The Best American Sports Writing 2013 Page 10

  Two afternoons later, on May 26, the team boarded a charter bus—the first one the boys had been on—and headed two hours east to Ripken Stadium in Aberdeen, home to the Class A IronBirds, an Orioles affiliate. The Wildcats peered up at the ballpark’s towering brick facade, then walked through the tunnel to the field, staring at the two decks of stands and the big video scoreboard. Later Lewis would compare the boys’ reaction to “the awe of Hoosiers combined with the excitement of getting dropped off at Disneyland.”

  Presently Warrenfeltz gathered the team and talked again about bunt defense. For nearly an hour on the previous afternoon they’d practiced it: covering first, the wheel play, guarding the line. The players loved to complain about it, but Warrenfeltz didn’t care. As his father always said, “You can’t expect them to do something that they’ve never practiced.” His dad said something else too: there’s no way to defend against a well-executed squeeze play.

  While the position players warmed up, Zach sat in the dugout, icing his left arm. He was the kid who didn’t stretch, who needed only three warm-up pitches. Now, however, Zach’s shoulder and elbow were rebelling. He’d loaded up on four ibuprofen, swabbed on Icy Hot, and taken herbal medicine. His arm still shook involuntarily, but he didn’t care. Besides, his friend Tyler Byers was playing on an ankle that was so badly busted that Warrenfeltz had told him to not run out ground balls. Ryan Butts had recently shaken off the lingering effects of a concussion suffered during a home plate collision late in the season. And, somewhere up there, Brendon was watching him. Zach was damned if he was going to give up the ball.

  Warrenfeltz saw a look of resolve on Zach’s face that he’d never seen before. “How do you feel?” the coach asked.

  “Horrible,” Zach said, “but I’m not coming out until my five innings are up.”

  An hour later, when the boys took the field, Zach looked up at the stands and saw only blue and white. There was the Colliflower family and Ryan Butts’s father and the regulars, all having driven two hours. But there were so many more: face-painted students wearing blue wigs, a line of girls with W-I-L-D-C-A-T-S on their bellies, a guy in a Nick Adenhart jersey, and old men he’d seen only down at Tony’s Pizzeria in Williamsport. Then there were the signs: WILDCAT PRIDE and WIN FOR BRENDON #6. Zach had never played in a ballpark like this. He had one thought: Brendon would have loved this.

  The first Patuxent batter stepped in, and Warrenfeltz held his breath. He had no idea whether Zach had anything left in the tank. When the first pitch rocketed in, dangerously high but as hard as he’d thrown all season, Warrenfeltz had a different thought: Maybe he’s too pumped up. Then, on the next pitch, Zach floated a beautiful curveball. The Patuxent batter swung right through it, as if flailing at smoke. Warrenfeltz exhaled.

  The game remained scoreless for two innings. Then, in the bottom of the third, Brandon Toloso ripped a sinking shot over the Patuxent first baseman’s head for a double. A bunt moved Brandon to third, and then Tyler Nally, a skinny, determined senior whose father played on the Williamsport team that won the title in 1975, cracked one through the left side. One-zip, Wildcats.

  Meanwhile Zach was throwing two to three miles per hour harder than he had all season. “It was,” assistant Doug Stottlemyer later said, “like Brendon was living through him.” Even so, Zach was running on fumes. The Wildcats needed a cushion.

  In the bottom of the fourth Zach appeared to give it to them when he crushed a ball to deep center. In any other Class 2A park it would have been a home run. But in spacious Ripken Field the center fielder just kept backing up and finally caught the ball in front of the 404 sign. Then, in the fifth, the Wildcats failed to bring home a runner from third for the second time in the game. Two innings later, with Williamsport still holding a 1–0 lead, it came down to this: three outs and the Wildcats were state champions.

  On the mound to close it out stood Tyler Byers, who’d come in for Zach in the sixth. As a power pitcher, he was well suited to closing. As a near cripple, he was not well suited to playing defense. The day before, Lewis had asked Warrenfeltz what he planned to do if teams saw they could bunt on Tyler. Said Warrenfeltz, “Let’s hope they don’t.”

  The first Patuxent batter singled, and everyone on the Williamsport bench knew what was coming next: small ball. Lewis again walked over to Warrenfeltz. “You want someone to start warming up in the pen?”

  “If I wanted someone to warm up,” Warrenfeltz said, “there would be someone down in the pen.” After all the team had been through, there was no way the coach was walking out to the mound to remove Byers, and even if he did, there was no way Byers was giving up the ball.

  The next batter bunted, and so did the next. There were now runners on first and third with one out. Warrenfeltz grimaced. He knew what was coming next, but it didn’t matter: Patuxent laid down a perfect squeeze, the kind Warrenfeltz’s dad always talked about. Tyler’s only play was at first, and he made it. Now the game was tied. And still, Warrenfeltz left Tyler in. He struck out the next batter swinging.

  In the bottom of the seventh the Wildcats went down in order. In the stands the Williamsport fans went silent. Stephanie Warrenfeltz felt so anxious that she thought she might throw up. Meanwhile, in the dugout, Warrenfeltz worried about Tyler. The kid was a gamer, but he hadn’t pitched more than two innings in a row since hurting his ankle.

  Somehow Tyler made it through the eighth and the top of the ninth, but with each pitch he looked more tired. Time was running out. Finally, in the bottom of the ninth, Byers poked one to left for a single. Immediately Warrenfeltz signaled down the bench to Tyler Martin, a junior whom everyone called Brett Gardner on account of his speed. Martin rarely hit or played the field, but he might have been the best pinch runner in Washington County. On the second pitch he took off—“like he had jets on his heels,” remembers Stottlemyer—and swiped second. The next batter, Ryan Butts, sent a perfect bunt down the first-base line to get Martin to third with one out.

  So here it was, the opportunity the Wildcats had waited for. An inning earlier Williamsport had stranded a runner at third, and Stottlemyer had told Warrenfeltz, “Next time that happens, we have to go out guns blazing.” Now Warrenfeltz looked at Stottlemyer and nodded: time for the squeeze.

  Nick Williams, a fine bunter, came to the plate, but Patuxent intentionally walked him. The next batter, Riley Arnone, was the only Wildcat who’d successfully laid down a squeeze that season. Patuxent walked him too, loading the bases with one out. Looking back, Warrenfeltz wonders if Patuxent had a scouting report because walking to the plate was Brandon Toloso, who was 0 for the playoffs on bunts, whom Warrenfeltz had put through an extra 10 minutes of bunting practice a day earlier, with decidedly mixed results.

  There are moments that reveal a lot about a coach. How much does he believe in his philosophy? Does he have the guts to make the big call? Brandon stepped into the box and looked at Warrenfeltz, who was standing on the field as third-base coach. Warrenfeltz went to his arm. In the dugout, Lewis turned to Colby Byers. The two had the same reaction. “Oh, Jesus!” whispered Lewis.

  Byers stared back at his coach, eyes wide. “The sign’s on!” Byers said, disbelieving. “The sign’s on!”

  Across the diamond Patuxent prepared for the possibility. “Watch the squeeze!” the third baseman shouted. The first baseman crept in. The pitcher looked toward third, where Tyler Martin was inching down the line, and went into his motion.

  With that, Tyler broke for home. Brandon needed to remember everything he’d been taught: square up early, get the bat high, and slap the ball down. On the bench Zach couldn’t breathe. They needed this. The town needed this. Just get down one freaking bunt, Brandon.

  The pitch, a curveball, was difficult to judge. By the time it got to the plate, Tyler was two-thirds of the way home. If Brandon popped it up, it would be a sure double play. Had he missed it, Martin would have been out by a good 10 feet.

  None of that mattered, though, because Brandon plopped a b
eautiful blooping bunt in front of the plate. The Patuxent pitcher dived, trying to use his glove to flip the ball to the catcher, but by then Tyler was sliding into home face-first, the dust billowing up like stirred ash.

  There is a grainy video of what followed, captured by a Williamsport parent on a cell phone. In a split second the ballpark is engulfed by a deafening roar. Boys in blue fly out of the dugout, leap past the still-prone Patuxent pitcher and dog-pile Brandon at first base, some yelling and crying at the same time.

  Warrenfeltz tried to keep his emotions in check, to act like an authority figure. Then, seeing those boys streaming across the field, he thought, Aw, screw it. And thus on the video you see a taller, older figure fly into the picture and leap on top of the dog pile, grinning maniacally. In that moment Warrenfeltz didn’t care how it looked: he just wanted to be with his team.

  The next 15 minutes remain hazy. Warrenfeltz remembers Tyler Byers pointing to the sky. He remembers the fans screaming as if they were 5,000 strong. He remembers thinking about Nick and Brendon and how each would have savored this moment, Williamsport’s first title in 37 years. He remembers the security guards, who’d gathered to prevent the fans from storming the field but allowed Brendon’s grandfather John to pass through so that one by one the Williamsport players embraced him, none harder or longer than Zach, who cradled his head against the older man’s shoulder, both of them crying.

  Warrenfeltz will always treasure the hours that followed: How the team rode back to Williamsport celebrating the whole way and stopped just off the I-81 exit to climb aboard one of the town’s three yellow fire trucks and parade through town, followed by police trucks and a caravan of honking cars. How they looped the long way, past the Waffle House with its sign that read, 2012 STATE CHAMPS!!! GO WILDCATS BASEBALL 4 YOU NO. 6. How the team stopped at the cemetery for a moment of silence with hats off. And how the bus ended up back at the school, where 166 white plastic cups had been jammed into the fence of the football field nearly three weeks earlier. The word they spelled was HOPE.

  Life goes on, yet part of it remains behind.

  By late July, Warrenfeltz wasn’t seeing the seniors as often. Zach was getting ready to head to Salisbury College, where Brendon had been slated to be his roommate. Four other Wildcats would also play college ball. When Warrenfeltz did see the boys, they reveled in putting in a dip in front of their old coach, just because they could. They were young men now, asserting their independence. Zach Lucas and Tyler Byers had let their hair grow, so that it curled up and around their blue Williamsport hats like flames licking a log.

  In most ways they remained the same kids they had been, fishing and making crude jokes, but in deeper ways they had changed. Most days they wore their championship shirts, just as they would wear the championship rings that were being made, the ones that would read IN MEMORY OF B 6 C on the side. Even now the seniors remain in awe of what happened—how it seemed meant to be. How else to explain all the eerie coincidences? Like the fact that Sam’s number was 2 and Brendon’s was 6 and the team won the state championship on May 26 on two runs and six hits. Or the fact that Brandon Toloso, who dropped down the winning bunt, was number 2, the charter bus that day was number 426, and the Wildcats won six straight games in the playoffs. Or that the rainbow around the sun at Brendon’s funeral had reappeared that day against Wheaton, just before the first pitch. Nor did they know what to make of the eeriest coincidence—that the last time Williamsport won the state title, in 1975, one of the team’s best players, Mick Myers, had died earlier that year. In an auto accident.

  Talk to the boys, the parents, and the assistant coaches, and they would tell you that it was Warrenfeltz who made this happen. “He was the rock, the foundation,” said Gary Nally, Tyler’s father.

  “He was more than a coach to them,” Chad Colliflower said. “I don’t think they would have won the championship if it hadn’t been for the accident. There was something greater going on.”

  Lewis, Warrenfeltz’s longtime friend, is a jokester, but not on this subject. “After Brendon’s accident, these parents just wanted to hold their kids,” he said. “To put their kids in the hands of a 25-year-old?” He paused. “If I were a parent, I would want my kid grieving through me. But these parents relinquished their kids to David.”

  As for Warrenfeltz, it remained hard for him to talk about, just as it was still hard to talk about Adenhart. On this afternoon he took a visitor for a drive. It was warm and muggy, and the AC was going full blast. He passed Byers Market, the LIVE BAIT signs in the window, and Smitty’s Williamsport Creamery, where Zach still got free ice cream. Warrenfeltz reached the river, then turned around and headed back, past the cemetery. Only then, after 20 minutes, did he open up.

  He said he sometimes went jogging and ended up at the cemetery, and one time he stopped to look at Nick’s and Brendon’s graves, just across the slope from each other. Noticing something unusual, he began to walk off the distance between the two. It was almost exactly 60 feet.

  He talked about how there was no end point to his grief, about what he said to the team. “You don’t need to feel like you need to ever get over it,” he said, “because it’s something that we have no answer for, a situation that is so tragic and so close to you, it changes the person that you are and the way that you view the world, not necessarily in a bad way. I got a lot of strength from watching Nick’s family. At some point you have to go back to living your life and chasing your dreams and doing the things that are good for you.”

  That’s what Warrenfeltz himself was trying to do. He was hoping to raise enough money to redo the press box and put in a proper set of bleachers. When he first took the coaching job at Williamsport, some of his friends were surprised. “Don’t you want to be a college coach?” asked Lewis. “Don’t you want to move up the ladder?” But Warrenfeltz didn’t understand this thinking. In October 2010 he took Stephanie out to dinner in Baltimore, and the two walked from the Inner Harbor up to Federal Hill. Looking out across the city, he turned to her. “Are you all right being with someone who’s going to be a high school coach for the next 30 years?” he asked.

  She looked at him, surprised by the question. “Yes,” she said. Moments later, when he produced a small diamond ring from the pocket of his Williamsport High baseball jacket, she said it again.

  In the meantime he will be here, where he ended up after a half-hour drive, where he always ends up: at the Williamsport High diamond. There on the fence was the photo of Nick, and next to it a photo of Brendon and Sam in their prom outfits, and metal placards with Brendon’s and Adenhart’s numbers. And, over in the cage, even though it was summer, Colby Byers was hitting off a tee, crushing balls into the netting. Next to him, his father sat on a plastic bucket, sweating in the heat. After each of his son’s swings, he picked up another ball and placed it on the tee. And this is how it continues: one disappears, another takes its place.

  BILL LITTLEFIELD

  The Gym at Third and Ross

  FROM ONLYAGAME.WBUR.ORG

  JIMMY CVETIC RUNS the gym at Third and Ross. Most people don’t even realize it’s there.

  “I gotta a Golden Gloves thing I’m puttin’ on that weekend,” he said. “You could see that.”

  We’d been looking for a third story to fill up a trip to Pittsburgh that I was going to take, and one of Only a Game’s producers, Karen Given, found Jimmy Cvetic. Now Jimmy was telling me he was our guy. Story one was the Duquesne men’s basketball team, which was in the course of putting together an unexpectedly successful season after five players had been shot at the beginning of the year. Story two was the Pittsburgh Penguins, who were looking forward to a new arena, which the city might or might not be in any position to help fund, although a lot of other cities have not let that get in the way. Jimmy and his tournament were story three.

  “And I got a Russian kid, a heavyweight, who’ll be working out at my gym. You could see him,” Jimmy said. “And this guy who’s been in prison half his life.
Chisholm. He’s about 65, and he comes down here to hold the mitts for some of the fighters.”

  Jimmy himself is a retired police detective, which is why he said that what I’d see if I made it to Pittsburgh was “the ex-commie, the ex-con, and the ex-cop.”

  “And the mayor,” he said. “The mayor comes in here a lot. And a card girl if you want.”

  This was beginning to sound like a long story, especially for the radio. I’d met several fighters, and also some mayors, but I’d never met any card girls, who are the girls who strut around the ring in high heels and not much else with a big card that tells everybody what round is coming up next, in case they have not been paying attention.

  “I’ll tell her to dress like she’s going to work,” Jimmy said.

  So that was settled and he hung up the phone.

  About midday on a Sunday a couple of weeks later I landed in Pittsburgh, and the idea was that I’d go see Jimmy first, because the Golden Gloves thing was that night. He’d told me to call him from the airport.

  “Jimmy,” I said when he answered the phone, “it’s Bill Littlefield.”

  “Who?” he said.

  “Bill Littlefield,” I said. “I’m the guy from public radio. We talked a couple of weeks ago. I’m here for that Golden Gloves thing tonight.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Yeah, I had to cancel that. They were givin’ me a hard time about the lights in the room there in the hotel where it was supposed to be, the chandeliers, that they were afraid it might get broken if somebody threw something, I don’t know.”

  “So there’s no fights tonight?”