The Last Mitt
Benjamin Franklin famously confirmed two certainties of American life: Death and Taxes. I would add two more: One, we live in a right-handed world. Two, because of One, the majority of baseball mitts are made for righties. I am a leftie.
Within the first year of my family’s landing in Los Angeles from Tehran, I noticed the mitts. Kids used them for Little League at the park, Flies Up on the playground, and Pickle on their streets before dinner. And while they may have thrown baseballs, softballs, tennis balls soggy with dog spit or even rocks; while they may have swung bats, broomsticks or broken tree branches; they caught with mitts. And everybody had them.
On our block, Kersh from down the street had one; his little brother Mikey had one; Cowan from across the street had two; his sisters each had their own. On our playground, mitts were like sneakers, lunchboxes and sweet-smelling erasers. Most everyone had one; not everyone. For those who did, it was something to show off, care for, or take for granted. For those of us who did not, it was one more thing to have FOMO over; we had to either muster up the courage to ask and borrow or go without. And there was little chance of theft because everyone wrote their name on the back of their mitts using Marks-a-Lot.
In Tehran we didn’t have mitts, or baseball. And because soccer is played with feet, I was comfortably ignorant of the world’s Righty-Leftie bias. It was only in America where I discovered I threw left-handed, and that this wasn’t normal. Not only did I have to contend with being a brown-skinned, non-English-speaking foreigner, I had the added burden of being Leftie. Normals had fairer skin, spoke good English, and threw right-handed. My little brother was lucky because not only was he lighter skinned than me, he was a righty. He could borrow a mitt anytime to play pickle or over-the-line. Thus, he got to play more, kids knew him better, were more likely to pick him. Thus, he got better. Doors open for you when you are more normal.
Because there weren’t many lefties, I had less opportunities to borrow so my choices were limited. I could do play-by-play, imitating Vin Scully; I could learn to throw righty and look terrible doing it; or I could shove my fingers into a righty mitt.
The Guild Drug on National Boulevard, where we went for candy bars and gum, also sold mitts. They didn’t look like normal mitts — smaller, vinyl. We didn’t know where normal mitts were sold; it seemed like everyone at school was born with theirs. Whenever our Mom went to Von’s market next to the Guild, we’d ask for a mitt knowing she’d say No because “who would wear such big ugly gloves? Not Persians.”
“It’s a mitt,” we’d explain, “for baseball.”
“Leave us alone with your meet,” she’d say. “And the baseball is for the Amrikayee.”
Exactly!
One afternoon she came home and pulled it out of the grocery bag. “Here,” she said, tossing a small vinyl mitt. We jumped like puppies to thank her as we pulled and tugged to be first to try it, a struggle that didn’t last long as it became immediately clear that it was a righty mitt. My little brother waited with a smirk as I relinquished it and watched him slide his fingers in with ease and punch the pocket like a real Amrikayee baseball player.
But Kersh and Cowan laughed when we showed up. “That’s for babies! A toy!”
Still, we made it work. I had to push the fingers on my right hand into finger holes meant for the opposite hand, but I didn’t need to borrow. We had to take turns, but I was in the game.
That was the first mitt.
It wasn’t until seventh grade that I got a genuine leather leftie mitt. A classmate gave it to me. MM came from a baseball family and had lots of mitts. Other than being a fellow leftie, MM was a normal American with shaggy reddish hair, a tiny nose, freckles, and an experienced ballplayer with a loose gait and easy feel for the diamond. He and his little brother lived up the street, so we played a lot of ball together. At first MM let me borrow one of his mitts; an adult-sized outfielder’s mitt, large and heavy. He let me take it home and bring it back the next day. By the end of seventh grade, he let me keep it. Throughout the schoolyear MM was a friend, but also a bit of a bully who regularly tormented his little brother and was often crude, calling me Beaner, Taco or any form of brown-skin/Mexican style pejorative. In that regard, MM was also very normal. But I never said anything about it because beside the fact that he was bigger than me, I didn’t have many friends and most of the time MM was honest, playful and generous. He gave me his mitt knowing I had never had one of my own. He was also starting his own sandlot league, complete with stats, scorecards and standings — a league in which he would surely be the star — and he needed players, so he needed me to have a mitt.
We played in MM’s sandlot league for two years on a deserted lot up the block. During my time in our sandlot league, I learned to hit, pitch and use my mitt. I even made Specs. A Spec — short for “Spectacular Play” — was a stat MM created so that on the rare occasion when he got out (his lifetime batting average was over .900; he led the league in average, homers, RBI and overall hits) it would be counted as a Spec instead of an out in calculating batting average, like a Walk or Sacrifice. Like America itself, it was MM’s league, MM’s rules. I didn’t care. Making Specs with my mitt made me feel special; but just having that mitt made me feel less incomplete in my daily life.
That was the second mitt.
MM and I drifted apart in high school. He made the baseball team and found new baseball friends. I tried out too and although I didn’t make the cut, the fact that I got to tryout at all was a small victory. I whiffed on every pitch, discovering that I needed glasses and that I would never hit a baseball.
As the Iranian revolution played itself out with a massive influx of Iranian youth in my high school, I was confronted once again with being an outsider. This time in two cultures — the American one that saw me as too ethnic, dark or foreign, even with my mitt; and the emerging Persian one that saw me as too American and not Persian enough, because of my mitt. I wasn’t Persian enough for the newly arrived Persians and was never American enough for the Americans I had grown up with. With all that going on, the mitt took a backseat.
The mitt got tucked deeper in the back of my closet when I started college; too old for sandlot and no more P.E. I got busy flexing the muscles of my burgeoning adulthood, exploring higher education and aspirations. I studied literature and tried to be a writer. I hung out with brooding poets and provocative philosophy majors, learning to roll French tobacco and drink espresso and tequila without gagging. I got a job, focused on finding love, romance, sex or some workable combination of those three. Mitts didn’t have a role in that.
At twenty-two, I graduated, fell in love with a fellow poet and moved to San Francisco to be with other writers. We got jobs at a warehouse in Berkeley that distributed small press books. The mitt stayed behind in my old room at my parents’ house with my ribbons, AYSO trophies, and the toolbox I made at cub scouts.
Not knowing anyone in my new town triggered familiar fears of being the outsider. I had been living in the U.S. for fifteen years by then, spoke perfect English, had a degree in English Lit, even had an American girlfriend, but outsider fears are strong; maybe my brown skin, dark hair, my inability to maintain long friendships because of never fitting in. I was a loner. But the warehouse had a softball team. And I knew baseball. We went to the Sears on Geary and Masonic where, at twenty-three, I had a new mitt for the first time.
It was a Rawlings, for lefties yet bearing the signature of right-handed Dale Murphy in its brown leather pocket — lefties were still under-represented in the mitt-pocket-signature industry. I had heard stories about breaking in new mitts so when we got back to our apartment we doused ours in Mazola, rolled them backwards and left them overnight under the rear wheel of the car. By Opening Day of the Berkeley Warehouse League at Kinney Field, my mitt was ready, much to the surprise of my all-American girlfriend who had always seen me as an exotic Persian poet who would know nothing about catching a fast moving ball thrown from a hundred feet away. She watched, impressed, as I peppered the ball in and out of my mitt with ballet-like finesse.
After earning a spot on the roster, I walked to the plate in the bottom of the final inning of the league championship game and promptly slapped an opposite-field game winning liner to left that gave us the C-League championship. It made the Berkeley paper. My mitt had gotten me in the door, helped me gain the respect of my peers, and connected me to co-worker Mac, the Red Sox fan who would become my best and oldest friend.
After our girlfriends wised up and moved on to greener pastures, Mac and I relied on our mitts to soothe our broken hearts, spending many evenings on the front lawn of Oakland Tech High School — dubbed “Ricky High” after alum Ricky Henderson. We played catch, throwing the ball as hard, high and far as we could, outfielders throwing runners out at home, making miraculous running catches and sweeping tags, over and over until we were two silhouettes among the pine trees and buildings in the hazy purple dusk of Broadway’s evening commute.
Eventually I moved to St. Louis, where my mitt was my calling card once again for the adult league at Forest Park. I was a dark skinned, dark haired outsider but it took only a few minutes on the diamond playing pepper and long-toss to show the Show-Me state I belonged.
I ended up in New Orleans for law school after failing to accomplish much as a poet, and it was my mitt again that got me a spot on the intramural team at City Park where I bonded with classmates from all parts of the country.
Wherever I landed in America, my mitt got me through doors and helped me to fit into any community, snug and confident, running down fly balls in the gap at center, snagging ropes hit on a line to first or spearing comebackers to the mound. With my mitt, I could handle hits as good as any real American. And that’s what was important; not to feel like I was better, but as good, like I belonged. That was the third mitt, the equalizer.
I lost it somewhere between Pittsburgh and Odgen as I found my way back to Los Angeles where I got a job and eventually married the girl next door — if “next door” is the corner of Pahlavi & Wilshire Boulevards. Like me, she landed in America at seven and grew up on the west side. For me, she had just enough Modern American Woman in her that I could handle her Traditional Persian ways. For her, I was American but just Persian enough to satisfy her worried parents. A perfect match! On her birthday, we bought mitts, her first. She is a good athlete but didn’t know baseball. We played catch and I taught her the finer points of fielding and oiling. We rolled our new mitts under the tires of our car overnight and joined an adult league at La Cienega Park. She played a cautious second base, never willing to damage her manicure just to get her glove down in the dirt to stop a silly grounder. We won no games that season or the next. The third season, we won our first game as our one-year old son ran onto the field to celebrate.
I had my first catch with my son not long after he could walk. I got him a vinyl baby mitt from Big 5 similar to the one my mom bought us from the Guild. I taught him to stand at the plate, to swing, to field and even though I had hoped he’d be a leftie, I respected that he was a Normal and made sure his mitt fit right. He was getting pretty good at catch when my second son was born. The four of us would take our mitts to Rancho Park to play ball, me pitching, them taking turns catching and batting. They each had their own mitt — no need to share. Even Mama got into it, cheering her boys on from the outfield and whacking long fly balls.
When we signed them up at Sherman Oaks Little League, I was excited. As a grownup I got to be part of the community I didn’t have access to as a kid. My parents, fresh-off-the-boat immigrants, were too busy assimilating to figure out how to get us situated culturally. We were on our own, figuring out America step by stumbling, humbling step. Watching my boys take the field alongside neighbors and classmates, I noticed their sense of belonging, and didn’t notice my own other-ness as much. I was just another Little League Dad, warming my boys up before games, coaching their teams and cheering them on.
When our third son was born, I was burned out on coaching and shuttling between games and leagues. But there were moments when I’d open that internal eye and see the bliss: playing catch before a game at Van Nuys Sherman Oaks park with my kids; pepper, pickle, high flies. They had their mitts, I had mine, and we’d throw and catch without words but with a sublime American harmony that was awesome.
My mitt is always in my trunk, in case, prepared for a game of catch at all times. It’s a point of pride decades after not having my own mitt, having to stick a wrong hand into a righty mitt just to be able to play, having a friend casually toss me one he didn’t need, probably never realizing what a huge deal it was for me.
But time catches up with everyone; my back is sore often these days; trying to be a responsible husband and father takes its toll on the body. When my youngest asks me to throw him fly balls and grounders, I don’t jump like I used to. He has to beg. But I know what lies ahead, a time when they get older, independent; no more catch. So I creak up off the couch, grab my mitt, and throw with him, storing the sensations in a memory bank I will draw from in my golden years, a retirement account of visceral memories — playing catch with my kids, them needing me, being one with them — an account I can pass on to them when the time comes.
These days my boys play on their own, no longer needing me to pitch, catch or remind them of baseball fundamentals. They got everything they need. We drive to Ocean View Park in Santa Monica, the place they call “Grass Hill” and while they play, my wife and I go for long walks on the beach. They have their own games; their own rules. When we get back from our walk, we watch them play on their makeshift diamond — a shirt is first base; an old beanie is second; a rock is third. But home plate — where all the action happens, where balls and strikes are argued, where swings and hits spark motion, where runners score — that’s where my mitt, the last mitt, sits. My name is written on the back in Marks-a-Lot.
