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my dad’s semipro team was coaching a group of Little League ten-to-fourteen-year-olds. He’d been watching me play with the younger kids and said he thought he could use my arm. I was totally opposed to making the leap into the big-boy division. Those kids looked like giants to me. Playing with adults was one thing. I wasn’t expected to be as good as they were. But older kids—I feared they’d show me up. I begged my dad, my coach, and the league director to keep me with the little ones. But everyoneseemed to recognize I was playing far beyond my age. They wanted me to keep pushing myself, and I reluctantly agreed.
    No one was more intimidating than Albert Everett, the very first pitcher I faced when I moved up. He was eleven or twelve, but he was built like a sixteen-year-old. Once I saw him hit a kid in the face with a fastball hard enough to break a cheekbone. Someday soon, I figured, he’d probably be drafted by the Reds or the Braves. The coach caught my eye in the dugout at the top of the third inning of that first game and said, “You’re gonna pinch hit.”
    What?
    “I have a headache,” I told him. Then I wobbled in front of the team bench and gave the coach a pained, bug-eyed look. “It even hurts to put the helmet on.”
    “Then find a bigger one,” the coach said.
    “I gotta sit down,” I moaned.
    The coach shook his head. “Need you in there,” he said. “Go get a hit.” He gave me a spank on the butt and a little shove toward the on-deck circle. The kids on my team began to cheer, and I had no choice but to bat.
    My knees were knocking. I could feel the sweat beading on my forehead. I didn’t want any part of this. I kept thinking how this monster’s fastball would feel, slapping me in the face.
    All that fear got the better of me. I bailed out of the batter’s box on every pitch. Albert whiffed me on three called strikes.
    Ouch!
    But I learned. Later that season, the tables were turned, and I had to pitch to Albert for the first time. A kid on my team offered a brief scouting report. “Just throw him curves,” my teammate told me. “He can’t hit ’em.”
    I threw two curveballs and jumped out to an 0-and-2 count. Then I got cocky and threw a fastball. Albert whacked it over the right-field fence, and I was sniffling again on the mound. I still had a ways to go,but even I could see I was making progress with my arm and my head. I was getting better every week. At nine, I was becoming one of the stronger pitchers among the ten- to-fourteen-year-olds.
    It was that season my dad’s friend Dennis from the Cargill plant started coming out to watch me pitch. He considered himself a good spotter of young talent, and he told my father he saw something in me. He had a unique way of being encouraging. He’d lean on the fence along the third base line and chatter constantly at players on the field. He liked to dream up little nicknames that only he understood.
    When I was on the mound, he would wait until I reached 0 and 2 on a batter. Then, he’d start to yell.
    “Operate on him, Doc! Time to operate, Doc!”
    He told my father I performed like a surgeon out there. Steady and smooth. Getting the job done.
    After I struck out the first kid and the next batter stepped up to the plate, Dennis would go at it again: “You got another patient, Doc!”
    Pretty soon, everyone was calling me Doc.
    Over time, “Doc” would morph into “Doctor D” and eventually “Doctor K.” I didn’t mind. I liked Doc from the beginning. As far as I was concerned, it was cooler than Goody, the other nickname that occasionally popped up, and a million miles cooler than Poodney, my mom’s dumb name for me.
    I kept playing Little League and pitching well. When I was ten, our team made it to the Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, which was very exciting except that as a ten-year-old, I had to sit in the stands and watch. I was too young to play. But I kept at it. Working with my dad in