The Big Game

A

fternoon game, day three.  Whitey had a gem going.  Solid gas, good mix, fresh arm.  Mowing our team down.  Strike-outs, weak grounders, soft fly-balls. 

I bat seventh and lead off the third inning.  Behrs is eighth and Jimmer ninth.  I’m swinging so bad there’s no way I’m getting behind in the count…too risky.  I probably won’t hit him, he’s really throwing well, but I’m not looking foolish on a breaking pitch, or getting walked up the ladder and swinging at something over my head either.  My plan is this; the first ball anywhere near the plate I slap into play.

Bocko is in full gear behind the dish.  He looks funny, surreal to me, like he’s fake.  He says something like, “I think the Weasel just said curve ball”.  I laugh, but it’s hard with the ceramic frog in my throat.  I’m genuinely nervous, and you’d have to know the hyper-competitive relationship between me and Weatherby to understand this.  He wants more than anything in the world right now to strike me out.  He has the upper-baseball hand (probably always has), but you’d probably see me dead somewhere before I’d admit that to him, or myself.  

He throws one off my shoe-tops with some velocity and I put a good swing on it.  I know it’s a good swing because I don't remember it, but I can still feel it in my hands sitting here at my keyboard.  I see the ball lash (literally lash) into left-center, my old sweet spot.  I know it’s hit hard and will fall. 

As I limp up the line the first smile of the day is impossible to keep off my face.  It’s 90% relief, but the other 10% is rapid-fire knowledge that this is how I will remember fantasy camp and that I have Weatherby again.  I have him.  And he knows it.   I'd done what I came to do...hit Whitey.  He glares at me all the way to second base, an easy stand up double. 

And then, believe it or not, this happened.    

Whitey’s still pitching.  I’m on second, relieved, and happy.  Beaver is in right field.  He’s there because balls are being hit out there, and the Murray team doesn’t have anyone who can catch them except Beaver.  Bocko is behind the dish (for the same reason).  Tony is at the plate.

I lead off second, still happy.  I forget the pitch count, but Tony hits a soft liner into right field.  It’s going to drop, so I run/limp to third.  Shooty (third base coach) is on his cell phone.  He’s no help.  I decide to try for home.  I’m going real real slow.  Behind me somewhere Beaver picks up the ball.  Whitey slides over to cut off the throw (he doesn’t back up the plate).  I round third and look up the first base line.  I feel like a big slow dumb fleshy railroad car.  I hear the blood in my ears; Bocko can hear my feet pound the dirt (he tells me this later).  My head swivels from Beaver, who has just let go of a throw, to the plate to Bocko, who does a surprisingly realistic impression of a catcher blocking a plate, back to Whitey who does not cut off the throw, and back to Bocko again.  I’m under water.  My legs do not cooperate.  I want to put it in another gear, the clutch is broke.  The sun is hot and too bright.  Dirt kicks up in my eyes.

Now I actually see the ball rolling along first base line.  Beaver is on target, but there’s not a lot on the throw.  Tony made it to first and he and Whitey turn to track the ball to the plate.  I see the ball bounce and I look back at Bocko.  He’s waiting for it.  I am not happy any more.  I HAVE to make it to the plate. Otherwise why hit the double?

I hear nothing.  There’s a gallon of blood between my ear drum and my brain.  The ball rolls, slowing down.  Any way Bocko can field it with a catchers mitt?  Any way I can get there first (looking less and less likely).  I look down at the ground and I see Bocko’s foot block the plate, just like you’re supposed to do.  I can’t let him block the plate.  That has become evident, and paramount.  Oxygen, water, food, sleep, and Bocko can’t block the plate.  I have another thing about Bocko and competition, that would remind you a lot of the thing I have with Whitey.  They can get me out, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but it has to be because Beaver made a good throw… it can’t be because Bocko blocks the plate. 

The ball and I arrive at exactly the same time…I mean exactly.  Impossibly, Bocko fields it cleanly.  I watch it go into his glove.  At the same time I jump with both feet and drive them at Bocko’s dusty black spike.  For a sick micro-second I think that I might break his ankle from the angle I go in.  He can’t block the plate, but neither should I bust his ankle…(or blacken his eye…there’s a little history there too).

Everything is dust and dirt.  I’m lying on my back.  Bocko pops in the air and lands on his back…on my front, HARD!  I wrap my arms around him, not completely unconcerned that I might have hurt him.  Immediately he reaches back like a turtle and tries to tag me.  My ass is on the plate, and I know I’m safe.  Importantly, I know he’s not hurt.  I squeeze him so he can’t flop over and pin me in the dirt.  We wrestle for a few moments, and it won’t dawn on me for a few minutes that this is pretty special, pretty cool.  Tony’s on first base.  No outs, one run in.  Everyone laughs.

On the next pitch, Whitey drills Jimmer between the numbers.  Jim storms the mound, and we laugh again.

My double off Whitey?  The ball is probably in the catcher’s mitt.

The Hendu comedy hour around the 1990 baseball cards…including getting a Greg Cattaray card when he was standing right there and Mark ‘Big sack’ McGwire.

Whitey 

The Final Day

O

n the last day my arm returns to life; all it takes is three days vicodin and the constant reminder that there’s no tomorrow.  We’re playing for the camp championship. 

I warm up gingerly, testing a new wing.  When I can zip it a little I know I can suck it up and throw a few strikes for the team.  I tell Shooty.  I’m excited to help again.    

We start the game on fire, with the help of the other team’s pitcher who can’t find the strike zone.  I feel for him…but I can’t quite reach him.  We go up like 6-0 early, and have Gamer on the mound struggling on no days rest.  I double-walk for my first time all camp, play error free first base, and mentally get ready to pitch. 

Championship Game:  This looks like a pitch-out…it isn’t

 After two innings of solid work, Gamer is spent.  For a weird guy he does a good job.  I warm up, careful to use good technique, and save the arm.  Of course, once I go to mound in the top of the third all preparation goes out the window and I start slinging it, but we all know that’s going to happen.   

For some reason I think strikes will come easy this time.  They don’t.  I get behind in every count early and fight hard to get out of the inning.  My elbow is twanging like a sick piano string but the vicodin holds up.  One guy hits me so hard the ball dents the center field fence 402 feet away.

I walk about three, give up three hits and three or so runs.  A couple times my arm hurts so bad, I feel sick.  It dawns on me that if I can throw strikes, I won’t have to be out there so damned long.  Knowing this doesn’t help.

Second inning I walk the first two guys and get a little pissed.  I’m not even close.  One pitch is so far outside it hits the back-stop on the fly.  I say, “I think I killed the moose.”  Parent’s coaching the other team.  He hears me, says, “Try breathing through your eyes.”  We spend the next three batters (all of whom I strike out by the way) trading Bull Durham lines…easily one of my favorite fifteen minutes of camp.

My last inning fatigue pours down on me like a wave.  My arm is quite possibly severely trashed.  I don’t want to think about it.  I let in a few more runs (I think my total ends up being six).  Finally I get two outs in the book, runners on first and third.  I’m starting to wonder things like. How do I get through this? Has anyone ever died from pitching?

 

The Deuce!  Best pitch of my life

I get one strike on the next guy.  He keeps taking the pitches I want him to chase…just a fantastic at bat, like he can smell desperation leaking off me.  I throw one as hard as I can that’s about three inches (I swear) outside and the ump, smelling something bad calls it a strike.  Full count.

I get the ball back from Beer-man as fast as I can, rushing to get this done.  I stretch, squint, and damn if Tony doesn’t drop the deuce (uh, call for a curve).  He wants me to throw a full count curve ball.  I’m too tired to argue, but goddamn if I don’t snap off by far the best pitch I throw all week, one that starts out in the high part of the strike zone and drops into the bottom third.  Best part is the guy swings and misses, so the ump doesn’t even have to bail me out. 

I leave after my three innings feeling like a hero, like I finally did something useful.  It doesn’t last.

With my mound appearance a dedicated piece of Hendu baseball camp history, I retire to first base.  First base...no running, no throwing, no action.  Catch a couple of balls, stand on the bag no one gets hurt.

I guess no one will blame me for losing the big game.  Nobody at first base ever gets blamed, except Buckner and that was cosmic malpractice that should be corrected.  (Anybody who saw the game, including Hendu who was there, and because we asked him... knows that the game was lost by the relief pitchers.  Hendu’s exact words were, “Hell no, we blamed the relief pitchers.”)

 

  

Missed the ball…it was the glove

 

Anyways, I lost the game.  In the last inning there’s a dribbler down the third base line.  Manny the Mexican, with no arm left after the week, throws me a soft grounder, easy pickings.  Except I don’t pick it.  It dribbles under my glove.  Three batters later the other girl in camp slaps a double down the line, and we lose the game.

So the ending could have been better, but not the week.  In the locker room for the last time we clean up and pack up say goodbye and drive back to Phoenix.  I fall asleep during the drive and drool on myself. 

We try to rally in Phoenix, but can’t mount much of a charge.  Baseball took it’s final toll.

 So baseball is a different animal for me.  It’s not a beast threatening to devour me in competition and self esteem.  It’s now a feeling that comes up through my feet into my legs and back and arms, out into my hands.  There is no more wind in my face as I round the bases, but rather when things go best, a content rumble along the paths that ends with me standing on a different base. 

It’s no longer only about the baseball.  That ship, obviously, sailed.  Lesson learned.  There is no longer a switch that can be thrown, or if there is, it’s been lost behind layers of years and bodily abuse that I never saw coming.  The dream of playing center field for the Yankees was never mine, it’s a TV sitcom cliché, but I never saw the day when I couldn’t pick up my arm, or run to the outfield.  That script I never saw written.  But the day is here and that makes baseball different for me.  It makes the locker rooms, and the chatter, and the smell of cut grass and dirt formed into a diamond, and the feel of wood or aluminum in your hands…it makes all that better and more real and, hell, a lot more fun.  Can we still win at the game?  Frankly who cares?  Can we still play the game…well now you’re talking’.