"It's spring - and a young man's fancy turns to baseball." Even when I was a kid, and this saying could truly have applied to me, I knew that the word "fancy" no longer had any reasonable place in a sentence like that, so there must be something suspicious about the whole concept. But the truth was, I couldn't get enough of baseball. I played on a team every summer and practiced the game all year 'round. I badgered a knowlegable playground director I knew into teaching me how to throw a "slider" at the age of twelve, thereby assuring myself of a couple of glorious seasons on the pitcher's mound at such a tender age, and a significantly damaged elbow shortly therafter. "What did you do to your ulnar nerve?" a doctor would ask me many years later. "It's like a hose with a crimp in it, right where you bend your arm." "Doc," I said, smiling ruefully, "You gotta understand. Till I was sixteen, I was pretty much unhittable."
I believed in those days that the Dodgers relocation from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, my hometown, was probably an omen that I was destined to play for them. My little brother and I would sneak a transistor radio into our bedroom at night so we could hear Vin Scully announce the last couple of innings of their games. We lived and died for the exploits of our heroes. After school, waiting for my mom to pick me up at my grandmother's house, I'd spread out four little squares of white paper on the floor in the shape of an imaginary diamond, lay my chest across a footstool with my head hovering above the "playing field" - and imagine - the game. Hours could pass. It was not a problem. In restaurants, I'd stare at the line where the wall met the ceiling, as if it were the field from a dugout seat - and imagine (complete with sound effects and violent jerking motions to lend the proper body English to a vicious line drive) - the game. My parents got used to fielding sympathetic comments from fellow diners who lamented my affliction, having witnessed through the evening my recurring twitches and grunts, and the far-away look in my eyes as they rolled up into my head at the crash of a home-run. After a while, my mom says, my parents stopped trying to explain.
When my son was getting started in life and dealing with some vision difficulties, the eye doc said, "The most important thing your boy can do for this is to play with a ball - as much as possible." And though Cody was leery at first, ours was definitely a likely family in which to fill such a prescription. The problem was, he couldn't really track a ball as it came toward him, and it was hard for him to understand the reasons for trying when ball after ball would show up suddenly and unpleasantly. Taking him out to Dodger Stadium started to turn the tide. We were able to share in the wonder of Fernando Valenzuela, and Cody was rapt at the story of how far baseball had taken that young man from the dirt floor shack he grew up in in Mexico. I could sit in the stands and point out the exact row where I sat the night Sandy Koufax threw his perfect game, and describe to him what that night was like: The concession stands around the stadium closed after the seventh inning, so the workers could witness the masterpiece. Koufax threw only fastballs in the eighth and ninth innings. He was throwing so hard his hat popped straight up off his head on many of those pitches. There was an absolute hush in the sold out house before each offering. Strike after strike after strike made total strangers leap in each other's faces - scream, grab and dance - then snap back to hushed attention. Six batters up, six down - all of them went out swinging. I'll never forget it as long as I live.
Years later, I was offered the lead role in a film at the American Film Institute. The student director had assembled enough money to buy his film stock and rent some extra lights, but like most such films, there was no money to pay the actors. At the time, I was broke and in the process of losing my house, which I was desperately trying to spruce up for sale. The offer came for this part - a month's work for no money - and of course, there was no way I could do it, until I read the script. There, leaping off the page in the second act, was a long and beautifully written monologue my character had, speaking to his father as they drove along together, about how amazing it was to watch Sandy Koufax pitch. When I finished reading that page, I immediately called my agent to accept the part. Ten days later, on the first day of the shoot, I met Leslie Bryans, the remarkably talented and vibrant camera operator, who eventually became my wife and Cody's mom. Cody understands just how magic baseball can be.
By now, he has come to love the game and respect the depth of its mysteries much like his old man, and he has acquired some formidable skills along the way, not to mention a noticable measure of courage. Batting in the All-Star game last year, with the bases loaded and the count three balls and one strike, he ducked under a pitch aimed at his head that should have been ball four and given his team the lead, only to feel the ball bounce foul off the tip of his bat for strike two. It would have been easy to conclude in that moment that fate was against him and cave in mentally. He scolded his bat for a moment before stepping back in the box. The next pitch was a fastball that was four or five inches outside, not in the strike zone but the kind of pitch the umpire loves to CALL a strike; the kind of pitch I would probably have watched go by when I was his age. He reached out across the plate and stroked it on a line into center field. I think this is evidence of evolution at work, and of baseball forging character. The urgency of my praise for him at game's end was more than he could stand. "Dad, please, you're embarassing me." "Sorry, son. Someday you'll understand."
This year I'm a coach of his team. We're about a month now into the effort to help shape them up for the season. Though I've long since realized how rare my kind of passion for the sport is, it's still slightly disappointing to witness how little it matters to some of the kids. It's just one more way to pass the time to most, a nugget along the road that is paved with video games, computers, TV shows, movies, Shaquille O'Neal and Michael Jordan, and a sense of the world and their places in it that is so far beyond what I experienced as to be almost unrecognizable. On a couple of faces, though, I've seen the spark begin to flicker when we talk strategy, and especially when we demonstrate the difference it makes to crank your hips before you swing, to square your shoulders before you throw, to signal the umpire that you are a batter to be reckoned with by the way you behave at the plate. We talk about stuff like the value of preparation, and the importance of staying in the moment at crunch time - about where a competitor needs to put his head to get the best from himself. And that finally, you have to think in terms of the long haul and keep your head up no matter what, since the game, in any given moment, can humble you without warning. And sometimes it waits a while before it lifts you back up.....but that it almost always does, if you strive to be worthy.
A little of this stuff is going to stick with these kids. With some of them, maybe even a lot of it. But most important, I know they see my own pure joy in the study and teaching of such a wonderful set of rituals, and understand how precious it is to me that I get to share them with my son.
Till the next time,
APS - That's my little brother, Billy J, second from the left in the front row. He was as good a shortstop as you'd ever want to see, and the heart and soul of our championship season.
