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numbness in his pitching arm that didn’t seem to be getting any better. His surgeon explained that he probably had some mild nerve impairment, which was normal, and told him to have patience, that most pitchers eventually returned to full strength. Ryan rehabbed over the winter at the Indians’ spring-training complex in Winter Haven, but by March he still felt weakness in his arm. He continued to work out vigorously and pitched in a few simulated games. Although he didn’t have any pain in his elbow, he had lost velocity on his fastball - velocity he couldn’t afford to lose. His top heater maxed out at eighty-one miles per hour. Even worse, his bread and butter, his great control, was gone. His fastball didn’t hit locations and his curveball didn’t break nearly as sharply. With the loss of speed and a lack of movement on his pitches, he wasn’t much more effective than your average batting-practice pitcher.
    In May he was sent back up to Kinston. In his first start he got rocked, giving up nine runs in one-and-two-thirds innings. He started developing another problem - stiffness in his shoulder -and was placed on the disabled list. When he came back he made a few more equally ineffective starts, then was demoted to the bullpen. Pitching in relief, he continued to get beaten up, his ERA ballooning to over ten, and in July he was released.
    Ryan returned to Brooklyn, where he worked out every day and paid out of pocket to receive treatment from a physical therapist. He hired a kid on the Canarsie High baseball team to catch for him every afternoon, but he couldn’t get his speed or control back. A year went by with no change in his performance, and it finally set in that his lifelong dream of pitching in the major leagues was dead.
    Ryan was crushed and disillusioned. He decided that what that gymnast had said was total bullshit. Nobody had worked harder or spent more time and energy chasing a dream than Ryan Rossetti. But in the end all those hours of dreaming and working his ass off had gotten him a big fat nothing.
    Broke, living in his old room in his parents’ house, Ryan had no idea what to do with the rest of his life. His mother pushed him to apply to college, but he had no interest. The only thing that had ever interested him was baseball and without that everything seemed pointless. His mother suggested that he could get a degree in physical education, and maybe coach a high school or college baseball team someday, but the idea of spending his life on a baseball field, being constantly reminded of how his dreams had gone to pot, seemed like torture.
    Ryan didn’t have the energy or the desire to look for a job. He spent most of his time at home, locked in his room, watching TV. He watched anything but baseball. Just the thought of baseball made him sick. He couldn’t even read the sports section of the newspaper anymore without getting depressed. The worst thing was hearing or seeing anything about Jake. Whenever the Pirates played the Mets, people would huddle around the big-screen TV at the Thomases’ house, like they were watching the fucking moon landing. It killed Ryan to see this guy who’d always had a take-it-or-leave-it attitude about baseball making it so big. Ryan knew that should be
him
on TV, and Jake should be the one stuck in Brooklyn.
    One day Ryan went into his backyard and burned all of his old baseball cards and baseball magazines and programs and year-books and anything else he could find in his house that had anything to do with baseball and was flammable. His mother wanted him to go to a shrink, talk to somebody, but he didn’t see the point. He started drinking beer and put on a gut. He also started listening to a lot of gangsta rap. He’d never paid much attention to music - especially rap - but he suddenly identified with the raw anger of rappers like Nas, 50 Cent, DMX, and Canibus.
    But even rap couldn’t get him out of the dumps. When he was bitter he spent his days