There's a frosty morning icing on the ground, with a chill in the air, and summer's green leaves now hang withered and brown. It's late October and the languid days of summer baseball have given way to the fall intensity of the World Series. The television coverage takes me back to Southern boyhood memories of yesteryear, when baseball was a nighttime play-by-play voice on the radio and a daytime fantasy with made up rules.
Schoolyard Intrigue
Like most of my childhood classmates, boys and girls, I played schoolyard baseball at every recess opportunity. We chose our own teams, we made our own rules, and because you can only squeeze in an inning or two at recess, the games sometimes lasted for weeks. Though it was BOYG (bring your own glove), every classroom was graced with a school-issued baseball bat and ball, and we played every day, rain or shine.
By school year's end, that ball had rolled through water, seen many a mud puddle close hand, been bounced off rocks on our less than regulation field, and been whacked enough times to make the dead ball era seem as though it had been played with Superballs. The bat didn't fare much better; we hit baseballs and rocks, leaving it chipped and dented.
It was only grade school, but I almost had my arm broken playing this schoolyard game. One recess, I stepped too close to the make-believe Babe Ruth swinging the bat at imaginary pitches and took a hard blow to my arm. On returning from recess, my 4th grade teacher took one look at the rising lump, and then walked down the hall to the principal's office to call my mother. Mind you, there was no school nurse and only one school telephone.
During this interlude, alone in the classroom with my fellow students, I managed the classroom intrigue. The teacher liked me, I was not one of the cool kids, and my classroom social status was already shaky. I knew the schoolyard omertà, and I assured everyone that there'd be no casting of blame.
My mother arrived a few minutes later, oblivious to my political machinations, and, despite my protests, carted me away to the town doctor for an x-ray. He, in turn, verified that my arm was not broken and charged her the munificent sum of $7. Why that amount? Simple, that was the maximum expense the school insurance would reimburse, and he knew my mother could not afford to pay more. By lunchtime, I was back in the schoolyard with a new story to tell.
Ghost Runners and Homemade Bats
During the summertime, I played baseball with my neighbor and best friend. Yes, you can play baseball with only two people, but it does take a bit of childhood creative license. As I recall, the willow was first base, the walnut tree was second, the oak was third, and maple tree was home. Unevenly spaced, the distance from second to third was about twice that of first to second, but that was the least of the flirtation with the rules.
We played with a homemade bat, made by one of my older cousins in shop class. Turned on a wood lathe and a bit lopsided – woodworking was not his strength – the handle was wrapped with white surgical tape. All this seemed perfectly reasonable to me; I was proud of that bat and I swung it with pride, though I might have used black electrician's tape instead.
Now back to the rules. On a hit, the pitcher chases the ball and then races to catch and tag the batter. If successful, this is an out. (In a more physical version, the fielder can throw at the runner for an out. Our mothers frowned on that version, and I wasn't fond of it either.) If the runner reaches a base, then he or she can call a ghost runner and return to the plate to bat again.
Sometimes a mano a mano faceoff between batter/runner and pitcher/fielder determined outs. The fielder would toss the ball in the air, daring the runner to advance. As successive pitches went higher and higher, eventually the runner would bolt for the next base and the chase was on.
Let me add that long before I learned of the Friendly Confines or the Green Monster, I knew the importance of home field advantage. Even through my nine-year-old eyes, I saw how the lawn mowing mores of one's father heavily influenced the pace and outcome of the game. If the grass had been close cut recently, the batter had a huge advantage because the ball could roll more freely; otherwise, tall grass definitely favored the pitcher. My dad hated to mow the lawn, and I was a slow, chubby kid; I always wanted to play at home.
KMOX and the Cardinals
If ghost runners and fantasy filled the days, radio and imagination owned the night. In the Arkansas Ozarks, the nearest professional baseball team was the St. Louis Cardinals, and their games were broadcast on KMOX, a clear channel AM station. Those were the days of Lou Brock, Orlando Cepeda, and Bob Gibson, and Harry Caray was the iconic voice of the Cardinals, long before his days with the Chicago Cubs.
In a nightly ritual, my parents, my grandfather, and I would gather outside in cloth lawn chairs, parked near an open window so we could hear the radio. Armed with grape Kool-Aid (me) and iced tea (the rest), we would sit in the dark and listen to the summer breeze and the rhythm of the game.
No one in my family ever attended a Cardinals game; that would have been a wild-eyed extravagance beyond our means. Instead, we relied on our imagination and a few word sketches from Harry to conjure the scenes of Gibson strikeouts, Cepeda hits, and Brock steals. It was a richness that filled my imagination, a memory of family happiness that lingers still.
Batting Triple Zero
The summer I turned ten, the community organized a summer Little League. I was excited, beyond excited – for the first time, we would be playing "real" baseball against teams from other area communities. Why, we even had actual uniforms and rubber baseball cleats!
Dreams of glory filled my head, inspired by those Cardinals broadcasts, the derring-do of schoolyard games, and the ghost runners who whispered of bases clearing home runs. In my imagination, the parents all stared open mouthed and the fielders' heads swiveled like marionettes to watch balls launched like 1960s rockets from my bat. Dreams they were, and alas, dreams they remained. I had the passion but, as I was soon to learn, not the skills.
Not only did I fail to make the starting lineup, I rarely played, whether as a mercy to my parents and me or to the other players and their parents I do not know. If the manager put me in, one could be confident the game was either irretrievably lost or inconceivably beyond losing. I was a bellwether indicator that even the most dedicated parents might want to close the cooler and start preparing to leave; this one was over.
I was a slow, left-handed player, so naturally they put me in right field. I was okay with right field; I had a strategy. I played, deep, deep right field, closer to the parking lot than to the action. Consequently, no budding Little League hitter ever hit one over my head. This made my task simple; run down hit balls, preferably while they were still rolling, and heave them in the direction of the infield.
My outfield strategy was born of observation, for I had seen one of my friends, swifter and more athletic than me, try, and fail, to catch a fly ball in centerfield. It looked like an easy catch, but he misjudged it, and the ball hit him squarely atop the head. Tears flowed, followed quickly by parental intervention, and later by laughter from all the players. I was determined to avoid that, and I did. Only later, did I realize I'd lived Peter, Paul and Mary's Right Field, absent the dandelions.
My hitting strategy was equally calculated but far less successful. Okay, let's not be circumspect about it – I batted triple zero for the season. Wearing thick glasses, I had both severe myopia and astigmatism, and I quickly learned to appreciate the truth of the baseball adage that you can't hit what you can't see.
Mind you, I was not staring down Hall of Fame pitchers with 96 MPH darting fastballs and a repertoire of breaking balls; these were fellow ten year olds for whom unqualified success was hitting the strike zone. Not that this mattered; I literally could not see the ball in flight, and the umpire's calls seem mystifyingly random to me.
The nadir came late in one game when I stepped out of the batters' box and grabbed some dirt to dry my sweaty hands, determined that this time, hope against hope, I was going to hit the ball. No doubt thinking that he had to work the next day, the umpire looked at me as the gloaming settled, and said, "Come on son, we need to finish this game." Nothing if not obedient to my elders, I promptly struck out yet again, putting an ignominious end to my baseball career.
Later that fall, my mother took me to the optometrist, where I was again fitted with new glasses. I was stunned to realize there were individuals, now including me, who could see individual leaves on trees. I had always seen them as brownish trunks surrounded by green blobs. I like to close my eyes and believe that with those glasses, I could have played in the fall classic and now be in Cooperstown. Maybe not.
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