Batter Up! Or How to Catch a Baseball with your Teeth
By
Troy Andrew Smith
In these times of world wide strife, with our President and Congress and every other elected politician, or maybe we should rename them polutatitions, since they spread more bullshit than all other known species combined, while trying to make sure that the United States of America is no more. And they think they can get away with it because we the people no longer care. I believe it is time to remember why we should care about our country and our freedom and our right to play baseball when and where we want. After all, that’s what freedom is all about, the right to do what you want to do when you want to do it; as long as your wife will let you. That last line is just for the husbands of the world to remember their proper role in the way things work.
This first paragraph, as far as the politicians go, has very little to do with the rest of the story, I just felt like bringing attention to the crap we are feed everyday on the news. But, now; let’s get on with the real story here and that’s playing baseball. For as many years as I can remember the Dodgers play by the same formula. It does not matter who the players are. It doesn’t seem to make any difference who the manager is. A new stadium didn’t change anything. It certainly doesn’t matter who owns the team, they still play by the same formula every year! The only times they have deviated from it, that I know of, is when they are so bad they never get into contention in the first place. The good part is, they are seldom, THAT BAD. But, every season, they start out good, get in the lead of their division or close to it, play great up until the All Star Break, then fall apart in mid-season. They lose until they are nine or so games out and then come to life at the end of the season. Play great ball and make a run for the playoffs. Most of the time they make it into the post season play and sometimes the World Series itself; usually to go back to playing bad baseball and lose. That is the plight of the Dodgers.
Why do they do this? Hell if I know! The only thing I can figure is; it is just ingrained in their basic nature. It is like the old adage says; it’s just the way things are. It started a long time ago, maybe when the team left Brooklyn? Some things just are the way they are and go all the way back to their roots. It’s like the Bible says; In the beginning…
Well, the beginning of my baseball career, such as it was, could be best described by the word ominous. It started like this. When I was about nine years old, or maybe eight, or it could’ve been ten, I’m still a little fuzzy about it and you’ll soon learn why, it was a fine clear spring day in Northeast Oklahoma. Dad decided, I’m not sure why, that I needed to learn to play baseball. The idea sounded alright to me because as most kids are at that age, I was for anything I got to do that brought me positive attention from my parents. There was always plenty of that other kind of attention from my parents to go around so I never tried to compete too hard for it. It would just show up on its own. So, in one of his mental stupors, Dad sent Mom into the Oklahoma Tire and Supply store to buy a bat, a ball glove and, you guessed it, a baseball. Why Dad believed Mom would be able to pick out baseball gear I’m not real sure. Mom’s main criteria in shopping was the price tag. Here is where another old adage comes in; you get what you pay for. Actually, if my mind serves me correctly, it was a ‘softball’ that she brought home. Now, I don’t know who it was that came up with the idea of naming this thing a ‘soft’ ball because it was anything but. It really didn’t matter that much about what kind of ball she bought because the ball only had a minimal role in the game. But, still, we wanted to play ‘baseball,’ not softball! There is a principal here but I’m not sure what it is.
She also bought the world’s flattest, pocket resisting, ball glove ever made. For more than twenty years, I tried, Dad tried, my brothers tried to put a pocket in this glove. It never happened. We soaked it, oiled it, wrapped it around baseballs and rubber banded it and when the leather finally wore plumb out, the lacing had been gone for years; it was still as flat and as hard to catch a ball with as it was that first spring day when Mom liberated it from the shelves of Okie Tire, as most folks called the pre-runner of Wal-Mart, and it came to live on the Smith place. I can say the glove was a major impediment to my progress in learning to play baseball. Mostly because the argument between Mom and Dad, about how in the h*$#((&(E^*W she picked this glove, held up the start of my baseball career for several minutes.
I have often wondered how Mom did pick out this glove? I can envision her going through all of the other ball gloves that had ready made, built in, pockets that would almost catch a ball for you and digging down to the bottom of the pile to find the one and only glove that made it almost impossible to make a one handed catch. You could catch a ball with it sometimes but you had to use the two handed technique. When the ball hit the flat surface of the leather mitt, you had to slap down on it with the other ‘free’ hand and trap it before the ball could have time to spring back into the air. I will admit that once I had reached my junior and senior year of high school, I could use this mitt to play catch with my younger brothers or friends, while they used the good gloves, and make a one handed catch. But in order to do so, I had to constantly hold pressure on the glove to keep it bent. By the end of a backyard ballgame my left hand would be worn out. Anyway, I digress from the story, after it was decided the glove had a new home, mostly because Mom said she wasn’t going to drive back to town again, we got on with my career.
Honest to God, this is my first baseball experience and the reason some of the details are still a mite fuzzy today. Dad gives Mom the ‘glove’ and the ball and he takes the ba t. She stands not too far away from the ‘plate’ and is going to pitch. Right here, I should tell you, I can do an awful lot of things and do them well, most of them I was taught to do by my Dad. But Dad’s teaching technique had one, okay a few, flaws. The first being he would have me stand someplace where it was ‘safe’ to watch “how I do this.” It might have been a safe place to stand, I don’t know. I never found out because he would always stand me behind him and I couldn’t see anything but, remember I was young and short so the sight line was a little low, his butt. So, I would move over a little.
This is exactly what happened on the first pitch of my budding baseball career. Try to imagine, if you can, the excitement, the anticipation that had built up in my adolescent body from the time Dad had said, “Son, I’m going to teach you how to play baseball today.” Or some words of that general nature, I can’t be expected to remember the exact wording, through the mists of time that have drifted through my life since then. Anyway, I had waited on Mom to go to town and buy the equipment. Then I had waited while my parents finished their fight about the equipment. Then Dad had had to lay out the playing field. I’m not real sure why he hadn’t already done this while Mom was gone to town but maybe he needed the end of the bat to draw the bases in the dirt, because that was what he did with it first. Then there was a slight argument over who the pitcher was going to be and who was going to bat first.
I was starting to think I was going to grow old and gray long before my baseball career would get started. Some of you are probably feeling that same way right now waiting for me to tell you about it. So, Dad stood me in what I have learned to call the preliminary learning position, and I couldn’t see nothing. So, being the ever resourceful person that I am, I moved to the ‘secondary learning position,’ and experienced the effect of being able to see what was happening for the first time. Most of my experiences later on in life have fit right into this mold; sort of like the Dodgers. I was able to see. I saw Mom do her wind up and underhand pitch, remember it was a softball. I saw the arc of the ball as it made its way through the air on its trip to home plate. I saw Dad choke up on the bat and begin his swing. I saw him smash the softball.
I saw the end of the bat coming right on around. I saw the round end of it just before it hit me in the mouth. I don’t remember seeing much after that, other than blood, my own, and that was trough a veil of tears. I would like to say I never cried but I was only nine for gosh sakes and it hurt! As they say in the story books, time passes and I had healed up, still had my teeth, and after much persuasion, Dad convinces me that the problem was the yard had been too small and that was why I got hurt. We needed to go out to his old roping arena, where there is more room. Then I could stand out on third base and watch and not have to worry about getting hit by the bat.
Even though I was a little apprehensive, I agreed. One of the other things that was a little flawed about Dad’s teaching methods was he never bothered too much with the basics, it was more a learn as you go sort of method. I may be wrong, but I still believe to this day, that if I had a little more time learning to catch a ball and a little more instruction on how to play the infield, more than, “Just stand there and be ready,” things might have been a hair better for me.
Once again Dad laid out our playing field but this time Mom and I both had ball gloves. I guess she had made another trip to town in between my first two baseball experiences and now we had a glove with a pocket plus old mitty and a real baseball instead of the ‘soft’ ball. To this day I remember as clear as a bell watching Dad hit a line drive directly at me standing on third base. I remember watching the seams of the ball rotate as it flew through the air in what would have been an easy catch for a Dodger third baseman, but since I had never caught a ball before, heck I’d only had the glove on for five minutes or so, I must have been a natural because I made my first catch… with my teeth.
The impressions of the seams were very clearly marked in both my upper and lower lip. I did have a very good view of the blue Oklahoma sky, but alas, I think I failed to appreciate its beauty, like I should have, as I lay flat on my back just behind third base.
But, I healed up and I still had my teeth, so… A year or two later, I had been doing a lot of throwing the ball in the air and catching it. Dad had also spent some time lobbing balls to me, saying he was going to ‘burn me one. ’ I got to where I could catch a ball most of the time and I was feeling pretty confident that I was finally a true ballplayer. About this time my Uncle John, who I also learned a lot from and worked for on the farm many times, came pulling into the yard. He had no more gotten out of his pickup than I had thrown him the ball and said, “Burn me one John!” He did.
I was able to get my glove up in time to keep the ball from hitting me in the heart and probably killing me on the spot. The bad part was, I only deflected the ball upward s. The imprint of the seams could be clearly seen in my upper and lower lip. But, I still had my teeth. It was shortly after this that I started to campaign for a catcher’s mask. When I did eventually play baseball on a little league team; I was the starting catcher. Even though I did become a pretty good baseball player, I was more of a football player as I went through school; it was safer, and easier on the teeth. After leaving high school I took up steer wrestling in the rodeos and drifted away from the game of baseball even further until my son wanted to play the game. He ended up being a very good player and now his oldest girl is following in his footsteps.
Now, I am getting close to sixty years old. I still have most of my teeth, a couple of them did break over the years but most of them are still original equipment. Often times I think about those first experiences at playing baseball and I wonder if any of the great players of the game ever started out like I did… I doubt it. I do still love baseball and I love to watch a Dodger’s and Cardinals game. I just wish the Dodger’s could play the whole season sometime, instead of only the two ends. Oh, well, some things are just the way they are. I would like to get rid of politicians too, but no world is ever going to be that perfect.
