Baseball Memories

I recently wrote an essay for Sensible Medicine about my memories of the Brockton VA Hospital. As I was writing that, I got to thinking about baseball memories, so here is a companion piece.

I am hesitant to share essays that are mostly a list of memories. I know that great memoirs can make readers nostalgic for experiences they never had; a feeling sometimes referred to as anemoia. There’s no way I am a good enough writer to achieve this, but when I recall my years on baseball fields, I am certainly nostalgic.

Falling in Love

As an only child, I’d have been better off falling in love with something like running or swimming, something I could have mastered on my own. Maybe baseball was productive because it made me find someone else to pitch to or have a catch with, thus getting me out of my shell of shyness. The kid who loves baseball but doesn’t have a constant playmate does master a couple of skills.

Besides buying me a constant stream of baseballs, my father also bought me a pitchback. It’s a bit shocking to think about how much time I spent throwing a ball at this spring-loaded net. It’s equally shocking to remember the joy I got from the activity. My time with the pitchback did nurture a skill, one that was my most reliable -- from middle school baseball prowess to college baseball dwindling -- control, as in throwing accuracy. If I missed the pitchback, I often had to chase the ball down a hill.

The other skill I mastered was hitting fungos, tossing the ball up with one hand, grabbing the bat with two hands, and then hitting the ball. This skill launched me into the next phase of my baseball career. The spring before my first summer at camp, I joined some friends on the Great Lawn in Central Park. Many of the other kids would be heading to camp with me. They were as good or better than I was at baseball, but on this day, we decided one person would hit fungos to the other kids in the field. My well-honed superpower gained me respect far beyond what was due.

Baseball Friends

Once summer camp began, I was freed from trying to make baseball into a type of solitaire. I landed in a bunk of other baseball-obsessed boys (5 Jons/Johns and 3 Adams), and counselors who either tolerated or nurtured our obsession.

I always think that pop culture disrespects male friendship. “Men only talk when they are distracted by activities”, they say. Not true. But having shared activities certainly laid the foundation for 50 years of friendship. There were two groups of bunks, Braves for the 6–11-year-olds and Warriors for the 12-15-year-olds -- it was a time before such monikers were considered neither offensive nor appropriative. The bunks were arranged around an open lawn. During free time, we had endless catches. At first, we just honed our skills. In later years, we practiced double plays and cut-offs. Decades later, watching my daughter’s ballet classes, I realized how similar learning dance and baseball are. You repeat moves until you have schooled your substantia nigra with the muscle memory.

We also threw as hard as we could, hoping to throw a ball through someone’s webbing or cause someone to cry out in pain.

A few counselors proved to be amazing coaches, role models, and a reminder of how we’d never be pros. Doug had played semi-pro ball. We were in awe when he took infield practice with us one day. His throws from third had no arc and hissed as they crossed the field. His friend, whom I only remember as Brillo (he had curly hair), spent the very last morning of camp teaching me to throw a curveball.

Middle school baseball didn’t only happen at camp. Weekends in Brewster saw a parade of visiting friends, and as adolescent boys left alone are always trouble, we saw to it that we mucked with the purity of our national pastime. There were whiffle ball games in which the plastic ball was replaced by a densely packed aluminum foil sphere coated with masking tape. One weekend, A and I moved a dozen 4X8-foot plywood planks outside to create an outfield wall against which we could craft catches worthy of rebroadcast on This Week in Baseball.

Then there was the shrine. An old chlorine barrel, lined with a black garbage bag, and filled with retired baseball equipment: Gloves, balls, broken bats, and old batting gloves. It was buried with its own tombstone. Sarah and I got married at the Brewster house over a decade after we entombed the equipment. Someone suggested that we exhume the shrine during the wedding. It took an impressive degree of maturity and a reference to the Howard Carter curse to prevent our wedding from devolving into a tomb raid.

Glory Days

High school baseball expanded the clutch of friends who played. My memories of individual at-bats, fielding plays, and practices are impossibly vivid. It makes me understand Springsteen’s Glory Days a little too well. I can picture my three senior home runs perfectly: straight center field at Fieldston, deep right at Dwight-Englewood, and a long fly ball over the fence at Woodmere Academy. I can also remember P’s homer over a wall at a field in Riverside Park, and J’s hit to the warning track at Shea Stadium, where we played a playoff game. And then there are more pedestrian memories, like marveling at our coach’s transcendent knuckleball and timing the interval between planes flying over our Randle Island field on their flight path to Laguardia.

The End

I am pretty sure my best performance on the Haverford College baseball field occurred during infield practice on the first day of fall ball, my freshman year. (I always liked fielding better than hitting, and I always like practice better than games.) From that day forward, I got a little worse at the game and a little less invested in it every day. When I called it quits during the fall season of my junior year, it was already too late.

I still loved baseball. The summer before my “retirement,” I took a physics class at Bryn Mawr College. Every day after class, I would stop at the library, grab that day’s paper, and marvel at the previous day’s exploits of Don Mattingly. The season was a bit of a come down from ’85 and ’86, but he did hit .327 with a .937 OPS. Sarah, who was also taking physics that summer, tolerated me telling her about his accomplishments.

What finally ended my so-called career was that I wasn’t having any fun on the field. Other interests made practice seem like an intrusion, and I didn’t like my teammates. For the previous decade, baseball had meant spending time with my closest friends. When the new guy joined the team in 7^th grade, he was just folded into the group. At college, except for my roommate, my closest friends had nothing to do with baseball. To some extent, I probably disliked my teammates because they weren’t measuring up to my previous ones. I like to think I wasn’t the best version of myself for not appreciating the other players for who they were.

The Present

I still read at least one baseball book every year. I still listen to Cubs’ games most summer nights. I go to a few games at Wrigley every summer. I love having catches, especially with kids or my old teammates.

Oh, and many of my former teammates remain among my closest friends.