In the spring of 1984, Keokuk, Iowa, sat at the bottom corner of the state like a cork that had been pushed into the Mississippi and forgotten. The river was high that April, brown and fast and carrying whole trees past the lock and dam, and the ball field behind the high school still had standing water in the left-field corner where the grass dipped. Coach Amundsen had the freshmen out there with push brooms every afternoon, sweeping the puddles toward the drain like they were trying to sweep the river back where it belonged.
Garrick Thiel was not a freshman, so he did not sweep. He was a junior, sixteen years old, five foot ten if he stood up straight, which he mostly did not, and he played right field for the Keokuk Chiefs because right field was where you put the boy you did not have to think about. He had a decent arm and a quiet glove and he never once in two seasons argued with an umpire or threw his helmet or said anything at all that anyone remembered. If you had asked the other players on the team to describe him, most of them would have said, after a pause, "He's fine. Garrick's fine." A few would have said, "Who?"
What they would not have known to say was that he carried his bat home every single night.
Everybody else left their bats in the long wooden rack Coach Amundsen had built along the back wall of the dugout, the slots stenciled with numbers in red paint that had faded to the color of a scab. The school bats lived there, the dented aluminum Eastons and the two old Adirondacks with the handles taped so many times they looked like they had been bandaged after a war. Players who owned their own bats left them there too, because the dugout had a padlock and the padlock had a key and the key hung on a nail in Coach's office, and nobody in Keokuk in 1984 was going to break into a high school dugout to steal a baseball bat.
Garrick carried his home anyway. He walked it the eleven blocks down Concert Street with the barrel resting on his shoulder and his glove hanging off the knob, past the Hy-Vee and the boarded-up shoe store and the house on the