Batter Up! Top of the 4th
Life Happens While You’re Making Other Plans
It’s funny how life seems to work these things out. I spent all that time and energy in my growing years desperately trying to fashion myself into an athlete and a ballplayer, then just as I began to really come into my own on the field, life had other plans for me. I got to play a lot of ball in the navy at a few of my postings, not as much as I would have liked, but enough to scratch the itch.
But by the time I got out of the navy, I had other more critical priorities to tend to — I had to clean up my act. My first steady job after getting out of the service was at a printing firm, where I bonded with the owner’s son over baseball. We eventually got a team together at work, and challenged this other team run by the guy who brought the lunch truck (aka “roach coach”) around. This was right after I’d gotten totally clean and was attending that 12-Step fellowship I’d found to help me do that.
What I didn’t realize was how out of control some of my anger issues would become when I stopped doing drugs altogether. As it turned out, I’d used drugs for that — smoking pot had mellowed me out, and had always taken the edges off my anger. Without the drugs, and before I’d begun to acquire new tools in the program for managing my anger, I was one hot mess.
The roach coach guy had previously told me I could play with his team (before we got the company team together), then had reneged on that offer. I was still carrying a big time resentment over what I felt was a snubbing by him.
My childhood hero, Roberto Clemente, used to channel his anger at how he got treated, as a black Hispanic player in the 50’s and 60’s in America, into a burning rage that propelled his game and drove him to play harder with something to prove. I tried doing the same when the company team I’d helped get started played the roach coach squad.
I played like a man possessed. I know I made some good plays out there, but my God, I must have been incredibly obnoxious. It would have been one thing if I had just let my play speak for itself, but I had to use my big mouth to try to rub it in that this guy never should have passed me by for his team. There was no call for any of this acting out on the field, but I had long since lost any semblance of control over this rage that boiled inside me at that time.
The game culminated when I hit a ball into the right center field gap for a solid triple — but, instead of holding up at third like I should have, I made the turn at that bag with all my momentum and rage propelling me on towards home…. I was going to prove, once and for all, how that guy had made a huge mistake when he’d snubbed me for his team.
Me, the ball, and the catcher blocking my path to the plate all collided in a billowing cloud of dust in front of the plate. Once the dust had settled, I was called “out”, as the catcher had managed to hang onto the ball despite my best imitation of Pete Rose colliding with Ray Fosse in the 1970 All-Star Game. I was just as big of an a**hole as Pete was on that infamous play. In both cases, there was no call for that kind of aggressive play.
I also managed to screw up my knee pretty bad on that play. About a week later, having had very little sleep due to the pain, I was sitting in a little alcove I had arranged back in the warehouse where I could prop my knee up on a roll of printing press paper to ease the pain. I fell asleep on the job. My anger and erratic behavior on the job over the previous months had alienated my fellow managers in the company, to the point where they just needed a good excuse to get rid of me. That was all they needed. One of the other managers took pictures before he woke me up — it looked like I had set up a cozy little sleeping spot for myself - and promptly fired me. The pictures helped to prove their case when they challenged my ability to collect unemployment, so I was in a bad way for awhile after that.
I didn’t play much ball after that until I was clean for a couple years. By then I was so busy with commitments in the program, and just trying to keep my head above water financially, as I scrambled from job to job, there was scant little time for playing ball.
Then I met a great girl in the program and got married, we had a kid, and raising that kid became our priority. I had to conscientiously put childish things like playing ball behind me, and meet life on life’s terms. It appeared that my ballplaying days were behind me, barely before they’d even had a chance to get started.
But all was not lost, my friends. We are, after all, only in the top of the 4th, so the game isn’t even half over. I did eventually get a chance to play ball to my heart’s content for a good long stretch of 11 years. You’ll find that glorious story, and more in the bottom of the 4th and beyond. The game is not over, after all, until the bottom of the 9th.
That’s one of the beautiful things about baseball — unlike just about any other sport, it is not controlled by a clock. It is organized in innings, and you keep playing until one team holds the lead after 9, or after any subsequent inning, if it is tied after 9. Games have been known to go 22 innings or longer. I doubt this one will — but you never know. We’ll see you in the bottom of the 4th. Until then — play ball!
