The Contract Page 3

  They all piled into the family car. Derek sure hoped the letter was there by the time they came home—because practice started tomorrow, and if he didn’t get a team assignment, what was he going to do?

  • • •

  The school gym was packed, with folding chairs from wall to wall filled with parents and other family members applauding the pint-size dancers on the stage.

  Derek saw some of his friends there, in the role of older brother, watching their little sisters perform. Two of them, Jason Bradley and Harry Hicks, told him they were on the Yankees. They were really good players. With them and Jeff, the Yankees sure had the makings of a good team. Derek hoped he would be on the Yankees too, and not just because it was the name of his favorite team.

  All the Jeters stood up and started applauding the minute Sharlee came onstage. At the end of her solo, Derek shouted, “Go, Sharlee!” which prompted giggles, and a “Shhh!” from his mother. But her eyes sparkled as she said it.

  When the recital was over, Sharlee came out the stage door, where the families were waiting to greet the performers. She saw Derek, ran to him, and leapt into his arms.

  He spun her around and said, “Bravo, Sis!”

  “How was I?” she asked him point-blank. “Was I the best one?”

  “You were fantastic!” Derek said.

  “She was, wasn’t she?” said Mr. Jeter, giving Sharlee a kiss on the head that knocked her tiara loose.

  She squirmed out of Derek’s arms, bent down and grabbed it, and stuck it back on her head.

  “You were awesome!” said Mrs. Jeter, clapping her hands. “Yay, Sharlee!”

  “Derek,” said Sharlee, putting her little hand in his as they walked to the car, “do you think I can be a ballerina someday?”

  “Of course you can, Sharlee!” Derek thought back to what his parents had told him the night before. “You can do anything you dream of, if you’re willing to work hard enough for it.”

  “Work? Hard?” Sharlee repeated, scrunching up her face. “That doesn’t sound like much fun.”

  “It can be,” Derek assured her. “Hey, don’t you have fun when you’re dancing?”

  “Yes!”

  “And it’s the same with me and baseball. I don’t mind working hard at that.”

  “But you work hard in school, too,” she pointed out. “Don’t you mind that?”

  “Yeah, sometimes,” he said, thinking back to the contract he’d just signed. “But I’ve still got to do it if I want to succeed.” Then he gave her a look. “Hey,” he said, “you’re pretty smart for a four-year-old, you know that?”

  “I know,” said Sharlee, and that cracked them all up again.

  Soon they were pulling into the parking spot outside their apartment. Derek raced over to the mailbox and opened it—and there was his letter! He tore it open and read:

  Congratulations! You have been accepted into Westwood Little League for this season. You have been assigned to the Tigers with Coach Hank Kozlowski. Please be at Westwood Fields at 1 p.m. Sunday, April 20, for your first practice.

  Derek’s heart sank. He’d been hoping to play for the Yankees. And while he was glad that at least he’d gotten his team assignment, and that Vijay was on the team with him, he wondered whether he was going to be on another weak team.

  Chapter Four

  PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT

  Derek’s dad drove him over to Westwood Fields on Sunday a little before one p.m. There were actually four ball fields at Westwood. Each had its own chain-link backstop and fence down the first and third baselines. Behind these fences were the team benches. Farther from home plate, there were bleachers where family and friends could watch the games.

  Since there were eight teams in the league, there could be four games at once. But only one team per field could practice at a time, so four teams were meeting now, and the other four would meet at three o’clock.

  Team signs were hung from each field’s backstop. Derek spotted the one that said TIGERS. “Let me out here, okay, Dad? I’ll meet you over there.”

  After grabbing his mitt, he jogged across to the far side of the park, where he could make out Vijay playing catch with another kid—who threw the ball just like Vijay used to, with the wrong foot forward. Vijay was trying to show the kid which foot to lead with, just like Derek had taught him.

  “This is my best friend, Derek!” Vijay said to the other kid. “Derek, this is Norman. Let’s go, Tigers!”

  Norman flashed a grin. “How you doin’, man?”

  “Good, good . . .”

  “Vijay says we can’t lose with you at shortstop!”

  “Oh yeah? Well, um, uh . . .”

  Derek looked around to see if he could find any other kids he knew and spotted Elliott Koppel. Elliott was just dropping an easy throw from a kid who looked like he couldn’t be more than six years old.

  Derek did see at least one kid who looked like a real gamer. He had a buzz cut and wore a Tigers jersey—from the real major-league Tigers. He was rearing back and firing fastballs into the catcher’s mitt of Isaiah Martin. The mitt popped loudly with every catch.

  Isaiah lived in Mount Royal Townhouses, too. He was shorter than Derek but about thirty pounds heavier. He had asthma and sometimes had trouble running the bases out on the Hill because he’d run out of breath. But he loved playing catcher, and he was a good one.

  “Who’s the kid with the arm?” Derek asked Vijay and Norman.

  “That’s the coach’s son,” Norman said. “Pete Kozlowski.”

  “He looks good,” Derek said as Pete reared back and threw one so high that Isaiah couldn’t pull it down.

  “Maybe a little wild,” Vijay said.

  “He can hit, too!” Norman told them. “He was on my team last year, and we won the championship.”

  “He was on the Mets?”

  “Yeah. He was our cleanup hitter. He had, like, a million home runs,” Norman said excitedly. “We are so set!”

  The Mets had crushed the Indians, Derek’s team, 13–4. He didn’t exactly remember Pete, though—probably because all the Mets had been hitting home runs that day.

  A husky man in a baseball cap came over to Pete and put an arm around his shoulder. “That’s Coach Kozlowski,” Norman told them. “He coaches Pete every year.”

  Looking around, Derek saw his own dad settling down on the bleachers. He wished his dad could have been his coach. The problem was, while Mr. Jeter tried to attend as many practices and games as he could, he had a lot of other responsibilities as well. Not only was he taking courses for his master’s, but he also was a student teacher at the university.

  At home, Mr. Jeter always worked with Derek on his baseball skills, and he had promised Derek that as soon as he got his degree, he would start coaching Derek’s Little League teams. But that wasn’t going to help any this year.

  Derek knew his mom would have been there too, but she was with Sharlee at her friend’s fourth birthday party. When Derek and Sharlee both had someplace important to be, their parents always played tag team. One time, their mom would go with Derek. The next time, it’d be his dad.

  But his dad was his role model—the one who’d taught him to play baseball when Derek was just three years old. They had a secret arrangement: Derek would sometimes go outside and throw the ball against the wall of the house, getting ever closer to the aluminum siding. When—bang!—he hit the siding, that was his father’s signal to come out and play with Derek.

  Derek turned back to see Coach Kozlowski helping Pete with his pitching motion. He felt a wave of jealousy go through him.

  • • •

  As soon as enough kids had arrived, the coach called the roll to see who was there. He reeled off twelve names, but only ten of the kids were present. “Okay, team!” he said, tucking his clipboard under his arm and clapping his hands. “M
y name’s Coach Kozlowski. A few of you know me from last season—Pete, of course . . . Ryan McDonough. . . . Um, I’m sorry. I’m forgetting your—”

  “Norman,” said Norman, looking disappointed. “Norman Nelson.”

  “Of course! Norman. Sorry. It’s just . . .” He cleared his throat and changed the subject. “Anyway, right now all positions on this team are open. I’m gonna check out what you’ve got, and then we’ll decide who plays and bats where. Okay? Let’s start with each of you telling me where you’d like to play if you had your choice, or your second choice.”

  He started reading out names.

  “Ernesto Alvarez.”

  “Pitcher.”

  “Second choice?”

  “Third base.”

  “Okay. Chris Chang?”

  “Shortstop, second base.”

  Derek looked over at Chris, the little skinny kid he’d seen before who looked like he was only six. Chris was wearing a huge glove that looked brand-new, like it had never been used. Maybe it was a Christmas gift, he thought, pounding his own, well-worn mitt.

  Okay, so there was at least one other kid competing for Derek’s position. Sizing Chris up, Derek thought that he could probably beat him out for the job. Of course, you never knew.

  “Sims Osborne Jr.?”

  “Third or first.”

  “All right. Derek Jeter?”

  Derek looked straight at the coach and answered, “Shortstop.”

  “And your second choice?”

  “Um, I really don’t have one.”

  The coach seemed like he wanted to argue but didn’t have time. He just shrugged, sighed, and said, “Okay. I’ll just put ‘no preference.’”

  Derek wondered if he should have said something different. But it was too late; Coach Kozlowski had moved on to the next kid, and the next.

  When Coach Kozlowski called his own son’s name, Pete shot Derek a confident look that made him nervous—and said, “Shortstop.”

  Coach Kozlowski let out a little chuckle, said, “Surprise, surprise,” and wrote it down on his list. “Okay, next . . .”

  Derek couldn’t believe it. The coach hadn’t even asked Pete for his second choice!

  “Ryan McDonough?”

  “First base, pitcher.”

  “Okay. Norman Nelson?”

  Maybe he just forgot to ask Pete for his second choice, Derek told himself. But it sure didn’t seem like a good sign.

  He’d thought all along that Pete would say “pitcher.” After all, hadn’t he just been pitching to Isaiah?

  Derek felt like he’d been ambushed. Not only did he have real competition for shortstop, but the competition might already be over!

  Two other kids had also picked shortstop as their preferred position. That made five out of ten kids, but the only one Derek was really worried about was Pete.

  Coach Kozlowski sent them out into the field to one of their chosen positions, and he began to hit grounders and pop-ups to each of them in turn. He told them to field the ball and throw it back in to Isaiah, who was the only kid to pick catcher. He had always liked catching, and was the only one to bring a catcher’s mitt and mask from home.

  Derek fielded his three grounders and one pop-up cleanly and threw hard and accurately back to home plate. But none of the balls hit to him were difficult plays, where he could have had the chance to impress the coach. Anybody on the team could have caught any of those balls nine times out of ten.

  Pete, on the other hand, got to show off his skills by diving for a ball to his right, getting up, and firing home so hard that Isaiah cried out in pain, took off his glove, and started shaking his hand out.

  Pete laughed, then turned to Derek with a confident look and said, “Your turn.”

  Derek set his jaw and was all set to take another grounder and make a spectacular play on it, no matter what—but just then Coach Kozlowski said, “Okay. Everyone shift to their other choice of position!”

  As the other kids switched positions, Derek just stood there at short. So did Pete.

  Coach Kozlowski noticed that they were both still there, along with Chris and two other kids who had yet to try out at short. “Pete and, uh . . .”

  “Derek. Derek Jeter.”

  “Okay, Derek. You and Pete go over on the side there and take turns pitching to each other while I see what these other guys can do.”

  It was a way for the coach to avoid embarrassing anybody. Derek saw that, and he understood that it had been an awkward moment.

  Pete grabbed a ball, and the two of them went into foul territory along the third baseline and started pitching it back and forth.

  It soon became a contest to see who could throw harder and still throw a strike. Burnout, the kids called it. Both of them threw really hard, for sure. But neither of them threw too many strikes.

  Still, after a few pitches their mitts were popping so loudly that everyone else stopped what they were doing and watched Derek and Pete go at it instead. His dad would be watching too, Derek knew.

  Back and forth they went, blazing wild fastballs at each other, leaping and diving for the stray throws. Derek’s glove hand stung, but he wasn’t going to cry uncle. He gave back as good as he got, and he knew Pete’s hand had to be hurting just as much.

  In the end, neither one could claim a clear victory. Considering how wild they both were, Derek didn’t think either of them would get to pitch anytime soon.

  Luckily, three o’clock rolled around before Derek’s arm totally fell off or his hand caught fire. Coach Kozlowski called the Tigers off the field just as the Yankees started to arrive for their practice.

  Derek saw Jeff, Jason, and Harry—along with two other good players he knew, Skip Larsen and Jayquan Graves—all high-fiving one another. Derek couldn’t help wishing he were on the Yankees too.

  He tried to look on the bright side. There were five or six kids on the Tigers who might be pretty good. Himself, Pete for sure, Isaiah . . . That kid Ryan, the big lefty, was awesome at first base. Ernesto didn’t throw hard like Derek or Pete, but at least he seemed like he could get the ball over the plate. And little Chris had good speed. He’ll steal a ton of bases, Derek thought. If he ever gets on base.

  Still, Derek couldn’t help feeling disappointed as he watched the Yankees gather, looking like a team full of world-beaters.

  “Okay, we’re out of time, unfortunately,” Coach Kozlowski said. “Next practice is tomorrow at four o’clock, right here. We’ll do some hitting and some baserunning. For now, here are your uniforms.”

  He opened the top of a big garbage bag and started pulling uniform shirts out. They were green, with “Tigers” written in yellow script on the front.

  Derek held his breath, hoping he would get number 13. He’d worn it the past two seasons, and although it hadn’t exactly proved to be a lucky number, 13 had been his dad’s number in college. And his dad was Derek’s original, all-time, and forever baseball role model (even though Dave Winfield was his current favorite).

  Coach Kozlowski pulled out several jerseys and tossed them to kids one by one, based on who he thought would fit that size shirt. When Derek saw number 13 come out of the bag, he raised his hand and said, “Me! Me!”

  “Sorry, Darren. This one’s taken.”

  “It’s Derek,” said Vijay.

  “Right. Sorry. I had a special request for this number.” He gave Derek a wink, then tossed the shirt over to Pete, who quickly pulled it over his head.

  “Yeah!” Pete said. “Lucky thirteen again, same as last year!”

  “Here y’go, kid. This one should fit you pretty well.” He tossed a different jersey over to Derek, who looked at it and made a face.

  Number 2.

  Pete was standing right next to him. He gave Derek a nudge and said softly, so that no one else could hear him, “Hey. N
umber two! As in second best!”

  Derek tightened his jaw and pursed his lips so he wouldn’t say what he wanted to say. Instead he shuffled off toward the bleachers, where his dad was waiting for him.

  “How’d it go?” Mr. Jeter asked, putting his papers back into his briefcase. “You looked pretty good out there.”

  “Terrible,” Derek said.

  “Well, you were throwing a little wild. Try coming over the top more on your pitching motion. It’ll help you be accurate. And make sure you follow through on your throws. Your hand should be pointing—”

  “It’s not that,” Derek said. “I probably won’t even get to play shortstop!”

  Mr. Jeter looked surprised. “Is that what the coach said?”

  “No, but his son wants to play there. And look, I didn’t even get number thirteen.”

  “Well, two is a fine number.”

  “It’s not thirteen,” Derek said. “Speaking of which, guess who did get thirteen?”

  “Oh.” Mr. Jeter nodded slowly. “I see. Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. You might still get to be shortstop.”

  Maybe, thought Derek. But not likely.

  “And if not, just remember—that boy might be your rival, but he’s also your teammate. Your team’s not going anywhere if you don’t all pull together in the same direction. Remember your contract? Respect others.”

  Derek knew his dad was right. But working together with Pete wasn’t going to be so easy.

  Chapter Five

  THE TESTING GROUND

  “It’s the bottom of the sixth . . . last licks for the Tigers . . . and Jeter at the plate. . . . Here comes the pitch. . . . He hits it deeeeep to left! That ball is going . . . going . . . gone! That makes three homers for Jeter in this game. What a performance! We’ve got a future star in the making, folks!”

  Derek sat in class, trying to keep his mind on the math drill they were doing. But it was almost impossible. His thoughts kept drifting back to yesterday’s practice, and forward to the team’s first game.