Play Ball!

Knowing all that, for some reason, I’m beginning to have a need to see a game — to experience America’s pastime once more.

I was never much of a sportsman. It wasn’t for lack of trying. Being the fastest kid in the neighborhood, I tried out for the track team. The coaches had me pegged as a half-miler. In my first race, I shot out of the starting blocks like a shiny new Ferrari. On the first lap around the track I gained a huge lead which only increased as we rounded the second lap. By the third lap, I was so far ahead of the pack, the coaches were wondering if they had an Olympic candidate on their hands. But as we went into that final lap, that shiny new Ferrari not only ran out of gas, its engine blew up and all four tires fell off as I finished dead last barely crawling across the finish line.

I can’t count the number of hours I spent playing touch football in the front yard of my house, catching passes and dodging defenses, scoring touchdowns, so I went out for the football team. After five days of practice, all we did was an endless stream of calisthenics and blocking exercises. On the sixth day, after crashing into a tackling dummy until I could barely stand, a coach ran up to me, grabbed the face mask of my helmet, whipped my head around and got nose to nose with me. In a voice loud enough to puncture my eardrums he screamed, “My little sister could hit harder than that!”

I unstrapped my helmet, dropped it on the ground and said, “Then let your little sister play football for you,” and I walked off the field, ending any chance I might have had of one day becoming an All-American.

I tried wrestling, learning moves like the half-Nelson, the full-Nelson… the Ricky Nelson; it was all the same to me. Even with all the twists and turns of the sport, it left me flat…on my back.

On the tennis court, I thought I might serve up a good game. I had a great backhand, a powerful forehand. If only I could have kept the ball in the court. In the end, tennis was never a love match.

When it came to baseball my luck was no better. Maybe it just wasn’t my game, but my Dad was a baseball fan so I played on a Little League team for three years. My problem was fear…of flubbing a ground ball, dropping a pop fly, or even worse, getting clunked on the head by totally misjudging a catch. I started off on second base. After dropping a bunch of easy catches, I was moved to left field, then eventually to left out, warming the bench and finally striking out completely. Despite my total lack of skills on the field, it didn’t take away from the time my father and I would spend together sitting on the couch watching the Brooklyn Dodgers on TV trying, season after season, to bring home a pennant for us. Then one day, the Dodgers announced that the bums were leaving Ebbets Field in the rough and tumble Brooklyn neighborhood and were heading for some snooty California park called Chavez Ravine. We couldn’t believe it was true. It broke my heart…so bad, in fact, that I lost all interest in the game. Over the years, I’ve watched a couple of innings here and there, a World Series or two, but it was never same.

The funny thing is, now with the corona virus, there are questions about whether there will be much of a baseball season at all and just how long it will actually last. Knowing all that, for some reason, I’m beginning to have a need to see a game – to experience America’s pastime once more. I want to see a field of green grass, white bags at the end of the baselines, see the boys of summer playing out on that field again. Like Joni Mitchell said, “Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you got ‘til it’s gone.”

Like everyone else, I can’t wait until this pandemic ends. Until it does, we’ll just have to tough it out. But I will tell you this. When it’s over, when we finally come to terms with it, and things are normal again, and stadiums are filled with cheering fans, I’m going to take myself out to the ballgame. I’ll take me out to the crowd. I’ll buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jacks. I don’t care if I ever get back, and I’ll root, root, root for the home team. If they don’t win it’s a shame, for it’s one, two, three strikes you’re out at the old ball game. There’s a song in there somewhere. I hope it won’t be long before we’re all singing it again.