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long. Better to stick with fastballs and changeups for a while.
    But one day in the park, my dad showed me how to grip the ball with my middle finger on one of the long seams and my thumb just beside the seam on the other side of the ball. “Your hand should form a little C,” he told me. “Pretend you’re holding a cup of juice.”
    And right before I released the ball, he said, I should snap my wrist just so, letting the ball tumble off my index finger and fly toward the plate with a forward topspin.
    “See it dive?” he asked.
    I did. The ball started high then dropped suddenly as it approached home plate.
    “Not bad,” he said.
    There was no denying it. I had a pretty good curveball for a seven-year-old, and I threw a lot of them.
    Learning to throw a curve so young would turn out to be a key factor in my baseball and personal development, for bad and good reasons. Years later, people would ask whether I had been pushed too hard too early, and that’s a legitimate question to raise. But those early curveballs also did something very positive for me. They gave me some of my earliest hints that I might have real talent on a pitcher’s mound.
    No other seven-year-olds I knew could throw curveballs. And I got a little thrill every time I saw one of those babies sail toward home plate then make its little dive at the end.
    “See that one?” I’d called out to my dad behind the plate.
    “Very nice,” he’d call back. “Very nice.”
    I wouldn’t say I was brimming with baseball confidence. Far from it. That would take years to build up, far more slowly than my skills did. At seven, I was still too shy to sign up for Belmont Heights Little League. I was happy just to practice with Dad and play with my neighborhood friends. Then a boy from a team called the Larkin Giants quit and my dad told the coach, Grover Stevens, I might be interested. I played third base and did some pitching and was immediately one of the better players on a very lousy team. After we lost eight or nine games in a row, I was so frustrated, I decided to quit.
    “None of these kids are any good,” I said, “except for me and one other guy.” I’m not sure what I was expecting from a team of seven- and eight-year-olds.
    Dad tried to talk me out of quitting. “If you’re going to play baseball, you can’t just quit,” he said. “It’s not fair to your team.” But I was adamant, and he didn’t press the point.
    I kept playing pickup games with my friends. Dad and I kept going to the park. I knew he wanted me to keep at it. He didn’t push me too hard, which could have driven me away from baseball forever. And when the next season rolled around, I told my father I’d been thinking about giving Little League another try. I think he knew I’d come around, but he wanted to make sure I’d learned a lesson from the experience.
    “If you quit again,” he warned me, “you’re done. Forever. You gotta go out and do your best, no matter what the other guys are doing. Maybe they will learn from you.”
    I was still a terrible loser. I could get absurdly upset at defeat of any kind. If I was pitching and a player got a hit off me, I’d get furious. If, God forbid, someone hit a home run, I’d start crying on the mound. We could be winning 5–1, and I’d still burst into tears.
    When I glanced over at the stands, I could see my father, looking like he wanted to die right there. He did not want to be
that
boy’s dad. “Knock it off,” he’d hiss in my direction. After the game, he wouldn’t yell. But he’d try to calm me down with a stop at Baskin-Robbins, which took at least a double cone.
    I noticed slow improvement on the field, even if my confidence was lagging. All that mat-ball Strike Out I’d been playing with Gary was paying dividends. Dad’s drills in the park really helped. My fastballs and my curveballs were definitely getting me noticed among the seven- and eight-year-olds.
    When I was nine, one of the players from