Getting ready to play ball
My husband dropped the bomb in an e-mail:
“I’m the new assistant high-school baseball coach,” he wrote. “I will mow the lawn, power-wash the house and build closet shelves after the season’s over. Until then, let’s discuss this like adults.”
“Adults” and “baseball” aren’t often used in the same sentence. Baseball is for the child in us; my husband has a lot more of it than I do, which is why I’ve been waiting all these years for the other cleat to drop.
A decade ago, my husband volunteered to coach a high-school team. He became so enamored of the experience that he went to graduate school for three years to become a certified teacher so he could continue to coach baseball. Unfortunately, the little school that hired him didn’t have enough eligible students to field a team — until this year.
My husband’s body may be 64 years old, but his heart is 17. That’s when he last played America’s game, when “my bat made a certain sharp sound, a CRACK, and it meant I’d struck the ball firmly and had a hit.”
I found that youthful memory in an essay he wrote the day Alex Rodriguez signed a $50 million contract. My husband’s Little League and high-school baseball experience wasn’t about steroid use, overpaid underachievers, scandals and Congressional testimony.
He remembers he “always made a point of first touching home plate, a mere depression in the gravel and clay field we played on.” His sandlot team’s baseballs were “usually hardened by moisture and time, and when the leather cover wore out we wrapped them with electrician’s tape one of us had nicked from his dad’s toolbox.”
“There were no fans, no umpires, no uniforms,” he recalled of happy days a half-century distant. “Most of us hadn’t started reading the sports pages yet, so we listened to radio broadcasts of away games, where the announcer made up his own sound effects.”
Why does he love it so much?
“Because high-school baseball is life played out in seven innings,” he said, speaking slowly, as to a kindergartner. “All important lessons occur in baseball: opportunity, success, failure, dreams, discipline. Joy is a home run; disappointment is a strikeout. At the end of a game, nobody’s died and everybody gets to eat. The next day we do it all over again.”
Every April through October, through all the decades of responsibility, my husband has mentally worn an outfielder’s glove on his left hand from opening day through the World Series.
This year, when he got an unexpected shot at a last hurrah, he ignored his arthritic shoulder and creaky knees and became the batting and pitching coach for the Hana Dragons — all 11 of them, including a girl. He refuses to comment about the ice bags he drapes over his arms and legs after every practice.
I’ve never seen him so sore and exhausted — or happier.
Every day, he spends nine hours slogging through the impossible mandates of the No Child Left Behind law until the final bell releases him from his teaching duties. Then he leaps out of his polo shirt and khakis, and into a too-tight nylon uniform that shows off his spare tire as well as his still-great legs.
Scuffing new black tennis shoes in the dirt, tugging at the bill of a new black cap embroidered with a gold “H,” he becomes our very own Tommy Lasorda, spouting the wisdom of long-gone heroes Ted Williams, Mickey Mantle and Jackie Robinson.
Our small town doesn’t have a regulation baseball field, so all the Dragons’ games must be played nearly three hours away. For the next six Friday nights, my husband, who is nearly eligible for Social Security, will wrap himself in a sleeping bag and camp out on the opposing team’s hardwood gym floor, chaperoning a bunch of teenagers.
Like I said, baseball is child’s play.
You may write to Tad Bartimus c/o The Women Syndicate, P.O. Box 10169, Columbia, Mo., 65205.