The Next Ted Williams

Rebecca Maines

They thought they were doing the right thing; it wasn't selfish. Yeah, okay, a major league baseball player makes good money, could take care of his parents--Mike and Katy O'Brien had always worked hard, and it would be nice to retire, relax a little, maybe spend some time in the winter in Florida. But that was a far second to the O'Briens. The important thing was the Boston Red Sox. Getting the Red Sox a World Series championship, that was the important thing.

Mike was a cop, third generation. Katy had been an LPN when they'd first got married, but she'd gone back to school and retrained to become an EMT. The money was pretty good, for both of them, but they'd held off buying a house. Season tickets to the Red Sox were more a priority. Both sets of parents had understood: they'd always had tickets, too.

And when the time came that Mike and Katy were ready to have a baby...well, Mike had this idea.

Everybody who knew Mike knew what a fan of the Sox he was. He could be trusted. He met the man from the lab in Boston--at the bar where he sometimes went to watch away games on the big screen, the kind of place where if you weren't a Red Sox fan, you just wouldn't go--to see if it was true. Then he went home to his wife.

Mike didn't have to ask Katy twice.

It was all very secret, very illegal Mike figured, and if he got caught he would be off the force for sure. But he was willing to take the chance to have his son be the next Ted Williams.

They'd even timed it pretty close: Ted Williams--the first one--was born on August 30th, and Theodore Williams O'Brien was born on September 4th. The timing had been Katy's idea: she wouldn't call herself a devotee of astrology, but she figured what the heck, on the off chance there was something to it, they might as well do what they could.

They started taking baby Ted to games right away--Katy got good at juggling a scorecard in one hand while popping open the nursing bra and slipping the baby under her Red Sox jersey with the other. Teddy never fussed at the games; Katy and Mike figured that was a good sign. By the time the boy was three, he could sing "Take Me Out to the Ball Game"--even the verse part that hardly anyone knows. Katy had told him her maiden name was Casey, like the girl Katy Casey in that song (not true; she was the former Katy McNichols, but at three young Teddy could hardly put together that Gramma Sally and Grampa Bob weren't named Casey), and so he would crow the words at the seventh-inning stretch--"Katy Casey was baseball mad/Had the fever and had it bad"--and then announce to the people sitting around them that the song was about his mommy.

Bill and Noreen, who'd had the seats in front of theirs for as long as they'd had the season tickets, would applaud the little boy. Noreen would slip him a piece of candy--once she knew his favorite flavor was cherry, she always had cherry Life-Savers in her pocket or purse--with a stage-whispered "Don't tell your mother" while Bill tousled the young boy's hair and said to Mike with a chuckle, "You're raising the boy right."

Were they? They didn't know much about the day-to-day details of the upbringing of the Splendid Splinter. But they did their best. Took him to all the games, played ball in the street or at the park, got him a new bat or glove or cap for every birthday and Christmas. When, at seven, he insisted to Santa and his parents and his grandparents and anyone else who would listen that he wanted a video game system for Christmas, they'd debated. "It will keep him sitting inside instead of outside playing ball," Mike said.

"But all the other kids have them," Katy said. "We're not very well going to keep him from playing one. At least if we have it at home, we have some say over what he plays and for how long."

Mike pushed back from the kitchen table where they'd just finished a late dinner after Mike's long shift. They'd finally managed to buy a house, because it was better for raising their boy. Teddy was already asleep in the back bedroom, the one wallpapered with teddy bears playing baseball, his tiny shape curled under a dark blue blanket studded with red B's.

Mike shoved a cold cup of coffee into the microwave and tapped the buttons. The smell of it permeated the kitchen. "I guess we could get him a couple of those baseball games for it. That wouldn't be so bad."

"They're pretty realistic now, they say, those games. Keep him busy in the off season. Be kinda nice." Katy cleared the plates and shoved them into the dishwasher.

"Yeah. Okay."

What they ended up getting him was not the latest game system, but rather a top-of-the-line computer loaded with baseball-themed games, and also with internet access--the Sox page set as the home page, of course, and all the baseball sites bookmarked. And an ebook version of Ted Williams's The Science of Hitting, the new version with the video clips demonstrating technique. They figured a PC would be something he could grow up using, for school and so forth--and these days all the teams, all the players used them, to keep stats and stuff about the guys they'd be facing. Teddy would need to know computers for baseball.

They were anxious that Christmas morning. They hoped he wouldn't be disappointed that it wasn't exactly what he'd asked for. After all, they wanted him to be happy.

Teddy ripped the paper off the great big box with furious abandon. His eyes lit. "Aww, wow . . ." he breathed. Katy winked at Mike. "We done right."

The computer was a hit all right. Teddy spent time at it every day that winter. His friends in the neighborhood came over a lot to play the baseball games with him. There was a home-run-hitting game on the machine that Teddy particularly liked. He got so he could beat his (beaming) father at it--pointing out to Dad how making contact on a certain part of the bat made the ball go a particular way. "That's my Ted," Mike said.

He liked other things on it, too. He used the electronic encyclopedia to look up things he was learning about in school. He developed an interest in astronomy, which he studied avidly online. Remembering that Ted Williams had been as expert a fisherman as a ballplayer, Mike showed Teddy some web sites about fish. The boy pursued the topic to the point that he could recognize dozens of types of fish, and draw charts of how all different types of fish were related to each other. Mike and Katy encouraged his hunger for knowledge, as long as he still paid attention to baseball.

Which he did. He knew the players and the history of the Red Sox as well as any good Boston boy. When Mike had been young, his father made him learn and recite Bible verses, a new verse every week. Mike taught Teddy to recite baseball stats. He taught him how batting averages were calculated, and before long the boy could calculate them in his head.

Teddy kept track of every pitch in his scorecard at the ball games. He could tell you what the pitcher's new ERA and WHIP were at the end of each at-bat.

"Ya gonna be a ballplayer, son?" Bill asked young Ted between innings one sunny Sunday at Fenway the May Teddy was ten. The Sox were up seven to two over Baltimore.

"Yes," Katy and Mike answered before Teddy could.

"I dunno," the boy said around a mouthful of popcorn.

"I think we're gonna win one today," Noreen said to no one and everyone. Heads all around them nodded. They'd given up two out of three to the hated Yankees the week before.

"I dunno," said young Ted, fingering his scorecard, pencil now replacing popcorn in his mouth.

The Red Sox went on to lose 8-7. After he was done cursing--the Orioles, the current Red Sox, their management and ownership, and God in His Heaven for denying the Red Sox faithful for so long--Mike shook his head as they shuffled along the sidewalk outside the park. "They need you, Teddy," he said.

The boy twitched his shoulder in a gesture too noncommittal to be a shrug. "I dunno."

Despite his initial resistance to playing Little League--"That's all right, he probably knows in his gut that he's better than all of 'em. I'll coach him at home," Mike reassured Katy with a forced cheer he didn't feel and she didn't hear--Mike and Katy were proud of their boy: Ted did well in school, always bringing home A's, played with kids in the neighborhood, ran fast and grew tall. Mike took the boy on a summer fishing trip up to Vermont, which the boy took to with appropriate enthusiasm. Caught more fish than his city-bred father. (And could tell you about the life cycle and natural history of each.) It's gonna be fine, Mike told himself.

The boy liked to read, too. Not fiction so much. Katy ran across a book about the physics of baseball and bought it for him. The boy devoured the book, barely able to put it down to come to meals. Two days after she'd brought the book home, Katy found Teddy curled up in his favorite reading corner--on the floor on the far side of his bed, pillow jammed against the wall and long legs up on the bed--with the book in one hand and pad and pen in the other, scrawling equations. "This is cool, mom!" he crowed. "You can figure out what the baseball is gonna do--exactly!"

"You oughta put that to use, Teddy. Play some ball in school. I bet the team would love to have you."

He looked puzzled. "You mean they don't already know all this stuff? I mean, it's in a book and everything--don't those guys who play baseball read?"

"I expect they do, some of them. But knowing it and doing it aren't always the same. You gotta have talent. You should go out and show 'em."

He turned back to the book. "Yeah, maybe," he said noncommittally.

He did play some baseball, at his parents' insistence. The team made him a pitcher. "Pitcher?" Mike squawked over another late supper. "The heir to Ted Williams a pitcher?!"

"Teddy Ballgame pitched a couple innings once. Heck, he probably could have been a great pitcher. But they needed his bat," Katy reminded him. "It'll be fine. There's no arguing with genetics."

"I guess. At least he's playing."

But not very much, as it turned out. Teddy wasn't a bad pitcher; he just wasn't very interested in it. His mind wandered on the mound, so he never caught the catcher's signals, and the ball frequently sailed out of reach. And every so often he would lecture his teammates about what they should be doing differently as hitters, which didn't go over well with his fellow thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds.

Mike phoned the coach when his son found himself more often than not warming the far end of the bench, solitary and silent. The coach cited the episodes of inattention, but focused on Teddy's inability, in his eyes, to be a good team player. "Ted Williams never gave a damn what anyone else thought of him!" Mike spat, and slammed down the phone.

The next day, Mike showed up at the field and made an ugly scene, insisting his boy should play outfield. "Sad that they should think of calling the cops on a guy who is one," one of the other parents muttered in Katy's hearing. But it became a moot point. Teddy stripped off his team jersey and left it in a heap in the spot on the bench he had made his own. "I'm outa here," he said to no one in particular.

Teddy and Mike sat across an empty dining room table, the faux-mahogany veneer reflecting the thin lines of their mouths. The teenager was tall, rangy--his heritage was apparent in his body, if disguised in the face by long, blue-dyed hair and triangular flip-up sunglasses worn for style not purpose. Mike, on the other hand, had grown jowly and soft with age, his square face losing its sharpness and marked with deepening lines, all of them deeper with the intensity of his emotion at this moment. Both remained silent, Mike because the conflict within him made it impossible to find words, Ted because it was his way to make his father fill the silence. Finally, Mike did.

"Harvard."

Ted nodded.

"Are you sure?"

"Yes."

"And you think you'll get in?"

Ted sighed. "There's no question, Dad."

Mike echoed his son's sigh. "All right then. Harvard."

A smile broke across the boy's face and his shoulders relaxed. "It's the best place for theoretical physics right now, Dad. They're doing some amazing work there. And I'll be close to home, to you and Mom." A long pause as he looked deep into his father's eyes. "I know you wanted other things for me, Dad. But I'll make you proud."

The tension--the hope--never left Mike's face. "What would it take to get you to hit .400, boy?"

Ted yanked his PDA from his pocket and began scribbling. After a few moments, he slid it across the table to his father. The screen was covered in equations. "That's what it would take to hit .400."

Mike's voice rose, against his will. "So if you got it all figured out, why the heck don't you do it?"

"Because I know the answer. It's solved. It's not an interesting problem."

But the Red Sox didn't know that answer--or any other answer, judging by their third-place finish that season, which was all the more disappointing because, as Mike, Katy, and their many friends constantly complained, the team had plenty of young talent, plenty of seasoned veterans not yet past their prime. Nobody wanted to believe in a curse, not in this day and age (and not for this long!), but how else did you explain it?

The answer. Mike asked Ted for a copy of what he'd scrawled on that PDA. He'd not understood what Teddy had written when he'd first seen it, but--once his anger had subsided--he'd had the boy explain it. It amounted to an education in physics and mathematics to understand it, probabilities and trajectories and force diagrams and all, but the boy had warmed to the task of teaching his father, basking in his father's attentiveness, and he stuck with it until he was satisfied his father understood it all, and Mike was satisfied he could explain it to someone else. Boy would make a good teacher, Mike thought. At least he'd always be able to get work teaching, since Mike couldn't imagine something "theoretical" getting a fellow any other kind of job in the real world.

He had Teddy write it all up, the equations and what they meant, what a person would have to do to hit.400 consistently. It read like something out of those Scientific Americans Teddy had around the house. Once Teddy was satisfied as to the document's accuracy and completeness, and Mike and Katy as to its clarity, Mike packed it up and mailed it off to the general manager of the Red Sox, with a copy to the team's manager--after all, you never knew who might get fired first.

Every day Mike came home and looked for a response. Every day he was disappointed.

Teddy never asked what had happened with the document. Maybe he knew from the Sox's finish that season, nine games behind the Yankees.

During the off season, Mike read in the paper that a bunch of Red Sox players and coaches would be among those signing autographs at a big card show down in New York. Much as he hated venturing onto enemy territory--and anywhere he might run into more Yankee fans than Sox fans was enemy territory--he figured it was a better way to get a minute to talk to these guys than waiting outside the ballpark among the throng. And besides, this was too important to wait until the season was under way.

There was no doubt of his loyalty as he paid his money and entered the giant exhibit hall--the kid collecting admission chuckled at his Boston cap, jersey, pins, and even socks. "Hey, thanks, man, for Bill Buckner," the kid said. He pointed at his own cap. "Mets."

"You're not old enough to remember Buckner," Mike snarled.

"Mooooookie," the kid called after him. Mike ignored the laughter.

He found the line for Boston's big slugger, Tyrone Hamilton. The guy was a bona fide five-tool player, if only he'd make use of all those tools consistently. Maybe with what young Teddy had written, he could bat .400--or better: the rules changed after Ted Williams's .406 season so that sacrifice flies don't damage the average, and you throw in the improvements in conditioning and medicine since 1941--heck, anything was possible. Mike shifted from foot to foot waiting his turn. He could feel the sweat building under his arms, making cold tracks down his side. Get on with it, let's move, he wanted to hiss at the people ahead of him. Before I lose my nerve.

His turn came. An elderly woman with a cheap adjustable Yankees cap perched atop her gray hair was acting as usher. "Have your item ready for autograph. Let's keep things moving for the people behind you." If the Yankees cap hadn't gotten on his nerves--and it had, naturally--her shrill New York accent did the job. But he quashed the irritation, the almost reflexive desire to make a smartass remark; he was on a mission here. The Yankees would be eating beans soon enough.

He'd thought maybe the big article Ted had written had been too daunting, so he kept it to a single page this time--just the equations and some brief notes of explanation on the back. He stepped up to the table where Tyrone was seated and handed the big man a hard copy. The ceiling lights glinted off the hitter's shaven head. "Ty," he said, "my son's a scientist--Harvard." Stretching the truth, since Teddy was only a freshman, but what the heck. "He says this here is all you need to know to be able to bat over .400 every year. I wrote out an explanation, but it's kind of scientific--I could go over it with you--not now, I know, you got people waiting, but you tell me what hotel you're at and I could come by--or I wrote my number on it, you could just call me and tell me when it's convenient, or we could just talk on the phone..." He was running out of breath.

"Uh huh." Tyrone Hamilton scrawled his autograph on the page of equations and turned his body toward the next supplicant. He signed a baseball for that fan, who thanked him and wished him a great season. "Uh huh," Hamilton responded.

"Come on, sir, you have to move on." The lady in the Yankees cap was nudging Mike away. He resisted the urge to shake her hand off his arm--as a cop, he knew better than to make trouble. New York's finest wouldn't have any trouble taking a Boston fan into custody. Lord knows he'd been harsh enough on loud Yankee fans near Fenway.

Shit. Mike hoped they'd trade that Hamilton bastard. He didn't deserve to hit .400.

There were other possibilities. One he was sure would hear him out: the team's hitting coach, Eddie Escobar.

Escobar did at least pay him some attention. Maybe because his line was pretty short--ex-players who'd only done two years' service in the majors weren't exactly in huge demand. The only reason he'd been invited to a baseball card show, Mike knew, was that his card was rare, having been misprinted and then withdrawn from circulation.

Escobar nodded a couple times as Mike launched into his spiel. "My number's there--you can look all this over and let me know when you want to talk about it," he finished.

"Okay. Thanks," Escobar said, folding the sheet carefully. "Thanks for comin' by."

Mike nodded, a grin splitting his face, and moved on to make room for the next person in line.

Just as Mike drifted away, he thought he heard Escobar breathe the word "Crackpot," followed by the sound of paper thunking into a trash can.

Not surprisingly, it was another losing season for the Sox. Followed by another. And another.

Bill, who'd sat near them at Fenway, died of lung cancer. Noreen stopped coming; word was she'd moved to Florida to live with her sister.

They tore Fenway down, and some said maybe that would be the end of the curse. But the Red Sox apparently took their dirty old curse with them to the shiny new ballpark.

But still Mike and Katy kept their season tickets up, and went to every game they could. When Teddy's girlfriend Susan--who later became his wife--expressed surprise that they would continue to root for a losing team (she was from Atlanta, so of course she didn't understand) after so much disappointment, Katy explained, "It's the same as being Catholic. You're born to it. You don't just give up your faith."

Susan wasn't Catholic either. She just shook her head.

"Teddy called," Katy reported distractedly to Mike as they watched an away game on the new 3D widescreen they'd just bought.

"Yeah, what'd he have to say?"

"Damn that umpire! That was no strike!" Katy shouted at the image. After a moment, as the next batter made his slow way to the box, she answered. "Something about Sweden or somewhere. He won a prize or something."

"That's nice." Mike leaned forward. "Come on, we need just ONE run...."

"I guess we did something wrong, raising him," Mike confided to the young man at the bar, running his hand through what was left of his steel-gray hair. "But you might do better with your Teddy."

"Yeah, we've done a lot of research into Teddy Ballgame's upbringing, me and the wife." Konicki was this guy's name.

The same friend of a friend of a friend who'd gotten the DNA for Mike and Katy had put the two men in touch. They'd arranged to meet up in this bar after a game. Katy was working that day--she wasn't up to the EMT work any more at her age, but she trained other EMTs, and today her charges were graduating. She'd assured Mike she'd be listening to the game on the bud in her ear.

Mike knocked on the bar to tell the bartender to set him up again. "I think the computer may have been where we went wrong," he said. "That's when he started to get into the science."

Konicki nodded his commiseration. "Just about impossible to keep a kid away from computers. You pretty much can't live without one. But we'll do what we can to keep his attention on the game. We want to do this right."

"Well, I wish you luck. For all of us." The Sox had lost 3-2 in a heartbreaker.

"Yeah, we're even moving to California. Ted was born there, so we figure maybe that'll help. Plus, he can play year 'round, so that'll be good. We can still get the games--" He jerked his head in the general direction of the ballpark. "--on satellite."

Mike nodded. "Well, like I said, I wish you luck." He knocked back his drink and gestured for another.

Theodore Williams Konicki was touted as the hottest young prospect in baseball. And there was no question of his heritage: he too was a dead ringer for the Splendid Splinter. (Fortunately, the cloning laws had been relaxed by the current administration, and they chose to ignore what might have been going on before.)

Sad as she was at what might have been, it still made Katy's heart swell with pride to see him. She'd even made a couple trips to the Red Sox's AAA farm team to see him. Mike had had a heart attack and died the year before; she wished he could have been around to see young Teddy Konicki play, too. The boy would be the Red Sox's salvation for sure.

She scanned her email on the widescreen. There was a note from her own Teddy. He had attached a video file of the first episode of his new TV show; he knew she'd never quite figured out how to program her own recorder. The opening streamed past, and then there was Teddy, thin and serious and a little gray at the temples, sitting on the corner of a long table, talking about some kind of little particles. She wished he'd sit in the chair; she'd never raised her son to sit on tables that way.

Mary Ellen, the teenage girl down the block that Katy'd looked after when the girl was small and who now looked in on Katy regularly, burst through Katy's back door. "You heard the news, Mrs. O'Brien?" She was breathless.

"No! What?" Katy stopped Teddy's program with a voice command. She switched over to news to see if the president had been shot, or there was a new war on, or what.

"Teddy Konicki!"

"Oh no. Oh no. What?" She'd spent too many years as an EMT not to have vivid mental pictures of the kind of things that could befall a bright, bold young man of twenty-two.

Mary Ellen squatted to Katy's eye level, one hand on the arm of Katy's chair. "He's been traded," said the girl, her eyes mournful and bitter at once.

"To the Yankees."

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