Next week we’re headed to Phoenix to watch spring baseball, the Cactus league, and particularly the Mariners and the Indians.

I confess to a long standing love-hate relationship with baseball, interspersed with many years of indifference.

I was probably seven when I first joined a team. Several houses down from our house in central Wyoming lived the Holton’s, Chris and Lloyd. They were several years older than I was and I was their shadow, not always included, but always at hand. When we weren’t collecting tadpoles and bugs, or building forts in the chokecherry bushes along Garden Creek, we were at the field behind the local elementary school playing ball. Chris, my hero, always pitched. Lloyd, a year younger than Chris and a tow head, played first. I was out in the outfield of course, and waved back until they were sure no hits could reach me. I stood in the sun and chattered at the batters, running in when it was our turn to bat. I never got a hit, but was so short that most pitchers couldn’t find my strike zone. I was a guaranteed walk every time.

The year I turned eight I was old enough for little league. Chris and Lloyd were on the same team and their father Harry was the coach. Still a tag-along, I was invited to join the team. I could play, but I had to be the bat boy also. Two honors at once, not to mention that I got to ride to practice in the team jalopy. (This is an arcane word to many people now. A jalopy was an old, beat up vehicle, in this case a 1940’s panel truck with only a driver’s seat. We sat in the back on the floor and bounced around with the bases, bags of bats, and water jugs. It was wonderful.) Practice was held at a field up the hill after Mr. Holton finished his shift at the refinery. We’d pile out of the jalopy and race to place the bases and sort the gloves and bats, all of which were too large for me until a parent donated an unusually small bat that just fit me and I found a ball glove that had been left at the field. It too was unusually small and fit perfectly. For weeks I lived in fear that someone would claim it, but after two weeks I claimed it by branding my name on the wrist strap with my wood-burning tool.
At the third or fourth practice, I experienced one of my life’s greatest humiliations (Isn’t it strange how these things stick with you? 59 years later and I remember every moment.) I stepped up to the plate for my turn at batting practice. The late afternoon Wyoming sun baked us. Sweat trickled down my neck. I tapped the plate with my bat the way the other guys did. I perched it behind my shoulder and waited. Chris, trying to find my zone, dinged me in the calf. In slow motion I saw it coming. It stung and it shook me. Mr. Holton checked to see if I was okay, then had me step back into the box. The next pitch came and I stepped back out of the box. It was an involuntary reaction, but it wasn’t a baseball reaction, especially baseball in Wyoming, where the creeks run testosterone. Mr. Holton told me to get back in the box and stay there. Chris wasn’t going to hit me again. My face was flushed and I’m sure I had tears in my eyes. I stepped back in and waited. The pitch came and I stepped back out of the box, again. From his position behind the pitcher, Mr. Holton yelled at me: if I stepped back again, I was done for the day. I remember everything clearly: The pitch came and I stepped back out of the box.

I sat in the dirt behind the backstop the rest of the practice and rode in silence down the hill to our block. It was dinner time and getting dark as I walked down the block. I don’t remember telling my father, a 6 foot tall policeman, how practice went. Maybe he talked to Mr. Holton, the way neighbors did in those days, but he did find out. He never said anything directly, that just wasn’t his way, but I felt his disappointment when he began to practice in the backyard with me, something else we never did.

Practice continued, but we played practice games, odds vs. evens, or picking two teams. I was always last to be picked. When our side was up, I batted last and so, rarely batted at all. Still, I hustled in and out as the innings changed and collected the bats as quickly as I could. I was, after all, the official batboy! I got tan and I got dirty. My freckles spread across my nose like a herd of brown sheep. My crewcut turned blonde from the sun.

Then we got our uniforms! We were the Indians and I was so proud. (Keep in mind that 1) I was growing up in Wyoming and 2) nearly 50% of television was devoted to Westerns. I can, by the way, still remember the words and tunes to nearly every TV western shown in the 1950’s.) They were new, stiff and white, with those pants that ended at the calf, except for mine of course which ended at my ankles, and red stirrup socks. We had a smiling Indian face on the front and big, stiff numbers on our backs. They were wonderful and just as wonderful, they came with caps that we could keep. I remember watching the older boys and bending my brim to a gentle curve and then creating a crease across the top in the front like a flat top haircut. To make the crease stay, we each sacrificed a baseball card from our private collections to stuff sideways in the inside liner to act as support. No round tops for us. Chris, as a token of good luck used his prized Rocky Colavito card, which stayed in his cap as a lucky token until a game late in the season. I don’t remember too much about that game other than we were getting trounced, the opposition hitting Chris’ pitches like it was batting practice. Finally, to top off his disgust at himself, he was hit in his pitching arm by a line drive and was pulled from the game. Benched by his own father! He threw his hat into the dugout as he left the field, kicked it once, then picked it up and tore the Colavito card in half and threw it in the dirt.

I knew how he felt, humiliated and betrayed, a complex emotion, embarrassed at having let down the person you most looked up to and yet somehow let down that that person had actually been the cause of the humiliation in the first place.

My father had for several years been an umpire for the little league as well as a referee for high school basketball. Police officers in the 50’s didn’t make much money and officiating was one of his side jobs to help make ends meet. We only intersected in one game. As I have mentioned, I was so short that I was a guaranteed walk, unless I made the foolhardy decision to swing my bat. Then I was a guaranteed out. I ached for a hit despite Mr. Holton’s one coaching tip before every turn at bat: “Don’t swing, let ‘em walk you.”

It is impossible to describe my feelings as I walked to the plate. My father watched me approach, put his mask back on and waited. Sweat trickled down my forehead. I pounded home plate with my puny bat and waited, torn between the urge to swing and the order to just stand there. I knew if I swung, I’d get a hit. I knew it. I could see myself tossing the bat aside as I ran to first. A hit, my first hit.
I hardly noticed the ball crossing the plate.
“Strike one,” my father said.
I had never had a strike called on me before. No one had ever been able to pitch low enough to enter my strike zone. “Now what?” I thought. Mr. Holton had said don’t swing. My team mates chattered that it was okay, I’d get the next one (though they all knew I wouldn’t. Still it felt good to hear their encouragement.)
I waited.
“Strike two,” my father said.
Swing. I desperately wanted to swing. I knew I could connect. I knew it. But, the truth was that I was an eight year old kid in 1958 Wyoming with a cop for a dad and I always did what I was told (a condition that changed later) and so I stood there like my coach had told me to do.
“Strike three,” my father said.
In my defense, I really thought the third pitch was a ball and told him so later, off the field, in the safety of the back seat of our car where we didn’t have to look each other in the eyes. He assured me it was a strike and we never spoke of it again.

That was the last year I played baseball and generally ignored it other than following the Mantle-Maris home run race in 1961, but then the entire country was following that. At school, a radio played in the cafeteria during lunch and we huddled around the stage where the radio sat cheering for our favorites, cats’ eyes, shooters and rare steelies on the line as we bet for Mickey or Roger. I tried other sports through junior high, but eventually decided that I was just not an athlete. Moreover I knew in my heart that I was a disappointment to my father, who, I believed, wanted a big tall athletic son to be proud of, not the puny debater and actor that I became in high school, whose only claim to fame was the occasional poem published in school collections.
A father myself now, I look back and wonder how hard it must have been for him that day. Crouched behind the catcher, watching his son stand in front of him, unmoving with a bat in his hand as strike after strike passed him by and finally calling him out. Was he disappointed or did his post-depression Kansas stoicism shrug it off? I don’t know; I like to believe that I’m a different kind of father than he was. I like to believe that my children know that I am proud of them. Still, that day stays sharp in my memory.

Years later, when I had grown children of my own, I was visiting my parents at their home in Washington and had accompanied my father, a Customs Officer by then, to his office. He introduced me to his fellow officers as a teacher and sometimes writer. From the back of his wallet he produced a much folded and worn copy of a poem I had written nearly 50 years before, passed it around, then carefully returned it to his wallet. That moment was a game changer; it was the hit I never got, the base I never reached. I am stunned to this day by the effect of that moment. Everything I had thought about his understanding of who I was turned upside down. He passed away half a dozen years later and, going through his effects, I retrieved the poem, nearly worn in half from years in his back pocket and I was reminded of this:
“It is the life-affirming genius of baseball that the short can pummel the tall, the rotund can make fools of the sleek, and no matter how far down you find yourself in the bottom of the ninth you can always pull out a miracle.”
― Bill Vaughn, First, a Little Chee-Chee: Then Some Other Weird Sports

So, that was it, that was baseball for me: two summers of sun and dirt and long ago friends I’ve lost touch with compressed into a complex allegory of my endeavors, played out on a field of four bases 90 feet apart on a sunny afternoon.

Now, in the later years of my life, I go to Phoenix to sit in the sun with Lydia, eat peanuts and hotdogs and spend as much time listening to the people around me as watching the game. See, the thing about allegory is that it becomes everyone’s story and, in a sense, makes us all equal participants, sitting there in the sun, wanting a win. But still, I don’t want to make a big deal out of it. It’s just a game after all and like Casey Stengel said:
Now there’s three things
you can do
in a baseball game:
You can win
or you can lose
or it can rain.

Blessings.