“I’m sorry, son. Let me deal with this,” the umpire told David.
David just nodded and took his base. Both benches were warned.
When David got to first, Coach Hob wanted a quick word.
“That’s their ace. He hasn’t faced many base runners because he tends to throw a lot of sinking stuff that gets hit as ground balls, which his defense takes care of. Having you on first will force him to pitch out of the stretch, making him uncomfortable. Keep your wits about you.”
“Yes, sir.”
Jackson Winslow, USC’s shortstop, was up. UCLA’s pitcher must have been worried about David’s speed because he made him eat dirt a couple of times when he tried to pick him off. Finally, the pitcher went home with the ball.
Jackson kept the bat on his shoulder. He liked to make the pitcher throw him a strike. It turned out to be a good strategy because their pitcher tried to throw around the edges to get Jackson to chase a pitch. Four pitches later, David was on second base. Five more, and he was on third, with the bases loaded.
Andres came up and looked confident, as their senior captain should.
On the first pitch, Andres hit a curveball on the ground, just out of the reach of their shortstop. It found a hole in the outfield and rolled to the wall. Everyone had run on contact because it was on the ground. David and Jackson scored easily, with Tucker Frost ending up at third and Andres being held at first.
Their pitcher settled down and was able to get Bill Woodall, the Trojans’ second baseman, to hit into a double play. But Tucker was able to score to make it 3–0.
Scott Martino, USC’s freshman left fielder, ended the inning by striking out.
UCLA came right back and scored three runs to tie the game. They would have gotten another run, but David robbed their big first baseman of a homer by leaping and making a grab above the top of the fence.
By the top of the ninth, it was knotted up at nine all. Seamus Walsh, USC’s catcher, and Micah Briggs, the Trojan’s right fielder and pinch-hitting, both went down quickly. David was back up at the top of the order. He hit a home run on the first pitch to put the Trojans up by a run over the Bruins.
Jim Bitter, USC’s left-handed closer, came in and did his job. The final score was 10–9 for the good guys.
After the game, David was glad to see Coach Deneau had brought Andres into the after-game press conference. He’d had a good game, racking up four RBIs. Andres deserved the limelight.
Waiting at the players entrance were Peggy and Ashley.
“How are my two favorite ladies tonight?” David asked as he gave each one a kiss and a hug.
“I won the Monday night tournament at The Bike,” Ashley announced.
Ashley had done well enough in a poker tournament in Monte Carlo to garner a sponsorship by a poker website. Last summer, they’d paid her entrance fees to tournaments at different venues across the country. The site had also sponsored three other players they considered up-and-comers.
She’d done well at first, but the grind of playing each weekend had gotten to her, and Ashley began to get knocked out of the money by early fall. She’d decided to back out of her commitment to the website and had taken a break. David was happy to hear that she’d decided to play again.
The Bicycle Casino had a reputation for having many excellent players. Winning the Monday night tournament was a good indicator that she hadn’t lost her game.
“That’s great news,” David said with a big smile.
“Dawson! Get your butt on the bus,” Coach Deneau called.
He hadn’t realized he was holding everyone up.
“I gotta go. Thanks for coming to watch me play,” David said.
David heard catcalls from his teammates. When he looked over his shoulder, several of them had their heads stuck out the windows, giving him shit. When he turned back to Peggy and Ashley, he was surprised when Peggy closed the gap between them and gave David a smoldering kiss. Ashley decided she couldn’t let Peggy have all the fun.
David chuckled when he heard the driver put the bus in gear, obviously ready to leave him at the mercy of the two babes. His teammates thought it was funny that the driver made him run to catch the bus at the parking lot entrance.
On the ride home, he was teased about making out with two hot UCLA chicks. He didn’t bother to correct them as to who Peggy and Ashley really were.
When David got back to his dorm, he had to grin because he found the door to his suite locked.
Chapter 29
David
The last two days had found David taking tests. He had a natural talent for Communications and Marketing, so tests in those classes were no problem. David also saw the value in his Economics and Accounting courses, which meant he thought those went well too. The class that David was learning the most from was Applied Business Statistics.
One of his first homework assignments had been to figure out, based on buying patterns, whether a woman was pregnant. The assignment bothered him a bit because it felt somewhat invasive to dig into someone’s personal life for financial gain.
Then he saw the business side of it. If you knew that a member of a household was pregnant, you could market differently to them. A mattress store that wanted to sell cribs could save a lot of money by only mailing out flyers to women about to have babies instead of to all homes.
After everyone turned in their papers, their professor told them that Target had actually hired a statistician to figure this out using only a computer. He developed a mathematical model that was able to predict not only which women were pregnant but what their expected due date was.
This taught David that you could figure out just about anything using stats. From that point on, he was hooked.
His mind went immediately to sports and how decisions were increasingly being made based on statistics. He was reminded of the book Moneybalclass="underline" The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, which had been turned into a movie.
It chronicled Oakland Athletics General Manager Billy Beane and his staff in the 2002 season. They used stats to figure out which players were undervalued by other baseball teams. That knowledge informed their choices in both the draft and when signing free agents. When you considered what they were up against, it may have been their only way to compete. In 2002, the Athletics had a player budget of $44 million while teams like the Yankees spent upwards of $125 million on player payroll.
David’s mind began to spin as he thought about how statistical analysis could apply to both baseball and football. For example, in baseball, what percentage of the time did Player X hit to the right? At what point would it make sense to shift your pitching and/or defense to take advantage of that knowledge?
The truth was, it was being done right now. What intrigued David was the notion that they’d just scratched the surface of how statistics could be used. The key would be to capture the data and then be smart enough to interpret what it all meant.
As far as studying for tests, David had discovered that what he’d heard about cramming was true. With everything else going on in his life, there just weren’t enough hours in the day to do the thorough day-to-day prep he felt was warranted to get ready for taking his exams. That meant he was up late into the night studying on Wednesday and Thursday.
What saved him were his life goals and his work ethic. At first blush, that probably made no sense.
When David entered high school, he’d spent the preceding summer at his uncle’s farm. It hadn’t been voluntary.
He’d gone off the rails in middle school and had gotten involved with the wrong crowd. David had experimented with drugs and alcohol. His close friends had tried to get him back on track, but he hadn’t listened, to the point they didn’t want anything to do with him.
David’s best friend growing up was Tami Glade. They did everything together, along with the two other members of their group, Alan Douglas and Jeff Rigger. David still had nightmares about the time Tami had become so frustrated with him that she screamed she didn’t want anything more to do with him.