Summer & Street Ball
It is the middle of June, and the Yankees are on a streak. Or, rather, Aaron Judge is on a streak. We’re up by four games to lead the AL East and have won the last six; but so far the summer belongs to the 495 feet homers that the rookie has been hitting routinely.
Of course, I’m not home to see it. I learn about these things through conversations with my parents, through ESPN podcasts, and the Yankees Facebook page (asserting in all caps the the aforementioned 495 foot hit from the other day ‘CLEARED THE BLEACHERS!!!’). Still, here in la Republica, the school year is winding down and summer is waiting on our doorsteps, and when I was a kid, baseball and summer were synonyms. If you had asked me, when I was 10 years old, I would’ve told you summer was for the 7:05 game on Friday night. When they renovated Yankee Stadium for the first time forty-odd years ago, my dad managed to swipe seats from the bleachers that we still have today. Growing up, they had two uses: as actual seats to sit on during games, and when we were feeling inspired by said games to function as bases in our backyard reenactments. So summer was my brother & I, sitting on our bleacher seats in the living room for the 7:05 game (5:05 with the time change, for us expat fans watching all the way from New Mexico, never feeling farther from our home in New York), fighting over the best bleacher, eating pizza and drinking RC Cola that my mom seemed to only ever let us have when the Yankees were playing an important game. And back then, every game felt like an important one. It was quite a gift to grow up a Yankees fan in the 90s. My father, who came of age in the 70s when the Bronx was burning, has always told me that I was spoiled by the back-to-back-to-back World Series wins of my youth, when one of the best teams of all time (this is not a debate so don’t try me) was on the field. Aaron Judge might be crushing the ball today, but can never replace the 1996 team that I grew up convinced couldn’t lose. Even today, I still bat exactly the same way I learned, from watching Derek Jeter do it — the way he taps the base with the bat, how he braces himself with his left arm. He hasn’t stepped up to a plate in three years, but twenty years of watching him isn’t something you forget.
There’s plenty that’s been written about the magic of baseball, and it’s all probably been written more eloquently than this. But I love waxing poetic about the sport, and how it seems to echo the life cycle of summer: the way the season itself and the season of baseball rise and fall together. The lazy, hopeful days at the beginning of the summer when you have all the time in the world; the way midsummer swells to a crescendo as we reach the longest day of the year, and how after that, as the season starts to close, every day feels more and more urgent and final. How the summer is long and at times the days drag the way those inconsequential afternoon games do; how those long days become punctuated with exciting nights and extra innings. How you look back when the fall comes and can’t account for all your time — just bits and pieces, just ordinary days where extraordinary things happened, and the rest has all blended together.
Now, as an adult, baseball is like a time machine. The way that summer makes grown adults who haven’t been in school for decades still feel as free as they did as children running wild, watching and playing baseball makes me feel like it’s a Friday night in July, and the Yankees are playing.
And so for me, it’s fitting that while cleaning earlier this week, we found a pelota in my house and have started playing baseball in the street. I don’t know where our broken wooden bat came from — I’ve never seen it before, but when I stated that we needed one, it just seemed to appear. The first time I played here, I laughed out loud because my nieces play it almost exactly how my brother and I did growing up, when were were impeded by having to field teams both comprised of a single player. You bat, you run to first base, you return to home to bat again. You run to second base, you return to home again, and repeat, and repeat.
My nieces love to play, but unfortunately are a bunch of dirty cheaters. Now, they’re Dominicanas and are therefore no strangers to the game — here, once the kids can walk, they’re batting with pieces of whatever the can find. However, being as young as they are, they don’t know a lot of the more complex rules. For example, our biggest argument so far was when I counted a ball that I threw perfectly within the strike zone as a strike. “But I didn’t swing!” Daniela protested. “No importa!” I yelled, it doesn’t matter! If the ball is in the strike zone and you don’t swing it’s still a strike! I think I get so frustrated because sure, everyone has to teach me a lot of things here. But while I don’t know much Spanish, damn it, I do know baseball. I know I should go easy on them, but I can’t — not when every time the pelota so much as clips the end of my bat it’s a strike, while they can bunt on accident and claim it was a foul (and a foul that never seems to count as a strike) and I can’t tag them out. Kids, you see, are the same in every country.
Street baseball is nothing to scoff at — this is serious shit. Bats are thrown in frustration and the pitcher often leaves the mound to protest to the nearest adult. At times I’ve heard my nieces yell things that would get them ejected in a formal game. The younger ones who don’t know how to play but still want to be involved, sit in the back of the truck on the side of the road and alternate encouragement and disbelief. They debate where exactly the foul line is (which is a fair point because the bases are usually piles of leaves that often move in the wind), lament the quality of the pitching, and often remark how the upcoming batter is as good as Sammy Sosa. It’s always Sammy Sosa, because I don’t have the heart to translate the phrase “performance enhancing drugs.” One more remark about my pitching and I might, though.
Play has to be halted often for the standard oncoming truck or motorcycle, but sometimes because horses or cows need to cross the street, or because someone has hit a homerun directly into the field and we have to climb the barbed wire fence to find it again. A homerun here is a jonrun. Like many of the words for baseball here, it’s basically the English word with an accent — jonrun, estrike, el bat, el piche. This is a good thing, because I find in the heat of the moment when I’m playing I can’t remember how to speak Spanish and I don’t know why. I think it’s because, like I said, baseball is a time machine. Daniela hits the ball and it soars into foul territory but she runs the bases anyway, and I open my mouth to say, in Spanish, “pero eso fue un foul!” and what comes out is the voice of ten year old me, in English, yelling at my brother in the backyard, “but that was a foul!”
