In my younger days I was something of an athlete, a far cry from the “athletic supporter” I have since become. A man-child for all seasons, fall’s soccer cleats were quickly thrown in the garage for my Van Exel Reeboks to satiate winter’s hoop dreams, until finally I could wear my fresh Griffeys when baseball opening day arrived.
As much as Little League was supposed to build character, I don’t really remember it being very conducive to growth. God’s cruelest trick of childhood was the invention of the Police Athletic League. Pick 15 random kids from your third-grade class and chances are that one of them is really good at baseball, four or five not so bad at baseball, three or four who know the correct direction to run after getting hit by a pitch and five who will quit next season to do biology experiments in the after-school program.
Traditionally, and I’m talking back in 1991, Opening Day was something of a holiday around town. The streets were closed so all of the players could parade around town in oversized trucker hats and jerseys whose colors never corresponded to the professional team they were supposed to be, such as the forest green Camp Connection Braves. If you were lucky, or showed up early enough to make the banal requests, you’d become the fortunate bearer of the sponsor’s banner as the entire squad paraded their way to the opening game to watch you drop the one fly ball that was hit at you.
What I learned over time is that Little League is not supposed to be for self-growth, but for self-actualization. One realizes his lot in life pretty quickly on a Little League team. The one good kid on the team will be good at everything. He will have sex with more girls and with better-looking girls than you can imagine. And that’ll just be by eighth grade. These boys are your future artisans of janitorial studies or inanimate gastrointestinal sciences.
We had one kid in our league who was the only black kid in town, and he could hit the ball from Long Island to Connecticut if the wind was blowing out. An exceptional specimen who stood five-foot-seven at the age of 10, Tyrone was the closest I had ever come to watching Babe Ruth. I’m not sure if this says more about Tyrone or about the level of his competition, but the last I heard he was at Community College, his last baseball game long since played.
The four or five so-so guys will always be your friends. They’re not great at anything, but they want to have some fun. In college they’ll join frats so they can hide their lack of discernible skill sets and eventually find jobs in the middle of the corporate ladder.
This was usually where I fit in on most of my teams. I could hit pretty well and I made the All-Star team six straight years-I like to think it was on the strength of my catching prowess, not because my father was the coach. If I had not gone to a Jesuit school, I might have joined a fraternity. If I had stayed in the business school, I might have hopped on the middle rung of the corporate ladder. From what I’ve heard about my former teammates, however, my path is not the norm.
Those kids who know which way to run will probably be your bosses someday. They’re the pricks that take up golf to help make business deals. They are smart enough to learn how to play the game, to avoid standing-in every time someone else loses a game of Butts-Up.
When I was 10 years old, we had one of these kids on my team. He understood baseball, had watched baseball but somehow did not have the motor skills to play baseball. A short, unathletic boob, Joe was perfect to play third base. Anybody who hits the ball to third base is hitting it so hard that you could stick Brooks Robinson over there and at 60 feet leave him helpless.
It was the World Series (my third-straight, by the way), and in the fifth inning a frozen rope got smacked toward Joe at the hot corner. More out of practical methods of protection than a desire for the out, Joe stuck up his little mitt and held it there. Joe had no clue where the ball was, because his eyes were closed. Somehow, the ball found his mitt. He was so stunned that he couldn’t bring himself to step on the base and double-up the runner.
Finally, there was Chris Grabowski. Chris was about three-foot-nine until he left for college a few years ago. My father liked Chris because he showed up every day and tried his hardest to get a little better, and because his parents never accosted his coach after the game for sticking the tot in left field and making him bat twelfth.
In the last game of the season one year, Chris came up to bat against Tyrone, whom you have already met. Tyrone could have eaten Chris and I heard years later he that actually tried, dousing the kid in Tabasco and flipping him horizontal like a buffalo wing. On this day, however, Chris stepped to the plate confident that if he could somehow put the bat on the ball, the velocity of Tyrone’s pitch would send the ball rocketing toward the outfield.
Chris, with eyes like a doe and hands like a paint mixer, stepped into the box. I suspect it was for fun, but Tyrone hit the shrimp straight in the back with a fastball, dropping him to the dirt. If my father hadn’t picked him up so quickly, his tears would have turned the box to mud. As he trotted to first base, I thought to myself, “He’s gonna blow something up one day. Big.”
