It's Almost Opening Day and I'm Back In the Yard

 

Clothespins

By Stuart Dybek

I once hit clothespins
for the Chicago Cubs.
I'd go out after supper
when the wash was in
and collect clothespins
from under four stories
of clothesline.
A swing-and-a-miss
was a strike-out;
the garage roof, Willie Mays,
pounding his mitt
under a pop fly.
Bushes, a double,
off the fence, triple,
and over, home run.
The bleachers roared.
I was all they ever needed for the flag.
New records every game—
once, 10 homers in a row!
But sometimes I'd tag them
so hard they'd explode,
legs flying apart in midair,
pieces spinning crazily
in all directions.
Foul Ball! What else
could I call it?
The bat was real.

I grew up in a red block house on Rt. 23 – a busy four-lane highway that I was warned never to cross or even go near. My only sibling was a brother twelve years older who joined the Navy in '57, the year I started grade school, so he was away from home nearly all of my early school years. Do I have to tell you that one of my prized possessions was a black baseball glove Brother Phil brought back from Okinawa?

We had no close neighbors as houses were few and far between, so I really didn't have a “neighborhood” as such or any playmates available outside the door. But, we had a very modest back yard. It was there and the hilly range behind the flat space that I, accompanied by my trusty Spitz dog Dixie, shot bad guys with cap pistols and fended off wild Indians.

And it was there – in the little backyard – that I played baseball … all by myself. I loved the game and worshiped the Cincinnati Reds … Johnny Temple, Wally Post, Ted Kluszewski, Vada Pinson, Frank Robinson, and all the rest. All of the stars came to life right there, smack dab behind the house on the little space Dad had leveled on the big hillside.

I didn't hit clothespins like Dybek's character, but I would toss up balls – any kind I had, be they actual baseballs, rubber balls, or plastic balls – and hit them back and forth across Crosley Field, the “stadium” in my back yard. No matter the lack of playmates: I played my own baseball games that lasted for hours. All it took to play was a ball and a bat … and a vivid imagination.

My games featured the Reds – my team and, naturally, the team that always won – against a host of foes from other National League teams. Every player in the game was announced, by me of course, and each one took his order in the lineup during these nine inning games. I swung for each batter's turn at the plate, and the game progressed according to my rules.

Making the rules required special attention. A swing-and-a-miss was a strikeout. Ground balls were outs, and stuck balls had to reach a predetermined mark in the yard on the fly to be a single, double, triple, or home run. To simply hit the ball over the fence and out of the yard was also an out because doing so meant a long pause in the game to search for the ball in some pretty bushy terrain. I had to hit line drives to score. The best batted ball – a home run – was a line drive that hit the short chicken-wire fence on the fly.

As a kid, my games were challenging and oh so faithful to my love for baseball. I think about those backyard games every now and then, and I picture the old home place and growing up on Scioto Trail. I really didn't miss a neighborhood gang since I had never had one – necessity creates fantastic games and adventures for any willing young heart.

Don't get me wrong. I had grade school and Cub Scouts and other social outlets, but “home” itself was a place void of playmates … until I was old enough to be trusted to peddle my bike along Rt. 23 to friends' homes like John Herms' down Lowry Hollow.

Later on, I would get to cross 23 and go down by the Scioto River. There, I loved to hit rocks with my wooden bat and test the full limits of my swing. It was fun, but not as entertaining as playing my own games in the backyard. Pretty hard on the bat, too. The river held its own mystique during those years.

I didn't know a baseball diamond until playing Clay Little League for Barrett's Insurance. Fielding at home? We had a very small front yard – located a good twenty-five feet above the highway that provided me with a place to throw and catch rubber balls. The block side of the house was my rebounder. And, I had to learn to keep within the limitations of the yard. Then, later I got one of those “pitchback” ball returns with adjustable angles. Those are such “sweet” solo devices for ballplayers.

As a youngster, I remember visiting my Great-Uncle John in Brooklyn, New York. He lived in a cooperative across from Sunset Park, where I first saw people playing handball. I was fascinated watching people play and brought back a couple of those rubber balls to use for my games.

After our family moved to a subdivision in Lucasville with sizeable yards and playmates galore, I became a Wiffle ball fanatic. Our baseball coaches used to tell us not to play the game, as their old school beliefs claimed it interfered with hitting a baseball – a claim I totally rejected. Without Wiffle ball, I would not have quickly adjusted to the breaking balls thrown by senior league and high school pitchers.

Now, I'm 70-years-old, and it's almost Opening Day. I still love baseball, and I still love the Cincinnati Reds. Each year about this time I remember going to my first baseball game at Crosley Field in Cincy. The park was a green oasis amidst the smokestacks and warehouses of Cincinnati’s west end. When we entered the stadium and I got my first glimpse of the field, I nearly passed out. The greenest greens in the outfield grass, the perfectly manicured infield, the dazzling red uniforms of the Reds, and the huge scoreboard that featured signs for numerous sponsors like Hudepohl beer and Longine watches took me to place of my dreams.

I hope youngsters still feel the magic of baseball. Nothing could replace the love in my heart for the game. Nothing could replace the thrill of playing the game – the contact of a ball on the “sweet spot” of the bat, running down a fly ball, playing a close game and employing the little strategies that give you an edge. Now, on every Opening Day I'm transported to  the backyard on Scioto Trail reliving my youth with a bat and a ball. I know of no other activity that conjures such emotions and vivid memories.

Baseball is a game, but so much more. Just ask poet Gail Mazur, author of Figures in a Landscape and Zeppo's First Wife: New & Selected Poems, which won the 2006 Massachusetts Book Award.

Mazur says she’s been obsessed with baseball her whole life. “I grew up in Boston. My dad knew Ted Williams. Being a Red Sox fan is a lifetime mania and an important part of my lore.”

In spite of that mania, Mazur says she resisted the temptation to write any poems about baseball because she worried about the seeming cliche that the game is a metaphor for life.

When she finally did write “Baseball,” Mazur said the poem came to her almost fully formed and it became the final poem of her first collection. Instead of worrying about the cliche, she poked fun at it.

Mazur concludes …

“Saying that baseball 'is not a metaphor' was actually a strategy to get around the fact that baseball in fact is such a perfect metaphor for life, or for creative work. To have said it is a metaphor would have left me embarrassed by the cliché. The strategy, I'm sure, came out of my feeling of being stuck with the truism.

“When I uncovered the missing 'not' in the declaration, I could go on to deny everything in the poem, an ironic denial, a trick to say what I wholeheartedly felt in the writing – that the world of baseball, the players, the park, the fans, is a world and a microcosm of the greater world. Sometimes I think that the longer a thing that is 'not a metaphor' lives in a poem, the more of a metaphor it becomes.”

(Tess Taylor. “You Bet Your Life.” The Atlantic. March 2006.)

Baseball

By Gail Mazur

for John Limon

The game of baseball is not a metaphor

and I know it’s not really life.

The chalky green diamond, the lovely

dusty brown lanes I see from airplanes

multiplying around the cities

are only neat playing fields.

Their structure is not the frame

of history carved out of forest,

that is not what I see on my ascent.

And down in the stadium,

the veteran catcher guiding the young

pitcher through the innings, the line

of concentration between them,

that delicate filament is not

like the way you are helping me,

only it reminds me when I strain

for analogies, the way a rookie strains

for perfection, and the veteran,

in his wisdom, seems to promise it,

it glows from his upheld glove,

and the man in front of me

in the grandstand, drinking banana

daiquiris from a thermos,

continuing through a whole dinner

to the aromatic cigar even as our team

is shut out, nearly hitless, he is

not like the farmer that Auden speaks

of in Breughel’s Icarus,

or the four inevitable woman-hating

drunkards, yelling, hugging

each other and moving up and down

continuously for more beer

and the young wife trying to understand

what a full count could be

to please her husband happy in

his old dreams, or the little boy

in the Yankees cap already nodding

off to sleep against his father,

program and popcorn memories

sliding into the future,

and the old woman from Lincoln, Maine,

screaming at the Yankee slugger

with wounded knees to break his leg

this is not a microcosm,

not even a slice of life

and the terrible slumps,

when the greatest hitter mysteriously

goes hitless for weeks, or

the pitcher’s stuff is all junk

who threw like a magician all last month,

or the days when our guys look

like *Sennett cops, slipping, bumping

each other, then suddenly, the play

that wasn’t humanly possible, the Kid

we know isn’t ready for the big leagues,

leaps into the air to catch a ball

that should have gone downtown,

and coming off the field is hugged

and bottom-slapped by the sudden

sorcerers, the winning team

the question of what makes a man

slump when his form, his eye,

his power aren’t to blame, this isn’t

like the bad luck that hounds us,

and his frustration in the games

not like our deep rage

for disappointing ourselves

the ball park is an artifact,

manicured, safe, “scene in an Easter egg,”

and the order of the ball game,

the firm structure with the mystery

of accidents always contained,

not the wild field we wander in,

where I’m trying to recite the rules,

to repeat the statistics of the game,

and the wind keeps carrying my words away

(Gail Mazur, “Baseball” from Zeppo's First Wife: New & Selected Poems. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 2005. Copyright © 1978 by Gail Mazur.)

* Mack Sennett, who became famous as the originator of slapstick routines such as pie-throwing and car-chases, as seen in the Keystone Cops films.