The Batboy Read online

  “B—I’m sorry. I’m no good at being your father. I’m no good at anything besides baseball. Dad”

  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.

  Dear Mr. Schenkel:

  My name is Brian Dudley. Maybe you remember me. I live in Bloomfield Hills with my mom and I wrote you a letter the year before last applying for the job of batboy. You were kind enough to write me back the same week and inform me that I was too young and to get back to you when I was older.

  I didn’t mention this to you the first time I wrote you, but my dad is Cole Dudley, who was in the major leagues with a lot of teams, even though the Tigers was never one of them.

  You also told me to keep my grades up, which I have. Over the past two years I’ve worked harder than ever at my schoolwork, telling myself that with every paper I wrote and every test I aced, I was working my way toward Comerica.

  I know I’m “officially” too young for the job. But I’m ready for this, Mr. Schenkel. I’m sure every boy who writes you tells you how much they love the Tigers and love baseball. But no one loves the Tigers, or knows them better, than I do. It’s not just statistics, it’s the history of the team, too. I know that Mayo Smith was the manager when the Tigers came from three-games-to-one down to beat the Cardinals in the 1968 World Series. I know it was Sparky Anderson who said, “Bless you, boys” to the ’84 Tigers. I know about Al Kaline and Kirk Gibson and my personal all-time favorite player, Hank Bishop.

  Before my dad left my mom and me, he used to take me to Comerica a lot and tell me about when he first started going to Tiger Stadium when he was my age. And even after he left, and I felt like I’d lost a big part of my life, I still had the Tigers.

  Maybe there’s no way around me being only fourteen. But I hope there is. Working for the Tigers, even if it’s just for one summer, is my dream. And my mom, even though she isn’t too big on baseball since my dad left, is always telling me that you can’t know if your dreams are out of reach until you actually reach for them.

  I guess that’s what I’m doing with this letter.

  Sincerely,

  Brian Dudley

  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.

  And each time, it was as if he was seeing all that green for the first time. Seeing how perfect the infield dirt looked after it had just been raked, and the dirt around the pitcher’s mound, and around home plate.

  He’d look at the signs in the outfield and the skyline of the city and up to where the announcers’ booths were, look around at all the empty seats as if this were the first day that baseball was ever going to be played.

  And every day he would go and stand right in front of the Tigers’ dugout and count the rows back to the twentieth row where he and his dad used to sit.

  Sometimes he would close his eyes and imagine the two of them sitting there, see himself at nine or ten eating popcorn or a hot dog with one hand, his glove on the other.

  Brian had the best seat in the house now, he knew that.

  But those two seats had once seemed like the best in the world.

  CHAPTER 3

  They were in Kenny Griffin’s backyard, at his house on Yar-mouth Road, playing Home Run Derby with a Wiffle ball. Kenny had just taken a break to run into the house and get them a couple of Gatorades.

  When he came back outside, he said to Brian, “This just went from being
a good day to a great day. Like an instant national sports holiday, practically.”

  “Why?” Brian said, taking one of the plastic bottles from him. “Did you figure out a way to hit a six-run homer while you were taking so long inside?”

  “No, it’s not that,” Kenny said. “It’s because I finally know something about baseball that you don’t.”

  “I would put that down as dubious,” Brian said.

  It was Saturday afternoon, two days after the Tigers had beaten the Indians in the ninth. Baseball practice was over, but Brian and Kenny weren’t baseballed out because they never were. So they were using Home Run Derby, a marathon game, to kill time before the Tigers played the Red Sox at Fenway Park on Fox’s Saturday Game of the Week.

  It was the beginning of a ten-game road trip for the Tigers. Batboys didn’t travel with the team, though Brian had heard from Mr. Schenkel that rules like that sometimes had a way of changing if they made the playoffs. But for now Brian’s team was in Boston and he was behind Kenny Griffin’s house trying to hit balls over the pool fence and into the water.

  Already he felt funny, like he’d been cut loose from something now that the Tigers were away, like the circus had up and left town without him.

  “Let me get this straight,” Brian said, plastic bat in hand. “You’re saying you now have a baseball fact that you didn’t have before you went inside?”

  “Correct.”

  “A stat?”

  “No, Stat Boy. Not one of Brian Dudley’s fun facts.”

  “So are you planning on telling me? Or do I have to beat it out of you with a Wiffle bat?”

  “Well,” Kenny said, “since you’re asking so nicely . . . when I checked my computer, guess what I saw on ESPN.com?”

  “Not a clue.”

  “Only this,” Kenny said. “The Detroit Tigers, our Detroit Tigers, just added some power to their lineup. Announced in Boston about an hour ago.”

  Brian could always tell when his best bud was busting his chops and when he was being serious, because he was generally easier to read than a text message.

  He was being serious now.

  “Tell me,” Brian said, “or I will beat you.”

  Kenny, the best pitcher on their team, the Bloomfield Sting, smiled as if he’d just struck out the side.

  “Hank Bishop,” he said.

  “No . . . stinking . . . way,” Brian said.

  “Way,” Kenny said. “Way back, from like the dead, practically.”

  Hank Bishop had been out of baseball for a year and a half, first because of a fifty-game steroids suspension, then because no club in either league had signed him this spring when he was eligible to play again. He was thirty-five now, about to turn thirty-six on the Fourth of July. Brian knew that the way he knew everything there was to know about Hank Bishop.

  But now the Tigers, who needed a right-handed bat to come off the bench and act as a designated hitter occasionally, had brought him back to Detroit, given him one last chance to be something close to what he was.

  “This is really happening?” Brian said. “No joke?”

  “You think I would joke with you?” Kenny said. “About him?”

  “Excellent point.”

  “Your boy’s back,” Kenny said. “Back on the batboy’s team.”

  And wearing the same uniform, Brian thought.

  It was all in there, everything that Brian already knew about the way Hank Bishop’s career had started out, and the way it had ended, with him ten home runs short of the magic number of 500.

  Only the Tigers had changed all that in Boston.

  “We’re not asking him to be what he was,” Davey Schofield was quoted as saying. “But from what I saw in batting practice this morning, there’s a place for him on this baseball team.”

  If Hank Bishop hadn’t been the best player in baseball by the time he’d been in the big leagues three seasons, he was, as Brian’s dad liked to say, in the conversation.

  He was MVP in the American League the year he turned twenty-five, still playing shortstop that year. From then until he turned thirty, he hit between thirty-five and forty-five home runs every season, knocked in at least a hundred, and scored at least a hundred. He kept hitting even after his first knee operation, and there wasn’t a baseball fan in Detroit or anywhere else who wasn’t sure he was on his way to the Hall of Fame.

  The sportswriters in Detroit started out calling him the Bishop of Baseball in Detroit. That was long before the first real trouble he got into, when he got arrested for a fight outside a bar and spent the night in jail and one of the papers ran the headline “Hank in the Tank.”

  But there was much worse trouble to come, only nobody knew it at the time and everybody was willing to forgive him—starting with Brian—because he just kept hitting.

  “The only way they stop forgiving you in sports,” Brian’s dad once said, “is when you stop producing.”

  Hank kept producing. Even after that arrest, even after the first knee operation, even after his move over to third base. The Tigers weren’t making the playoffs in those years, and so there were seasons when he was the best reason to keep watching, or keep going to the ballpark.

  But then the trouble began multiplying. It wasn’t just a fight in a bar. Hank Bishop seemed to fight with everybody—his teammates and his manager and sportswriters and talk show hosts, and finally there were two straight years when he didn’t get to thirty home runs and didn’t come close to knocking in a hundred and that was it as far as Detroit was concerned. The Tigers traded him away to the Angels. That was when he had his first positive test for steroids and got suspended, even though he blamed it on some shot he said he’d gotten from one of his teammates.

  He ended up in the National League after that, with the Rockies, and then came his second positive test, the one that got him suspended for fifty games, the rules tougher by then. He served it out last season and then wasn’t even offered an invitation to spring training. That’s when Brian realized just how right his dad had been. Now that Hank Bishop couldn’t hit the ball out of sight anymore, everyone had stopped forgiving him. In the minds of most baseball fans, Hank Bishop had committed the two worst possible sins:

  Not only had he used steroids, he’d gotten caught using them.

  Brian had never wanted to forgive him on either count, because he loved baseball too much not to see what guys using those drugs had done to the records and the record books in his lifetime. But he couldn’t help it: He never stopped rooting for Hank Bishop, even when he was off playing for other teams, and he knew why:

  Hank was the first guy in sports who made him want to watch and, even more important than that, he was the first guy to make him care.

  He watched the first five innings of the game at Kenny’s, by which time the Tigers were ahead 6-0 behind their best starter, Ben Dillon. But that didn’t mean Brian was going to put this one in the books or stop watching, because this was still Fenway Park, where bad things could happen to big leads. It was something Brian had always loved about baseball, that you couldn’t run out the clock, that you had to find a way to get twenty-seven outs.

  Kenny asked if he wanted to stay for dinner and then sleep over, since sleepovers were usually the rule on weekends, either here or at Brian’s house. But Brian’s mom had made a point of asking him to be home for dinner tonight, just the two of them, and Brian was pretty sure he knew why:

  This was the sixteenth wedding anniversary for her and his dad, even though his dad was long gone.

  Brian wasn’t sure why this date was one more stat he knew, but he did.

  He didn’t explain why he couldn’t stay, just told Kenny his mom had planned a special dinner and that he was going to bounce.

  “If I leave now, I can be home by the time we finish batting in the top of the sixth,” Brian said.

  “Boy, that’s a big load off,” Kenny said. “I don’t think Dillon could get through the heart of the order without you watching.”

&n
bsp; “You still don’t believe I can directly influence the outcome of these games, do you?” Brian said.

  “As long as you believe, Bri, bro, that’s all that matters.”

  “I bet they get Hank right in there tomorrow,” Brian said. “He always had huge numbers at Fenway, and the Sox have a lefty going.”

  “Can I ask you something before you go?” Kenny said. “I get why Bishop was your guy when he was with the Tigers the first time. But how can he still be now? You know, like after everything that’s happened since he left?”

  It was hard to understand, Brian knew that. And if he even tried to explain it now, he wasn’t going to make it home by the time the Red Sox came to bat in the bottom of the sixth at Fenway.

  So he just tossed a line at his friend over his shoulder as he headed off to get his bike, gave him enough of an honest answer to get him by.

  “At least Hank came back,” Brian said.

  CHAPTER 4

  Liz Dudley had no use for baseball. She went to as many of Brian’s games as she could, and he knew how much she wanted him to do well. Yet he knew she wanted to be somewhere else—anywhere else—except a ballgame.

  Baseball to his mom was like some foreign language she’d had to learn in school and then never wanted to use again.

  She had met her future husband at a charity dinner in Detroit the first winter after she’d graduated from the University of Michigan. He was thirty and had already been in the majors for five years, and she was twenty-two, interning at the ESPN radio station in Detroit—not because she was a sports fan, but just because she wanted to get into radio. A friend who actually was a baseball fan introduced them, and they got married a year later.