That Ball Is Gone

You step away one day, and the separation doesn’t hurt much. There’s no scar to speak of. When you’re removed from it for a while, the longing doesn’t really appear until you’re exposed to it again. And then you realize how much you want it back.

When I saw the yellow bus in the parking lot, I thought maybe I should pull over. And yet I wasn’t certain what would happen or how I’d feel if I did. I was hungry and had a few miles to go before I reached home. But forces I’m familiar with made me stop.

I pulled into the lot and parked my Jeep. I made my way up the hill and alongside the fence. It was forty-five degrees and breezy. Not the kind of day you want but the sun felt strong when the wind backed off for a few seconds. The rays warmed my face. But I had to keep my hands in the pockets of a thin jacket.

I stomped around and jumped up and down a bit— as much as my knees would allow in an old ritual meant to bring some body heat to the rescue on an early spring afternoon.

If you closed your eyes where I was, you’d know exactly where you were. You’d know from the crisp pop of an object colliding with leather and thwapping a syncopated beat to sometimes-unintelligible lines that almost always include the words yeah and kid and babe. They often begin or end with a quick h‘mon now.

If you’re close enough to the epicenter, you might— on a still day— hear the whoosh of the air’s resistance as the orb makes its way in a line. On any day, you hear one unmistakable dink after another as that sphere meets the bane of its existence.

I made eye contact with a young guy, probably half my age. He chewed gum or perhaps something harsher and shouted encouragement that I could barely understand. He kept an eye on that epicenter and smiled almost imperceptibly when he had to train his eyes on a launch whose object had very little chance of being recovered. By my estimation, the small round projectile traveled about 360 feet in the air.

“Kid can rake,” I said, when he looked my way again.

“Oh yeah.” He grinned broadly now. “We’re happy to have him.”

When you see a sweet one, you know it. There is no hesitation in it. There is rarely a hitch. There may be a half-step forward. And then detonation.

It is the result of an arc that is powered by the even distribution of weight generating power from front foot to back and up into the rotating core. It is a motion that has not varied much for more than a century, when a big kid from Baltimore used every ounce of his being to propel his tapered wooden weapon through the zone in a violent sweeping circle beginning behind the left shoulder, ripping past knee level and coming to rest behind the right shoulder.

When you’re around people who get it, you want them to know you get it too. It is part ego, yes. But it is also part of a desire to be drawn back in— to nod with affirmation when the young kid on the other side of the fence says they lost a few guys from last year. They have to plug some holes in the order.

“That kid should help out in the middle,” I said.

“He will. He’s a stud.”

“How you feelin’ about the season?”

“We’ll be okay. We’re gonna be okay.”

“Well… good luck to you.”

I blamed the weather and said I had to go. But it was more because at that moment the longing returned stronger than ever. If I could get behind the screen and throw a few down the pipe and hear the return fire whizzing past my right ear and then past my left. If I could watch a play at the plate kick up a cloud of beige and white from the ground to the high place where this game must have surely been born.

If I could just be part of it again.