Play ball

     Baseball started too late for me.  But it started.

     As a young boy, it was the game I loved best.  I would watch the Red Sox game, or the NBC Game of the Week, on Saturday afternoon, back in those days before there were three games on television every night, not to mention the highlight wrap-up shows.  I spent hours playing catch alone with my pitch-back screen, throwing tennis balls off the garage door and fielding the return grounders off our dirt driveway, pitching balls up onto the roof of the house to catch the pop-ups when they rolled back down over the side.  I cajoled my brothers into endless hours of wiffleball in the backyard, and got my dad to hit me fly balls in the yard or our neighbors’ field whenever I could.  And so, playing this way, I got very good at fielding, and not so good at hitting.  Hitting off live pitching is hard to come by when you have two brothers who don’t love the game as much as you do, a hard-working father, a small backyard or a stubbly field to chase the ball in and never more than a single baseball in the house at one time.  Oh yes, and a mother who declared Little League out of the question the first time she heard that some of the coaches were competitive and some of the parents were not nice. 

      One of the great things about growing up in Vermont, though, was being able to join the high school teams as soon as I was old enough to decide for myself that that’s what I wanted to do.  The school was small enough that pretty much nobody got cut and I had enough raw athletic ability to hold my own.  So I played on my first baseball team, and faced my first hardball pitching, as a sixteen-year-old sophomore on the Green Mountain Union High School junior varsity team.  White uniforms with green pinstripes, as I recall, hand-me-downs of course from the varsity team when they went to their incredible, 1970s Oakland A’s look of solid green and gold uniforms.  To die for.  I played center field for the JV squad, because I could run fast and catch just about everything hit my way.  I had no clue about hitting, but I looked for the walks, scratched out a few hits, and bunted my way on from time to time, and stole a bunch of bases, too. 

      That was also the year the varsity made it all the way to the state championship game.  The team was in the playoffs regularly in those days, with a strong coach in John Ratti, and a core of good athletes who moved from soccer in the fall to basketball in the winter and baseball in the spring.  They got the tying run to third base in the championship game, with the winning run on first.  The runner on third got picked off to end the game.  Wayne “Nugget” Coolidge, descendant of Calvin Coolidge, a happy go lucky guy if ever there was one.  Except on that day.

The next year I moved up to the varsity and those wonderful uniforms.  What a thrill it was to walk out from the locker room across the long lawn behind the school, beneath the second and third-floor windows where you felt at least someone you knew was watching, up the first short incline to the track, along the soccer field and up the second incline to the baseball field, tucked up against the woods at the far end of the school property.  I was a reserve outfielder, not good enough to start, and so mostly what I did was practice hard and then on game days ride the bench until the last two innings, hoping for a close game, so that I would be called upon to pinch run for somebody.  I was fast, if nothing else, and ran the bases with all my heart, just the way you would run them if it was the one moment you got to play on a long afternoon, after a long bus ride to Manchester, or Woodstock, or Arlington. 

My senior year I started in left field, playing strong defense and hitting a little.  When I did hit the ball, I ran fast and with abandon, which at that level works more often than not, although I ran into my share of outs.  We had a good year, riding the arms of our ace, the junior southpaw Keith Larson, and our number two pitcher, Tom Parker, a burly right-hander.  Two good pitchers takes you pretty far in a league where you play just ten regular season games between the snow melt and the middle or so of May, when the playoffs start.  We made the playoffs that year, too.

The week before our first-round game, against the Waterbury team that had croaked us the year before, and perhaps the year before that, our shortshop, Jeff Westine, got kicked off the team because he had been seen smoking.  It seems almost ridiculous that you could get kicked off a high school baseball team for smoking a cigarette, but that’s how it was.  And I’m sure Coach Ratti, whom I respect more than any man I played any sport for, never hesitated in doing what he had to do.  Our backup shortstop was Tom Parker, who was scheduled to pitch that next game.  Coach Ratti asked me to give it a shot and so, with just one day to take ground balls and think about where I needed to be on all the throws, I played shortstop, of all things, in a state playoff game.  I caught one pop-up, fielded one ground ball and threw the guy out, and those, I’m pretty sure, were all the chances I had.  Oh yes, and I doubled down the left-field line off some big stud who threw harder than anybody we’d seen all year, and got thrown out ridiculously trying to stretch it to a triple.  I was so excited I just kept running until there was nowhere else to go.  And we won. 

In the semifinal game, with our ace on the mound, Parker back at short, and me back in left, we lost the proverbial heartbreaker.  I remember running after a long double down the line by one of their hitters late in the game, chasing it all the way to the outfield fence, running as fast as I good, with that rotten, bitter feeling you always have when you are chasing after a ball that goes past you in the outfield.  I had another hit that day, a solid single to left center, and then got thrown out trying, again ridiculously, to stretch it to a double.  These base-running mistakes were all of a kind; they were unthinking in the truest sense.  I hit the ball and I ran, and I kept running, out of sheer will to get to the next base.  I was oblivious of the odds of making it or not, and so I ran.  And learned the hard way.

Baseball in college had three distinct phases for me.  My freshman year, the team was not very good, made up of a bunch of average freshmen like me, some slightly better freshmen hitters like my roommate Robb, and Jim Willey, and a bunch of tired upperclassmen who were never that great to begin with and were worn out from losing all the time over the years.  A skinny, goofy center fielder who decided half-way through the season that he preferred Ultimate Frisbee.  A bearded, blond, first baseman with a beer league softball player’s physique, who smoked cigarettes and rounded up the poker games on our spring training trip to Florida.  A pitcher who had returned to school for his senior year after taking a four -year hiatus to do something else and figure out whether he wanted to finish college.  Rich Fields, the good-looking third baseman, who sang with Crash Davenport, the cool band on campus.  A decent ballplayer, but who was better at covering Crosby Stills and Nash than he was at covering third.  And so on. 

A few weeks into the season, two of our middle infielders were injured badly enough to miss the rest of the year.  So instead of being a back-up outfielder, I got to start most of the year at second base.  I made the easy plays and probably hit .200 at best, although I do remember a booming triple at Widener toward the end of the year.  My buddy Robb played short only because he had a better arm, not because he was an infielder, and set an NCAA record with seven errors in one game.  We stunk, but we had a good enough time traveling around the league, to Johns Hopkins, Ursinus, Haverford, Lehigh, Dickinson and all the rest. 

The next year, a bumper crop of freshman athletes arrived.  Many of them were recruited to play football, which they transformed from a perennial doormat to a Division III playoff team.  But they all played another sport, too, either baseball or lacrosse, usually, and, along with a handful of new baseball-specific recruits, the baseball team was immediately transformed.  I spent the next two years as a back-up outfielder, riding the bench, practicing hard, getting the occasional chance to play late in a one-sided game, especially for defense. 

I especially remember one spring training in Florida, competing with one of the football players for the starting job in left.  Tony Cianci, a strong, stocky kid, not very tall, with a strong bat and a strong arm, but he didn’t hit for a high average and he couldn’t cover nearly the ground I could in the outfield.  The coach, Ernie Prudente, who was really a football man masquerading as a baseball coach, loved him.  I caught every ball in spring training hit anywhere to left, long running catches over the shoulder, diving catches coming hard in behind the shortstop, sprinting catches in foul territory down the third base line.  And I hit the ball on the nose – but right at someone – in most of the ten chances, just ten chances, I had at the plate that week.  Oh for ten.  And that’s all the coach remembered all year.  “Gotta hit the ball,” he said.  Fucking Ernie.

So I rode the pine, as we say, watching my teammates win much more often than not, until my senior year, when Tony Cianci decided to concentrate on football in the off-season and I finally got the chance to start as an outfielder, as I felt I was meant to do.  I had a good defensive season, which I expected to do, even getting two assists in a game down in Florida.  And I hit a little bit – rollers and choppers through the infield, and a few line drives, scratching my way to a team-leading .300 average, all from the ninth spot in the order.  I had just one extra-base hit all season – one double down the line.  A lighter .300 season you will never see. 

But I had my turn, and made good with it in my eyes, given my limited experience and my lightweight physique.  I even have a game ball tucked away in the closet somewhere, from our one-run victory over Lebanon Valley in the season opener.  Three for three with the game-winning RBI, a sharp single to right with two outs in the bottom of the eighth to break a 3-3 tie.  Of course, as the go-ahead run was rounding third and heading for home, the right-fielder’s throw was cut off, and I was thrown out trying to reach second.  But it was glorious nonetheless, trotting back to the bench, dirty from the slide, batting helmet in hand, as my teammates shouted good things and we grabbed our mitts to go defend the field for the ninth.

What passes for a middling Division III baseball player can pass for a star in the shorter, quicker, easier game of softball.  For two summers in Washington, D.C., during college internships, I played with a team for the Center for Defense Information, where I worked my first internship.  The weekly games on the mall at the foot of the Washington Monument were by far the highlight of my week.  Running down balls in left, and later playing a mean shortstop, it was easy to impress the summer softball gangs, full of middle-aged men, wimpy college interns, lots of girls, and the occasional serious baseball wannabe or has-been.  

I took three years off from softball in Chicago, during law school, because there was nowhere to play in the downtown campus between Michigan Avenue and the lake.  But then during the two years I worked in Chicago, I played in two or three leagues each summer.  The serious Jenner & Block lawyers league entry that played way up on the northwest side of the city, playing left field again; the mostly Japanese team that KC’s cousins played on in the Skokie fast-pitch league, mostly playing first base of all things, because there were regulars everywhere else; and, for just one year, playing on a weeknight fast-pitch team out in Highland Park.

Back in Boston, I was relegated for years to nothing more than the relative wasteland of the slow-pitch law firm league.  Poor quality coed ball, with batting orders twenty names long.  It was not good softball, but it was good to get out in the evenings and at least have some semblance of a sporting life.

Finally, in my mid-30s, I got the chance to get back into semi-serious ball, an invitation to join a long-running Sunday morning pick-up game in Brookline.  A mostly Jewish crowd, some of whom have been playing in the same game for over twenty years.  Modified fast pitch, with real pitchers who can change speeds and hit their spots.  Good hitting and fielding, too.  As with most of my softball experiences, somebody with a longer stake in the game has shortstop nailed down, and so I play the outfield for a few weeks, until everyone gets a sense of my ability, and the shortstop makes the mistake of missing a week or two, and then a shortstop, for the most part, I become. 

This game has been a joy, not just because I have a chance to play the game competitively again, but also because I have finally learned to hit.  I’m not just reacting and swinging, but thinking about what the pitcher is trying to do and trying myself to execute a plan for each at-bat and doing a better job laying off the low pitches that I love but ground to shortstop or third too often.  I am also hitting with more power, driving more balls deep into the gap, or over the center fielder’s head, and even hitting the occasional true home run over the fence in left (two in one day, no less). 

So I am holding my own, still able in my early fifties to make the occasional diving stop at short or long running catch in the outfield.  Happy still to have some little part of the game.  Wondering how it might have gone if I had started playing real ball a bit earlier.  But thankful it started, and that it has quite finished yet.