Truth on the Baseball Field

Let me say at the start that I believe in baseball. Sandlot baseball is a testament to democracy and the training ground for life.  It provided the thing I most needed as I became an adult: competence. Without competence, confidence is always lacking and what better way to instill confidence in a boy than putting him on a field where all the other boys use the same equipment, a bat, a ball, and a glove. I am not certain why few girls showed up for sandlot ball game. Maybe in my generation their mothers did not like the idea. I just do not know, but they missed a great learning experience.

     In my time as a boy, someone on the team at bat would loan you their glove until he returned to the field, so not every boy had to own a glove. Or, a ball. Somebody always had a ball. Even if it was one with the cover knocked off and was covered in sticky black friction tape. It did not matter that much. We all played with the same ball. And, often we shared a common bat, a cracked and taped one at that. Again, no matter, we all hit with the same bat, played with the same ball. No excuses.

    We often worked out our own rules to fit the circumstances.  Oh, we knew the real rules. We had been to baseball games. The major league games were on the radio. And, there were games on TV. Many of us played Little League or Babe Ruth Leagiue baseball. But those were only in the summer. We played ball year round.

Still, making up the rules was necessary to cover lots of situations. For example, there were never eighteen boys to create regulation nine-man teams. You chose a captain, often the oldest or best player for each team, and each captain took turns choosing his teammates from those not yet chosen. It worked out because the older boys were often better players, and there was still room on the squad for the younger ones, even if they were only good for chasing down foul balls. And, older boys were pretty good about giving skill lessons. Besides, imitation is the greatest teacher. Watch and learn.

     This was before school grounds were locked behind gates. There were public parks with baseball fields, and open fields that neighbors kept mowed for their kids to play in. Every elementary school had a ball field. Most were sized for softball. It just did not matter. We agreed on rules to fit the field. Was there a garage in left field? It was only a home run if the ball went all the way over. Or, it was an out if you knocked a ball into the garage. We made the rules.

     So, what other rules had to be made up? Well, if there were only four people on each team, that left too much field to cover, so right-hand hitters could only hit to right field and left- hand hitters could only hit to left field. Otherwise, it was too easy to just hit the ball where there were no fielders. Sometimes the rule was that the pitcher also covered first base. Or, if there was an odd number of players, the same boy pitched for both sides. Base runners only ran to fist and back home if there were only a few players.

     Usually, nobody owned catcher’s equipment because it included an expensive mitt, a padded chest protector and a wire mask in case a foul ball hit you in the head. Batters who let a ball pass without hitting it sometimes served as their own catcher and chased the ball to the backstop (if there was one) to return it so another pitch could be thrown. This was an annoying and time-wasting effort, so we swung at every pitch, bad or good.

Bats. Somebody always brought their own bat, and only one was necessary. If there was only one bat and it was cracked, we taped it up. A taped bat was like a dull knife. It worked, but not too well. But everybody was using the same bat, so no harm, no foul. For most of us, friction tape was something you kept alongside your baseball bat or glove, and it was in your jeans pocket when you went out to find a game to play

    Too few people to guard the base paths or pull off a double play? This called for a new rule: if you caught a hit ball you could throw it, along with the glove, at runners off or between bases. Throwing the glove with the ball in its pocket in theory made it safer than being hit in the head with only the baseball. Throwing the glove into the air when a fly ball was out of reach was okay, and it is amazing how skilled at this some boys became. Of course, even if the fielder caught both the glove and the ball it usually produced a disagreement about whether the batter was out or not.

      Walks? There were no walks in sand lot ball. That required more players. You swung until you hit the ball. Did an older boy hit a fly ball into the high grass? Boys often brought their dogs with them and these mixed breeds could be relied on to find a missing ball, along with an occasional cat.

    I hope you are beginning to see that the game of baseball lent itself to any number of players, and rules could be made up to address almost any problem, or to compensate for any missing equipment. This required agreement and compromise, so baseball was a training ground for citizenship, for work and for friendship. Oh, and preparation for life in general. There were no adults on hand to tell us what to do. Bullies could gain no advantage. They needed us or there could be no game. Size only came into play in arguments over whether a runner was out or not. The bigger, the safer.

    Most of all, once you acquired just a little skill, chances are you would occasionally be the hero. This is a great confidence builder. I believe this to be why American democracy, a thing that hardly existed before baseball, was invented.  It was founded on the principles of pick-up baseball. Everybody had the same three strikes, the same number of turns at bat, played with the same basic equipment and everyone occasionally struck out or dropped a fly ball. And, everybody hit a fluke skitter that got past the fielders or caught a long fly ball even though they closed their eyes at the last second.

     Sandlot baseball was also a learning opportunity for school. When I was a boy, I may never have seen the Yankees or the Cardinals play before we had a television, but I learned to read the newspapers so I could follow baseball. And, there was the challenge that so many baseball players had Polish, Italian or German names, names we struggled to pronounce. We learned them though, and along with their names we absorbed the reality that many-maybe most-Americans had “foreign” names. Whatever the names that seemed so discordant to a southern ear, having a “foreign” sounding name actually seemed to help their batting averages.

Could baseball improve your grammar? Dizzy Dean, who was the last pitcher to win 30 games in a season became an announcer and his grammar was way off the standard, so much so that my mother used his hackneyed comments as examples of how we should avoid speaking, as well as the kind of stories best not to tell in public.

Even before Dad bought a TV, I could sure tell you who the starting lineups were likely to include for most of the big league games. And, as for the top ten players in each of the major leagues, we were all likely to know their batting average and how many runs they had batted in so far that season. Most importantly, we knew who had hit the most home runs. It was the golden age of the hitter, so we were not so keen on keeping up with ERAs and won-loss records for pitchers.

     Problems with math? What better way to learn math than by calculating batting averages. Listening to baseball games kept you up to date on such things as miles-per-hour on pitches and slugging per centages. I almost completed a degree in math in college using only what I had learned keeping up with baseball. Unfortunately, my calculus professor never offered any baseball problems that could be solved using differential equations. If only….

There was plenty of controversy about what Blacks could and could not do and baseball even helped straighten that out. Was my dad mad because Jackie Robinson got to play? Yeah. But I had hopes of being a big-league catcher, like Roy Campanella of the Dodgers, who was, to my way of thinking, the best catcher in baseball. Georgia had no major league team then. Rooting for the Brooklyn Dodgers was one way to work off our frustration that the Yankees always seemed to win every World Series.  They won the series eight of the twelve years I was playing ball at different levels. What could be worse for the Yankees than losing a World Series to the Dodgers?! (They never did while I was still playing ball and when they did win, they were no longer in Brooklyn and that meant to me that it did not count.)

Eventually, Dad was converted to my persuasion. I remember the afternoon we watched Willie Mays of the Giants make the greatest catch and greatest throw in major league history. I thought Dad would never stop praising Willie. Willie raced way back in the 475- foot deep center field pocket at the Polo Grounds chasing a fly ball that would have been a home run in any other big league stadium. When he caught the drive, it seemed like a miracle because he was running with his back toward the coming ball, running away from the plate, reaching out in front, eyeballing the long drive coming in directly overhead and coming from BEHIND him!

To convince those who did not believe in miracles, he followed this up, by turning toward home and throwing a strike to the catcher at home plate- in the air, all the way – almost 475 feet- without even taking a skip step to propel the ball. The ball came in chest-high to the catcher, gunning down the runner stealing home. As my father commented, to my mother’s chagrin, “it was a damned miracle.” And, to think we were virtually there, because we saw it live on a black and white TV.  It was baseball that was the proving grounds for better race relations in America. Baseball showed it just did not matter. One bat. One ball. One glove. There was truth on the field.