In my younger days, this was one of the times of the year I looked forward to the most. The days were getting longer, which meant more time outside, but what made it particularly great was that it was also time for baseball. As far as organized sports, baseball was the only one I participated in before my senior year in high school. It seemed like every male child was on a baseball team in those days.
Even before the season started, I was practicing as much as possible. That meant playing catch with anyone willing and finding ways to practice alone. Of course, that meant throwing the ball up in the air and hitting it – basically pitching to yourself. You could also throw the ball as straight up as possible to simulate fly balls. I can also remember throwing the ball on top of the house and catching it when it rolled off (we didn’t have gutters, so it worked).
The season started with a parade that ran through the McDonough square down to the ball field at Alexander Park. After the parade, the atmosphere at the park was as good as it gets. It even smelled good – the magical combination of sweet Georgia clay, fresh-cut grass, hamburgers and hot dogs cooking on the grill, and bubble gum.
Our uniforms weren’t always the best, as they may have been used for years, but we didn’t mind. We were glad to have them and were ready to play games that counted. Everybody was undefeated at the first of the year, and there was the chance to be a champion. As best as I can remember, there were only four teams in 2-year age groups, so it wasn’t like ‘winning it all’ was impossible for any of us.
When I first started at the age of six, I was a decent player. There was no tee ball at the time, so you didn’t play until you were old enough to hit pitched balls. I usually played catcher in those days. It wasn’t complicated as the pitchers only had one pitch. I did learn a couple of things that appealed to my devious side. One was framing pitches to make them look like strikes even when they weren’t. But the other was the opportunity to torment your opponent and even the umpire if you were careful. There was a choir of constant ‘chatter’ when you were batting, and it was easy to ignore, but the catcher was right there with you and much harder to ignore. Saying something like “just throw a strike, this kid isn’t going to swing at anything” could get the bat moving. You might even get the umpire thinking with a comment like “great pitch, throw me another one just like that” when it was called a ball.
As the years went by and the kids got bigger, faster, stronger, and better, I didn’t. I moved from catcher to second base and then to the outfield. I was still playing and could make decent plays on a good day, but it was apparent that Little League would be the end of the line for me. As Clint Eastwood’s character Harry Callahan famously said, “A man’s got to know his limitations.”
So, I wasn’t playing organized baseball anymore. However, we still played some at home, and we even created a baseball variant we called tennisball, which I think I probably played until I got married. I discovered I didn’t necessarily have to be playing baseball to love it.
Sitting here now, it strikes me that anytime I’m writing about sports, I have to admit being not very good. I don’t know that everyone will get their 15 fifteen minutes of fame, but I’ll share a time when I got maybe 15 seconds worth. When I went away to Reinhardt college, I joined a tiny fraternity, the smallest one on campus. One of the things we did was play intramural sports, and since there were so few of us, just about everybody had to play to field a softball team. The intramural softball field was fascinating. It was a beautiful grass field that was much bigger than it needed to be. It was primarily flat within the dimensions of a standard softball field, but if you could drive the ball through a gap, it could catch the downhill and roll for probably six or seven hundred feet – there was no back fence. So, I’m as skinny as a rail, maybe weighed 120. When I come up to bat, the outfielders move in because they know I could not possibly have any power. But I jump on the first pitch, and I hit it solid. It isn’t going to hit a gap because I hit it right at a guy, but he was in too far, and it got over his head. I’m running as fast as I can around the bases. When I round second, the guy coaching third is waving me on. I cross home plate, and I think the ball was still rolling. It was my only home run of the season, but the outfielders didn’t come in when I came up to bat after that.
“Every day is a new opportunity. You can build on yesterday’s success or put its failures behind and start over again. That’s the way life is, with a new game every day, and that’s the way baseball is.”
– Bob Feller