Читать книгу One Season in the Sun онлайн

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Every week, my parents gave me an allowance of twenty-five cents. As soon as I had the money, I walked to a drug store near our house and spent it all on Topps baseball cards. A package cost a nickel and contained five cards and a stick of pink gum coated in fine, white, powdered sugar. Each card had the glossy color photograph of a major league player on one side and, on the other, his batting or pitching statistics. At first, I kept the cards stacked in a shoebox. As I collected more and more, the shoebox became too small to hold them all. Then I stored them in a Styrofoam ice chest.

I spent hours reading those cards, the players’ numbers of home runs and strikeouts. I loved baseball so much, in fact, that my father taught me how to calculate percentages by showing me the formula for a player’s batting average: take the number of his base hits and divide it by the number of times he batted. Twenty-five hits in 100 at bats meant a .250 batting average. Thirty hits in 100 at bats meant a .300 batting average. I learned that even such a small difference in hits meant one player was great and another merely good. Or less than good. A player with a .300 batting average was great. A player with a .250 average was not. Subtract even a few more hits for every 100 times a player batted and he was fair or even poor.