The Past Time Involving the Pastime: Later Baseball Years

by Chris McGinty of AccordingToWhim.com

I figure that three posts about playing baseball as a kid are good enough to get most of my memories down. In the first post, I talked about tee ball and trying to kill my brother. In the second post, I talked about pitching, and almost taking a line drive to my nuts. In some ways, this post may be a letdown.

When the pitcher position changed over from pitching to your own team to practice accuracy to pitching to the other team and actually trying to strike someone out, I just didn’t have the new skills needed. I was still a pretty good player, though I was starting to make my way down the list of top players.

I spent some time in the infield playing all four positions. I think they put me as catcher in a couple of practices, but I don’t believe I ever played the position in a real game. At one point, I was on first base. This was perhaps an odd position for me, because the thing I was good at was throwing. I could throw far. I could throw accurately. First base doesn’t have a lot of throwing going on.

Chris is on third. Right. I don't throw. First base.

One game, our dugout was right next to first base. The batter got struck out, and I ran to the dugout. It was three outs after all. Or so I thought. It was actually two outs. The nice thing about being pretty much anywhere else is that you can see when your teammates are running in. When you’re right next to the dugout, you don’t see that you’re the only fool running in. My coach was standing there and said, “That was two outs. Where are you going?” I responded, “To the races.” It was a Marx Brothers reference. It was all I had in that moment.

At some point, maybe even during another year of baseball, I was demoted to the outfield. They gave me a good reason, which is that I was a fast runner, and had a good arm. These are both traits you need in the outfield, but I somewhat hated outfield. I got bored easily, and outfield can be boring. It was a lot of standing around hoping that the inning would end soon, so you could go watch your team bat. There aren’t a lot of power hitters in little league, so while you occasionally got to catch a fly ball, you mostly only got to do something when an infielder missed a catch.

One day, I was out in centerfield and exactly that happened. The batter hit the ball just high enough that it went over the second baseman’s head, but low enough that I had no chance of catching it and getting the batter out. The runner on second base clearly saw this, because as I snagged the ball up I saw that he was running full speed at third base. Their coach was waving him home, so they were seriously sure that that was the break they needed. What we were taught was to use a cut-off player. Throw to second base or the short stop, and they’ll throw to home. In a very instantaneous thought, I realized that the reason I was in centerfield was that I threw far and had good accuracy, and the batter wasn’t going to try for second base since I’d already snagged up the ball. I threw to home…

I’ll get back to that story in a minute. I need to tell you about another time I screwed up. It involves me getting into a fight I didn’t win. So far all the stories I’ve told took place when I was still living in California. My dad was in the Air Force, and we moved a lot. We ended up in the Fort Worth area, and we moved into a rental house in Azle, Texas. If you go back and look at my little league pictures, you’ll see that I already was wearing my hair long by choice. I wanted to look like Luke Skywalker. I mean, who didn’t?

I don’t want to get too much into the realm of “back in my day,” but seriously. There be a lot of young uns these days that think that the older generation is a bunch of bigoted assholes. You have no idea how wrong you are. We’re nothing compared to what we grew up with. California was a bit more progressive, so no one thought anything about my long hair. Azle Jr. High started my first day in class sending me to the principal’s office to explain why I was going to have to cut my hair. Little boys don’t need to look like little girls, don’t ya know.

This also put me on the radar of those who wanted to size me up. Some of these guys were assholes who would never give me a chance to be friends with them. This is probably a good thing in retrospect. There was this kid named Travis. He started out by picking a fight with me in class, and then following up after class. It had been so long since I’d been bested in a fight that as he threw me against a locker I was really glad that there was a teacher nearby. Except that the asshole teacher disciplined both of us. I really didn’t do anything except swing my book at Travis to get him to back off, and then get thrown against a locker. So my first day at a new school, I was told I couldn’t wear my hair long, and got in trouble for fighting.

The weird thing is that Travis basically warmed up to me after that, but I avoided him. He wasn’t the misunderstood bully with the heart of gold. He had a fucked up life, as I came to find out, but at least as of the last time that I saw him, he was going down a bad path. I hope things went well for him, but I suspect that like many of us, he had to make some mistakes first. The last time I saw him, he asked me if I knew where to get weed. The second to the last time I saw him was when my baseball team played his team.

I was still centerfield. I was also pretty irritated that Travis was playing baseball. I didn’t like him. He hadn’t tried to beat me up again, and he was basically pleasant the few times we briefly spoke. I still didn’t like him. In the little victory department, he came up to bat in the seventh inning, and he hit a homerun. Well, it would have been a home run except that I played deep. It was easier to run in than to back up. I backed up a few steps and snagged the ball before it went over the fence. It was super casual. I didn’t even have to jump, because they were short fences. It’s the little revenges, I guess. Sorry, Travis. If it makes you feel any better, you really hit that ball. My hand hurt the rest of that game from catching that hit.

Anyway, let me finish up the story where I broke protocol and threw home rather than to second base. My coach didn’t end up being mad at me for screwing up the rules for using a cut-off, because he realized after all was said and done that the other team needed that run. Like I said, it was a break they needed. You have someone on second base with little chance of getting him home this inning, and the batter hits that sweet spot where the infield can’t do anything and the outfield has to work for it.

I wish I could say that I knew the ball might go wild at the moment that I threw it, but I was so sure that I could throw far and accurately. I mean, I’d been playing for years at that point, and I really wasn’t that bad of a player. How likely was it really that I would end up throwing the ball into the dugout rather than to the catcher? Luckily, that didn’t happen. The ball sailed over the surprised second baseman, and continued sailing over the pitcher’s head. It bounced once. The catcher caught it high, then swung it low, and tagged out the runner. That was the only time I broke protocol like that, but it turned out to be the right choice.

I played baseball into my teen years, but the other players started getting better while I was staying about the same. To make matters worse, for some reason the last season I played, I became afraid of getting hit by the ball when I was at bat. I was hitting just fine in practice, but something about the other team pitching was getting to me. I only hit one ball during that last season. The screwed up part was that it was a good solid hit. I never even got hit by the ball. I think it might have been better for me if I had. It would have shown me that it wouldn’t be that big of a deal. Or it would have broken my arm. You never know.

Chris McGinty is a blogger who never wanted to make the big time playing baseball. And in that way, he succeeded.