Beisboll Been Belly Belly Bad to Norton

Posted on August 17, 2002 in Childhood Crosstalk

Karen Zipdrive’s furious about the baseball strike. I wrote:

What? Another strike? They resolved the last one?

On a more serious note: I think the privitization of municipal sports is just another example of things being out of control. Think how much less players might demand if they were employees of the cities for which they played and had national health coverage?

Oh dear. I’m talking like a progressive again….how dare I attack the sacred cow of the so-called free market!

To tell the truth, I don’t even know the names of most of the positions and can not definitively put an X on a diamond to show where the short stop is supposed to stand. (In front of or behind second base?) I wanted to join Little League when I was of that age, but my father would not allow it. And so I was denied participation in the one activity universal to boys of my age. I chose not to care.

I was a baseball disaster, the proverbial last kid to be chosen for a team. I had my one day of glory which was the first time I played at a new school in the fifth grade. This brat named John who spent the rest of his career in San Bernardino public schools hating my guts pitched. With the first swing, I pounded the ball out into the outfield. A good solid shot. Kids screamed “keep going! keep going!” Got to third base and they shouted stopped. I didn’t. I remember John running furiously at me, his blonde hair flying. He tagged me out. The next time I played I couldn’t hit the ball worth shit. Never could to tell the truth. I had no idea where the magical power to bring the bat to the ball came from. I just know that I couldn’t do it again.

Two guys tried to teach me to play ball in the sixth grade with some marginal success. They dragged me out to the field and threw pitch after pitch to me, improving my batting and catching skills marginally. I don’t remember my father ever playing catch with me and my brother, who was six years older than me, regarded it as yet another of those dismal chores he had to pull around the house. We owned a baseball bat, a glove, and a softball. They were Robbie’s and, in time like his shirts and pants, were duly passed down to me. I left them in the garage where they mouldered.

I am not sure why I never took to baseball. Perhaps one thing is that I am not a “team player” in the sense that I don’t like filling a stale role. Sports may be for the simple-minded, those folks who just want to do one thing and do it right. It could be that I harbored fear of the bat from the time when my brother broke my arm with his when I was five years old. But I honestly don’t remember the dread. He programmed me to remember that I’d fallen on the sidewalk, an excuse I rehearsed so well that I believed it. (I do believe in implanted memories.) Later, when he was in his thirties, he told me that he’d finally confessed to Mom that he’d broken my arm with his baseball bat. I had to think back to what we were doing that afternoon. Playing some game based on The Sword in the Stone, which was in theaters then as I recall. We imagined that we were changing into different animals like Merlin does in the scene where he faces the evil witch. (There was no evil witch in T. H. White’s book, but Disney put one there anyways — the classic Disney formula that we all have come to know and love ever since Snow White.) I don’t know who was Merlin and who was the witch. Maybe I was Arthur. Robbie had the bat in his hand. I think it might have been his magic wand. I recall something about my changing into a gazelle so his lion couldn’t catch me. It was after that that the accident happened. He persuaded me to make up a story on the spot and showed me the exact concrete square that I was to alledge that I had fallen on. The doctors had problems finding the crack. It didn’t turn up until a second x-ray. Between x-rays, my father whined that my mother was making me a cripple. But I never associated the bat with that. It just withered and turned gray among the rakes and the shovels simply because I wasn’t interested.

When I got into the later grades, kids tagged me with the term “uncoordinated”, one of those clinical terms like “mentally retarded” or “handicapped” that are supposed to have neutral connotations suitable for home, school, clinic, and office, but which become a heated knife in the hands of seasoned taunters. I might have just given them the finger and revelled in my lack of ability in sports. I found my competitive edge in speech and debate. I wasn’t the best at those — my voice was the voice of a frog — but I did well enough in overcoming the sting of the taunts that kids made about my nasal voice to go to California State Speech Finals twice and silence them.

It could be that I chose not to be in sports simply because the teasing that my brother and parents extended to me also extended to my friends. If I played team sports, kids would come knocking at my door on odd afternoons. One of two things would happen: either my brother would mock them or my parents would enlist them as part of the crew that they formed for the purpose of belittling me. I didn’t have to bring my friends from speech home. You don’t get together on a whim to have a pick up speech tournament after all. I thus protected myself from the harm that my family was so good at dishing out. If no friends came by, they had no one to attack or to use against me.

I know, things could have been worse. I could have had some kid swing a bat into my head and broken my skull. Or I could have seen someone get hit in the chest with the ball and die instantly, the victim of a heart attack. My reasons for not caring about baseball seem quite trivial in comparison. I know it’s not worth crying about. So I don’t. I just ignore the game. When I see the Angels on television, I look maybe once and then go on with my shopping or my dinner. The title of this article lies: Baseball hasn’t been either good or bad to me. It’s just had no place in my life as either a participant or as a spectator.