I hope you enjoy it. I am working on a book that may or not ever get published called "The Night The Martians Stole our Garbage". Hope you like this excerpt.
A Moment in Time
Killing time as I was waiting for my wife to finish her shopping, I passed through the sporting goods department. I was not in the market for any equipment, but it is sort of a genetic reaction when a guy sees a piece of sporting paraphernalia to go ‘hands on’ with it. As I passed the baseball section, I pulled a bat out of the rack, took a couple of slow swings and I knew immediately that I had found the most perfect ball beater ever made. The handle portion was of a small diameter and slowly tapered up the length, widening into a lump of power filled ash at the business end. Everything about this bat said it had been made in heaven exclusively for me. I don’t remember the length or weight, or even the brand name, but on that day it became one of my prized possessions.
Now, I was never a great ball player, I played Little League and Babe Ruth as a kid. I never played high school ball, my grades stunk worse than my talent. I did play some in the service, but mostly my sports career was relegated to pick up games at local ball fields. But I absolutely loved the game. Other than a chicken egg, there is no object that lends itself so perfectly to the act of throwing as a baseball. By the way, that’s why God didn’t give chickens hands; they would have been pegging eggs all over the place and never had any chicks. A baseball thumping into a well oiled and broken in glove is something you have to experience to understand. And oh, the feeling of connecting with a pitched ball with the ‘sweet spot’ on the bat and the sound of wood and horsehide coming together is just about the most satisfying thing there is. It is my personal opinion that the advent of the aluminum bat was…well, it don’t sound right, it don’t feel right and it just ain’t baseball.
My new bat and I were to spend many years together. I don’t know if that bat was waiting for a future major leaguer to buy it, but it got stuck with me. Let it be known that although I was no Mickey Mantel, I was not exactly a duffer when it came to hitting a baseball. I could pound out long balls pretty well in my youth. I just lacked all the other skills that mark the difference between an average player and a really good player. One of the greatest catches I ever made in the outfield was swallowing a large flying insect. I still got the ball and unleashed an arrow straight throw into the third base dugout. Every time I see a player charge a hard ground ball I can taste that bug. My little league coach once told me I ran like molasses in January. I was pretty proud until I had that explained to me. But then came the game.
I was in my 20’s, sharing an apartment right next to a school yard. One Saturday morning my roommate and I noticed some guys our age getting a game. Up and over the fence we went with the age old introduction, “Hi, can we play?” Dick, (my roommate) and I wound up on opposite teams and the game was on. The school yard was basically a large square field. Home plate was in one of the corners, and the outfield, well, was out in the field. A chain link fence ran around the edge of the field. It did not curve around the outfield, but ran away at a ninety degree angle from the left field line. This made the distance to straight away center half again as long as if the fence actually encompassed the playing area.
My turn at bat came and I stepped up to the plate, my longtime friend on my shoulder. Dick was the other team’s pitcher and was throwing good stuff, but not too hard. I got hold of a nice outside ball and took it deep to left center, over the defender’s head for a double. As I trotted out to my center field position at the end of the inning, I asked the guy coming in how close the ball came to the fence. He looked at me with surprise and with a laugh said, “About forty feet. You don’t think you’re going to hit one over it, do you?” I said “Well, I thought maybe...”
The next time up to bat I told Dick to put a little more speed on the pitches, that I wanted to try to really blast one. About three balls later he served up the pitch of a lifetime. It was a moment when all the forces of physics and nature come together. The ball came in looking like it was moving in slow motion. I could see the stitches and seams as it began to break low and outside. As I came around with the bat I knew if there ever was a homerun ball to be served up, this was it. I felt the bat make contact, the force of the blow traveling down the shaft into my hands, mind confirming what body felt. I knew it was a candidate for at least the lower deck. I watched the ball leave the infield and the center fielder turn to begin to chase after it, then stopping as he watched it go high overhead. The ball cleared the fence by a good twenty feet, going up in the tops of the trees in the yard on the other side. It was the moment all my ball playing years had been waiting for. There were no cheering crowds to see it, but that was a homerun in any major league stadium in the country. So on a very ordinary Saturday morning long ago, on a ball field buried between a school and some apartment buildings, I hit the longest ball in my life. Only a handful saw it, and probably only I remember it, but it was grand. Some years later in another pick up game that bat was broken. I felt a real sense of loss as we had achieved great mediocrity together. I never found a replacement that felt as good. Over the years my ball playing went on to softball, then sort of ended without fanfare. But in my mind is a memory of a warm summer day and a special bat, when for a brief moment I felt like Babe Ruth. I wish I had the foresight before I hit it to have pointed to center field. I guess that’s what separates the amateurs from the great ones.
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