Spring Training
Monday, March 2nd, 2009
The game trusts in threes – three strikes, three outs – the father, son and holy ghost, say the ones who follow it as religion. Where I first stepped up to plate and sat in my first dug out, the diamonds amounted to three, all facing the elementary school on a hill – the outfields touching corners where the fence posts came together. Those fields are going to be tilled under and chalked next month, no longer quick sand to be stepped around kids walking through to surrounding neighborhoods.
The fields were for practice only. There were no grand stands. The fences were rotted through with rust and whenever the ball went clear through the catcher to the screen or the batter fouled one straight up, they made a terrible crash, like dishes breaking. The dug out was overgrown weeds and terminates had tunneled pencil jabs into the wooden benches. The last paint job came in the late 70s and the milky green was rubbed clean by asses, by rain and the unforgiving August summer sunshine that beat down and ripped the color and the life and the strength from the wood.
This is what the sun did to the boy’s bodies too. Tore them apart in the pebbly field, as many rocks as there were parcels of dirt, which made fielding groundballs as dangerous as minefields. So many came off the coaches bat toward an open space and looked to be a casual grounder. A fielder would kneel down to gather the balls with his glove and just as he would get in position, the ball hit a gravel piece and the ball shot up into his eyes, the stitches touching first and distinguishable from the raw hide – stitches tearing the flesh open, then rawhide rubbing into the wound, deep, leaving a crater, and blood coming down – straight down into the dirt, the player clutching his eye – and finally the tears in front of the other boys. And the coach calls time to look it over but his serious, not sympathetic. The boy’s going to have a scar, he’s never going to get back down on that ball again. For the rest of the season he might play outfield, which too detached from the action. He’ll spend practice looking out into nowhere, maybe the tree lines or the suburban house rows behind him until a batter actually connects and sends one his way, but he won’t chase it, he won’t be aware of it and the coach will send him down. Sometime the next spring he’ll fade away, baseball will become the farthest thing from his mind, another good talent wasted because of the field, another good kid from the neighborhood given up on himself because of a ground ball.
No one knew this the first day ion the dug out. Everyone sat there, splinters in their asses, and listened to the coach. The dug was pointless. It was just a way to collect the boys, to make it feel more like a baseball experience, but the coach could have told them the same things in a circle on the field. This was about illusion. I don’t remember what was said, but the positions must have been chosen. I was in the group that would bat.
I stood behind home plate and the coaches helped me get into a stand. The coach at the mound was going to throw to me when I was ready. He told me to choke up. I didn’t know what that meant, so I cleared my throat. He told me it meant to move my hands up higher on the bat, so I moved them up and it never occurred to me that my father should have taught me that or he could have if he’d only played with me in the back yard. The phrase would have come up. I know it. I could have learned to be a better hitter much sooner if someone showed me, but they never did. I was on my own in the batter’s box, and I wouldn’t be better until a year later.
I’d strike out, see other kids quit, jump over balls I should have caught, finish last. Other kids’ parents would turn their heads from me after the game. I’d watch my mom buy pop for all of the kids, whether we lost by the 10 run mercy rule or if we lost by one. I’d order suicides and I’d be content. I wouldn’t know how much better it could feel until the next summer, what seemed like forever, but I would earn my position and I’d pay attention in the dug out for my moment to watch the blood drip in my glove, to catch the ball, the out to be recorded, more adept to the pain than the other boys.
