Singsong

A trip to Florida for spring training this past weekend found me sitting in the bleachers watching my family's team, the Cardinals, beat my current city's team, the Twins. Bleachers are my favorite place to sit as it's easier to smell the dirt and beer just tastes better in the bleachers. And while drinking said beer and listening to my boyfriend talk baseball trades with a Pittsburgh fan in front of us, there was that holy and distinct sound of bat* connecting with bound leather that reminded me of my own days of well-worn gloves and polyester sliding shorts. (*note: my Dad read this blog and emailed me to correct my use of "metal" in the prior sentence since aluminum bats have never been allowed in MLB baseball.  The crack of a bat sounds like metal to me, but I concede that my aluminum-based childhood bat usage likely colors my aural experience. Thanks, Dad.)

Softball took up a long chapter of my childhood.  I joined a T-ball team the summer after kindergarten and played slightly longer than a decade before hanging up my cleats in favor of the spotlights of high school theater. The majority of the girls on my various teams have been forgotten, as well as the majority of the wins and defeats.  A few coaches stick out (some fondly, some not-so-much), a few awesome plays, a couple injuries, but only one at-bat has survived in the half-life since I quit the game.

I wouldn't say I was ever a great ballplayer.  By the time I quit, I was a very good shortstop and a competent second base.  I was also never a powerhouse at bat.  I hit a handful of homeruns in my decade of play, and most of those were only homeruns due to errors on the other team's part.  Despite my slighty-better-than-mediocre mediocrity, I can be proud of how well I learned the game and how dedicated I was to a sport that, at first, seemed destined to destroy all childhood joy.

My first couple of years playing I remember having fun.  But I also remember being HORRIBLE at bat.  Once they took the T away and I had to swing at actual pitches, I was just a mess.  I'm sure I cried a good bit over it, although I don't remember doing so.  I just remember the burning knot of anxiety that formed in my stomach when I was on deck, my brother playing in the dirt on the other side of the backstop, my dad smiling and shouting support from those noisy, shiny metal bleachers. We were in Arkansas then and softball was a hot sport. The bats left too long in the sunshine would burn the skin, and I can remember the taste of hot, still Southern air when I would take my practice swings with that burning bat.

My dad would practice with me at home, tossing pitches that I could never hit.  I'd get frustrated and probably start to cry and he'd get frustrated and tell me to shake it off.  After a few too many minutes in that routine, we'd switch to playing catch, which I was infinitely better at.  Dad would hit grounders at me and I'd dive around in our backyard with my dog chasing my heels, or he'd stand at the top of the hill at the side of our house and toss monstrously high pop flys to my waiting glove below.  I was a good fielder, and it was definitely easier to strengthen my assets than force me into a skill I was loathe to master.  My bat and that ball were just not meant to be friends.

I suppose that's why I distinctly remember the game where I got my first "real" hit, the first time my bat hit the sweet spot on the ball and sent it in a solid, unforgiving line just above the head of the shortstop, grounding to the fence with a left fielder on its tail. I can remember the sound of that hit, coupled with that sharp, nearly painful vibration of metal traveling from palm to elbow to shoulder, like I'd just stepped out of that batter's box, bat tossed towards the dugout along first base (we were visitors that game). 

Before that at bat my dad had said often (usually after patting me on the back after another strikeout) that I just needed to keep practicing and if I kept my eye on the ball, one day I would make the two connect.  This is common, overly common advice.  Keep your eye on the ball.  Keep your eye on the ball.  It was some phrase in Swahili that never settled in my brain to make a formidable impression.  I can watch the ball all I want, Dad, and typically I watch it sail right over the plate because I'm too scared to swing.  What does "watching the ball" have to do with anything?

I remember the team I was playing for at the time was coached by a drunk, Billy, who yelled at us often.  The parents would step in when he got rowdy, and he didn't last many seasons coaching.  He was actually a very good, deliberate coach when he was sober.  And he genuinely wanted us to win.  But I remember his breath and that cup of tobacco spit as he'd wave me out of the dugout and tell me that "if you're going to strikeout, at least strike out swinging."  I wasn't his hitter and he knew it, so why waste effort on the girl that just watches the ball land in the catcher's mitt?

Our team that year had hideous maroon tshirts, I think sponsored by a garbage collection company, which I wore with either black sliders or an equally hideous pair of hawaiian shorts.  The Day of the Hit was a hawaiian shorts kind of day.  I walked past my parents and my brother, likely jumping off bleachers or killing bugs or inflicting injury on himself or others at that point. My dad likely yelled his encouraging phrase of the inning (that must get monotonous for parents of underachieving athletes) and I'm sure my gut was hollow and I was just hoping for minor embarassment, hopefully to be rectified by a good play or two in the infield later on.  I'm sure my mom said something along the lines of , "You can do it, honey!" and I just moped my way to the box.

Billy wasn't too drunk that day, but he was mean anyway.  I had three balls and one strike at the point when Billy yelled, loud, exasperated, and simple, "Swing!"  I remember looking at him, probably scornfully, and then looking over at my parents.  My dad was picking my brother out of the dirt and talking to him with a stern expression and my mom was watching me and smiling, blithely waving her hand as if I was doing an excellent job up there.  At that point I just figured swinging would be the fastest way to get the moment over with and so I settled in and leaned my weight against my right leg, hands grasping a good two inches above the end of the bat which I held at an angle slightly lower than normal since before the game my dad had mentioned sometimes I held it a little high.  Harder to swing it around that way.  

This time, this pitch, I saw the ball as it left the pitcher's hands.  I could see it, watch it, the way you watch an egg roll over a counter, fall, and splatter on the kitchen floor.  It was an easy, rolling egg, kind of pitch.  And for the first time I hooked my elbow a bit higher before bringing the bat around to twist at the waist, watched that egg, the sweet spot of that mud-crusted egg, crack at the thickest part of my bat.  I remember Billy's yelp of surprise and hearing my dad yell, "Go, Rachel!" and while I know I ran, know I got a double, know we lost the game, I don't remember much beyond that moment.  Only the arc of the pitch, Billy's "Swing!", my mom's sweet smile, and my dad's emphatic direction stick out on the periphery of what I felt.  It's what I felt that remains. 

It's the feel of diamond dirt beneath tennis shoes (I didn't get cleats until I played in St. Louis a few years later), the marking of that line with my right foot as I stepped into the box, the slow slow tense of the right shoulder as it lifts up, and the swift, strong twist of the hip as I pivoted towards the ball ("point your right hip right where you want to hit that ball," quoth Billy), that remains.  And the sound of that metal-on-leather choir, the singsong of the game, echoes through each tap and crack and minor hit and grand slam of baseball. Every spring.  Every year.

And maybe that's one reason why I love it so much.