Postponing Autumn
I walk into the dugout and Dennis eyes me up. “I’ll put you in center", he says. “Really? … cool”, I say, not sure what to make of that. I’m a replacement player and I get to play the best position on the field? I thought there would be testing of some sort. Come off the bench and pinch hit or pinch run. Make a play in right field. Watch me throw or run or spit a sunflower seed husk. Something.
But no. The Overrated Underdogs will, apparently, take any 6’3”, 195 lb. guy who can walk into the dugout without crutches or a doctor’s note and stick him in centerfield. I’m confused, until some guy shows up to show off his internal bleeding. He pulls down his sweatpants and shows a horrid purple-blue muscle tear stain on his thigh. “Out for the season” he says, before departing with a “good luck, guys.”
I think I’ll go stretch.
Fifty-three is a dumb age to break into baseball but … well, there you have it. The Overrated Underdogs of the Monterey Peninsula's "Sea Otter League" need a player for their 45+ team, and I’m done with coaching for the season. Golf is too boring. Neither hockey nor skiing is close enough. Don’t want to bowl alone and be a Robert Putnam cliche. Climbing can wait till the off-season. The mountains are there all year. But the boys of summer are season-dependent.
Baseball it is, then. Baseball it always was. Baseball, it will always be. Just look at Dennis. He is 82. A player-manager, he sets the line-up and bats as designated hitter. He's not much of a stealing threat, mainly because he gets a courtesy runner when he makes it to first. But he is still going at it, putting the ball in play and hustling down the line. A boy of summer, in the autumn of his years.
So yes, my legs are a little sore this morning. Centerfield, and pinch running almost every inning will do that to you. I’m not sure I have to use my left arm to lift my right leg into the Jeep, but it seems a little faster that way, so I do (for the record, the Jeep is kinda tall). If pain is weakness leaving the body, what does that make soreness? The body being reminded of stupidity? That’s too harsh. Silliness, then.
Fifty, sixty and seventy somethings playing baseball is silly. But, as the ball is arching into the right-center gap, the delight of intercepting an object moving in three dimensions while you just have two to work with, running as fast as you can? You’re not fifty, sixty or seventy. You’re ten, eleven or twelve. My modest suggestion when picking a sport is pick something you can play until the reaper casts his unflinching grimness in your direction.
The OU’s fight back against the Seals, plating three runs in the bottom of the eighth to take a 9 – 8 lead, which we do not relinquish in the ninth. And thus, after fifty years of endless inner-city pick-up games where Little League was not a thing, a high school baseball career lost to fate, the twenty-something softball / bar circuit and years of coaching kids in life as much as tactics, I’m entered in a scorebook in a real, organized game.
Fifty-three is a dumb age to break into baseball, but it does remind me of a question I asked at City Hall this week. The Monterey Peninsula climate is famously splendid. Never too hot. Never too cold. But 68 to 73 degrees gets a little monotonous. So I asked some locals, “what sort of thing happens to let you know autumn has arrived?” It happens to be my favorite season. No one had an answer.
The sun is shining, the Pacific-fresh air is wafting over the dunes into the ball diamond, and Dennis is legging out a hit. I’m cheering for him, and only in part because I get to run for him if he makes it.
The earth orbits around the sun and the seasons, inexorably, come and go. So too we, will come and go. But keep the joy of your childhood game - whatever game that is - in your heart, and you can live eternally in that bright spring, when all is possible.
