A true baseball story

It's early April. The North Texas wind is, as they say, blowing like a bandit. White, fluffy clouds are scooting east fast, and I have that comforting, aching feeling again, the one I've had every March and April of my life in memory.

Soggy dirt, wet grass and chilly afternoons.

Baseball season is back.

Roughly 47 or 48 years ago, when I was a kid of 13 or 14, I spent my summer days on a baseball field on Thomas Drive, one block over from my home with my buddy, Norm Miller. We always got there early and that's where we spent our days.

Sometimes we were eventually joined by other kids. Often we were not. Didn't matter to us. Norm and I would throw baseballs to each other, taking turns swinging for non-existent fences, absorbing imagined cheers from the imagined crowd.

We peopled our fantasy with our Northern California heroes of the early 1960s: Mays, McCovey, Cepeda, Marichal and Hart. We gave them reality by batting left or right handed as they did. We announced their advancement to the plate at Candlestick Park:

"The batter, number 12, Jim Davenport!"

That's how Norm and I spent our spring weekends and summer afternoons, in baseball heaven.

Late one afternoon a man wandered up behind the backstop and watched for awhile as I threw slow fastballs and flat curves to Norm, who was always a sucker for any pitch high and away.

Balding, portly and puffing on a cigar the man behind the backstop watched. Norm and I thought nothing of him until he finally hollered, "Hey! Mind if I take a swing?"

In those days it never occurred to any kid to say no to any adult request. It never occurred to us that his request was weird or that we should run for our lives and report the strange, fat, balding cigar sucker as a potential child molestor.

He just wanted to hit a baseball and we said, "Sure".

Together, Norm and I had acquired a kid's treasure trove of baseballs. We had maybe three or four between us. Some of them had their covers taped shut, maybe one had its seams intact. That's the one I picked up as Norm ran out to center field.

Something told me I needed to show this guy my best stuff. I was only 13 or 14 but on that particular day I had never been older and I had never played baseball with an adult.

I concentrated, made my best imitation of scraping my toe at the pitching rubber, peered in at the non-existent sign from non-existent Tom Haller and fired in my best non-existent fast ball.

"Thwack!"

The fat, bald guy slammed it on a line into centerfield and hadn't missed a puff from his cigar.

Two or three more times I threw baseballs as hard as I could and the old man peppered them around the deepest outfields, left to right. Poor Norm Miller was run ragged shagging them down.

The old man smiled, dropped the cigar on the grass beside him and got down to business.

"THWACK! THWACK! THWACK!"


He slammed everything I had that came anywhere near the plate. A couple of pitches, the ones twelve or fifteen feet away, he let pass, easily ducking the ones that were boring in straight for his head.

It ended when the bat in his hand splintered. You could say it simply gave up, glued, nailed and taped together as it had been to begin with.

And when the old, fat, cigar-chomper came out to the field, grinning from ear to ear and offering to pay for the bat, we asked him -- with the ignorant innocence of youth: "Did you ever play baseball?"

He smiled again and took the wallet out of his back pocket. Then he carefully fished out a yellow newspaper clipping nearly twenty years old.

I'm sorry to say it didn't mean anything to me at the time and I remember nothing about it now. But his wallet also displayed his driver's license, and having never seen one from New York before it caught my attention:

Carl Furillo.

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Carl Anthony Furillo (March 8, 1922 – January 21, 1989), nicknamed "The Reading Rifle" and "Skoonj," was a right fielder in Major League Baseball who played his entire career for the Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers. A member of seven National League champions from 1947 to 1959, he batted over .300 five times, winning the 1953 batting title with a .344 average – then the highest by a right-handed Dodger since 1900. Noted for his strong and accurate throwing arm, he recorded 10 or more assists in nine consecutive seasons, leading the league twice, and retired with the fifth most games in right field (1408) in NL history.

"It breaks your heart."

A writer who loves baseball must be careful. It's too easy to slip into flowery purple prose about the game and I'm already prone to over-writing. Besides, the love of baseball has already been written with soul-stirring elegance by the likes of Roger Kahn, Roger Angell, Red Smith, George Will, Jim Murray, Joshua Prager, Ken Burns and many others.

This morning  I started watching the Ken Burns documentary, Baseball, for the third or fourth time and for reasons I understand in my heart but can't put into words it still chokes me up. I get teary and a lump in my throat. It's that good, cleansing, happy emotion that makes you feel young, fresh and wholesome again.

The memories melt years from my body; I remember how I felt when my legs were lean, strong and swift and my arms were powerful.

I could smash a fastball to the moon and run like the wind all day with a huge smile on my barely sweating, freckled face. I can still remember the smell of freshly mowed grass under a cool March sky of scooting, fluffy clouds.
 
The base paths are wet from last night's rain. One leaden, water-soaked, torn-cover baseball is heaved toward the mud that immerses home plate. I swing my glued, nailed, taped bat. Foul ball. Pitcher and batter are enthralled by the escalating drama.

See? There I go, pushing the flowery purple envelope. When you love baseball you just can't help it. It's a disease you catch as a child and it festers joyously for a lifetime. As the great sports writer Pete Hamill once wrote:

"Don't tell me about the world.  Not today.  It's springtime and they're knocking baseballs around fields where the grass is damp and green in the morning and the kids are trying to hit the curve ball."

Pete Hamill has the delicious disease of his youth.

Here are more of my favorite quotes about the game from the men who played it professionally and fed the dreams of the rest of us who still believe we could have:

 

"You can't sit on a lead and run a few plays into the line and just kill the clock.  You've got to throw the ball over the goddamn plate and give the other man his chance.  That's why baseball is the greatest game of them all."  ~Earl Weaver

"People ask me what I do in winter when there's no baseball.  I'll tell you what I do.  I stare out the window and wait for spring."  ~Rogers Hornsby

 

"I don't care how long you've been around, you'll never see it all."  ~Bob Lemon

"It breaks your heart.  It is designed to break your heart.  The game begins in spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone."  ~Bart Giamatti, "The Green Fields of the Mind," Yale Alumni Magazine, November 1977

"During my 18 years I came to bat almost 10,000 times.  I struck out about 1,700 times and walked maybe 1,800 times.  You figure a ballplayer will average about 500 at bats a season.  That means I played seven years without ever hitting the ball."  ~Mickey Mantle, 1970

"The pitcher has to find out if the hitter is timid.  And if the hitter is timid, he has to remind the hitter he's timid."  ~Don Drysdale

"Every player should be accorded the privilege of at least one season with the Chicago Cubs.  That's baseball as it should be played - in God's own sunshine.  And that's really living."  ~Alvin Dark

 

"You gotta be a man to play baseball for a living, but you gotta have a lot of little boy in you, too."  ~Roy Campanella

 

"When they start the game, they don't yell, 'Work ball.'  They say, 'Play ball.'"  ~Willie Stargell

 

"You see, you spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball, and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time."  ~Jim Bouton, Ball Four