Blog 2 for Teen Spies:
Teen Spies, Ch 6, pages 65-66:
Again I took my batting stance, and without a pause, Derek [Miller] took his windup and whizzed one over the outside of the plate, and swinging hard again, I managed to tick the top of the ball, causing it to glance off the bottom of Otto’s mitt. Ugghhh, he moaned, and I looked in time to see the ball fall to the ground in front of him. He took it squarely in his sizeable gut. Sucking air, he muttered something in German.
“What’s the matter, Mister Herman?” I could see in his eyes that he knew I wasn’t giving up. “Maybe you’re not as good a catcher as you pretend? Is that it?”
Glaring at me, he swore softly and extended the mitt. Derek winged another bullet right at me, but I saw it coming and turned away. The ball plopped into my left arm, and I flipped the bat to my right, sending it flying at Otto’s head. Reacting, he fell backward, and I heard a thump as he landed on his sizeable butt. Walt [Bunker] yelled, “Hang in there, Mister Herman,” but Derek shouted something at me in German.
Straightening up, I walked toward the bat, ignoring Otto as he got laboriously to one knee. “You okay, Otto?” came the worried query from Derek standing sixty feet away.
As I picked up the bat, I noticed the coach and his wife standing, now with curious expressions on their faces. I knew they wondered if I tossed the bat at him on purpose. Smiling to myself, I returned to the batter’s box. Looking around, Walt caught my eye. He was pounding his fist into the pocket of his glove and grinning like a circus clown.
From beside me came a guttural voice: “Mein Gott! You almost killed me!”
“Geez, I’m sorry, Otto.” It was the first time I hadn’t addressed him as Mister Herman. “The ball was gonna hit me, and I was trying to duck out of the way. Isn’t that what you’d expect a smart ballplayer to do?”
I grinned at him, knowing this was really a contest between me and Otto, not so much between me and Derek. He was really just a German thug sucking up to his superior. Looking at our neighbor, my calling him Otto told him in a word that the gloves were off and I was a young man ready to engage him and Derek. In fact, I was no longer the kid next door.
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