Hardball

a personal essay

from River Teeth, Winter 2000

by Philip Gerard

After college, when I lived in Burlington, Vermont, and tended bar at The Last Chance Saloon, on Main Street only a few rough blocks above Lake Champlain and the tank farms and barge docks that are gone now, replaced by a tourist pavilion and a yacht basin, I got recruited to join a baseball team in one of the small outlying towns. We played other town teams, usually on weekends. Our home field was built on the edge of a granite quarry-- beyond the outfield fence was oblivion. The first practice, as I trotted out to my position in left field, the centerfielder warned me: "Don't go diving over that fence after a ball-- it's a long way down."

I leaned over the chain link fence and stared down a hundred vertical feet onto solid rock, flat and smooth where the gray stone had been carved away in great square slabs. "No prob," I said.

The infield was dangerous, hardpan basepaths and close-cropped grass. The pitcher's mound was high and the batter's box was a ditch. It was as if whoever had designed this baseball diamond had tried to make it as hard on everybody as possible.

It was a country of hard-scrabble farms and bone-cracking winters, and it was deep in recession. Half the men on the team were out of work; the others scrambled between two or three different jobs, trying to make ends meet. They stacked groceries or repaired cars all day and then spent their evenings splitting firewood for sale. In the winter they drove snowplows and repaired chainsaws. They were serious about the game.

Our player-manager and catcher-- call him Randy-- was a muscle-bound plumber who shaved his head and sharpened his cleats with a file before each game. He had a habit of firing the ball back sidearm to the pitcher after each pitch, daring him to catch it. That first day, as we loosened up, throwing and catching, Randy burned one into my glove so hard my palm stung. He grinned at me through missing front teeth. "We play hardball, son," he said. "Got it?"

"Right." I loped out to shag lies, wary of the low fence and the long drop.

The outfield captain was Mike, who some years before had come up through the Yankee farm system with Mickey Rivers. When Rivers went north to star in the Big Show, however, the Yankees gave Mike his release. After that, he roamed semi-pro outfields with an attitude and eventually landed up on our team. He was a rangy, strong guy with remarkable instincts, good for at least one homerun per game, and he could chase down any fly ball in the same county.

Mike played mad. He swung at pitches like a man murdering his wife's lover with an axe. When he chased the ball into left field, I cleared out of his way. I always had the uneasy feeling that one day he was going to leap over that fence after a fly ball. That he wanted to do it. That one day he would just take a running leap and catch it on the way down.

And when he did, Randy would just cuss and send out somebody from the bench, and the game would go on without him.

Our pitching ace was Stoney. The Pirates had drafted him and his 85-mile-an-hour fast ball straight out of high school-- then released him after a single season, claiming he was psychologically unstable and a menace. So we'd heard. He'd get that light in his eye, and he wouldn't take signals from the catcher. He wouldn't take signals from anybody.

Stoney always pitched with a manic grin on his face. His control was erratic-- or so he pretended. I think now he always knew exactly what he was doing, and the crazy act was just a way to psyche out the hitters. He'd wing pitches over the backstop just to keep the batters guessing. The more furious the batter became, the bigger Stoney's grin got. He seemed to like keeping everything his fastball, the batter, the fielders, the game Bjust on the verge of going out of control. If the other team got a rally going, Stoney would knock down the next hitter, and no umpire ever called him on it.

In our league, you had to actually injure another player to get thrown out of the game, and then it was even money.

Stoney's brother Brad was our second baseman, a spray hitter whose trademark was the headfirst slide-- a dangerous play, since on a close throw your face winds up dueling with the baseman's knees, fists, and spikes.. This was in Pete Rose's heyday, years before he disgraced himself gambling and wound up banned from the game for life. Rose had a way of never being satisfied; if he had a clean single, he hungered after a double, and he'd batter down anybody in his way to get it. Brad showed that same hunger-- tried to stretch every hit into a triple, and more often than he had any right to, he succeeded. His face and arms were always cut and bruised, as if he spent his time brawling in taverns and not hitting to the opposite field.

The other players were equally eccentric-- aging jocks who had once had a shot at the big time and blown it, holding on, doing it the hard way, playing for keeps.

In that league, we slid high and threw low. No game was complete without a knock-down collision at homeplate or a free-for-all at second base. More than once I came home with blood on my jersey.

I'd never been better than a mediocre player. I had no dreams of glory, but I've always enjoyed the game. When it is right, there is no better game. There is no better feeling than the smooth swing that connects with a fastball, no sound better than the crack of a line drive coming off the sweet spot of a wooden bat and already leaving the infield by the time you hear the sound. I could pound out doubles, hit a long ball once in awhile, and catch anything in the outfield that landed in front of me. But I couldn't hit a really slick curveball, and I couldn't make the over-the-shoulder catch going away.

In that league, though, pitchers preferred to smoke the ball right down the middle of the plate-- mano a mano-- and I could hit a fastball all day long. Defensively, I played with my back to the fence, out of pure terror. I ran in on everything. So I had the season of my life. That summer, I was powerlifting, and I handled a 35-inch Louisville Slugger easily. I rapped out vicious grounders that sent shortstops sprawling. I ricocheted frozen ropes off the centerfield fence. That troubled crew made me believe I was better than I was, and I played harder than I ever had.

We played under summer skies choked with thunderheads that scraped open their black bellies on the craggy rims of the mountains and doused us with hard rain, in golden afternoon light cooled by the deep verdure of swaying evergreen trees, into the sudden chilly twilight that carries voices for miles and years and calls children home to their suppers. We played forever, that summer.

We slugged our way to the playoffs, in which I doubled in the winning run.

Like every contest in which winning carries virtually no reward, we fought the championship game out hard and for keeps. At long last, the classic moment arrived how could it not, that season? Two out, bottom of the ninth, down by a run, two men on base. I stepped up to the plate. The pitcher winged a fastball down the alley, and I nicked it up over the backstop. He came right back at me with another fastball on the corner, and I slammed it down the third base line, just foul. The thin crowd in the bleachers was going nuts. I stepped out of the box to whack the mud off my cleats, took a breath, then stepped in.

I remember even now the quality of the light that clear Vermont light, crisp as green apples, the field of vision opening beyond the scowling pitcher and the crouching infielders and the outfielders kicking at the grass like horses, beyond the silver toprail of the fence into absolute blue sky.

My wrists were loose and the bat felt weightless. Everybody was shouting-- my teammates, the other players, the wives and girlfriends and younger brothers in the stands and their voices blended into a kind of surfy incomprehensible murmur, and I had a clear vision of what was about to happen: the pitcher was rattled. His next fastball would sail in a little too high. I would get around on it quick and sock it into left centerfield.

Watch it arc over the fence.

Not start my homerun trot toward first base until the white ball disappeared into the quarry.

The pitcher wound up. His arm whipped past his ear in a blur. The ball came in high and fast, just as I had predicted. I dug in my back foot, took a short step with the front one, and swung from the heels. The power came out of my thighs and up my back and down from my shoulders into my thick arms and the wrists snapped around quick and the bat sang through a perfect arc.

But it was a curveball. It tailed magnificently toward my knees. I missed it by a mile.

I swung so hard, I cracked the thin handle of the barrel-heavy bat. When I swatted it against the ground in disgust, it busted clean in two.

A few months later, I left Vermont. I played another season with a town team in Delaware-- a young, careless bunch who played, not hardball, but baseball. I never again played under such low skies, never again played with such desperate men, never again hit so hard or wanted to win so badly that, the night before a game, my stomach hurt.

Whenever I watch a big league game on TV now, I can't help but think of all the guys who didn't make it. Who almost made it. Who couldn't hit the slick curveball. Whose defensive game was one step too slow, or whose character had some hairline fracture that revealed itself under the stress of pro competition as under an x-ray. Whose timing was flawed, who guessed wrong just once too often, whose luck came up just one swing short of stardom. Whose imagined future never came true, leaving them baffled, bereft of any idea of how to live out their adult lives.

Who had been the boys with the high expectations, the heroes of their high schools, the older brothers that their parents always bragged about, the boys all the other boys wanted to be like, who ached for glory, who never learned properly how to be men, how to take from disappointment hope, and from failure the dignity of their secret character.

That was the point of the game, of playing hard, of winning in that golden crisp light when you felt you could hit and run and throw forever, immortal-- and also of striking out so wildly your neck stung with shame and losing a game that stuck like a pill in the throat: it was only a game, but it was a game that could teach you all you ever needed to learn about heartbreak and euphoria, and point you toward a future in which you would not be surprised and destroyed by the death of a loved one or true love or losing a job or a friend's betrayal or sudden glory, provided you paid attention, and provided you let it go.

I imagine them out there, roaming ugly hardscrabble fields in far-flung country places, throwing low and sliding high, inflicting as much pain on each other and themselves as they possibly can, season after season, waiting to take that last great flying leap over the fence and into oblivion.