A baseball can take a lot. It can bound across the stone-riddled infield of some small-town diamond or skid through the crabgrass, dandelions, and thistles of a ragged outfield. A batter can hammer it down the right-field line, where it ricochets off the corner walls and skitters along the warning track, or drive it 400 feet into the centerfield bleachers. A four-seam fastball fouled off of a Louisville Slugger might rip past the catcher’s outstretched mitt and whiz by the umpire’s mask before bending with a hiss into the backstop, the chain-link fence shivering like the hide of a fly-pestered horse. Or it can rocket high above the light standards before plummeting out of the darkness, drifting into foul territory, and banging like a hammer on a dugout roof. And for all its wear and tear, it still plays as well if not better for most kids. Yes, siree, a baseball can take dang near anything.
But it often gives even more in return.
Go to a Major League game or watch one on TV and odds are you’ll see a fan sitting down one of the baselines who, while holding a beer or a baby, snares a foul ball with one hand, his face lighting up and the crowd laughing and cheering as he puts the ball in the too-big glove of a wide-eyed youngster. Or when Mike Trout or Albert Pujols or Byron Buxton sends a fastball soaring into the left field stands, the tan arms of a half-dozen fans all reach up for the descending ball and then high-five one another, first for someone’s terrific catch and then for the homerun hit by the home team. In those moments, fans feel they’re a part of the game, and both the game and the ball let us relive the simple pleasure and carefree joy we felt when playing baseball as kids.
Of course, “baseball” doesn’t always mean an actual game with umpires and nine players on a side. When I was a kid growing up on a farm in southern Minnesota, it often meant playing by myself. On warm summer afternoons when cicadas buzzed in the elms and a distant John Deere tractor putt-putt-putted in a neighbor’s field, I grabbed my glove and the scuffed-up baseball from the cardboard box in the porch, pushed open the screen door, trotted past the pump house, and stopped near the base of the silo by the cow-yard fence. In a few months, the cylindrical thirty-foot tall concrete silo would be filled with corn silage, but now it was empty and was best used for throwing a baseball against it because (1) the ball wouldn’t knock it to pieces as it would a window or a wooden garage door or asphalt shingles, (2) slinging the ball up against its highest rim made it perfect for shagging fly balls instead of just corralling grounders or snaring weak liners bounced off the side of the barn, and (3) every now and then, the ball ricocheted unpredictably off the silo’s concrete curvature, which made catching it an uncertain adventure.
Of course, when I hurled the ball toward the highest part of the silo, I sometimes missed it completely, the ball soaring over the top and into the cow yard (resulting in a more pungent ball), but if I hit just the right spot, it caromed off the concrete and sailed over my head like a long drive into centerfield. Then, I’d turn and, with my back to the silo, try to run it down and make an over-the-shoulder, Willie Mays-style catch, the kind that made me whoop and smile and believe that someday I could do this during an honest-to-God baseball game. The memory of looking over my shoulder as I ran past the front of the barn and hauled in that flyball still makes me grin even though it happened more than fifty years ago.
That’s how I feel, too, when I remember spring days in Rochester, MN, where my daughter Mary and I lived in an apartment. One warm day in May when she was twelve, we went out to the courtyard to play catch. She wore a black sweatshirt, dark blue wind pants, and black Nikes, pulled her hair back into a ponytail, and pushed a black Rawlings glove on her left hand. Wind rocked the tree tops against the gray sky as we warmed up, and then, she shouted, “Throw me some pop flies!”
So I leaned back and flung the ball in a high arc, higher than the flat roof of the three-story building, up where the wind caught it, so Mary scrambled forward, lunged onto her hands and knees, and stabbed at the ball. I threw short shallow flies, then longer looping ones she turned and ran for and backhanded above her head, then a sidearm line-drive that sank to her ankles and a towering fly that she settled under and caught one-handed next to her ear.
She puffed for breath, her cheeks red, and eventually said, “Make me dive into the bushes.” She pointed at the row of low round shrubs near the walkout area of two first-floor apartments.
So I lobbed the ball high above the roof and toward the bushes.
As she started to her right, she kept her eye on the ball and ran with low, long strides, but then slowed as she got nearer until her knees pushed against the waxy cedar-like leaves. Barely keeping her balance, she stretched her glove across the bushes, as if over a dugout’s railing. When the ball plunged into the pocket, she sank into the small one in the middle and disappeared in the green shrubbery, her black Nikes thrashing in midair.
“Nice catch, Mare!” I yelled and laughed.
She scrambled out of the bushes and stood, a wide smile lighting up her face, the white ball snug in the webbing of her black glove.
Last week a few miles east of Dyersville, Iowa, I stood in the right field grass not far from where Ray Liotta’s Shoeless Joe Jackson and the other Black Sox walked out of the cornfield in the movie Field of Dreams. It was a sentimental thing to do, I suppose, this pilgrimage to the site of a fiction that Mary and I revisited on VHS every spring for several years running. Of course, I wasn’t the only romantic on the field that day. Dozens of kids — some in fresh white uniforms but most in T-shirts, shorts, and baseball caps — swarmed over the infield while men and women threw a ball back and forth with a daughter or son, sat on the wooden bleachers, took photos with their phones, or called after a tyke who, after hitting the ball, ran for third instead of first.
I was mostly alone in that sun-splashed outfield until two kids — a boy about ten years old and a fair-skinned girl with a mop of wavy blonde hair who was maybe three or four years older — walked across the infield dirt near first base and onto the outfield grass. When they stopped in shallow left field about sixty feet apart and faced each other, the girl reached into her glove and gripped a baseball with her right hand. With the natural grace of Griffey or Ichiro, she shifted her weight and drew the ball back, her throwing arm stretched straight behind her, her blonde hair drifting down her back. Then, her shoulder and front leg poured forward, her throwing arm as smooth and fluid as a whip, and she slung the ball on a taut line to the boy, the cowhide hitting the leather of his glove with a solid thwack.
It was enough to put a lump in my throat. How could I (or anyone, for that matter) not be moved by that elegant motion, by that strong, precise throw, by that green outfield in Dyersville, or by summer memories stretched out like long fly balls run down in some far-off barnyard?
“Put me in coach!” – John Fogarty