Assignment 1...BDJ 600/300

“Ain’t much to being a ballplayer...if you’re a ballplayer.”

                        …Honus Wagner (Baseball Hall of Fame, 1936)



I gave my BDJ 600/300 class this assignment...a third-person piece that examines what got them to where and who and what they are today.  It sounded interesting enough, so I gave it a try myself.

When he asked his grandmother what the boys in the far distance were doing, she replied “playing baseball.”  That, by itself, meant nothing to a four-year-old, but what does?  No further details on what baseball actually was were needed. No explanation of the rules, no mention of players or teams was necessary. The simple “playing baseball” was sufficient. 

Or so it seemed.

It would be very difficult  to trace back to the specific moment that turned his life in a certain direction, but there had to be a moment when a ball was thrown toward him and the inclination to catch it rather than duck out of the way took hold. There had to be a moment when the idea of throwing it back to whomever threw it his way also took hold. 

The act  itself, tossing an object back and forth…playing catch…unfolded over time into something far more complicated, yet still simple in its essence.  

In sports, repetitive, relatively simple individual actions, are designed to become exhilarating when they are successful and frustrating when they are not. He learned over time that he seemed to succeed more than he failed. That he was good at most things he attempted and he was very good at baseball.

When he was about 12, his mother’s words… “It’s possible,” (he sensed that she actually meant ‘probable’) that you might not become a professional ball player,” were softened by her thought that there might be a place for him, some other way of being “in baseball.”

But he persevered, determined that practice and repetition and dedication and all the other things that drove him would overcome his lack of size and speed and the number of others who pursued the same dream, all of them clamoring up a steep hill toward the very small plateau at the top.  

He was wrong.  He was good, but not that good.  He could play, but too many others could play better.  And he understood what his mother had meant. 

All along, he had reveled in the repetition.  He loved practice, he loved the game in its many incarnations. He invented ways to play constantly…in the park, his backyard, his front yard, his driveway, his garage. There was an inexplicable essence to the game.

He had become something of a star in Little League, and Teener League and high school and American Legion and summer semi-pro leagues. He had been a D-1 starter and letter winner in college.  He became an assistant coach at his alma mater. He played 10 years of semi-pro baseball and quit before he lost his skills.  He became an umpire so he could stay in the game. 

But his future, his reality, lay in something that had really never occurred to him.

He had taken a shot at law school and hadn’t liked it.  He had served in the military, but knew it wasn’t his life’s work.  He became a substitute teacher as a stop gap until he found a “real” job, and after being hired full time, gradually, a few years into it, it became clear that teaching WAS his real job.

He realized that he had been meant to be a baseball player, but not destined to be a great one. He came to understand that baseball had helped mold him, but only so far as to eventually set him free to find what he truly needed to be doing. Baseball had given him the gift of confidence, taught him the lessons of success and failure, and given him the sense that in the long run, the exhilaration of success overrides the dejection of failure, but both highs and lows of the past become … just the past.  

It became clear that the things he had not done were less important than the things he was doing. 

 

As a teacher, there were no statistics to define him, no scouts to tell him that he was too small or too slow, no scoreboard to register success or failure. There was only his intuitive sense that he was in the right place doing the right thing. And that was all he needed.

He understood that when his grandmother had pointed into the distance to tell him what those boys were doing, she was, somehow, pointing the way into his future.