Curveball

© 2024 by Eric Goodman

All Rights Reserved

Cover design by Jim Villaflores

This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidental.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

Post Hill Press

New York • Nashville

posthillpress.com

Published in the United States of America

Contents

Part 1: Spring Training

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Part 2: The Minors

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Part 3: The Show

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Part 4: Wild Card

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Acknowledgments

For my brothers Mike and Frank

Mets siblings Danny, Lamar, Rich, and Mary Jean

And for Mets fans everywhere

who every year

bleed orange and blue

The world is very old

But every spring

It groweth young again

And faeries sing

—

Cicely Mary Barker

PART ONE

SPRING TRAINING

Chapter One

Jess Singer was tall, and he was fast. Like, really fast. Sophomore year, when he still flashed more acne than lip hair, he touched ninety. Six-two at sixteen, six-five as a senior, long-armed, broad-shouldered, long-legged as a ladder, Jess viewed the world through his mother’s pale eyes from under his father’s dark floppy hair and, as time would reveal, through his famous dad’s ability to pitch up and in.

Remarkably, when the baseball gods and good fairies fluttered over Jess’s crib, they not only blessed him with size and strength, an easy repeatable motion, and the hand-eye coordination the child of a beach volleyball star and a major league pitcher might expect, those same beneficent imps had made him left-handed. Left-handed! With fingers that would grow long and strong enough to enclose a ball in the web of his left hand, helping Jess master the curveball his father, Jewish Joe Singer, had forbidden him to throw until he was eighteen.

Four years later, as Jess toed a slab on the twelve-pack in the spring training complex in Port St. Lucie, most minor league scouts considered his curveball the best in the minors. Not only plus, but elite, a 12 to 6 tumbler, evoking comparisons to the famous hook thrown sixty years earlier by his co-religionist, the legendary Sandy Koufax, and more recently by another Dodger southpaw, Clayton Kershaw.

Jess’s agent had explained to Jess and his parents, and to Grandpa Jack too, who’d groused about the lousy cheapskate bastards, that Jess could expect a call to the Show in late April or May, once the Super Two deadline had passed. Until then, he needed to hone throwing heat up in the zone and bouncing his curve when ahead in the count to produce more swings and misses. Work on your Charlie, Jack had whispered early in high school, when his father still forbade it. And keep away from the slider. More elbows been blown out by that shit than anything.

Sweating under the Florida sun, Jess hummed a heater homeward. Then another. Knee high, letter high, inside and out, ticking targets in all four quadrants set by Rah Ramirez, Jess’s catcher the previous summer in Double-A. Bing, bop, and zing. Bing, bop and zing, the ball disappearing from Jess’s fingers to materialize nanoseconds later in Rah’s mitt.

Mac Davis, his father’s catcher and best friend in their glory days in the ’80s and ’90s, and now the major league bullpen coach, stood behind Rah with several team officials Jess didn’t recognize.

Four more, Mac called.

Jess threw four four-seamers, then half a dozen two-seamers, which cut hard, left to right. Jess could see Mac and the others nodding, Mac’s creased face round and tanned as a well-oiled mitt.

Now the two, Mac said.

Jess nodded, reflexively rolling his glove hand forward in the universal meme for a curve. Rah set a low target and waggled two fingers. Jess positioned his glove in front of his face the way Jack had shown him long before Dad allowed him to throw a curve. His whole life he’d had his grandpa in one ear while with the other he feigned attention to Dad, who was kind-hearted if not, everyone said, very smart.

Jess had always felt closer to Jack, who had nicknamed him in middle school as he strode off a travel team mound, a head taller than his teammates.

Look at him, Jack shouted. Big as two fucking Jews.

The nickname stuck. Sanitized, but enduringly odd: Two-J’s Singer.

Jess dug in his mitt and gripped the ball across the seams, supporting it with his flexed thumb. Hide your face, Jack had counseled. Scare ’em shitless. This was his advice when Jess was ten and twelve, not even Bar Mitzvahed. You’re the Chosen One of the goddamned Chosen People. They’ll be gunning for you, Two-J’s, just like they did your dad.

Jess rocked into motion, hiding his lips, nose, and the ball as well as he hid his secret self. Release point, he thought, release point, torqueing his wrist and snapping off a Charlie, aiming at the head of an imaginary left-handed batter, then watching his curve break sharply down and to the right, crossing the dish just above the batter’s imaginary knees to settle in Rah’s very real mitt like a white bird on a wire.

Yes, Jess thought and smiled. Yes, sir.

Sixty-four miles south, in Delray Beach, Jack was doing push-ups. Twice a day, he knocked out forty, followed by forty crunches. If it was good enough for Paul Newman, a good-looking Shaker Heights Yid, it was good enough for Jack, a tummler from East New York. Five years ago, he’d eliminated most red meat and cut way back on the hooch because as he always told Joey, Take care of your body, and it’ll take care of you.

Unlike most old boys in South Florida, Jack could see his own dick without a mirror. A few years ago, after the second love of his life died and left him comfortable, Jack became known in Huntington Pointe as Viagra Jack, gray-haired Lancelot of old ladies. As he liked to assure Joey, and now Two-J’s, the old man was one in a million. But even one in a million, old was old. On Jack’s next birthday, an imaginary calendar would flip to eighty.

Thirty-six, Jack counted in his noggin, twice Chai. Thirty-seven. Thirty-eight, feeling the ache in his shoulders and arthritic thumbs as he fought to keep his gut flat and ass sea level, burning biceps, delts and lats. And now the whole truth and nothing but. Forty years ago, Jack began lying about his age. This was before Joey signed his first contract, not that he took a penny from the kid; he didn’t. Jack wasn’t seventy-nine, turning eighty the last day of November. He was eighty-two, turning eighty-three, but couldn’t tell no one.

He finished his push-ups and collapsed gut down on the rug. Every other alter kocker in Huntington Pointe had tile floors. That’s how condos were built down here, where it was Schvitzville six months a year. But now that he was four score and halfway to three, Jack feared falling more than black mold, so he’d had the tile ripped out and replaced with a rug.

When the doorbell chimed, Jack ignored it. Getting up and down was harder than the crunches and damn if he was going to struggle vertical, crab to the door, get down again to finish the set. Besides, he had a pretty good idea who it was.

Again, the bell.

Fourteen, fifteen, eighteen. Christ, he loved staying in shape. Fifty years ago, when he was raising Joey alone after his sweet first wife, may her name be a blessing, had to be put in a nut house—what sorrow, what shame—his gut was a plank, what the kids call an eight-pack. He used to encourage Joey, a sweet kid, to punch him hard as he could, just like Houdini. Joey’s eyes would spin. No, Daddy. No.

Jack would taunt his own boy, and still Joey wouldn’t punch until he’d threaten to send him to bed without supper. Hit me if you know what’s good for you. Only then would Joey sock him. Eight and ten, he already packed a wallop, what a left arm! After every punch, Jack would remind Joey Houdini died because some anti-Semite bastard gut-punched him when he wasn’t looking. A magical Jew, gone too soon.

Not Jack, still crunching in Delray Beach.

The bell rang a third time.

Thirty-six, thirty-seven.

I know you’re in there!

Forty.

Jack pushed himself up on the coffee table, joints cracking like a dead man’s bones. He approached the door and peered out the peephole. Just like I thought.

Gladys Goldberg, fully made-up at 10:00 a.m., fake lashes and platinum hair coiffed like Carol what’s-her-name, Channing, cheeks smooth at seventy-six, eighty, eighty-five, who knew? stepped through the door. Glad surely shaved years off the real number, but who was he to hurl pebbles from inside the glass house of eighty-two? She must have had some nips and ducks, Jack thought, casting a knowing eye: quality work. She offered up a covered dish.

I knew you were here, Jackie. I could hear you grunting.

Whatcha got?

Your favorite.

He followed her to the kitchen where she set the kugel on the counter, then moved her hand to his cheek.

You’re sweaty.

I need a shower.

Like wings, her lashes whirred. Want me to scrub where you can’t reach?

She was a wild one, Glad. You’ll get wet.

What if I do?

He grinned and followed Mrs. Goldberg to the shower.

Joe eyed Frannie in profile on the patio. Only because he knew her, as he liked to say, better than she knew herself, could he detect the limp that had never completely gone away. Only Joe could see it. It made him feel guilty and sad and as full of love as he’d been since they met a quarter century ago in Hermosa Beach. Back then Frannie was the uncrowned queen of beach volleyball, everything about her larger than life. Her height, six-one; her ability to leap and spike; her loving heart; the crushing sorrow she’d survived as a girl. As Joe liked to say, you can’t tell a book by its cover, nor a wounded girl by her beach bunny bod. Now that age and circumstance had reshaped the exterior—her long hair shorn at fifty, her leaping ability taken by the drunk who had hit them head-on twelve years ago—her loving heart and fierce, principled soul shone through even brighter.

Breakfast, Joe.

Joe cast a long last look at the fairway and the green hills enclosing it. For the past four months, they’d been living on the ninth hole of a golf course in Sonoma County. This was the first time in years they hadn’t wintered in Florida near Jack, or in Southern California, where they met. This year, feeling at loose ends with Jess away, they’d decided to try someplace new.

I’ll be right in.

Frannie disappeared inside the house, still long, still lean, which made Joe feel like a hippo. He’d gained twenty-five pounds since Christmas, padding his waist and ass. His face was rounder too, Semitic cheekbones sunk in goo. And though he hadn’t lost any hair in front, there was considerable shine on the back forty: a two-and-a-half-inch circle a yarmulke would cover if Joe were that kind of Jew.

Joe watched a golfer proceed slowly up the fairway pushing an oversize handcart. He looked seventy-five or eighty, Jack’s age. The old man selected an iron, swung mightily, and topped the ball ten feet.

Fuck a duck!

Joe turned, pretending he hadn’t seen or heard the outburst. Inside, he found the bowl of steel-cut oats Frannie had set out for him, but no Frannie.

I got tired of waiting, she said when he found her in the bedroom, putting on a warm-up jacket and tights for her morning bike ride. Ruby, her black mutt, the latest in a thirty-year-long line of rescues, crouched beside her, eying Joe suspiciously. Ruby was ten or twelve; she’d been with them only since the move to Sonoma. Short-legged, stout, and ill-favored, with a white muzzle and bulging eyes, Ruby rarely barked or wagged her tail. Her teats and belly sagged. There was nothing ruby-like about her except the name she’d come home with.

Why’d you let Frannie adopt her? Jack had asked when he visited.

After Randy died, you remember Randy?

Jack nodded.

Ruby was the only dog she showed me with four legs.

What is it, Joe? Frannie asked.

"What’s what?"

You’re not here.

I am.

Only in body.

Fair enough. You going for a ride?

Frannie nodded.

Want company?

Sure, Joe. Only, you don’t own a bike.

Joe felt flummoxed.

Frannie hugged him, and he glanced over her shoulder at Ruby, who, with her protuberant eyes, looked like a dog in a comic strip. After a moment, Ruby looked away just as Frannie added, I’m going for my ride now, but when I come back, let’s talk about what’s bothering you.

Joe started to say, Nothing, but knew that wouldn’t float.

When Joe returned, hours later, hiding from his wife and the looming conversation, it was 3:30 and drizzling. It had been a wet winter, rain every few days since November.

Are you hungry?

Joe shook his head. I ate.

I’m sure you did, Frannie said, then looked embarrassed for fat-shaming him. More gently, she asked, How about tea, to take the chill off?

Joe’s eyes filled with sadness. It was easier to face Frannie’s anger than kindness.

I think I’ll lie down.

What about that conversation?

Later, okay? Joe fled, guiltily, down the bedroom corridor, opened and closed the door behind him. What would Frannie think of his strange behavior? That he was having an affair? But he’d been the most loyal of husbands, even in his playing days, when women were all over him, like shell on a hardboiled egg.

Joe sat on their unmade bed, arms crossed, staring out through the sliding glass door at the rain and the puddling fairway. He tried to think about as little as possible, in fact, to think about nothing at all. Suddenly, the bedroom door burst open, and Frannie landed in front of him on the bed.

What is it? she demanded. What is it, Joe?

Let me get this right, she shouted sometime later. "You’ve known how long?"

Frannie now sat beside him on the couch. Beyond the wall of windows and sliding glass doors, plump geese waddled up the wet fairway.

Two months, he admitted.

Two months! Two months ago, you had a blood test that said you might have cancer, and you didn’t tell me?

Joe nodded.

Why the hell not?

At first, he’d felt embarrassed. Then scared. Finally, after letting months slip past, he felt unable to act. I couldn’t.

What the hell is wrong with you?

I told you. High PSA might mean prostate—

"I know!! Her eyes fired body-piercing blue missiles. Why didn’t you tell me? Frannie’s hands balled into fists larger than most men’s. Don’t you love me? I could punch you in the face!"

I wish you would, Joe thought. Go ahead.

She socked him. Eyes smarting, cheek throbbing, Joe declined to strike her back or, like a plunked batter, to rub the sore spot.

Feel better?

She nodded. What about you?

I feel great, he said. You hit like a girl.

Fuck you, Joe. I suppose you haven’t gone for tests, or anything?

I was scared, Frannie. That’s why I didn’t tell you. I didn’t want to know.

You think not knowing will save you?

She was right. Frannie was always right.

You’re such a dope sometimes.

"But I’m your dope, he said hopefully. Right?"

Forever and a day.

He kissed her and she kissed him back. For a heartbeat he thought they might end up in bed, where they hadn’t been in a really long time.

Maybe later, Frannie said. Right now, you call that doctor.

Joe thought about explaining he’d decided to pretend it was all a mistake or happening to someone else, that for two months he’d done nothing but eat because that would make him strong enough to fight off whatever was happening down there. But she’d only call him a dope, or invoke Jack’s favorite insult, the dumbest Jew in America. Instead, he went looking for his cell phone.

And just like that, the nightmare began.

Chapter Two

Jess was scheduled to pitch an inning in the big club’s spring training game, so he’d slept badly. Fearful he was too keyed-up to keep food down, Jess decided to skip breakfast, but realized that was crazy. Energy! Fuel! He forced down four eggs, six slices of bacon, and an English muffin, then fretted, What the hell? I’ll be too full to pitch! He considered making himself hurl like the gymnasts and cheerleaders did in the second-floor bathroom in Redondo High.

Oh, how he’d longed to join them in the girls’ room—to learn the secrets of applying eyeliner—although Jess, all-county then all-state and destined, everyone said, to follow his famous dad to the Show, would never dare wear any.

At least not in public.

He arrived early at the park, stretched, and got his running in before the mandatory game-day meeting. Greg Gallagher, the pitching-savvy manager, not even forty, blue eyes, close-cropped beard starting to gray, took Jess aside after the meeting.

Remember, Jess, pound the zone. Strike one, strike two, every batter. And don’t be afraid to come inside. Gallagher, whom some of the vets called Gigi (sometimes singing it in a French accent, though not, of course, to his face), but whom Jess could only think of as The Manager, dropped his hands onto Jess’s shoulders. And do yourself a favor. Don’t shake off Furillo.

In this way, Jess learned he’d be throwing to the Mets’ starting catcher, rather than Rah or one of the other minor leaguers he’d known coming up. He was scheduled to pitch third—likely the fourth or fifth inning—depending on how long the starter lasted. No matter what, he wouldn’t pitch for at least two hours. He exited the meeting room and passed a poster for The Natural : Redford as Roy Hobbs, winding up left-handed, grinning sexily. Why a movie poster and not one of the team’s former pitching stars, Jess couldn’t say. When he was in middle school, some of his teammates’ fathers called him The Natural, but Dad wouldn’t allow it. He never knew why. What Jess did know was that for as long as he could remember, he’d loved Redford’s blond good looks, so different from his own. Just thinking about Redford, Jess felt a tingle downstairs. Growing up, if Jess could have looked like anyone, it would have been Robert Redford.

He picked at the training table lunch, then headed to the minor league side of the complex to run sprints on the outfield grass. He tried to remember if they’d been using these same fields when Dad played, and realized, of course not, how many years ago was that? Twenty-five? Thirty? Jess pulled his cap down and closed his eyes, visualizing strike one, strike two, just like Gallagher suggested. Then Jess heard his name, and when he looked up, Grandpa Jack was coming towards him.

Two-J’s, Jack said, you ready?

The old bookie wore a short-brimmed straw hat, which looked like the unnatural child of a Panama and a fedora; a red feather waved from the hatband. The moustache, now white, that Jack had worn Jess’s entire childhood supported his hooked nose.

Whatsamatter, Jess, cat got your tongue?

Grandpa, you’re not supposed to be on the field.

Jack waved his fingers as if shooing gnats. I slipped the mook a fiver. Anyway, they know me. He grinned, then his expression flipped serious. Trust your stuff. And remember where you come from. He raised his right arm for a fist-bump. The Chosen Ones’ Chosen One. Jack pointed at his chest: one of Dad’s old jerseys. Then he ambled towards the stands, like he owned the place.

Jess returned to the major league side of the complex. He shagged flies with the other pitchers, then stood in the semicircle of players watching Randy Vermouth, the club’s number five starter, warm up on the practice mound halfway down the left field line. Vermouth was thirty-four, in the last year of his contract. Never overpowering, Vermouth’s greatest virtue, from the team’s perspective, was durability. Unlike most of the big club’s pitchers, he never went on the IL. Instead, he took the ball every fifth day and gobbled innings like salted nuts. From Jess’s perspective, Vermouth’s greatest value was his expiring contract; there was a spot in next year’s rotation.

When the game started, Jess sat in the bullpen beside Rah. They were the same age, and for the past three years had played on the same minor league affiliates in Low-A, Advanced-A, and Double-A. Rah, whose full name was Pedro Torres Ramirez, buzzed his hair on both sides, but grew the center part long enough to curl. He hailed from Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico, not Venezuela or the DR. Like his hero, Yadier Molina, Rah often dyed his central swatch of hair blond. He was six-one, with medium-brown skin, large hands, a great arm, broad shoulders, and a rollicking sense of humor. Everyone said if Rah could just hit .240 he’d reach the Show.

Rah had signed at sixteen and reached the US at eighteen, which was when he and Jess met. Four years ago, Rah spoke badly broken English and hung out only with other Latins. Since then, he’d learned English, mostly, he said, by watching Friends re-runs.

Maybe because of his devotion to sitcoms, or maybe it was the other way around, Rah laughed often, and the world laughed with him. His large, perfectly formed teeth were as well-matched as a box of Chiclets, which Rah pronounced, Chick-lay. Privately, Jess thought Rah was cute as the Eveready Bunny, and he sometimes feared he was half in love with his batterymate.

"Cabrón. Rah banged his right fist on Jess’s knee. You ready?"

You know it.

Little Prince finally gonna pitch for the big club.

For years, Rah had been calling Jess Little Prince, intimating he was baseball royalty because his dad had pitched in the Bigs, while he was a campesino from nowhere, his dad a security guard. But while he might have come from Nowhere, Rah had signed for 500K—dollars, not pesos—and bought his Mom and Pops a new house, or as Rah said, una casita. As Jess liked to remind him, he wasn’t from nowhere no more. What Rah didn’t understand was that because of the whole gambling thing and the way his career ended, Dad wasn’t exactly baseball royalty, more like the star who fell from the sky.

Someday, Jess said. I’m gonna pitch in New York and you’re gonna catch me.

Think so? Rah asked, eyes dreaming.

Jess considered leaning in and hugging Rah, which happened all the time with teammates, although usually after some on-the-field achievement. Instead, he settled for a fist bump.

"You know it, cabrón."

A moment later, Ray Gibson, the major league pitching coach, told Jess to warm up.

Jack wanted a beer,