Catching Colleen Ch. 01 Rounding Third and Heading for Home
It was my last game. The wear and tear on my knees caused sharp, nagging pain, and my doctor said stop or live the rest of my life as a cripple. I thought of the ache in my arm, how hard it got to lift that arm as the season and seasons went on--and how I somehow managed to make good throws anyway. I took foul tips into the forearm, the thighs, a hand, almost every game. Torment. But even then it was not an easy decision to stop. I loved that game.
But it was always a game, just a game. I never thought it was important to society or democracy. I saved some money, invested conservatively on good advice and built up some savings. I made a living--a lot compared to plumbers and teachers and carpenters--but that wasn't it for me. I loved that game. Kinsella called it the thrill of the grass, that feeling of expectancy and nature and playing a game on green grass and dirt. For me it was the grit of the dirt. I got dirty catching. I got it in my mouth, the creases of my elbows, the angle of my jaw, and sometimes between my teeth. I got it in scrapes on my elbows and hands and knees. When I was 15 and pimply I almost quit because of the mask and the sand and my skin. Then I'd throw a stealer out at second, or call the right pitch to get a strike out, or block someone who thought he could make home, or I'd even make an error. There is nothing like it: Baseball. Great.
In the last of the third some guy was yelling at me from just where the backstop ends, near the home dugout. One was out. A pitch came outside, not where I'd called for it, with no one on. (Trouble with your release point, eh Pitch?) The batter swung, nipping the ball almost straight back into me, hitting my mask and caroming about 12 feet into the air, heading for the corner of the backstop. I threw off my mask, treating it like a real foul pop up (because it is since it didn't go to my hands, first) and dove to catch the ball but it hit the brick just as I got to it. I had it, but just a little late on the rebound, and I heard some guffaws and then claps. I came up laughing with the ball and Art signalled safe because it was a foul ball when it hit the brick.
"Fuckin' asshole, you've sucked your whole career, Kowalsh!" I heard. "It's not a popup when it hits off you, Idiot." How do you turn off your hearing? I always heard what was yelled. And I remembered a lot of those constructive comments. This one being incorrect (if I'd caught it the guy would have been out), I did not disabuse him since I'd missed the catch. Mostly I looked away, but this time I looked over. It was a guy maybe 38, my age, with a 10 year old boy on one side and a nice-looking, dark-haired woman on the other. She looked at me with a funny expression, embarrassed, acting like she hoped I hadn't heard. Her husband had his lower lip sticking out and a beer in his hand.
I pulled the ball out of my mitt and started to toss it to the ball boy, but then I held up. I looked at the guy's kid, dark-haired like his mother, thin, looking a little like he wished his pop would shut up. I turned to the kid and jogged two or three steps to get to the edge of the backstop net. I looked up at the kid.
"Here, kid," I said as I reached around the backstop and tossed him the ball. I looked at his dad as the kid caught the ball. "Welcome." I smiled at the guy and ran back to home.
The ump was Art Nichols and he handed me my mask. I shook my head. "I ain't gonna miss that, you know?" I said. He smiled and nodded, said, "Know what you mean. It was a good try. Almost got him. I hate to see you go, Serge." He and I went way back; he'd called some of my games in the minors. I'd had a drink with him once or twice, heard about his kids and ex-wife. He put his hand on my shoulder as I crouched for the next pitch, an unusual thing for an ump.
I didn't notice a direct response from the guy in the stands, but he was quieter after that. I didn't notice any more criticism of me. I kinda wish he'd yelled some more. His wife was attractive. Man, I like women: pretty, kind of pretty, and nearly pretty.
And that's all of them.
I went 2 for 4 in losing and called it a game, a season, and a career. I had a lifetime average of .252, never hit over 270 or under 241. I went two years with only 18 passed balls, which got me into the record books. I led the league in throw outs at second some years, at third for several others, and made the all star team twice. Not bad for a sore arm pedestrian. I hit a few homers, though not enough to raise many eyebrows. I usually batted around seventh, once second but that team was not so good. Never made it to the Series. First in division one year, within a few outs of the league pennant. I knocked around different teams. I'd put on a little weight over the last few years. 38 is old, especially for a catcher. Crouching was comfortable, standing was comfortable, but going from one to the other was creaky, very creaky. And my arm hurt.
I don't think I ever threw a ball after February that my arm didn't hurt. I made every dugout smell of mint from the BenGay and anything else that might take the pain down. Aspirin, naproxen sodium, acetaminophen, ibuprofen, whatever. Occasionally a cortisone shot in the shoulder. Nothing illegal for me, though. I watched McMann go from slim to simian and that was not my style. No way, as Trip would have said back in the day.
Catching just hurt, that was part of the game, and it hurt from the time I lifted my arm the second week of camp until my knees throbbed in September. I wished I was one of those easy throwers who don't hurt, but I never was. It was pain that got in the way of perfection, all part of a great thing. I don't think baseball is just fun: I think it's why we should live, it's so fun. Okay, I know, that doesn't go with the part about it's only a game. If you want consistent philosophy you should turn to Kierkegaard or Kant, not Kowalsh. It works for me, and I don't care about the inconsistency.
I didn't go to college before I went to the minors. I went when I had time: between seasons, in the evenings, and one minor league season in mornings. Baseball was life because it paid my way. It cost me, too, but any career costs. Baseball hurt and I loved it. I guess lots of careers are like that. Lawyers have to work after hours and policemen work early and overnight. Nurses too. Doctors. Plumbers have to get the job done when it needs doing. Baseball wasn't so bad. Yeah, my arm hurt. And I probably have a torn rotator cuff or bone spurs in my elbow. No pain, no value added, as economists say.
I picked up a degree in American literature along the way. I played a lot in the Carolina League off and on and East Carolina U. had an off campus program that minimized my required time on campus. I joined in, and it took me close to a decade but I got the bachelor's degree. I took lots of courses early on with Marines from Camp Lejeune, for whom the program was actually designed. I could read, I had time on the buses and planes, in the motels at odd hours, and I could write. Study was my yoga. I liked some poets, but I particularly liked the American novels of the 1950s and 1960s--Styron was my favorite. I read his books between Wilmington and Winston-Salem and every other place in the Carolina League. (I remember a game between the Blue Rocks and the Mudcats and...) Oh, I studied between some of the cities in the American League, too.
His books were more than people thought, more than some of my teachers thought. I stand by "The Confessions of Nat Turner," which I think got twisted in petulant racial politics and was tortured for no reason relating to author or book. I thought it showed the humanity and deprecation of racial animosity; Nat was smart and fully human--a characteristic white people needed to admit in 1960s America.
But "Sophie's Choice" was uneven, ultimately; Stingo was not common or normal or regular. Weird in a book about weirder ones--that was Sophie's Stingo. Sophie went crazy because she had to choose one of her children to live; Stingo seemed desperate to have a girlfriend, even a paranoid, schizophrenic one. Nat Turner just wanted to love like a man could, regardless of race. That was powerful, that was right, and that was human.
The ones who should have embraced Styron turned on him; he wrote the first politically incorrect novel about Nat, he said. So ultimately I think Styron will be pushed aside by political correctness and his tactic of going after our greatest prejudices; the greatest writer America produced in the last half of the 20th century lost because we can't talk without hating white people or loving black. Confessions is about the way we are, black or white. "Sophie" is about evil's ability to overwhelm by corrupting all that is best in humanity. Styron was so good. So close. Irony: instead we read Irving.
We didn't talk much lit in the locker rooms. Others chewed some quid, whatever that noxious and obnoxious concoction of tobacco and bubble gum was. Some guys were doing steroids or hgh, not openly when I was around. But there was not much deep talk. Senseless banter and adolescent joking were the norm. I never found anyone who read Styron. Most didn't know who he was. As I grew older and they younger they left me alone, mostly. I had no enemies, it was just I was the old guy who'd been to college. Most didn't read for enjoyment, anyway. In the minors they'd sleep on the bus or stare out the windows. A few read newspapers. Once the Ipods and stuff came around they listened to music with earphones. They seemed to avoid thinking about things. They self-distracted. "Set This House on Fire" never came up. I wished I'd found one Crash Davis (the "Bull Durham" movie character--not the real guy). There must be some. But Styron was only mine, minors and majors.
I had a pitcher who went to college and some infielders over the years, more as the seasons passed. None of them said they learned much. I was disappointed, and I wondered if it meant anything. My manager at St. Louis had a law degree, but I was only there one season. It was before my degree, after I'd started classes in North Carolina, but we never talked about it. I missed classes and due dates in September. Never in October, too bad for me. I missed other things because of the game.
