Pitching to Giraffes (eBook)

Chapter 1

I Just Can’t Help Believing

In 1972 there was still time to believe.

Even the baseball season, which began for us in February, promised to be an outstanding year, an opportunity to redeem lost chances and unfulfilled promise. Fifteen letter winners from last year’s 19-8 team showed up at one of the lecture rooms in Kirkpatrick Field House at 7 P.M. for the first meeting. Outside, a light snow fell on campus in Sivia, a small city in western Michigan.

I approached the meeting alone, slowing to feign interest in a bulletin board while I gathered myself to enter the room. When I heard the thump of the main door closing, I took a breath and slipped inside.

Wild Bill, a rather small outfielder who never lacked energy, greeted me looking serious. “What did you do, man, fall in the snow?”

I looked down my body, coat to shoes. No snow anywhere.

“Hey, you gotta look at yourself to know whether or not you fell?”

He laughed, and I laughed along with him, seeking a clever response. None came, so I slouched to the back of the room, nodding to greetings from players.

“Grab some pine, Light,” called Tommy Beamon, our second baseman.

“Lookin’ good, John,” said Tom Baldwin, our shortstop, lifting his hand. I slapped his palm, maybe a little too hard.

Kool-Aid, big and chubby as ever, saluted me, grinning. I slid into a chair with a desktop attached, leaving my coat on even though the room was warm. Kool-Aid turned around and said, “Hey, man, gettin’ any?”

The green chalkboard that ran the full length of the front wall had been washed but was left streaked.

I watched the other guys, bothered by a grating irritation above the roof of my mouth which had begun on my way here after I sneezed while eating some beef jerky. I worried now that I’d maybe popped something.

The other players jostled around, sharing raunchy stories. I laughed, often out loud. My ease and fluency with others came and went. Much like my talking when sometimes I’d get so uptight that my larynx tightened and wouldn’t let air through regularly, forcing me to manipulate airflow through enlistment of my diaphragm and abdominal muscles. Plus, I’d trick my larynx with alternative word choice and speech rhythms. That’s tiring and often nauseating. It’s called stuttering. I know. It cost me five years in speech class, an unmonitored effort taught by an overwhelmed yet well-meaning speech teacher who came to the school twice a week. The embarrassment and frustration fed an ambition in me to prove I was more than what this affliction seemed to limit me to. We were good people in that class, broken in an open way, hard for others to understand.

My speech is better now. I don’t know why. I mention it only to say it and move on.

Tom Baldwin came back and sat next to me.

“This year we do it,” he said. “Am I right?”

“You’re right,” I said, trying fruitlessly to match his intensity.

“Yeah?” He looked me in the eyes.

“Yeah.”

“No excuses, just bring it. Like never before. I’m serious. Are you there?”

“I am.”

“Alright, then. We need you, big time. Countin’ on it.”

He raised his hand, and we slapped five. He flashed a fist of solidarity and went back to his seat taking small, quick steps.

The irritation above my mouth moved forward toward my nose. I felt a more palpable nature to it now. I silently forced air from my throat to my nose, creating pressure by pushing my tongue against the roof of my mouth. To my repugnance, my nose gave birth to a huge chunk of beef jerky. Man! I dropped my head and hoped to hell no one saw it.

Right then, into our reunion stepped our coach, wearing a red Wrencher College blazer. He wasn’t overweight but had an older-person look. His waist was too high, or maybe just his pants were. I don’t know. His hair was dark, and his round, cherubic face looked younger than it was: Coach Fred Fragen.

Terry Wilkins, our idea-fertile centerfielder, had hung the nickname Shcoach on him, claiming to hear a little extra sh sound swishing around whenever Coach pronounced ch words as in, “Punsh that outside pitsh to left, Terry. Punsh it to left.”

“Hi, men. Ready to go?” Shcoach beamed at us, standing at the front of the room. “Can you believe ball season is here already? Jeesh. I’m glad to see you all here.”

His head bobbed around, taking in the whole room. He clapped and rubbed his hands and waved them like he was signing for the deaf.

“We got a lot to cover, men. Let’s get going so we can get through everything and get you guys back to studying.”

“Or in Kool-Aids case, eating,” said Tommy Beamon.

“Bone straight,” said Kool-Aid.

Tommy lifted his hands, palms up, in puzzlement.

Kool-Aid shrugged. “Hey, I don’t run a perfect mouth.”

“We want to be sure the lines of communication stay open,” Shcoach, well, Coach said. “I want you to be able to come to me if you have a problem or something you need to talk about.”

“How about new uniforms?”

“And women trainers.”

Coach grinned. “Now, guys.”

Coach thought he was approachable. The reality was more like where a parent says, “If you have questions about sex or things changing with your body, just ask.” I’m sure he wanted to be approachable.

“Everyone gets a full chance with me. There are no jobs sewn up. We’ll take a fresh look at everyone and …”

Heads shook. Eyes rolled.

Coach was tough to figure out. He claimed he didn’t want to start freshmen, but then would give preferential treatment to one. He’d blow hot and cold with some guys, changing with each batting practice performance. I never saw any malice in him. I’ve never played on a sports team that didn’t have grumbling over playing time.

“Hey, Kool-Aid,” Steve West, our athletic catcher, said from the right. “You know how it feels to have to take a piss really bad?”

“Yeah.”

“Feel me, will ya, and see if I have to.”

“Seriously, men,” Coach said over the laughter, “it’s important to have rules to achieve our best effort. I’m talking about things like swearing. Jeesh.” He lowered his head and shook it, then brought his grimacing face back up slowly. “I don’t like to hear it. We’re representing Wrencher College, and that’s a big responsibility.”

Pretty much every guy in the room muttered an obscenity under his breath, then looked around and laughed.

“The same goes for smoking and drinking to excess. That’s not good for you as ballplayers, and it’s not the image of fine young men we want to project. Conduct yourself with pride and respect, and treat others the same way.”

Nobody took Coach seriously when he gushed about values. There was nothing in particular anyone disagreed with, but the whole package seemed so out of touch with the real world.

I knew exactly how that felt. College was a huge wake-up for me, sudden after an incomprehensible sleep, as I tried to align my own moral package with the real world.

“We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us,” Coach said, “but, you know, Ted Williams said many times …”

Ted Williams was Coach’s guru. The man worked hard at coaching. We gave him that. The thing is, though, he was better attuned to general advice than to the smaller details that might benefit a player as well.

“Udo’s put some work in,” Tommy Beamon said about our left fielder who had noticeably bulked up since last year. “Damn, man.”

Udo stood and flexed his biceps for everyone to see.

“We have to think about having a philosophy, men. We need that both as ballplayers and as people. We need to develop our conscience about what we’re doing at all times, on and off the field.”

The idea of philosophy made sense to me. Every year Coach made us fill out cards asking for our philosophy about certain things. I took it seriously.

Mostly what he got were gems like “Eat, drink, and find Mary,” and Wild Bill’s “All the meat around a pig’s ass is pork.” Terry Wilkins’ goal in life, we found out, was to find a piece of driftwood that looked like Mickey Mantle.

For all the sense Coach made, he sounded like a 1950s guidance class pamphlet. We considered ourselves way past that. One thing he said, though, stuck in my mind. Of all the attributes a person might have, the only one we can unqualifiedly wish for every person to have in unlimited quantity is goodwill. I liked that.

“Finally, men, with you returning ballplayers and some promising new players we expect to help us, we have a good squad. A dum good squad. If we work together and support each other, we can go a long way. You guys know...