Free The Youngest Hero by Jerry B. Jenkins

with a weak swing and looked silly. The boys all laughed
     again, including the hitter.
    “I burned you, man!” the pitcher said. “You shoulda seen yourself, man! Two down! Okay, El-El, get in there. Big stick, heat
     against heat. Let’s see what you got.”
    That was the first time I had ever heard anyone call my son El-El. Were they teasing him, as if he were a baby?
    “You already know what he’s got, man,” Elgin’s Puerto Ricanteammate sang out. “He seven for nine against you already and three homers.”
    The Joe Davis imitator threw a pitch so hard that it bounced off the wall and back to him on one hop.
    “Strike one!” he said.
    Elgin had stepped into the pitch and opened his hips, but he had held his swing at the last instant. I wondered how anyone
     could react that quickly, and I figured his teammate must have been kidding about his already getting several hits off this
     kid today.
    The pitch had been at about Elgin’s eye level, but the strike zone had been chalked for the older kids. Elgin’s shoulders
     slumped, and he cocked his head and pursed his lips at the pitcher.
    “It was in the zone,” Davis explained in a high, squeaky voice.
    “It was in the zone,” Elgin mimicked, and I was stunned. To make fun of a black person, especially the way he talked, constituted
     the fixings for a fight where we came from. I watched in amazement as everyone laughed, including the pitcher. “Come on, Darnell,”
     Elgin said, “I’m not a seven-footer here!”
    “That pitch was in the zone, wasn’t it, boys?” Darnell said, turning to look at his fielders. They both nodded.
    “Oh-and-one,” Elgin sighed. “Now I dare you to bring that pitch down six inches.”
    Darnell went into his exaggerated windup again, and the fastball hurtled toward the wall. This pitch was slightly lower, but
     just when I expected it to bounce off the wall and back to the pitcher, I saw my son, as if in slow motion. Could I lay the
     credit for his incredible swing at the feet of Neal Lofert Wood-ell? Someone deserved the praise.
    Elgin had stood there, bat cocked. He followed the pitch with his eyes, keeping his chin down and his head steady as he stepped
     and pivoted and swung as the ball came in at about chest level, and blasted it straight back at Darnell. The pitcher flinched
     and tried to move, but I was sure he hadn’t moved a muscle until the ball was well past him, though it had come within inches
     of his ear. One of his fielders across the street instinctivelyshot out his glove and the ball slammed into it and ricocheted out and back to Darnell, where it hit him just below the knee
     and bounced away.
    I had not entirely caught on to the game yet, but plainly this was an out. The team in the field whooped and high-fived each
     other and ran in to hit. Elgin and his teammates shook their heads and grabbed their gloves. The ball had not reached the
     building across the street, so it wasn’t a hit; it was as simple as that. Though Elgin had hit it as hard as I had seen a
     tennis ball hit, he was out. Those were the rules, and they were having fun, so who was I to consider it unjust? In spite
     of it, he was the youngest, the smallest, and the best hitter. And from what I could tell, this was wonderful training for
     the real thing. If he could hit that little, speeding ball, thrown from so close by kids so big, and with that sorry excuse
     for a bat, real baseball was going to seem easy.
    Elgin hit three more times before dark. Once he lofted a high pop-up that was uncatchable but fell as an out in the street.
     The other two times he rifled doubles off the wall across the street. As we walked home he explained his new nickname.
    “I don’t really like it, so don’t start calling me that. But they took the first syllable of my first name and the last syllable
     of my last name.”
    “Clever.”
    “But I don’t like it.”
    “I heard you, El. I can still call you El, can’t I? Aren’t you