Pleased to meet you …

The month of October brings many strange things: Halloween, my birthday, and the World Series of Baseball (I feel the need to be specific here due to the popularity of televised professional Poker).

In the 20th century, baseball was considered the National Pastime, a game that reflected American Values of the time; patience, strategic thinking and acting as the situation demands for the greater good. [In the 21st century, we have online Poker, Fantasy Football and blogging about Britney Spears and Hillary Clinton, but that’s an item for another time.]

American children played baseball in sandlots on endless summer afternoons, while adults followed Major League pennant races in newspapers, took leisure in listening to games on radio, and watching on broadcast TV. Baseball’s long season soaked into the steamy summers, giving Americans something to talk about and listen to as they waited out the heat of the day or relaxed with the family after the sun went down. Sometimes the grown-ups watched the kids play organized Little League games, and sometimes they took the kids into the city for a Big Day Out to catch the local heroes at their hallowed stadium.  

In order to celebrate the 2007 World Series, we asked some of our friends from Joel Achenbach’s Achenblog to share their favorite baseball memories or stories. Interestingly, they both invoke Motherhood and baseball, so take a moment, get yourselves some hot apple pie, then settle in to read some reflections.

This, from Boodler TBG:

Memories of my childhood summers are flavored with the sounds of baseball coming from the radio in my mother’s kitchen. Coming in after playing outside, I’d find her fixing dinner while listening to her beloved Senators (losing again, most likely). She had been a fervent baseball fan since childhood, when her brother started taking her to games at the old Griffith Stadium. It was Mom’s idea to attend the final Senators game before they packed up and left to become the Texas Rangers. At RFK that awful day, she laughed and pointed at the signs that cursed Senators’ owner Bob Short, while also crying at the thought of losing her hometown team.

It took nearly 25 years before Mom would take up rooting for the Baltimore Orioles, D.C.’s closest major league team, finally giving up the idea that Washington would ever again have a team of its own. In February 2004, my vibrant and youthful 76-year-old mother was diagnosed with a brain tumor and died in July after a terrible five-month battle with the disease. My sisters and I felt our childhood completely slip away when we lost Mom, after having lived a seemingly perfect life with no real tragedies or complications. That Fall after Mom died, the Montreal Expos announced they would be moving to Washington, bringing baseball to the nation’s capital for the first time in 33 years. When I heard the announcement, I cried, thinking of how many years my Mom had waited for this to happen, only to pass away before it became a reality.

I told my youngest sister how I felt a stab of sadness every time I heard the announcement that day and she said, “But don’t you realize what Mom would have said when she heard the news?” When she told me, I laughed so hard, I decided that I would forever think of the new team as Mom’s team.

I can actually hear Mom’s voice in my head saying, “I never thought I’d live to see the day!”

TBG’s piece gives me a healthy perspective. I’d been complaining over the past baseball season that I’ll never live to see her Mom’s Nationals win a National League pennant…  

Boodler Scottynuke is a long time Boston Red Sox fan and invokes family as well, but also recognizes the pain that baseball can cause:

The Red Sox, to me, had always been about eventual heartbreak…
 
1978 and Bucky Bleepin’ Dent;
1986 and Bill Buckner (while I was serving overseas, no less!);
2003 and Aaron Frickin’ Boone.
 
Then came 2004 and Dave Roberts.
And Big Papi.
And Curt Schilling.
And all the demons were laid to rest.
 
Truth be told, I’d just about laid the Sox to rest after they went three games down to the Yankees in the ALCS. I had sunk deeper and deeper into my chair as Schilling got bombed the first time around. I decided the Sox would have to EARN another chance to punch me in the gut as yet another flicker of Boston hope was smothered by cruel reality. The next game I would watch would have to be Game Seven.
 
To paraphrase, however, a treasured picture on my mother’s kitchen wall: The Fat Lady had laryngitis. Dave and David and Curt and company would ensure I’d see another game, although I cost myself the chance to see Game Six and the bloody sock.

 
I was practically to the point to chewing my fingernails as Derek Lowe got things underway in Game Seven. Hadn’t we just been here a year ago? Wasn’t the belly of the beast the perfect backdrop for yet another oh-so-close-but-yet-so-far chapter in the Curse of the Bambino?
 
Big Papi’s opening blast, to say nothing of Johnny Damon’s second inning grand slam, seemed to put those fears to rest. Lowe was cruising, right through the sixth inning.
 
When the bottom of the seventh rolled around, though, I thought someone had slipped some LSD into Francona’s ever-present wad of gum and tobacco…
 
PEDRO??? Coming in from the bullpen?? But Martinez exorcised his “Daddy” and my heart started beating again.
 
Once Embree started dealing to the final Yankee batter, I got my mother’s number on speed dial. As the final ground ball headed into the infield, I hit “Send”…
 
I’d gotten onto Mom’s line just before my younger-but-no-less-passionate-of-a-Sox-fan brother, so it was my semi-coherent screams of “THEY DID IT!!” that first rang in her ears.
 
The Cards never had a chance. 

I would add here that Scottynuke’s Red Sox have clearly shaken their curse, as they were down three games to one in this year’s ALCS, and roared back with three straight victories to advance to the 2007 World Series against the Colorado Rockies. Congrats to Scotty and the Red Sox Nation. 

My own experiences with baseball were more about playing it than watching it, although my brothers and I always managed to watch some of the World Series on TV during the 1970s. Back in the day, the Cincinnati Reds’ Big Red Machine seemed to be in it every year, with Johnny Bench, Pete Rose, and our favorite, Joe Morgan. [We called Morgan “Flinch,” because of the way he used to twitch his back arm up and down while waiting for a pitch, trying to keep his back elbow up to take a swing.]

[Keep that elbow up, Joe!] 

Joe and the rest of the 70s Reds are good examples (along with the remaining local team, the Baltimore Orioles) of baseball the way I like it: tough, gritty, with dirty uniforms and infield dust flying everywhere.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t well-suited for playing baseball the way I like it. It’s fair to say that during my most notable moments on a baseball diamond, I wasn’t so much playing baseball as baseball was happening to me. 

When I was a boy of perhaps eight and playing CYO ball, I had a tough time catching fly balls. Frankly, I was a little afraid of them, much as I was afraid of girls. Back then, the hardballs were pretty hard - none of the newfangled padded softcover hardballs they have in Little League nowadays - and practice balls were especially hard as they’d been curing in coaches’ garages since Abner Doubleday himself took infield practice with them. These balls had the additional feature of being stained, nay, camouflaged, a nice dark greeninsh-brown from decades of infield practice. 

During one particular team practice, one of the coaches pulled kids who were having trouble with fly balls out to another field to take some fungoes with those camo rockballs. The coach walked us out to where he wanted us to stand, then sauntered about 50 yards trailing a 32 oz fungo bat, then turned, and called a player’s name while tossing a practice ball into the air, and thwacked it skyward with a swing of the bat. The young boy whose name was called staggered to where the ball appeared to be headed, with his glove held over his eyes to shield them from the late afternoon sun. Then the boy put his glove out and WHAP, the ball dropped right into it.

Next, the coach called my name and thwhacked another dun leather stone into the air. I followed what I believed to be the flight of the ball, and moved to where I anticipated it would fall to earth, my glove shielding my eyes as I had seen the boy before me do. And it helped. Until I pulled the glove off of my forehead and put it up to receive the ball, my eyes filled with glorious golden light. And I received the ball, all right – squarely on my lower lip. I don’t remember much after that moment, except sitting on the grass of the field, the weird sensation of my lips throbbing and my mouth filled with the taste of blood. When I probed my lower lip with my tongue, I found a pretty good split and thought to myself, “I’m going to have to go to the doctor’s. Mom is going to kill me.”

I never played outfield again.

(note: MLB will not make a Cleveland Infield Mayfly rule after the biblical plague that descended on Jacobs’ Field this past October 6th. When a huge swarm of mayflies appeared, the Damn Yankees were leading the game. When the sacrifice flies left the field, the Yanks had lost. Clearly, God had spoken. I didn’t check to see if there was anything about it in Exodus or Revelation, and I don’t think I want to know. I wonder if Joe Torre considered this a sign to resign his job as the Yankees’ manager?)

[Several things bugged the Yankees’ post-season, but not global warming.] 

I kept playing baseball, but stopped playing organized hardball when I found I couldn’t hit high school pitches more than they hit me.  

In my twenties, I became a pretty fair shortstop in a co-ed softball league. One afternoon, I went out to practice with a friend who was the first baseman and clean-up batter on our team. Typical of first basemen, I suppose, he was big and strong and a product of the local Gold’s Gym, Wieder Weight Gain, possibly the local friendly independent Balco distributor, and certainly from Clairol Born Blonde for his shoulder-length locks. We fungoed some balls to each other, I practiced throwing to him at first base from different parts of the infield.

Then, he wanted to practice hitting and wanted me to pitch to him. I hesitated, knowing his reputation for using all of that muscle mass to cannon pitches straight back where they came. When I walked to the mound, facing a blond Thor wielding a 36 oz. Mjolnir and armored with a tank top, spandex biking shorts and great tan, I told him I had a bad feeling about it, and he assured me with a half-smile that he would be careful.

He was careful to loft the first few hittable pitches (I was a little nervous) over my head and into the outfield, but I could tell that he wanted to take a serious swing, and was waiting for the right pitch. So, I gave it to him.

They say that in combat, you never hear the bullet that gets you. I don’t know anything about that, but I will say that when that pitch left his bat and headed straight back at me like a train’s headlight coming for Wile E. Coyote, I felt like I was in that tunnel with him, and all of my senses blanked out except for my vision, which zoomed into ultra-sharp focus on the tan moon blossoming in my view. As I watched the laces rotate, I thought, ”Ha. Two gods in one: Thor and Loki. Lucky me.”

As if that were not enough, I realized that the ball was hurtling directly for my Nether Regions like a testosterone-seeking missile. I reacted by launching into my patented echappés sautés temp leve demi-plie move, leaping into the air, and spreading my legs in an attempt to allow the ball to pass underneath (Who says that kids don’t learn anything playing dodge ball in elementary school?) while reaching my left hand down backhanded to field the ball with my glove.

It almost worked.

When the ball arrived all of 0.7 sec. later, it tipped off of the end of my glove, and directly into the tender inside of my right thigh about six inches below The Intersection. And stopped.

I could get into calculating the energy carried by a softball traveling off of a bat at 100 mph here, but for the purposes of this piece, I won’t. What I will say is that all of that energy (and force) was imparted into my thigh in a four-inch circle. And that energy reverberated through my body, radiating from the point of impact like a lightning bolt. When it came out through my eyes, I was at the center of the Milky Way: all I could see were stars. This wasn’t so bad.

What was bad was the thunderclap of pain that followed a few seconds later. I followed the ball to the ground and thought, “My Mom is going to kill me.” The Norse god - trying to cover his laughter - asked me if I was OK, and I honestly don’t know what I said. I was able to get up and walk around, but each step brought more thunder and lightning, so I made my way to my car and drove home. I stopped at a 7-11 and bought a big bag of ice, as the pain in my leg settled to a loping throb that kept time with my heartbeat, my body no longer a storm, but a techno dance floor with a bass drum counterpoint to the light show.

The bruise was a beauty: softball-sized purple and blue tie-dye of rock-hard blood in my leg that featured the ball’s laces, like impressions of fossilized fern fronds in a chunk of shale. My leg hurt for a little longer than the six weeks the bruise lasted, fading from purple and blue to green and yellow, and finally red and pink. Ultimately, all that was broken were thousands of blood vessels and my will to ever pitch again. And I never did.

I’ve stopped participating in organized baseball because it doesn’t fit into my schedule anymore, but I’ve never stopped wanting to play. These days, I enjoy playing ball with my children, and that’s all the baseball I really need. 

Baseball and families; joy and pain, love and memories.

Life.

bc

P.S. Heartfelt thanks to my good friends TBG, Scottynuke, and the Editor