Читать книгу The Comeback of Roy Walker - Stephanie Doyle - Страница 10
ОглавлениеA few months ago
“YOU’RE BROKE.”
Roy looked at his accountant and blinked. Frank’s face remained unchanged and entirely serious.
Roy knew the news would be bad. But not this bad. “That can’t be right.”
“You chose not to file for bankruptcy,” Frank reminded him. “I told you to.”
Stubbornly, Roy had refused. Bankruptcy had seemed like the coward’s way out. He’d taken the products from his vendors in good faith and he was a man who paid his debts. All of them. This meeting today was to discuss what was left.
Apparently not much.
“Look, you still have a few assets you can sell to get you a little more liquid until you get back on your feet. Your father’s house—”
“Not an option.”
Frank sighed. “Right. Your town house, then.”
“Great. I can sell that.”
“That will take some time. It’s November, not the greatest season to move real estate. What about your ex-fiancée’s thirty-thousand-dollar engagement ring?”
“Also not an option.”
Frank shook his head. “In today’s world it’s custom to give the ring back, regardless of who broke it off.”
Maybe, but Shannon hadn’t offered and Roy couldn’t ask for it. He’d met Shannon a few years into his new life and they had dated for nearly a year before deciding to get married. He’d tried, he really had, to make the long-term commitment work. But eventually he’d admitted to himself marriage wasn’t in the cards so he ended it.
Six weeks before the wedding.
What he’d done to her—led her on, let her plan a big, public wedding—was wrong and if she took some consolation from an expensive ring, she was welcome to it.
But that decision seemed to kick off his entire life coming down on him like a ton of bricks. After he ended the engagement, his developers told him the coding logic in Roy’s new high-tech gaming system, SportsNation, was faulty and would not be ready for their scheduled major launch. All the money they had poured into publicity, including print, radio and television, essentially gone as they had to push back the release date again and again.
By the time they got it working, there was another—better—product on the market. Eventually Roy’s company did launch the system, but it was too little too late. The company in which he’d invested every dime, every ounce of energy, for the past five years had failed.
Now he was broke.
He was thirty-seven, just beginning what was supposed to be the second half of his life. And it was over after five measly years.
Roy leaned back in his chair, looking at the stack of papers on the older man’s desk. Roy’s life had been reduced to overdue notices and collection letters. When all was said and done, there was nothing left but the loose change in his couch.
“What about advertising? You know, do a few commercials for some local auto dealer. They love that stuff. Or ESPN? You could become one of those baseball color commentators.”
Roy knew Frank was trying to help, just like he’d given him sound advice about the bankruptcy option. But Roy didn’t want to go back to any part of baseball. He sure as hell didn’t have the personality for television. And given his nonrelationship with about everyone associated with MLB, he was fairly sure no one would be standing in line to do him any favors. The type of job offers players got after they retired were based on the connections they made while they were still playing.
Roy hadn’t made any friends, let alone connections. He pitched. He pitched better than anyone. That’s what he did.
Even if he could find a way to work up the enthusiasm to sell some product, advertisers wanted someone relevant. Roy hadn’t been that in five years. Maybe after he was inducted into the Hall of Fame he would be, but not now.
“You could get a job. What kind of skills do you have?”
“I throw a mean sinking cutter.”
“Look, you’ve got some cash. Maybe it’s enough to get you through until you sell your house. If you’ve got some fancy watches or something...”
Roy shook his head. All of it, every last thing, had gone into the company. He drove a ten-year-old Jeep and his last investment in himself had been a five-dollar haircut. There was nothing to sell.
“What about some of your old baseball stuff? You hardly ever gave any of that away. I’ll bet that might fetch you some bucks to hold you over.”
Hold him over until what? The town house was in a nice area of Philadelphia, the city he’d chosen to establish his business, but it wouldn’t set him up for life. It might provide some seed money to invest in a new company, but what kind of lenders would take a chance on him again?
He’d seen it in the faces around him at the end. From the people who worked for him and the people to whom he owed money. Roy Walker was a great pitcher but he didn’t know much about building a successful company.
A vision of him selling used cars to men who shook his hand and said, “Hey, weren’t you that pitcher?” flashed in front of his eyes.
“So what about it? You got a few gloves or something?”
Yes. He had gloves and jerseys and his Cy Young Award trophies. Next year was his first year of eligibility for Hall-of-Fame contention. Many considered him a first ballot shoo-in. He could see the headlines now: Roy Walker, HOF Pitcher, Now Failed Businessman, Desperate for Money, Sells His Gloves.
He was pathetic.
“Of course...there is the alternative. I mean, you’re only thirty-seven. Who knows how many bullets you have left in that arm? You could go back to baseball, sign on with some team for a year, make a ridiculous amount of money and then start all over again.”
Start all over again. Back to baseball. Those two things shouldn’t be synonymous. There had to be other choices.
Because Roy was never going back to baseball.
Present day
ROY DROVE THROUGH the winding streets of the small town of Minotaur Falls, New York, with a sick feeling of dread in his stomach. The sick feeling had become fairly familiar to him. It had started when he’d learned he was broke and had pretty much continued ever since. All through November, when Frank had been proven right about the real-estate market being dead. All through December, when Roy had actually put together a résumé and started applying for jobs.
He’d been on three interviews. Two had been just baseball fans who wanted to the meet the legendary Roy Walker. Of course, since he didn’t have any actual skills, he wasn’t a fit for the company, but it sure was great to meet him. The third had been a nice older woman who knew nothing about baseball, but also told him that without a college degree or any real work experience he wasn’t qualified for the position. Again.
Roy had tried to explain to her that he’d once been famous and a multimillionaire.
That hadn’t swayed her.
He had considered going back to school. The money he could make from the sale of his town house would cover his tuition. But the idea of being a freshman at thirty-seven was even worse than the idea of baseball.
Which was what everything kept coming back to. Roy would look at his left arm and think if he could get back into shape, if he could get his velocity to where it had been, all he might need was one season. One contract.
“Is there anything left in you?” he would ask his arm.
Is there anything left in you? he imagined it asking him back.
Finally, he’d done the unthinkable and called his former agent. Charlie Lynn had taken his call immediately, which made Roy feel marginally better. Charlie loved the idea of a Roy Walker comeback.
Hell, Nolan Ryan pitched until he was forty-six. Mariano Rivera pitched until he was forty-three. It wasn’t unthinkable. There was only one catch.
Can you still throw?
Of course Charlie had to ask the question. Roy told him the truth. He didn’t know. He hadn’t put his arm through any kind of workout since leaving baseball. Which meant Roy was going to have to find some minor-league team who might take him on to see if he still had the goods.
Charlie started talking about bonus options if he made the team and incentive clauses for a multiple-year option.
All the familiar phrases and terms came back to Roy like he hadn’t been away for five years. Over the course of his professional life he’d earned eighty million dollars with Charlie as his agent.
Eighty million dollars gone. Because he’d put his faith in some programmers who ultimately couldn’t deliver on what they promised and he’d been too stupid and stubborn to realize that until it was too late.
Charlie told Roy to find someone he could trust. A place he could go with baseball people who would give him a workout but who wouldn’t be squawking to the sports reporters about what Roy was doing. They needed to establish if his arm still had the juice and what role he might play on a team. Maybe he couldn’t be a starter, Charlie mused, but with Roy’s sinking cutter, he might have closer potential. In baseball the only person who had the potential to make as much money as a starting pitcher was a lights-out closer.
One or two years playing, maybe an eight-million-dollar contract, and Roy could start over again.
Only this time he would do everything differently.
Roy shook his head. No, he couldn’t see that far ahead. He’d already failed once, so he couldn’t imagine having the confidence to try some other new business venture. Which meant he should stick to what he knew he could do. What he’d always done.
Throw a ball.
A ridiculous gift, really, that might set him up for life. Again.
Roy pulled up to the Minotaur Falls stadium, home of the Triple-A minor-league team for the New England Rebels. Minotaur Falls was also the home of the legendary Duff Baker.
Duff Baker, the only person in baseball Roy thought he might be able to trust. Duff had won four World Series titles as the manager of three different teams. Two of them with Roy. It was a remarkable accomplishment because it meant he could reach the top with different groups of players. That was because Duff had a better eye for talent than anyone in the game.
He had walked away from managing professional teams about eight years ago, but he hadn’t been able to leave the game entirely. Some might call being manager of a minor-league team a step down, but Duff just called it retirement.
Roy had phoned his former manager and asked if he could meet with him and if they could keep it private. Roy hadn’t given him a reason or any information, really.
That the old man hadn’t hesitated to say yes humbled Roy in so many ways.
Duff had been Roy’s first manager when he’d made it to The Show. Roy had been as cocky then as he had been through the rest of his career. In hindsight he could see what a handful he must have been to his manager. He used to shrug off bunting advice from the old man like what he was selling was old news. Duff had had every right to punch the upstart Roy had been, but he never did. Instead Duff just kept proving how his way worked until eventually Roy figured it out.
He’d been sad when Duff left the team. It was the first time Roy had ever felt any emotions for one of his coaches.
Excluding his first, of course. His dad.
Roy got out of the Jeep, grabbed his equipment bag, which still smelled like his basement, and hiked it over his shoulder. He hesitated before taking that first step, though.
It wasn’t the physical element of the game that bothered him. Either his arm could still do what it used to do or it couldn’t. There wouldn’t be much getting around that.
It was everything else.
Every failure out on full display, when he would have to tell Duff why he was here.
Well, not every failure. Roy didn’t plan to discuss the time he humiliated and hurt Duff’s daughter. That, Roy figured, he could keep in his pocket.
Lane Baker.
Hell, there would probably be a picture of her on Duff’s desk. Roy would have to brace for that. Maybe even a new wedding photo. Five years since the divorce, it almost seemed likely she would have moved on with her life.
Damn, that was going to hurt.
Don’t think about it. There was no backing down. He’d turned his life into this heaping pile of dung on purpose and now it was time to face the music.
Roy made his way through the stadium entrance to the second level, where the team’s offices were. Nothing fancy about minor-league security, so he was able to go wherever he wanted. He found a door labeled Private and Manager and knocked.
“Come in!”
It was a female voice who made the offer. For a second, Roy paused again. No, Lane couldn’t be here. She was in Virginia Beach last he heard. Helping wounded soldiers. Doing everything right, while he’d been doing everything wrong.
Roy put his internal pity party on hold and opened the door.
The woman standing in the office did remind him of Lane. Long hair tied into a ponytail, face devoid of makeup, wearing a heavy plaid shirt that might have belonged to a man at one point.
She stared at him for a good second. “You’re Roy Walker.”
“Yep.”
“My sister hates you.”
Not that he needed further confirmation of who the woman was, but her statement gave her away. Scout was Lanie’s younger sister. They also had an older sister, Samantha, who was known as one of the most cutthroat agents in the game, but everyone knew she and Duff weren’t close.
Scout was the opposite of Samantha. Where Duff was, Scout was.
“Yep,” Roy said again.
“You’re here to see Duff?”
The Baker girls called their father Duff. It was something Lane had told him about once while working on his shoulder with her voodoo physical therapy. Their mother had claimed that, because he was gone for so much of the year, they couldn’t legitimately call him a father. So they were to call him Duff.
Not hard to see why that marriage hadn’t worked out.
Which was part of why Lane had been so devastated when hers had ended.
Do not go there. Back to baseball, okay. But not back to Lane Baker.
“I have an appointment,” he said.
Scout tilted her head and eyed him as if he was a suspect in a criminal case. “He didn’t tell me. He tells me everything.”
“I asked him to keep this private.”
She assessed him and he had a hard time trying not to think about Lane. Lane was prettier than Scout. Softer around the edges where Scout was all sharp lines. Cheeks and chin. Still, it was easy to see they were sisters. They both had the same honey-wheat-colored hair with green eyes. A similar shrewdness in those eyes.
And honesty, with no thought of pretense.
“You’re here to see your first major-league manager. The man who led you to your first epic World Series win. You’re carrying an equipment bag that smells a little moldy and you look like you’re going to vomit if you breathe in that smell too deeply, which makes me think you’re nervous.”
“Hey, Sherlock, give it a rest. I need to talk to Duff.”
“Damn, I’m good. Roy Walker is here for a tryout.”
“It’s not really a tryout,” he mumbled. “More like an assessment. And I would appreciate it, if you didn’t tell anyone—”
Scout held her hand up. “Please. My father wants it private, it stays private. But you have to let me tell Lane. She’s going to die.”
Please, please don’t tell Lane. Don’t let her know what a complete and total failure I turned out to be. In...everything.
“I doubt she would care,” he said trying for nonchalance. “Like you said, she hates me.”
“Yes, that’s what she always said. All the time. ‘Roy Walker, Roy Walker, how I hate Roy Walker.’ Funny she never mentioned anyone she liked as much as she talked about hating you.”
Roy really didn’t know what to do with that.
“Let me go wake him up. He pretends he’s watching scouting footage after lunch but he actually just puts a headset on and takes a nap.”
Roy waited while Scout went into the inner office to wake her father. After a few minutes she came back wearing a grim expression but giving a solid nod. “He’s ready for you.”
“Thanks. Hey, you mean it, right? You won’t tell anyone I’m here.”
“I mean it.”
Roy nodded. He didn’t question her word.
“I won’t even tell Lane. That is, if don’t want me to. Do you want me to?”
He struggled to get the words out because he knew they would reveal too much about how he felt about Lane. But the consequences of Lane knowing how hard he had fallen were worse in his mind.
“I would prefer it if you didn’t.”
After all, what if he failed at this, too?
“Sure.”
He summoned a smile and walked past her. Duff was slow getting to his feet and Roy’s first thought was wow, Duff had aged. Thinner, his face drawn, his hair a bit wild around his head, probably from his afternoon nap.
“Duff, you’re looking good.”
The old man coughed up a laugh. “Ha. Liar. I look like shit. Which is appropriate because I feel like shit. That’s what happens when you get to seventy-five. You only hope you feel as shitty as me when you get to my age.”
Slowly Duff walked around the desk and Roy jumped to meet him halfway and shook his hand.
“Gotta tell you, you don’t look so great yourself, Walker. You look...defeated, and that sure as hell is a look I never thought I would see on you.”
Defeated.
“That about sums it up,” Roy said, not hiding anything from Duff. “I sank all my money into a video gaming company that went under. I was too stubborn to file for bankruptcy so I paid everyone off and now I’m broke. Really broke. I don’t have a college degree and the only thing I can put on my résumé is a failed start-up company. So I’m here hoping I have enough bullets in this arm to earn me enough money to try again.”
Duff nodded like it was a story he heard every day. “Why me?”
“I’ve got to find out if I can still throw. Before Charlie can put it out there that I’m looking for a team. I needed someone I can trust. Both to tell me the truth and to not announce it to ESPN that I’m trying to make a comeback.”
“How long has it been? Since you launched the rocket?”
“Five years. Since the no-no in San Diego.”
Duff let out a small grunt. “What kind of shape are you in otherwise?”
“I still run. Twenty miles a week. Still work out with weights. Physically, I feel good. In fact, my arm feels great.”
“Well, let’s go change that.”
* * *
ROY, DUFF AND SCOUT made their way to the field.
“You’ll start with throwing on grass before you take the mound,” Scout said, walking into the dugout and coming back with a ball, a catcher’s glove and a mask.
“Okay, wait,” Roy said, wondering if she actually expected him to throw to her. “It may have been five years, but my velocity still has to be pretty high.”
“Relax, slugger, this isn’t some scene from Bull Durham. I called Javier, who lives close by. He’ll come and catch for you. Also he’s a recent immigrant from El Salvador so he will have no idea who the heck you are and, even if he did, none of the sports reporters in town speak Spanish.”
At that moment, a young man with a round face emerged from the dugout. Scout spoke to him in Spanish and he took the catcher’s mitt and dropped to his haunches near home plate.
Roy stood in front of the mound on flat grass and gripped the ball in his hand. Like an old muscle memory waking up, he remembered the shape of the ball, the weight of it and how to hold it just so. There had been a time when the baseball had felt like a natural extension of his left arm. Like it had been grafted to his fingers with the thread of the seams.
He would hurl it as hard as he could, but those threads would retract and the ball would always come back.
When he threw it for the last time he told himself he would never pick up a baseball again. He used to tell himself that if he ever got married and had a kid he’d make sure his kid was into football or soccer. Anything but baseball. That’s how much he’d wanted to move away from the game.
Funny, now it didn’t seem so bad. He could admit, for the first time, that maybe he’d missed it. The grass on the field—although this field was mostly brown after a hard winter. The shape of the diamond. The sight of a masked man crouching sixty feet away waiting to catch whatever Roy threw at him.
“Keep it simple to start,” Duff called out. “Fastball.”
Roy nodded and he could see Scout had a radar gun pointed at him ready to record his velocity.
His throat tightened and his hand flexed around the ball. “Don’t time me yet. Let me get a few in first.”
Scout nodded and put the gun down.
Then Roy went through his motions—forward lean, left arm dangle, pull up, plant foot and fire.
He heard the snap of the ball hitting Javier’s glove. It sounded pretty fast. Javier tossed back the ball and Roy did it again. After his third warm-up he nodded in Scout’s direction. She held up the gun and he fired.
“Eighty-six!”
Roy held his glove up, asking for the ball. Eighty-six wasn’t fast. His fastest had been ninety-two, ninety-three miles an hour. But eighty-six after not throwing for a few years was...workable.
“Try a curve,” Duff suggested.
Roy changed the position of the ball in his hand and threw. It curved. It wasn’t his killer curve, but, again, it was something to work with. He threw over and over. All of his old pitches, even the changeup, just to test that speed. Every fastball got a little faster, every curve a little curvier.
They worked him for an hour and when it was over, his body was covered in sweat and his arm hurt like hell. But he knew. He knew what they knew.
“You can still pitch, Roy Walker,” Scout said, patting him on his right shoulder. Duff kept his hands in his jeans pockets and nodded his agreement.
“The New England Rebels are looking for pitching,” Duff said. “Might be willing to offer you a minor-league deal to see if you can get your conditioning and timing up to speed. I’m thinking in a starting role, too, to build your stamina. It’s a lot of ifs, but if we can get you back into form, if you don’t blow out your arm while doing it, it might be perfect timing for the Rebels, heck, any team, looking to add to their rotation after the all-star break in July.”
Roy nodded. “You really think the Rebels will give me a chance?”
“I don’t,” Scout told him bluntly. “No one will take a chance on what might be. You can still pitch, but you are nowhere near major-league ready. Plus you’re old. Sorry to be so blunt but—”
“No, I appreciate it. I...need it.”
Duff sighed. “They’ll take a chance. They’ll take a chance if I tell them to. Call Charlie, tell him to call Russell. He’s the Rebels’ new general manager. I’ll let Russell know what’s coming and what I saw. In the meantime, Roy Walker, you’ll fill a hell of a lot of seats in this stadium and that’s something that will make our owner very happy. I sure do like to make JoJo happy.”
“You might want to start by not calling her JoJo,” Scout said. “She hates it.”
Duff scowled. “No, she loves it coming from me.”
Roy tuned them out and focused only on what might be. The minors. Roy Walker, future Hall of Famer, was back in the minors.
Still, it was a start.
They walked off the field and Roy gave his thanks to Javier. Something he might not have cared about before. But the guy had come on his own time to help Roy and the least he deserved was a thank-you.
“You good pitch.”
Roy smiled. “Thanks. Gracias. See you around, maybe.”
With that, Javier smiled and headed through the dugout to the door that would lead to the locker rooms. Roy put his mitt in his bag.
“You know, I’ve seen a lot of guys try this comeback,” Duff said as they followed Javier to the locker room, where there was an elevator that would take them up to the second level.
Both Roy and Scout purposefully walked slowly to accommodate Duff’s slow gait.
“The problem is the technique won’t be there for a while, which means you could hurt yourself before you can get your arm into shape.”
“Duff’s right,” Scout said. “Seen it a million times. You’ll be almost there and then you’ll tear something because you’re not getting the right treatment. Treatment is the key.”
“Okay. I’ll try to find someone. You have any recommendations? A sports therapist you use for the team?”
Roy should have guessed by the look Duff and Scout shared but really, truly, he didn’t see it coming.
“I do know someone,” Scout said. “Maybe she can be persuaded to come home for a visit.”
Duff chuckled before he started coughing. “Yep. Got the best in the business on my team. And I hear she works cheap.”
Roy looked at Duff, then at Scout. They couldn’t be serious. “She’ll never do it. She hates me.”
Scout and Duff both smiled back. “Yep,” they said together.
