acorn and sending it bouncing harmlessly to the curb.
Four more times I swung with everything I had; four more times the acorn bounced no more than a few feet, the image from The Natural fading from my mind. My shoulders and the sides of my ribs were starting to ache from the strain, and I could feel blisters forming inside the sweaty death grip I held on the handle of the bat.
“All right, slugger, my turn,” Trip said, heading toward me.
“Hold on, one more. I gotta end on a good one,” I said, breathing heavily.
Trip dropped his arms and rolled his eyes. “One more pitch,” he said, backing up to the bucket again. “Then it’s my turn. I’m giving you cantaloupes here.”
I focused like a laser on the acorn coming out of Trip’s hand and swung with all I had. But my arms were tired, and even though I did actually hit it this time, it was nothing more than a hard grounder down what would be the first-base line, zipping past where Tabby sat a few yards to my right.
She finally looked up, taking in the scene as she stretched her painted toenails out in front of her. She smiled and went back to texting.
“Now it’s my turn. Let me show you how it’s done.”
I dropped the bat to the ground and walked past Trip to the bucket, hoping the blood pounding in my face looked more like exhaustion than embarrassment.
“All right, Matty baby, put one right here,” Trip said, pointing with the duct-taped head of the bat to a spot three feet out in front of him, just above his knees. “It’s Big Papi time.”
I picked a fat, round acorn out of the bucket and tried to nonchalantly toss it up in the air to myself. But home run derby wasn’t much fun anymore. Trip was still playing around, while I had crossed over into something much more serious. I don’t know what made me crazier: looking stupid in front of Tabby, or Tabby not looking at all.
I started in on my windup and said, “All right, Papi, let’s see you hit this one,” trying my best to sound playful. Trip grinned, waggling the bat in his stance, the tip of his tongue poking out of the corner of his mouth. I threw it as hard as I could, and—though I don’t think I meant to—struck Trip in the left temple.
“Ooooooowwwwwww! Fucking shit, that hurt!” Trip crouched to the ground, head down, his left hand covering the side of his face.
“Oh, shit! I’m sorry, man,” I said, walking toward him, if possible feeling even worse than before. As I got close, Trip took a blind swing at me with the hand still holding the bat, mumbling unintelligible swear words to himself.
Tabby, now finally watching, walked over to us, laughing.
“Trip, are you okay?”
“Son of a bitch, I think he popped my eyeball out of its socket,” he replied, still holding his face, checking for blood and, presumably, his eyeball.
Tabby laughed harder, bending over Trip with her hands on his shoulders before helping him to his feet. “Still beautiful, Trip. I think you’ll live.”
“I didn’t mean to hit him,” I said, shaking my head, unable to look her in the face. “I just wanted to see if Big Papi here could handle the heater.”
“Dude, your heater fucking sucks,” Trip replied, rubbing his eye and checking one last time for blood.
“I know, I know. No more heaters.”
“Cantaloupes, man. It’s home run derby. Papi gets cantaloupes like everyone else.”
“How ’bout I pitch to Papi?” Tabby stepped gingerly with her bare feet to the acorn bucket in the center of the circle. “Man, I should’ve taken a video of that.”
Tabby took over lobbing cantaloupe after cantaloupe to Trip, who sent one after another over the Hodgsons’ fence, while I sat there on the grass like an idiot. Which, whatever—my arms were shaky and my brain was a scrambled mess. I couldn’t have lobbed one into Trip’s wheelhouse to save my life.
But after every pitch, I looked back at Tabby, totally comfortable with us, happily oblivious to me, and I felt…desperate.
What the hell was wrong with me?