Don't force the boy to give up on his dreams.'"
"Your grandfather sounds like a wise man to me," said Ozma.
"He was," said the shadow. "But Dad would never listen. 'Ballplayers are
no good,' he'd insist. 'Ballplayers are no good, and they never will be
any good.' It was very frustrating. He would usually end the argument by
slamming the door and going outside to sit on the porch. And he would
stop speaking to my grandfather or me for hours at a time."
"That's too bad," said Tweaty. "If you were good at baseball, you should
have stuck with it."
"But I did stick with it," replied the shadow. "I told you, I just came
from a game."
"Oh, yeah," said Tweaty. "So you mean you brought your Dad around?"
"Well," the shadow said slowly. "The thing is, I was always very tall
for my age. I had three brothers and a sister, and my sister was the
shortest of the five of us. She grew to be six feet two. So you see, I
was constantly hanging around the older kids and playing ball with them
instead of hanging with kids my own age. When I was about thirteen or
so, I used to carry bats for some of the Cleveland Indians, such as
Elmer Flick, Napoleon Lajoie and Terry Turner. Of course, they were not
called the Cleveland Indians then.
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