Garrett Sullivan scowled. “Who let this street kid onto my field? Look at you—dirty shoes, dirty clothes. You look like you came straight off the street. This is a place for champions, boy, not charity cases. You think because they let you through the gate you belong here? You never will. Boys from neighborhoods like yours never do.” The boy did not flinch. Twelve years old, a cracked glove on his hand, he looked up at the billionaire and said, barely above a whisper, “I'll win $100 million in three pitches. You won't touch one.” Sullivan's laughter shook the bleachers.
Six weeks later, that laughter died. What did this boy know that a World Series champion didn't? Six weeks before that moment, on the South Side of Chicago, summer pressed down on the neighborhood like a hot hand on a wound. Fire hydrants hissing open for kids who couldn't afford pools. Bass rattling from a passing Cutlass with a cracked tail light.
Chain-link fences rusted at the base, bent where someone had climbed over too many times. On the brick wall of a shuttered grocery store, someone had painted a mural of a black man in a baseball uniform mid-pitch. The paint was peeling. Nobody remembered who it was supposed to be. Three miles east across the expressway, the glass towers of downtown caught the morning sun and threw it back like a dare.
Wesley Irving was 12 years old, and he had never crossed that expressway. Every morning at 6:00, he sat on a milk crate outside Earl Dawson's batting cage. A rusted wreck wedged between a laundromat and the dead grocery store. Half-collapsed roof, cracked concrete floor, one flickering bulb. A hand-painted sign read, “Dawson's cage. Open when I'm here.”
Earl Dawson was 68, built like a fire hydrant left out in the weather for 40 years. He came out carrying a bucket of baseballs so scuffed the stitching had gone gray. He hung targets from the cage ceiling, a tin can, a tennis ball on a string, a cardboard circle no bigger than a fist, and knotted each one. Wesley was oiling a glove, slowly, like a prayer. The leather had turned nearly black, cracked in three places, restitched with fishing line.
Two letters burned into the thumb, J.I. That glove never left his hand. Wesley threw. The tin can exploded off its wire like a gunshot. The tennis ball snapped off its string. The cardboard punched clean through.