Nonfiction » Moral Stakes » Hardball

Reprinted by permission from The Hudson Review,
Volume LIV Number 4 (Spring 2001)
Copyright © By Robert Schultz

 

ROBERT SCHULTZ

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  Hardball

 

When I was an infant in the crib my first toy was a blue rubber baseball glove. By the time I was seven I was accompanying my father to small lowa towns where he conducted clinics for young ballplayers, mostly Little Leaguers. We would park the station wagon, gather the bags of bats and balls, and walk together to the sun-baked, crabgrass-pocked diamond. My dad always strolled to the field in nothing but a pair of white athletic under shorts and his baseball undershirt with the white body and blue sleeves. He carried his outer uniform draped over his shoulder, and I heard him tell a friend once, "When the parents see me in my boxers they decide to stick around." The first lesson of each clinic was how to look like a ballplayer.

"Whether you're a regular or you sit on the bench, everybody can look like a ballplayer," my father said. He stood in front of the sagging wooden bench next to the field with the boys ranged around him in their worn jeans and T-shirts. The bills of their caps were creased in the middle or sometimes at each edge, forming a shape like the hood scoop on a GTO. "First I'm going to show you how to roll your socks," he said. He sat and pulled on the long, white sanitaries that rose all the way to the knees and above. "Pull them smooth," he said. "Creases cause blisters." He slipped on the dark blue nylon stirrup socks and pulled them tight over the thin sanitaries. Then he stood and stepped into the pinstriped pants, drew them up to his waist, and pulled them back down, leaving the legs inside out around his calves. "The first step in rolling your socks is to pull the tops of both socks—the sanitaries and the stirrups—down over the pant leg." He demonstrated as he spoke, pinning the bottom of the pant legs to his calves with the turned-down socks. "Now fold the ends of the socks back up once, and you're ready to pull up your pants." When he pulled his pants up the bottoms were neatly turned under, held in a tidy roll at the top of each calf. "If you roll your socks properly they won't come undone when you run or slide, and you'll look like a pro through a whole double-header." It seemed to me that the boys regarded him then with a kind of awe. He had established his credentials and they would now believe whatever he told them about pitching, hitting, fielding, and base running.

It was probably watching this demonstration repeatedly at an early age that engrained in me the knowledge that baseball is a game of mysteries and rituals. As I grew older, my father introduced me to the higher arcane—executing the drag bunt, throwing the change-up, reading a pitch by the rotation of the seams. But, to my mind, the most intricate and beautiful thing in all of baseball was the double play, and so I became a shortstop. I followed the White Sox and idolized Luis Aparicio, the slick Venezuelan who teamed with Nellie Fox up the middle. I wrote his name in magic marker across the shoulders of a white T-shirt and wore it to the playground where we played ball all summer. We were eight or nine then, and a double play was beyond us, but I dreamed of gliding across the bag like him, launching myself into the air, and firing the relay over a runner sliding harmlessly beneath me.

By the time I reached high school I knew that it was the runner's solemn responsibility to dump or distract the fielder turning the double play, and my father had taught me to slide late and hard. He told me to watch the shortstop and second baseman during pre-game warm-ups to see where they came across the base so I'd know where to slide to have the best chance of taking their legs out from under them. "And if you can't reach him," Dad said, "raise your lead leg as you slide. If you show him your spikes he might pull up and take something off the throw."

This was not playing dirty. This was playing the game according to its time-honored conventions. The runner had a job to do and the fielders knew what to expect. And a shortstop coming across the bag had ways of protecting himself. My father showed me.

He was baseball coach at the University of Iowa now, hired away from his job at Humboldt High. We worked out on the university field after Hawkeye practices or at home in the back yard with a shirt thrown down as second base. There were three basic moves. To keep the runners guessing, I should vary them, coming across second to the outside, the inside, or right down the baseline. We drilled on these moves—the footwork, the ball handling—until they were instinctive. I learned to make the outside move by stepping across the base with my left foot as I caught the throw, dragging my right foot over the bag, planting, and throwing. The inside move meant planting the left foot on second as I caught the throw, then bouncing to the inside of the diamond to make the relay. The fastest way, of course, was to come across second and drive down the baseline toward first. It was also the move that brought me straight toward the oncoming runner.

Facing a charging runner, I had three defenses, the first of which was a quick release. With practice I could catch and throw in a fluent motion, usually releasing the ball before the runner arrived. The second defense was to get into the air after the throw. "If he's going to get you," Dad said, "get both feet off the ground. You usually won't be able to jump over him, but if your feet aren't planted he won't break your ankles." Getting spiked was one thing. If it happened you threw away your shredded sanitaries and made sure your tetanus booster was up to date. But a broken bone or a blown knee was serious. You jumped to tumble harmlessly with the blow.

The shortstop's third defense was the most effective. "Come straight down the line and throw through the runner's head," my father told me.

"What if I hit him?" I asked.

"Don't worry, he'll get down," my father said.

"What if he doesn't?" I asked.

"Well, he'll only make that mistake once," he said and grinned. And so I came to recognize the violence within baseball's most elegant play, and the hardball understanding between runner and fielder. It was a kind of contract with a chain of sub-clauses activated by split-second decisions in the game within the game. If both parties understood the contract and reliably played their roles the game unfolded with sudden outbursts of beauty along the razor edge of competition. And if a shortstop got dumped or a runner was forced into an early slide by a ball whizzing at his face, there were no hard feelings. There was, in fact, mutual respect within a common guild. Baseball knowledge and antici­pation usually prevented serious injury. If everybody knew what he was doing, getting hurt was just bad luck.

In the summer after my sophomore year of high school, I worked on a Johnson County road crew and played six to eight games a week. Mondays through Fridays I drove a truck from seven to four, then played at night on the City High sophomore and varsity teams. Saturdays and Sundays there were American Legion double headers. Working and playing ball outdoors all day, I sank deeply into the life of the body. My skin tanned dark and my flesh felt sweet around my bones. At night games, the scent of cornfields drifted over the glowing diamond as clouds of bugs swirled around the lights on their high poles. I slid hard and broke up double plays; I turned double plays, protecting myself with agility and guile. The summer wheeled by with the procession of the sun and the rotation of the batting order.

Three years later, in my first spring of college ball, I earned the starting spot at shortstop. Midway through the season I was in the field late in a tight game. There was a man on first, one out. I took two steps back and two steps toward the bag, positioning for a possible double play. The hitter cracked a routine grounder to the second baseman, who fielded it cleanly and flipped to me. I took the throw and pivoted at the bag. The runner from first was upright in the line of my relay. He seemed to think that obstructing my sight or placing himself between me and first was the way to break up a double play. I believe he was yelling. I think the word "idiot" flashed through my mind.

The instant of decision seemed to stretch out and I registered in swift cascade the essence of a dialogue: "Throw through his head," "What if he doesn't slide?" "Don't worry, he'll get down," "No he won't, I'll kill him." Everything slowed and there seemed to be time to examine the runner as if he were a photograph. He ran straight up, his shirt was untucked, his socks were not properly rolled.

I made a little jump and lofted my throw over the head of the runner, too soft to complete the double play. The runner turned aside and went by me. Immediately I felt a deep pang of shame.

The play, as it turned out, was inconsequential to the game's outcome. I don't even recall who won or lost. But I do remember the way I brooded on what I thought of as my loss of nerve. I felt intense contempt for the bush league runner, and my complicity in the ruined play stung me. He probably thought he'd made a smart move, and I'd let him get away with it. Nobody had taught him the proper way to play the game, so he'd have to learn the hard way. Someday somebody would plunk him. It should have been me. "I should have nailed him," I said to myself. The thoughts rolled around and around in my head.

I showered and went to supper. I went to my room in the dorm, listened to some music, spent some time with friends. One of them who had drawn a low draft number was reading a Canadian novel. He said he wanted to feel at home if he had to go. It was I97l.

My mind kept turning back to the play. I saw the runner's face, round as a pie, coming at me like a target. I knew with certainty he couldn't have dodged the throw. I didn't know what my father would have done, but as a college freshman in my first year on my own, I suspected he'd have made the good baseball play. You throw through the runner and he's got to get down. You feel sorry if somebody's hurt, but that's his responsibility. That's hardball.

In my instant of decision, however, there had been a recognition. There are moments, I saw now, when the rules outside the game flash into it. Mercy is not a part of baseball. But that runner, in his ignorance, had blundered outside the lines, and at that moment he'd become just a dumb jerk I could hurt or spare. By the time I released my throw he'd have been only a couple of feet from the end of my arm. I really could have killed him. I had drawn a high number myself, so I probably wasn't going to Vietnam, but the war was all around us. It was a time of taking sides, a time of decisions, a time when fathers and sons regarded one another across a generational divide exaggerated by issues of life and death.

I had not done as my father taught me, but in the end I didn't feel ashamed. Instead, a small coal of pride began to glow in the middle of my chest. In that instant of decision I had hit upon a value of my own, subversive and true. There was still regret. Regret that the runner and I had not been Maury Wills and Luis Aparicio sliding under and floating over. It had been a botched play. It was bad baseball. But, as my friends and I were learning in those harsh years—in the wide world outside the lines—there were worse things.