Safe at Home by Mike Lupica

that, he heard a cheer from down the hill, sat up straight and looked down there and saw Ollie circling the bases, saw Zach retrieving the ball past the tree line at the end of the lawn, which in their game meant only one thing:
    Home run.
    “At least somebody’s having fun at baseball today,” Nick said.
    “You can, too,” Gracie said. “It’s like something my mom says when she’s telling me I can do something I don’t think I can.”
    As if that ever happened, Nick thought. She thought she could do anything except fly.
    And maybe even that.
    Gracie said, “My mom just tells me to get out of my own way.”
    “I couldn’t even get out of my own way trying to catch one ridonkulously easy foul pop,” Nick said.
    “So today will be better,” Gracie said, and said it so convincingly that she almost started to convince Nick.
    Today there was no team meeting before the start of practice, which was just fine with Nick, since he didn’t feel like part of this team any more than he had the day before.
    They did some stretching drills first, Coach Williams saying they were going to start doing them every day, that you were never too young to stretch before sports. Then he announced it was going to be a very busy day for the Hayworth Tigers, infield first and then batting practice and then baserunning and then some scrimmaging, if they had time.
    “We’ve only got ten games in our season,” Coach Williams said. “And as most of you probably know, there’s no play-offs in our league, for the simple reason that we don’t have enough time to get them in before the end of the school year.
    “Anyway,” he continued, “our first game is next Tuesday, so we’ve all got to think of our first week of practice as being like the last week of spring training for teams in the majors. Which means we’ve got a lot of work to do in a real short amount of time.”
    Tell me about it, Nick thought.
    “One more thing,” Coach Williams said. “Everybody who goes to this school knows that we’ve only got one huge rival, and that’s King. Who has beaten us the last five years running. In addition to them going undefeated the last three. This year they’re our fourth game, so circle that date on your calendar. And, gentlemen? We are going to be ready.”
    Early in practice there wasn’t a lot for Nick to do. While Coach hit grounders to the infielders, Nick just stood next to him, catching the ball when the guys lobbed it back in.
    Even doing something as simple as that, he felt everybody watching him, same as yesterday.
    It made him remember the first day he’d played T-ball in Riverdale, way before that day at Shea Stadium had turned baseball into something he lived and breathed. They were called the RiverdaleRedbirds, even had the bird that looked like the St. Louis Cardinals bird on the front of their red caps.
    Nick didn’t remember the caps as well as the feeling he had when he got to the field and looked around and realized there wasn’t a single kid on the field he knew.
    That day, standing at the edge of the parking lot right behind the backstop, holding on as hard as he could to Mr. Boyd’s hand, he’d said, “I want to go home now, please.”
    They had gotten there late, so all the other kids had their red caps and red T-shirts already, and were lined up getting ready to swing away at the ball on the tee.
    “C’mon,” Mr. Boyd had said, half walking Nick and half tugging him toward the field. “You don’t know it today, but someday fields like this are gonna feel like home to you.”
    “I don’t know anybody,” Nick had said, still holding on to his hand.
    “Those boys out there, they’re the same as you. All they care about is hitting that little ball.”
    Afterward, long afterward, one night when Mr. Boyd and Nick were watching a Mets game on television,they were talking about that first day and Mr. Boyd had said, “We did the right thing. If we’d gone home that day, you might never have gone