By: Jefferson Weaver
The redheaded kid named Robby had an aluminum bat, the first I ever saw.
I was the son of a traditionalist, and was proud of my Mickey Mantle Special, so the space-age silver bar held no fascination for me. It really didn’t make a difference for Robby; while he was an excellent pitcher, he just couldn’t hit the ball.
When he did hit the ball – or more often, when one of the other kids on our team tagged it with his bat – everyone heard a queer “tink” sound. Although metal bats were supposed to be the equalizer for ball players as Sam Colt’s revolvers were for men in general, you still had to hit the ball. After that, it was all math and science, with a good sprinkling of heart.
I thought of Robby a while back when I stopped at an intersection and heard that odd noise. A quick glance to one side revealed and man and two boys, one in his teens and the other maybe six, playing a little pepper in their front yard. The little fellow was wearing a team jersey and cap.
I was never an athlete; as I have noted before, I didn’t have the temperament for football, and was really too slow for basketball. Our school played soccer before soccer was cool, but I never really got into it. We had no football team, so when I got the pigskin bug, I had to play recreation ball. On the gridiron, I was crippled because I was tall, wide, and thick for my age, so I landed in the next age group. Those boys were serious about their football, and didn’t like a little kid nearly as big as they were, so I was a natural target. I left the team due to my failure to understand why I couldn’t hit them back, in a manner I saw as more effective, on my own terms.
On the basketball court, my size was advantageous. The coach used me as a second string center, and under the basket I could intimidate some of those same boys who whacked me around on the football field, but I was a slow and lousy netter.
In my last year (on JV) our basketball team made it to the state championships; we lost by one point in double-overtime. I was the only member of the team who never even scored that year – everyone else, even the sole “third stringer,” was in double-digits. I did have more blocks and assists than anyone else, since all I had to do was loom over my rivals.
My heart, however, was in baseball.
My brother Mike and my dad were baseball fanatics. Papa had coached semi-pro ball, and sent some of his players up to the big leagues, back with the original Washington Senators. Knocking the ball around the side yard, or on the “diamond” he made in the huge backyard on Divine Street – those were things the Old Man and Brother Mike could always find time for.
I grew up on stories of Babe Ruth and the DiMaggios, Sandy Colfax and even Shoeless Joe Jackson. The Old Man openly cursed the designated hitter rule (but not the player) when Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s record. We drove around on Sunday afternoons looking for games on hard-packed dirt fields behind country stores. The Old Man was at his happiest watching the Durham Bulls, the old Fayetteville Generals, and legion ball – teams where he said people still loved the game, and hadn’t begun to love the money.
Papa had an antique five-fingered mitt with much of the padding gone from the palm; I was teased unmercifully when I used it, and coaches hissed and muttered about whether it was legal, but it was “luckier” than my own more conventional ball glove. Still, it wasn’t enough.
I tried. Heavens I tried, but I was never an athlete. I wanted desperately to make Papa proud (I didn’t know, of course, that I already did). Even when I lost some of the fat that made me a slowmover on the football field and basketball court, I still had a hard time beating the ball around the bases. The Old Man taught me to be a long-ball hitter, and by the time my baseball career was ending, I had the satisfaction of watching some teams move backward in the outfield when I went to the plate.
It is with a shameful amount of pride I remember putting a line drive through the left field fence, punching a hole through the plywood sign advertising a barber shop. Of course, the fence was rotten, and the field wasn’t regulation, but that didn’t matter.
We had very few angry parent-fans when I was playing ball; certainly nothing like the horror stories that today make the evening news and on occasion, the crime page. Our parents policed themselves, for the most part, although they weren’t above razzing an umpire for a bad call.
Even for a rotund little kid who was too slow to run the bases, baseball was the dream when I was a kid. Any kid walking down a summer street in an orange jersey, spikes grinding against the sidewalk, might be the next Ty Cobb or Aaron or pre-scandal Pete Rose or another Johnny Bench, or at least one of the lesser heroes who grew up playing Mill Ball in the ‘30s, and were recruited with little fanfare, right off the weaving floor with lint still in their hair, or their hands still sticky with tobacco gum.
While I don’t know how it is today, the teams tended to dwindle as we moved into junior high and high school, much like the brackets shrink as the summer turns to early autumn, and the Major League ballparks show people wearing outfits that wouldn’t be out of place at a football game. I simply couldn’t keep up with the better players, but I had fallen deeply in love with the outdoors, so I didn’t miss baseball that much. The Old Man was saddened, I think, but we still tossed the ball together. We still spent as much of our time fishing as work would allow. Someone put a gun in my hand and taught me to shoot, and others taught me to hunt, so the ball gloves and bats gathered dust in the closet, then the attic.
I hope the little slugger I saw the other day can run fast; what little I saw, he could catch the ball. I didn’t see him in a turn at-bat, but I hope, above all else, he keeps a love of the game, and remembers that first and foremost, in baseball as in life, he just has to be able to hit the ball – after that, it’s all math, science and heart.
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