by Bat Fastard
Tuesday, April 15, 2003
"Somebody please take over for the old fat guy behind home plate!" wheezed the old fat guy behind home plate. He'd been catching BP for his kid's Little League team for maybe half an hour. You could see the panic in his eyes when the coach asked him to do it. And as he "caught" (which is to say "chased foul tips"),he'd squat, stand, squat, stick one leg out, kneel, steady himself with his bare hand, squat, stick the other leg out... well, at least he didn't sit down.
Somehow his plaintive cry found a taker: a younger, less pathetic-kneed guy, for whom the old fat guy took over in the outfield, in the ever-important position of "shadow." I know all about being the shadow. For one thing, I know what evil lurks in the hearts of men -- it's called "T-ball" -- but for another, even in Farms, the level up from T-ball, you gotta keep after the kids to pay attention. That's what the shadow is supposed to do. The battle is uphill, however.
During yesterday's game, the first of the season, the Pirates played the Diamondbacks. The old fat guy's kid is a Pirate this year. (The Diamondbacks seem to be run by a bunch of nice fellas, but they're the Diamondbacks, so we hate them.) One little yard-ape stood in center field, spinning like a top. The right fielder was staring in a direction that suggested nonreadiness in terms of being able to either field or avoid traveling baseballs. The left fielder looked toward the plate, in a "kind of ready" position.
The old fat guy (OFG) had to justify his function. What, indeed, would a grown man be doing out there with a bunch of seven- to nine-year-olds, looking like an outfielder? (Well, sort of.) So periodically he'd bark, "On your toes, Alex!" "Okay, guys, know where the ball is!" "Hey Adam, get in your Ready Position!"
"Ready Position" is a favored term among the coaches (of which OFG isn't one; he just helps out). That's what they yell during infield and batting practice right before they smack the ball toward an unaware little nit. The head coach's son also yells it a lot, at random: "ReadyposiSHON!" You can tell how much OFG loves that -- you can hear him cringe. You can see him wince, too, when he uses the phrase "Ready Position." He also tells them, "Look, if you're not going to be ready, at least look ready." That works almost as well as, "If you can't sing good, sing loud."
Baseball for the Farms teams, like T-ball, doesn't require the presence of umpires. It doesn't require field prep, since the kids certainly don't care. About the only things Farms-level baseball requires are a baseball, a bat, and protective headgear. Gloves are unnecessary and even hinder play. Cleats make the kids' feet hurt. Caps wind up in the mud anyway.
The kids care about their uniforms, though (mostly because they're really costumes), and thankfully the Pirates jersey is reasonably cool, a step up from the standard T-ball jerseys involving colored sleeves, the team name on the front, and the number on the back. Well, okay, the Pirates jersey has all those things (except the colored sleeves), but it's gray and looks more like a BP uniform than a Little League shirt. Still, though, the little ding-a-lings wear those asinine white socks with a black stripe up the side. Someone somewhere decided that trying to get kids to use stirrup socks was a lost cause.
The talent at this level doesn't seem to be up significantly from T-ball. Some of the players, even the older ones, are just as skill-free as the T-ballers, but others can do everything you could expect from, say, an eight-year-old: catch, throw, hit, and run.
What they can't do, for the most part, is get over that fear of being hit by the ball. And they all get hit, in various spots, especially around the head. And it always hurts. And then they're even more afraid. "You'd like to see them go, 'Huh. That wasn't so bad,' and then be a little less scared," OFG tells me, "but it doesn't work that way. One day it will, but not now."
OFG relates his own story, which involves breaking his nose on a popup at age 11: "Not too embarrassing. Best part is that when the center fielder came over to yell at me, I bled all over him. Still, I felt like an idiot about that for years, since on a good day my peers took delight in magnifying my moments of ineptitude. I realize it could happen to anyone, but my life would have been no less full if it hadn't happened to me."
It hurt at first, he says, but the pain was less intense than the reaction to the sight of all that blood coming out of him, and especially the embarrassment -- he was, after all, old enough and well-practiced enough to make that play a hundred times out of a hundred without putting too much thought into it, and he still doesn't know how it happened. "All I can think of is, I must have moved my glove away. My dad had already recorded the out in the scorebook; next thing he knows, I'm a human blood fountain." He has been teased about this incident now and again in the intervening 31 years, though he's pretty sure he's long past the embarrassment and, certainly, the physical pain. He knows it hurts to break your nose, but the sight of a popup doesn't fill him with panic.
It did, though -- for maybe a year or two after the incident. Even now it crosses his mind as the ball descends toward him, but that's reflex, not fear. "When I see a kid who's obviously afraid of the ball, I ask if he's afraid of the ball. Or she -- there's one girl on the team. She said yes right away; the boys pretend to be tough. I tell 'em about my nose, and the fact that, yeah, it was bad at the time, but there's no obvious lasting damage, no misshapenness, no imprint of the stitches on my face, and that after a while you forget to be afraid. You have to forget, because you're concentrating on the ball, on the task at hand.
"I haven't talked to the coach about this, but I sure wish I knew how to get them past that fear, especially when they don't even really know what they're afraid of. I really with the coach would take this on."
Meanwhile, like the rest of the grownups, OFG tries to encourage the little goofballs, especially his own, cheering them when they do anything remotely right. They even get cheered when they drop the ball, because at least they got a glove on it. OFG's used to it, he says, from the lad's T-ball days. That was three years ago, though, and the kid hadn't played "organized" ball since, so while his "skills" didn't erode, they also didn't increase beyond what you'd expect for a kid who'd aged three years without playing much ball. "He can sort of catch," OFG says, "but usually I have to place the throw right on the money, which is a task because I'm as scatter-armed as he is (and he lets me know it). And 'right on the money' means 'about a foot to the left of his chest,' because if I throw it right at him, he sidesteps it -- and if it's heading for his face, I get antsy. He's getting less afraid of the ball, but he's still not that interested in actually going after it. What I can't get him to do, though, is throw the ball with any oomph. He says he's throwing as hard as he can, but you can see that that can't possibly be true. Also, lately he says he's afraid of hurting someone -- but Right now a flying moth could knock his throws off course." (OFG says, too, that the kid's eyesight has become a problem, but so's money, so they can't get his eyes checked yet. But this might explain why the kid's having trouble catching and hitting. I'd pay for it myself, but that's the money I set aside for Li'l Debbie cakes and Yoo-hoo.)
OFG is mildly surprised that the kids rarely hustle. "My kid's got no compunction about running indoors at home; why won't he run on the field?" he says. I wonder about this too, because hustle was pretty much beaten into our heads back when we played ball. You don't walk on a ballfield. You at least put up a front of trotting. For the most part, though, these kids don't, and it's up to the grownups to set an example and not just yell, "Hustle in, hustle out!" So OFG, between innings, forces himself to lope to and from the outfield -- an action which, just by itself, brings on the shinsplints after two or three reps.
"By the time I get home," he says, "I'm miserable. I'm dirty and sweaty, which is to be expected, but I ache from the waist down. Also from the waist up. Oh, and my waste aches, too."
This is to be expected, OFG is sure, when you're 42, could stand to drop a good 30 pounds, rarely exercise, and possess a "hearty" appetite. I'm not proud of my own physique, but it's pretty much always been my physique; OFG says he used to be a skinny Minnie. (Well, he doesn't say so in those exact words.)
"My favorite 'playing weight' was 155," OFG reminisces. "I was about 22. Never 'sculpted,' but very comfortable with the shape I was in. If anything ever hurt, it was my arm from airing out throws from center field, but mostly I felt fine. Not long after that came a bunch of office jobs. Now, I happen to like sitting down, and I even like using a computer, but that has a way of working against one's physique. Plus eating too much and not exercising, I mean."
Nowadays, OFG doesn't want to be anywhere near a scale, but he knows he weighs more than he ever thought possible. He says most of the excess is concentrated in his gut -- "And I don't even drink, so I can't use beer as an excuse. I dread looking in the mirror, and I'm a little bored with the grief I get from well-meaning loved ones. I appreciate the sentiment, but, well, I am in fact aware of how I look. I'm not proud. Luckily, I make up for it with my stunning personality."
More than the weight and the gut, though, it's being out of playing shape and out of practice that bugs OFG the most. "Your legs shouldn't hurt from a 40-yard trot to the outfield. Your feet shouldn't ache from standing on them and moving around for two hours. Know what else is unfair? Remember all those plays you knew you could make in your teens and twenties? My brain is still conditioned to believe I can do it, but various body parts keep going, 'Um, wait a second, you want us to what?'
"I used to play softball all the time, but now I find myself playing about once a century. I wind up in the outfield, thinking I can still handle it -- and knowing that my reflexes aren't fast enough for the infield anymore. The shinsplints kick in around the third inning; the back pain hits in about the fifth. I feel my thighs starting to go after reaching base once or twice. Still, one time, after eight sedentary years, I played a game in which I homered twice, including the game-winner. I swear. I felt pretty good about that, mainly 'cause I tried not to think of all the outfield misplays, most of which happened as the result of my body saying, 'Yeah, right. Tell you what: let's miss the ball instead, and maybe fall down a couple times. Then we'll grab the ball the heave a 30-hopper toward one of the baserunners, okay?' It's shameful."
Nowadays OFG drops the ball plenty during Little League practice -- probably more than when he actually played in Little League. He finds it easier on his psyche to blame the glove. "The arm, though, is what gets to me. For years I've had this Mike Ivie/Steve Sax thing going, where I have trouble simply throwing the ball in a normal way. I became so scatter-armed at one point that I must have started 'pulling back' on my throws, like pulling a punch, which results in even worse throws than if I just let it fly. And it's hard to correct that if you're playing catch with a bunch of eight- and nine-year-olds."
So why does OFG participate? Partly because his son enjoys having him there (though there are times OFG wonders if the kid wouldn't do better if his old man weren't there), partly because he does want to have a hand in the boy's enjoyment of baseball, and partly because it cost $120 to sign him up, but you get $25 back after the season if you help out enough. "Also," says OFG, "I tell the coach that I'm hoping that if I grab enough bats and shag enough fly balls, maybe he'll finally let me get in the game. I could dominate this league!"
This is Bat Fastard's first piece for EEEEEE! He insists on not having an author bio.