No one ever hit a baseball farther than my father.
Wherever there was a field, my father wanted to play. Now he can. Forever.
No one could hit a baseball farther than my father. I’ve seen Mike Schmidt, Greg Luzinski, Willie Stargell, Jim Thome, Ryan Howard, right up to Aaron Judge and Gary Sanchez. I’ve seen them all — and I’m telling you without fear of contradiction that no one could hit a baseball as far as Dad could.
When I was young we neighborhood kids would play outside all day during the summer, as was done back before this world. More often than not we’d be playing baseball. We lived on a dead end street so the chain-link fence at the end of said dead end made for a perfect outfield wall. I think I hit the fence once, but that might have been while trying to catch a fly ball rather than actually hitting one that far.
When he was not working, Dad would come out to hit fly balls for us. The problem was, he hit it so damned far. In fact, he’d cleared the fence at the end of the street so many times that we had to dig a hole at the bottom of the fence just so we could crawl under it and run the 300 or so yards to where Dad’s blast had finally stopped rolling in order to retrieve it. Whenever Dad came to bat, we all backed up to that fence and waited: sometimes, I’d just crawl under the fence ahead of time to see if I could catch it on the other side…