“These are kids. It’s a game! You should be ashamed.”
Before taking a summer break from writing, I posted Side A of this two-parter, suggesting that when tight ends, teachers, and emergency medical responders demand ‘the ball,’ they do so largely from their heart. Intrinsically prepared and quietly confident, they sense that in their hands, the situation can only get better. But if their motives are ‘largely’ unselfish, what are we to make of those whose motives are just plain ‘smally?’
When I was thirteen, a steelworker (and, I later learned, national casting champion)—call him Kay—moved to town at the start of my first summer playing thirteen-fourteen-year-old baseball. Kay alleged to have once upon played in the Dodgers organization and had plans to help us “win big,” which meant, among other things, wearing hot sweaty uniforms to every practice.
“You don’t see the Dodgers practicing in their [bleepin’] street clothes, do you?” our tobacco-spitting, pipe-smoking, salty tongued adult role model shot back at our whining. “You wanna play the greatest sport ever invented? Then you better [bleepin’] dress for it!”
Things only got worse when, during our first game, Kay picked a fight not with the opposing team’s pitcher but with his four-foot-nothing mom. Kay had knowingly (we later learned) recruited a sixteen-year-old ringer—the provenance of whose birth certificate was a blur—who, early in the game, cracked a line shot off pitcher Mike Miller’s forehead before ricocheting a mile up and down into the glove of shortstop Tim Anderson for a flyball out.
Unconscious for several minutes, a “Throw me the ball!” kind of player, Mike staggered to his feet and insisted on finishing the game. A couple of innings later, Kay, standing in the third base coaching box, asked Mike for an odd favor that, with over fifty years of hindsight, I now consider to have been the beginning of the end for our fledgling season that year. And, if I’m honest, my taste for the sport.
“Hey pitcher, throw me the ball,” Kay calls out innocently enough.
Confused by the unorthodox request—or still reeling from his concussion—Mike reluctantly obliges. Kay bare hands Mike’s toss and turns the ball this way and that as if inspecting for spit or bubble gum before throwing it back. Kay was new to the league and not even the umpire thought much about it. Not then, at least.
Kay joined our team in what he called its ‘building year’ if there was such a thing for a two-year league. Having lost every game the season before, half the team’s returners would be joined by Kay’s pick of the new recruits, sweetened when he also managed to snatch a future major leaguer who moved in a week after tryouts. With its new thirteen-year-old recruit—Vance Law would go on to set an American League record for third-basing the longest error-free game in history—there should have been no impediment to our rising in the ranks. Sadly, fourteen games later, we managed to win only a pair of them.
A couple of innings after Kay calls out to Mike, he repeats his kooky request.
“Hey pitcher, let me see the ball.”
When Mike objects, Kay bullies him into submission—Where is that ump?—and makes a second show of searching the ball for contraband. But in the decisive inning, trailing by two runs, the penny drops when Kay asks Mike for a final unorthodox favor. Brooking no resistance, Kay indignantly yells his demand as though he’s certain the thing is spiked.
“Hey pitcher! Throw me the ball!”
But this time, when Mike makes the toss, like a matador waving his cape at an unsuspecting bull, Kay just backs away to let the ball fly by and then bounce off the field. He then starts screaming at three of us runners encumbering all three bases.
Run! [Bleep!] Run!!
Run? I’m standing on first with a teammate on second. There’s no place I can run. Across at third, Kay is boyhandling a dazed runner, trying to get him to steal home, which he finally, confusedly does. (Did Kay kick just him in the pants?) But the tying runner on second just stands there looking at me like, ‘What am I supposed to do?’ So we both stay put. The next batter grounds to second, and, as they say in the bigs, that’s the ball game.
Only it’s not. Miller’s mom is instantly on the field. Her goose-egged boy has been “nearly killed,” and this crusty sailer in an old Dodger’s uniform has humiliated him a second time.
“You ought to be disbarred or something. This isn’t Los Angeles or wherever you think you played minor league. These are kids. It’s a game! You should be ashamed.”
When Mrs. Miller was finished, Kay sent us back to the dugout for a final earful.
“When I say run, you [bleepin’] run … When you’re old enough to listen, I’ll show you tricks that will let you walk around the bases … This one’s on you. We had it in the bag but you wouldn’t listen.
And he was right. We stopped listening to everything Kay said after that. Stopped wearing uniforms to practice. Stopped even coming to practice, some of us. At the end of the season, Kay went back to Los Angeles, never having revealed even a single trick for walking around the bases. Fourteen games and a new coach later, with Vance coming into his own as a second-year all-star, we managed to lose only a pair of them. I watched most of the summer from the bench after catching a Vance-Law-pitched game that broke my middle finger even through a heavily padded catcher’s mitt. But it was for a real team, having real fun. I wouldn’t trade it for playing every game the summer before.
Even seasonal games like baseball, boy- and girlhood, and our day jobs have an infinity about them. We played Mike’s team one more time that summer. Some of the guys on my team that summer have, fifty years on, found my blog. The folks in the office we ignore, mistreat, or build up will likely show up again tomorrow. The time we take now for even the smallest endeavor “creeps in this petty pace from day to day.” In some ways, forever.
Throw me the ball? Please do. I won’t step away.
This post is from a LinkedIn Newsletter called The Indirections. Subscribe on LinkedIn.
