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T H E R E N O V A T I O N 1 5
Charles Willis turned away from his father and focused on the pitcher and
batter once again. The young teen had been called Chase since he began
to crawl.
His grandfather had been watching the child one afternoon and had
spent a breathless few hours, always a few steps behind the crawling
infant. When his mother had asked how the afternoon went, his grandpa,
exhausted and exasperated, had replied, “I spent the whole afternoon giving
chase.”
His mother had laughed, and from that moment on the speedy infant
was named Chase.
Chase always dreaded the start of school when his teachers would
inevitably call out “Charles Willis.” He would redden as his classmates
giggled. “It’s Chase, not Charles,” he would correct ever so politely. “My
mom gave that name to me.”
Chase squinted at the stands and dug his toe in the edge of the infield,
a few steps off first base. Couldn’t he have just tossed the ball back? Did he
have to bow?
Chase tried to forget his father’s presence. He smacked his hand into
his glove, adjusted the bill of his cap, and waited for the next pitch.
The Franklin Flyers were the heavy favorites to win the Little League
Junior Baseball Tournament at the end of summer. Due to a string of late
birthdays of their fourteen-year-olds, virtually their entire team remained
intact from the previous year. If the Flyers won this year, their triumph
would be the first time in years that any team had won the summer series
back-to-back in any age division.
The Flyers’ pitcher wound up and threw. The batter, a tall boy from
Oil City with bleached hair, swung fast and solid. The ball skittered off
his bat—a line drive hard into the dirt on the first-base side.
Chase hated those hard hits into the dirt, when the ball took mean
and unpredictable bounces. He had a scar just below his bottom lip—
so faint now that even he struggled to find it—that was a reminder of a
fast line drive last summer. He tried not to shut his eyes as he bent
down. He took two steps toward the pitcher’s mound, smothered the
ball with a graceful, athletic swoop, pivoted backward to the base, and