One of my earliest memories involves the wielding of a truncated red plastic baseball bat around the expanses of my front yard in Redding. The thing was a "bat" in the sense that it slightly resembled the shape of one, though closer appeared as a dime-store caricature of Bam Bam's wooden club. I would have likely been content with a tree branch, the garden hose or a piece of rebar, but the big-little bat made such a thwump! when you connected that the accompanying thwump! in my chest endeared me to an early bond with the cosmic delight in making things happen with my own body, will and power. There was an oversized white plastic ball to go with it, replete with useless raised "stitches" and no holes. I don't know how much time I spent heaving the ball up with my right hand and swinging left-handed into the chain link fence that surrounded our tiny patch of land on Bond Street in the Enterprise area of town (an area I'd later regard as a pod of the worst kind of woe-is-me white entitlement refuse. The streets near Bond would eventually jibe more with reports of violent assaults, Noriegaesque drug busts and baffled garage salers wondering why no one was manning the piles of discarded junk in the lonely lawns). I remember vaguely not being allowed to stay outside for long, as the twitchy stroll of some fucked-up druggy inched ever-closer, or the emergence of steamy windows in the van parked across the street yielded orders to come back inside.
But I used my time wisely as a kid, and was rarely seen without some kind of baseball cap atop my head and continued practicing when I could. It wasn't until I was maybe four years old that I realized I was right-handed, and the impact of that discovery blazed a lopsided trail through my senior year at Anderson Union High School in 1998. Having suddenly the focused, coordinated wherewithal to hit a ball consistently and with pretty awesome accuracy, I recall diving headfirst into the hubris of someday becoming a professional baseball player. And what a dream that is! How focused and how pure! How universal and how necessary! What spirit it stirred in my prepubescent head! So much so, in fact, that I have no fucking idea how I ended up playing tee-ball for the Shasta Dam Area Little League. I was drunk with determination, though until that time, I'd never really played baseball with a team - an allusion referenced here with regret for a still-lingering affliction for perfection in myself. If I'm in control, everything works. Everyone's happy. The process has a predetermined result of indomitable accuracy and infallible meaning. I have no concept of a team, still, and don't know if I should.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
My first year of organized sports saw me lottery-picked onto the impossibly named "Artesians" tee-ball team. Our uniforms were red, with red mesh hats, red stirrups, white pants. The hats, in particular, were comically huge on our little seven-year-old domes, and implored demeaning observations that we looked "soooo cute!" I fucking hated it. And I always forgot my pants, so I'd wear blue jeans. And nobody cared because, I think even then, everyone knew that everyone in the Shasta Dam Area Little League was poor, and that the Prado family, for all its known prowess in athleticism, its natural gravitation toward music, were one of the poorest families in town. We got by on our senses of humor, too, but mostly we were each given golden tickets out of the neo-Dust Bowl milieu of Project City either by playing music, or playing baseball. Before there was much of a tangible interest in the dalliances of John Lennon, there was the tactile worship of Will Clark.That first year, I hit 15 home runs off of the tee, and I think we only played 10 games. It's not a figure I boast about often, for obvious reasons, but at the time I was convinced I was some sort of deity, planted for kicks by a woolly world hell-bent on making me feel apart from instead of part of. My translucent Pat Morita-style spectacles skiing down the face of my undeveloped proboscis, I would trot out to home plate, take my hack, watch that ball shrink high above the manzanita-red hills by the Indian reservation across the street until it plopped into the shitty gravel lot. Though the tin stands stomped their chorus of approval, I ran alone. Though my coach greeted me at home plate, I crossed it alone. In the dugout, in the flurry of seven-year-olds scared to death of baseballs, leering at me for the audacity of my aptitude, I sat alone and wondered what it'd be like to stop being the asshole. Because of this, for everything I ever did right, I four-fold absorbed it as being wrong.
Aside from making every other player on my team feel like jackasses for not being as good as I was (as if that were my fault), I had also recently skipped 2nd grade for being able to do long division in the first week, and was also placed in the Gifted and Talented Education (G.A.T.E.) program at Toyon Elementary School. I didn't really have a chance.
If donning enormous, Japanese-karate-instructor glasses hadn't parsed me off the norm, the straight As did. If my developing interest in devouring every book in my path - and winning the Book-a-thon Competition every year for the whole school - wouldn't single me out for ridicule, the crotch-torn blue jeans would. There's no way a kid from Central Valley can stand out and get away with it. So over time I chose to blend in. Pretending to be stupid, that I wasn't good at sports or didn't care, made me happier than I'd ever been. But it was a fine line to toe.
Just after that first year of tee-ball, I had my adult front tooth dislodged from my gums by a childhood friend a year or two older. Standing much too close to him to have been pitching - he using an aluminum bat and me lobbing him a hardball I wasn't used to - my mouth, confidence, and trust in my abilities all changed forever. I still wear a retainer.
But since that time, my physical stability has been nearly Herculean. I have never broken a bone, nor have I knocked on wood. I'd a permanent fat lip, permanent dentures and an even worse permanent self-image than ever, but the seeds of folly never permanently took root. Fittingly, I moved on to farm league baseball (Pythons), then tried out as a nine-year-old for the 9-12 year old league - the "major" league - of which only about 10 actual nine-year-olds would make it. Each team had maybe one younger sprout and a bunch of seasoned veterans to round out the squad. My tryouts were - unsurprisingly to me, surprising to everyone else - successful, and I was selected by the Pirates, a team coached by Steve Ray, father to Ricky Ray, who was years later a sought-after quarterback by the 49ers (he ended up in the Canadian Football League where he's won three Grey Cup titles and is one of the premier players in the game). But in 1990, he was just another freckled, greenhorn second-base fucker who didn't know anything about anything except that he wanted to please his dad. He never talked to me, setting an example that would be followed to the last cold-shoulder letter by everyone else on the team. In fact, I have absolutely no memory of speaking to any of those people, and being the only nine-year-old on the team, I rarely did anything but warm up the right fielder in between innings, chew bubblegum, and watch the stands to see if my dad would show up. I have absolutely zero memory of that happening either. But I do remember this...
During a game with the league's best team, the Indians, whose dominance sprung almost exclusively from the right pitching arm of an intimidatingly large black 12-year-old named Ty Young - one-third of a brother trio (not that way) who would go on to essentially dominate every sport all through high school and beyond all over the county - something incredible happened. Ty's fastball was my first observance of perfection, or at least a semblance of it. I could never quite see its movement, save for a trail of white-and-red cometing into - and almost perpetually popping out of - the catcher's mitt. Everybody lunged with futility, eyes no doubt cinched down with gooey kiddie tears, hitting nothing but the mosquitoes surrounding home plate - their inevitable accumulation being the result of ankle-deep puddles 10 yards away at the base of the concrete water fountain.We were getting our fucking asses kicked all over the place by Ty's blinding fastball, and toward the end of the game, after a towering two-run homer by Ty essentially drove the spikes into our coffin, the team, and most notably Ricky, started to mope with exaggerated despair in the face of The One. After about the third time Ricky struck out looking - something decidedly abnormal, rest assured - Coach Steve removed his erstwhile star-seed from the lineup at the beginning of the sixth inning (the final) and put me in to fill his spot. It was not only the first game I'd been put in to play that year, but also the first time Ricky had been taken out of a game during our season. Between innings, looking dejected, Ricky gave me a quick glance as his dad told him the switch, then sat down gloomily on the dilapidated wooden bench in the dugout. I ran out, forgetting every aspect of the fundamentals of the game as I trotted into the bright lights to tens of onlookers, and plopped myself at second base.
I'd like to think something happened during that half-inning, me out in the wiles of the field I'd until then only practiced long-toss in. But I don't think it did.
We had last ups against the formidable Ty in that last inning, and wouldn't you know it? I was fourth up. Which meant that if the three assholes ahead of me would simply have frozen in their loopy stances and not removed their bat from their shoulders, I could have sat "on the ball" - as they call it - watched them all blow it, and at least reveled in my name being added to the lexicon of active players for once. But the first person up - someone named Joe or Jon or something, whom I only remember for his unfortunate kid mullet - was hit ever-so-slightly on the arm by a wayward Ty Young fastball (I doubt he threw any other way but hard). Now, unless there was a double play, I would be batting against Ty. Me. 4'9" tall and weighing some 100 pounds. Ty. Probably 5'7" and 120 pounds of dynamite-arm. Fuck. I thought of Ralph Macchio going up against the Cobra Kai, how badly that turned out at first, and readjusted my specs atop my nose.
As expected, my next two teammates embarrassed the sport, and themselves, and struck out looking. What the fuck is wrong with these bastards?! I opined (I'd a sailor's tongue long before it's considered for a man to be justified). I would now have to be the last player to bat, ostensibly. I must have Spock-transported to the batter's box; I don't remember how I got there. I only remembered the sound of the gasp of the coaches and bystanders as the teeny plunk! of Ty's first fastball grazed the mullet-kid's arm, then the heavy breathing of my lungs inside my own head. Suddenly, I was there, where everyone else had been, trying to avoid eye contact with Doc Gooden.
I didn't even see the first pitch Ty threw, but I swung anyway, fouling it off straight behind home plate. I knew enough then to know if you fouled the ball off directly behind you, you were on it, only slightly not on it, which was more than close enough for me. A whoop! of electric applause erupted from the stands and inside my dugout for my brush with trumping the immortal Ty! No one had touched him all night long. I smiled a little bit. So did Ty. He was so much bigger than me, so much older. It was one of those smiles - mine anyway - that was so injected with giddiness that it wouldn't go away. Little tears formed in the corners of my eyes, happy ones, for knowing I wasn't expendable. I realized then that I'd already beaten him.
But the count was only 0-1.
The next pitch whizzed toward my ankles, and I only had time enough to bunny-hop two inches before the ball skipped underneath my cleats. My smile evaporated. Ty scowled. I suddenly realized that someday I would die. And then it happened.
With the count 1-1, Lemmy Kilmister on first base and me now knock-kneed and pussified, I greeted Ty's third steaming-hot fastball with a wicked thwump!, sending the ball zinging (sssssssssssssss) into right center field for a base hit. I was so excited I almost forgot to run, the thwump! cascading in rolling arches in my chest, and made it just in time to first after a relay from the outfield. I absorbed the waves of adulation like a houseplant being spritzed with water. A thunder befell the echoes in the stands. I wondered if this was how Will Clark felt all the time.
The people watching the game knew what had happened; my coach knew what had happened; and most importantly, I knew what had happened. I'd defeated the powerful Ty, if only that one time. That the next kid struck out to end the game didn't matter.
From then on, I treated baseball only slightly differently. Incensed at the competitiveness of the sport and the unfair popularity of local family legacies, while also having been imbued with the skills to execute knuckle-curves at above-average levels despite no name recognition, I would perform only as much as I cared in that moment. I would not look beyond that game, that pitch, that swing, that call, unless I actually gave a shit in that moment. The moment I drove a base hit off Ty Young, I was convinced special places were destined for my future. And the moment I realized that, I knew those places didn't have to feature ball gloves, sliding pants, Louisville Sluggers or umpires. My future was being written with every new experience I could deign to endeavor.
The next day, I put on my generic white sneakers, the hole-y jeans, the pit-stained white T-shirt, the Pat Morita glasses and the cap, and went back to school. I took out my book about the Wintu Indians, whose spirited bones sunk deep below me, forgotten beneath the asphalt foundations of my homeroom trailer, and read deeply of the ways to build a fire out of flint, sticks and roiling friction. No one at my school uttered a word about my triumph over Ty. As I read on, I noted in the margins the obviousness of the notion that you can, in fact, start a fire without a spark.
AFTERTHOUGHT
It's ironic, I suppose, that I'm reminiscing on my days playing baseball, now a journalist, struggling to find anything worth caring about in the fleeting tom-tom world, while currently donning a throwback Oakland A's practice jersey and intermittently checking Spring Training updates. The question posed for this essay wasn't "Why did you stop playing baseball?" but what the turning point for me was in realizing I didn't have the skills to play at that level. The answer is, with the proper quotient of humility, I'm not convinced I absolutely didn't have the skills to play at that level. I simply became less interested in running base drills and laps and more interested in girls, music, literature and girls. In that order, with very little variation.
I have no idea whether or not I'd have ever been good enough to make the Major Leagues, but I do know that based on instincts and athleticism alone, not to mention a pretty goddamn good throwing arm, had I actually given a shit anymore I could have probably gone into a later stage of the game. If even a semi-professional team. As my brother Noah will attest, by the time I attempted to revisit the baseball diamond at age 27 for his semi-pro NorCal Pirates, I simply didn't have the drive to succeed at it anymore. It was just something to do. It wasn't who I was anymore.
I know I still have a better arm than some Major League players. And that's enough for me.
