Prologue
He couldn't ever remember owning a TV, so he'd never seen the greats pitch. Rhaegar Targaryen, with a twelve-to-six curve so wicked hitters still ducked when it was clipping their shoelaces. Ned Stark, who threw six different pitches that did six different things while traveling ninety miles per hour. Not even Stannis Baratheon, reputed as much for his permanent stone cold expression as for his stone cold fastball.
None of them. They were all retired or dead by the time he even learned what baseball was. He had no father to teach him; his mother had never even told him who his father was, before she succumbed to cancer when he was but three. Maybe his father would have let him sit up late on weekdays to watch the Lions take on the most dangerous hitters and feared pitchers. Maybe his father would have dragged him to games, picked him up and sat him on the railing down the third base line and snagged the foul ball he had always dreamed of taking away from a big league game. Maybe his father would have done something—given a single shit about him at all—and maybe that something would have been about baseball.
Not quite something to lose sleep over, since he did not and would never know. Still... he couldn't help but wonder.
Incidentally, it was when he was being punished for punching a kid two years older and twice his size that he was first exposed to the game of baseball. Using curse words a six-year-old shouldn't know, he'd been cleaning out an old closet in a seldom-used part of the orphanage for his repentance and stumbled across a mitt that hadn't seen better days—it hadn't any days to begin with.
He knew what it was. He'd seen some of the kids from the orphanage playing with better ones, ones they'd bought with their priceless pocket change, and a boy who went to his school went everywhere with one, insisting he would make it pro when he grew up. The one he found was little more than a ratty leather glove with a stitched-on patch for the webbing, so worn that his fingers stuck through in two different places and when he slapped it with his fist he left a bruise on his palm. Nevertheless, as soon as it was on he decided he never wanted to take it off. In the space of a moment, the homeless, possessionless orphan he had been found a purpose to an angry, stubborn, angst-filled little life. He never really understood it; it was just a freaking glove, nothing to go crazy over, but from that moment on, he wasn't just Gendry the Stubborn Loser with No Friends anymore. He was Gendry the Kid With the Mitt, who went out to play the very next day with the orphans who owned the better baseball gloves and played ball for the first time.
His life was baseball from there on out. In the morning he snuck out early so he could grab the papers before the orphanage supervisors and memorize the box scores. Every day after school he was the one who started the pick-up games in the orphanage yard, and when the others were sick of it he stole one of the orphanage's few bikes (always putting it back later, of course) and rode to the nearby alley, where the older kids played. They didn't let him join in the first few times he showed up, but although he was at least five years younger than the majority of them he was nearly of a size, and when they finally let him pitch only two or three could catch up with his speed. Ever after, he was the coveted pick in King's Landing's inner-city pick-up games.
He never played for his school teams; he wasn't allowed to, on account of his grades. It wasn't because he was stupid; he was actually quite good at critical thinking, when given proper time to think, and his years of memorizing stats had given him a quick mind at math, as well. For some reason, though, he could never seem to concentrate in-class—admittedly, mostly, because baseball was on his mind. When he told this to his supervisors, they took him to a doctor, who then told him that he had some condition and that it wasn't his fault. Nevertheless, even with treatment he could never seem to stay focused long enough to put together a good report card. So the school fields of King's Landing were off-limits to him. Nobody saw him play. Nobody watched him pitch. It was only the streets that had sympathy for his insatiable need for the game, and it was only the streets that let him scratch the itch that told him to play, play, play...
It was just natural. It was him. He'd never known anything that felt so right as picking up a baseball and hurling it with all the strength his considerable mass could muster. During the day, at night, he was sifting through his mental reservoir of statistics, reaching for his mitt, dreaming of World Series moments and ninth-inning fastballs he could never have.
For the second, though, when he was toeing the rotted two-by-four they used as a rubber in the back alleys of the streets, wrapping his fingers around the laces of the ball, freezing the moment in time as his plant leg came down with unparalleled ferocity, it didn't matter that he didn't know his father, didn't have a future, didn't have someone who gave a damn about him enough to spend three minutes learning who he actually was.
All that mattered was when the second ended, and the ball left his hand. Because when it buried itself in the catcher's mitt, when the bat whooshed past it a half-moment too late, when the hitter swore and the fielders cheered, he meant something.
He was worth something. Not an orphan, not a nobody, not a street kid with no future. He was somebody. He was more. Undaunted. Unreachable.
Untouchable.