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Stealing

This is another Robert Holland classic. Stealing makes you think about things in ways you wouldn’t otherwise think about them. I loved the way the details and the adventure were presented It’s right up there with my favorite books written by my favorite author, Robert Holland. I would recommend that you don’t put this book back on the shelf.

-- P.J. Ambrozaitis, age 14

Stealing is a wonderful achievement! It made me shiver, yet also laugh. What’s more, when it comes to teenage mentality, there is no better author than Mr. Holland. But that’s because he’s a kid at heart. Not only does this book have voice, but it also contains the most rich and vivid plot imaginable, with one thing leading quickly to the next. It kept me hooked and, once again, I found myself locked in my room, reading the book to its jaw-dropping ending!

-- Gordon DiQuattro, age 13

Chapter One

Stealing

Okay, I’ve got a problem. It isn’t exactly one I caused myself, so much as being friends with a guy who has the problem, but it’s still something I’ve got to deal with. My problem is simple. I think that my friend, Brad Sheffer, is part of a ring that’s stealing cars and selling them to chop shops, and I’m pretty sure I could go to jail for withholding information about someone who has committed a crime. But what do I do? Turn in a friend? Of course, that’s exactly what I should do. I know it. And I’m gonna guess everybody I know knows it, but no way can I do that.

Well, there you have it. Write it down and it looks simple. Except that it isn’t simple because you can’t betray a friend.

And that’s what was going through my mind as I sat on the bench in the dugout, waiting for my turn at the plate. I play third base for Farnsworth High, and I’m sixteen and I’ve got my driver’s license and while I’m not exactly at the top of my class I make the honor roll every term. My parents keep telling me I could do better in school, but here’s the way it shakes out. Maybe I could do better, but that would mean studying more and somehow that just doesn’t work. I seem to be able to study only so long and then no matter how much longer I keep at it, nothing seems to sink in. I think it’s some kind of brain rot, but whatever it is, I can’t seem to get past it.

I’ve tried to explain that to my parents, but listen, you can talk to adults till you go blue in the face from lack of oxygen, but there are just some things they don’t understand. It’s like they were never kids once, or at least that’s what they want you to think.

I’m kind of a tall, rangy sort of guy at six-one and one-seventy, and I’ve got black hair and weird gray-green eyes, and listen, I’m not gonna be lugging home any prizes for handsome, and to tell you the truth, stuff like that doesn’t matter. I’m okay looking, and that’s good enough. I mean, a thing like being handsome can really get in the way.

My name, by the way, is Alexander Warfield, Alex for short, of course, because nobody goes around being called Alexander. You’d get hooted right off the planet. A lot of guys I know don’t like their names but I think mine is pretty cool. I mean, Alexander was a great Greek conqueror and that goes pretty well with a last name like Warfield. That may also explain why I want to go to Annapolis. And that also explains why this whole car-stealing thing is so big. You don’t get into the Naval Academy if you have a criminal record. In fact, there are a whole lot of things you can’t get into if you have a record. I looked up as Norb Hansen, our first baseman, swung through a fastball. Norb is a big guy, taller than I am, and he weighs about twenty pounds more and he’s strong as an ox. He’s one of three of us on the team who can hit, which is why he bats in the cleanup spot. But Norb is in love with the home run and that means he takes an enormous swing ... and, well, guys who do that strike out a lot. He did not disappoint. Five pitches and he headed back to the bench with another "K" chalked up after his name.

Bobby Harold, the DH, stepped to the plate and I put on a helmet, took my bat from the rack, and walked out to the on-deck circle.

The truth is our team sucks. We’d lost six games in a row and here we were almost at the end of April with still a long way to go and not much hope. The year before we’d gone to the state finals and lost by a single run, but the starters on that team had all graduated and now we were terrible. We didn’t have anyone who could pitch very well and we committed an incredible number of errors and to finish it off, we didn’t hit very well either. Three of us did, but that only meant we left a lot of guys on base almost every inning because nobody could drive us in.

But hey, that’s the way it goes sometimes, and while I wanted to get to the state championship, that just wasn’t gonna happen. I mean, you do have to win more games than you lose and all we’d done is lose them all.

Still, on a spring day or a summer day or on any day, outside of sailing my boat in a race or casting for stripers or blues, there’s nothing I’d rather do than play baseball. I hadn’t committed an error all season and I was hitting a solid three-eighty-nine and beyond that there wasn’t much I could do except cheer from the bench and the field and try to keep the guys who weren’t doing very well from getting discouraged.

Bobby Harold, who should have been a good hitter, popped out to short and I came up. You know how teams have fans who come out to cheer them on? We had nobody. Not even the parents or grandparents ever turned up. But I’ll give Coach Hornberg this, he never stopped cheering, he never stopped teaching us the game, encouraging us to do better, telling us how to correct what we did wrong, which took up most of his time in practice, ’cause we did a lot wrong.

I dug my cleats into the dirt, keeping my hands loose on the bat, watching for the ball. The pitcher gave me a fastball on the inside corner and I smoked a liner down the third base line and blew out of the box, not looking up till I rounded the base and when I saw that the left fielder hadn’t yet gotten to the ball, I put my head down and ran for second, dropping into a slide and coming up standing on the bag with my second hit of the day.

I brushed off my pants and waited for the pitcher to get ready for the next batter, Tom Trask, who plays short and plays it really well. True, he’d made a couple of errors, but he has great range, both into the hole and behind second. Tom’s troubles are mostly at the plate because he’s scared of getting hit. You know how that works. You get hit once when you’re a little kid and after that every time you go to bat you keep waiting to get clocked again.

And then, out of nowhere, I got this idea to steal third. I mean, what did I have to lose? Maybe it would even shake up the pitcher. I took my lead as the pitcher went into his stretch and then I took a bigger lead and I saw his eyes flicker, but it was too late. In his mind he had started the pitch and he couldn’t stop and throw behind me. The instant he started toward the plate I took off.

I’m not what you’d call a speed demon, but I can run fast enough and I had gotten a terrific jump and I went into third head first and the throw wasn’t even close to the bag.

By golly, that got Coach excited. He was jumping around inside the dugout and trying to send a signal to the batter to try a suicide squeeze play, but Tom was so frazzled that he never looked that way and then I said to myself -- I’m going home on the next pitch.

With two outs and up by six runs the pitcher ignored me and I kept inching farther and father from third and then as he started his windup I took off and he saw me running and it threw him off and I ran, man I never ran so fast, and all the way down the line I aimed at the catcher, planning to go right into him with my shoulder and knock him butt over bandbox. But it didn’t come to that. The pitch went well wide of the plate and the catcher managed to knock it down, but he was too far away to make a play and I came sliding across the plate in a cloud of dust with the first run we’d scored in the last two games.

Coach was all over me, clapping me on the back and the rest of the guys were roaring and cheering and when I looked out I saw the pitcher take off his hat and slam it onto the ground. A good sign. A very good sign. He’d wanted a shutout and now it was gone and in any sport what you try to do is make your opponent doubt his ability.

On the next pitch he hit Tom in the thigh and you’d have thought from the way he howled that he’d been shot. Coach went running out to see how badly Tom had been hurt, but the ball had hit him in the meaty part of his thigh and Tom got up and he was smiling and we heard him say, "hey, that didn’t hurt so bad." Then he trotted down to first base, smiling like somebody had just bought him an extra large pizza with extra cheese and pepperoni.

Up came Walt Fey, our rightfielder, and he walked on four straight pitches and that got us to Stan Wisnowski, our centerfielder and a guy who looks really good at the plate, but so far hadn’t hit much at all. It was a matter of timing and we all knew that once he got that down, Wisno would start smoking, but until that next pitch I don’t think we really believed he’d ever get a hit.

All he did was hammer the first pitch into the alley in right center field and both runners scored and when the centerfielder bobbled the ball, Wisno went on to third. Suddenly we were only down by three runs and everybody on the field knew what was coming. Wisno was gonna steal home just the way I had.

The coach for Springfield called time and walked out to the mound to talk to his pitcher who was standing there as if somebody had let the air out of him. The coach did everything he could to get his pitcher pumped up, and probably if he’d had someone warming up, he’d have changed pitchers, but he didn’t.

Finally, the ump signaled that it was time to get on with the game and the coach walked back to the dugout and Wisno got ready. Now, the thing is, Wisno can run. I mean, he can fly, but nobody on Springfield knew that. What they did know was that neither of the next two guys up could hit their weight. So the thing you do in a situation like that is focus on getting the batter out.

Wisno took his lead and the pitcher began his windup and Wisno started for the plate and the pitcher threw the ball two feet over the catcher’s head and Wisno trotted home on the wild pitch. Six to four. And suddenly we weren’t losers anymore. Unless you’ve been there, you can’t know how that feels. We were sky high, pumped, we felt almost explosive and there was Ari Kazan at the plate, our freshman second baseman, waving his bat and digging in his cleats in the batter’s box and looking like he believed he could hit whatever the guy threw. The thing is, believing you can do something, as often as not, makes it possible for you to do it. But it’s a big help if the pitcher is rattled and this guy wasn’t just rattled, he was ready to see a shrink. By then, Springfield had two guys warming up and the pitcher knew he was through but he still had to pitch until another pitcher had gotten warmed up. His control had deserted him and the first two pitches weren’t even close to the plate. On the third pitch he cut his speed way down as he tried to get it over the plate. He did. But slowing the ball down was just what Ari needed and he slapped a line drive over the first baseman’s head and took off. He may be small but man, can Ari run. He’s almost as fast as Wisno and he rounded first and never hesitated.

The play at second looked like it was going to be close, but Ari isn’t a very big target and he slid to the inside of the bag and the ball came in high and the guy had no chance to tag him.

We were really whooping it up on the bench by then, I can tell you. We acted as if we’d all been drinking crazy juice. I mean we were hollering and shouting and getting on the pitcher and throwing our hats around. It was like feeding time at the zoo.

On the next pitch with Hank Jones at the plate, another not so hot hitter, Ari broke for third and stole it standing up. Coach signaled for a suicide squeeze and this time the signal got through and Ari broke for home, and as he did, Hank squared around and laid down a nearly perfect bunt, rolling it past the pitcher up the first base line and as Ari scored, Hank made it to first without a throw.

That brought up Mike Santangelo, our catcher, the only starting player left from the year before, the best hitter on the team and ... he was hungry.

Then Springfield changed pitchers. They had to because the guy on the mound looked like he’d been turned inside out. So we waited through the new pitcher’s final warmups and then Mike stepped into the box. You could see in the way he stood, in the way he held his bat that it didn’t matter what this guy threw. If it was near the plate Mike would be all over it like white dog hair on a black suit.

Then Coach put on the steal sign and Hank got it and took his lead off first. Mike bats left-handed and because catchers are almost always right-handed, it’s harder for a catcher to throw to second when a left-handed batter is at the plate and it’s especially hard if the batter swings at the pitch, and that’s what Mike did.

Hank took off for second and the ball came inside and Mike swung at it and pinned the catcher behind the plate, waiting for the ball, and when he threw the ball went bouncing into second and Hank was already standing on the bag.

It was a great piece of coaching. You’ve got a new pitcher who’s watching his team lose a six-run lead and he comes in ready to pitch and then next thing he knows the tying run is in scoring position on second and the last thing in the world he wants to have happen is to let that run score. It tightened him up. It made him aim the ball instead of just rearing back and firing his best hummer over the plate. Oh, he threw it fast enough, all right, but he got way too much of the plate and Mike got every bit of the pitch and sent a long, long shot to right that cleared the wall and there we were, up by a run with two innings to go.

The energy we’d built up got to our pitcher too and suddenly he was throwing as if he believed he could win. And by then the Springfield guys had begun to feel like losers.

There is no better combination and we came away with our first win of the season. More importantly, we came away believing that we could win the next game and the next and the next. I was so pumped that I forgot about my problem and in fact, I didn’t remember it until later that night when it came time to do my homework. Maybe if it’d been algebra it wouldn’t have come up. But I had to write an essay for English and that’s when my brain goes all gooey and I think about everything but what I’m supposed to.

How come, I want to know, nobody told me that growing up would be so hard? How come you never have a day that is good from beginning to end? And how come I have to write stupid essays about things like love? And what kind of an idiot teacher assigns a thing like that? Mrs. Parsell, that’s who. So far we’d gotten to write about "caring" and "getting in touch with our feelings" and "solving problems without violence" and now, this little beauty on "love."

So far I was running a C average on those essays and I decided that because I’d just get another C, or worse, I might as well write about something I liked. So I wrote about the boat I ‘d been working on all through the winter. I called it "A Labor of Love."

Hey, if you’re gonna get hammered you might as well have fun doing it.

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