(Above: Aaron Judge photographed by the AP’s Adam Hunger.)
I had a lot of memories moving about this morning as I listened to sports writer Mike Lupica on MSNBC as he talked about the New York Yankees right fielder, Aaron Judge, now holding the American League home run record by hitting his 62nd one last night surpassing the record held by Roger Maris, another Yankees right fielder, who hit 61 back in 1961. Maris’s number was 9. Judge’s is 99. Baseball is not only a game of statistics but also the kind of symmetry that can seem mystical. And yet baseball baffled me until I moved to San Francisco and began attending Giants games because their stadium was just down the hill from me on the bay and it gave me something to do. Baseball until then was something that just didn’t translate to a television screen for me and held one deeply troubling and tragic memory which surfaced also today.
Baseball is a pastoral game in both senses of the word and witnessing it in person gave me an appreciation of that. It is played on a verdant field and one needs the kind of patience watching it with which one is imbued in other bucolic settings. Patience is just one of the lessons it teaches you in its other pastoral role. It teaches you about always holding out hope. It has a loping grace and sometimes life just needs to lope along in such a way as well. And it keeps track of errors that are committed in order not to judge them but to turn them with a terse tenderness into one of its statistics.
I never enjoyed playing Little League. I longed for rain on game days so the game would be cancelled. My first Little League coach also went missing for days and was found later at some construction site having “committed” suicide with a shotgun pointed inside his mouth. I learned that summer that suicide could have the sound of baseball about it because errors were something I lived in fear of “committing” not knowing how not to judge myself since everyone else already was judging a sissy like me for not knowing how to stand in the batter’s box or slide into home. That summer I surprisingly - thrillingly for me - hit one home run myself. I remember the high school football coach whose voice was on the loudspeaker saying it was a “humdinger.” I also remember the sweet, perfect feel of the spot on the bat hitting the ball and knowing in that moment I had hit a home run before it sailed past the center field fence. I have tried to find the feel of that sweet, perfect moment in my life ever since. Baseball for me is about both experiencing that sweet, perfect moment that has been alas unattainable and trying to make sense of man who could put a shotgun in his mouth and pull the trigger. It took me a long time to find the game’s mystical symmetry again and surrender to its pastoral aspects.
Aaron Judge - everybody claims he is fine young man - was adopted as a child. I was orphaned when I was a boy and that narrative thread in the story the nation has followed this baseball season reminded me of my father who was a coach. Lupica referenced the years 1960, 1961, and 1962 when the nation was once before baseball smitten. Those were the last years of my father's life and some of the most vivid memories I have of him are of his talking about Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle. He and his buddies seemed to divide themselves up as Mantle men or Maris men. Daddy, who had played semi-pro baseball over in Louisiana when I was baby, was a Maris man. That’s his baseball glove I am wearing on the cover of my first memoir, Mississippi Sissy. The glove hangs now on a wall here in my loft in Hudson, New York. I even mentioned his being a Maris man in this excerpt from my second memoir, I Left It on the Mountain, in which I felt masculine judgment for one of the first times in my sissy childhood.
The excerpt:
I suddenly heard the laughter of a neighboring coach and his two rambunctious boys who were a few years older than I as they came bounding into our yard to say hello to my brother and my father were were having batting practice. I stopped my drawing and went outside. The other coach had a small baseball uniform that his boys had outgrown and was offering it to my father. I assumed it would be mine because I was the older child and had first dibs on such things but my father took the bat out of my brother’s hand and stripped him down to his underwear and put the uniform on him right there in front of all of us. The uniform was pin-striped and had the word YANKEES written across it. My father was a New York Yankees fan and I had heard him often argue with that other coach about two men named Maris and Mantle who played for the Yankees. My father was a staunch Maris man. The other coach always stuck up for Mantle
‘Turn the kid around” the other coach told my father once he had gotten the uniform on my little brother. There is it was - Maris’s number 9 on the back. My father laughed and picked up my brother and held him to his chest and kissed him all over his laughing face.
The other coach then reached into his back pocket and retrieved a little Yankees baseball cap and plopped in on my little brother’s head. I pouted at all the manly bonhomie about me and sat down on the driveway … My father put my brother down and then turned to the other boys, who always picked on me when we were alone. “You kids want to have a race?” he asked, and pulled me up from where I sat. He led us all down to the circular street and lined us up. He and the other coach taught us all how to get into a crouched position as if we were in the starting blocks at a track meet. I looked over at my brother and the two other boys and realized they had on sneakers. I had not put mine on when I came outside. I was still barefoot, but I knew my father would get mad if I asked to go inside to put on a pair of sneakers myself because I’d be making everybody wait and interfering with his own excitement of finding a way to combine yet again his love of coaching with his role of father. .,.
“On your mark,” my father said. “Get set. Go!” … I scrambled to catch the other boys but the faster I ran the more I knew my arms flapped about in a way that the other boys’ arms did not. I then focused on my little brother and tried to catch up with him and match my arm movements to his as he pumped them by his sides, but I couldn’t make my movements match. I could not. I couldn’t. The pavement was growing hotter and hotter beneath my bare feet and the gravel on the roughly paved road was embedding itself into my soles. A sharp pain began to throb in my side the more I exerted myself. My arms became more frantic. My wrists were wrong. This was not the way a boy should run. I could see that by the three examples in front of me. But I could not mimic what I saw. In my panic, I could not right myself. I began to cry.
The other two boys went straight into their yard when we rounded the third curve where they lived and began to play with their dog. They weren’t even going to finish the race. If they were not then I decided I wasn’t either. I sat on the next lawn over and watched my brother hit the finish line and race right into my father’s arms. The other coach shaded his eyes and looked past me at his sons playing with their dog. He walked past me on his way home without acknowledging my presence. I looked at the bottoms of my bare feet. They were pink from the heat of the pavement. I scraped the loose gravel from them. I limped home, thankful for the cooling green feel of the grass from yard to yard, careful to avoid the summer stickers, until I reached my father who would not acknowledge my presence either.
I went inside the house and stood at a window and for the first time enfolded myself in a curtain to hid and watch my brother be a boy and wonder why he had such ease at it when I did not. I heard my mother turn on the shower back in her bedroom and I tiptoed back to her bathroom. She pushed back the curtain and for a moment I caught a glimpse of her glistening body. There was a flash of nipple. It was as pink and dimpled as the soles of my feet had been when I had scraped the gravel from them earlier. “Kevin, honey, would you hand Mommy that shampoo over on top the lavatory there?” I handed it to her and she disappeared again behind the shower curtain. The tiles on the bathroom floor felt so cool beneath my still burning feet. I looked over again to the top of the lavatory. There was also a tiny bottle of red nail polish on it. I grabbed it and put in it my pocket.
Kevin--you summed up my favorite game perfectly and I think you know how much of a fan I am.
Thank you for this gorgeous account. I loved the red nail polish finish to it ! XO Betsy
Pastoral. Patience. Loping grace. Yup. That's baseball for me. It's a great game. Good story, Kevin.