Читать книгу 100 Miles of Baseball - Dale Jacobs - Страница 17

May 6 – 10, 2018

Tecumseh Thunder U18 vs Sarnia Braves Midget Major

Riverside Secondary School vs W F Herman Academy

Tecumseh Thunder U18 vs Amherstburg Sr

Sunday, May 6, 2018

Tecumseh Thunder U18 vs Sarnia Midget Major

Lacasse Park, Tecumseh ON

Game Time Temperature: 20°C

If the weather holds, today will be the first Canadian game of this project. Driving east along the Detroit River to Tecumseh, I kept looking at the sky, wondering how accurate the rain forecasts of rain would be. As I parked in the teachers’ lot at the school next to the field, I could hear AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” from inside the car.

There are about twenty people here. It’s chilly in the shade but almost warm in the sun. No anthem is played, the game just starts. I’m starting to really like Lacasse Park with its worn bleacher seats, painted a fresh green every off-season. There’s a basic but decent scoreboard. The dugouts are wire cages with a bench. There is no entertainment here today. No mascots. No pep squad. No walk-up music, only music between innings. I am grateful for the lack of spectacle. Today it’s just baseball.

A young woman announces the batters, only using the visiting players’ first names. “Now batting: Greg.” I hear the Sarnia players laugh at this. And then she says, “Now batting: Drew.” People are actually watching the game today; it’s likely mostly parents and grandparents in the crowd.

Last night I wore a lily-pad-green gown to a Scottish Country Dance ball. My curls were pinned up and I felt like a Jane Austen character, strathspeying with gallant suitors. Today, the humidity has made my curls unruly and they’re tucked under a ball cap. My feet, dangling off a bleacher seat, move in time to the Scottish rhythms lingering in my head.

“Every pitch, two steps. 1-2. I don’t want to see you flat-footed. Two steps, set your feet.”

The Sarnia infielders lean in, listen to their instructions, move to where their coaches want them on each pitch. Repeat the fundamentals. Think about the possible plays before they happen. Burn it into their subconscious, into their muscles so that their reactions become automatic when the ball is hit. The stream of instructions and encouragement is constant from the Sarnia bench just to our right, down the first base line.

Earlier in the weekend, I had marvelled to Dale that pitchers and catchers could remember the ever-changing secret signals. “Some people,” he replied, “would find it equally amazing that you can remember and do eighteen different dances in one night.” Baseball doesn’t come naturally to me the way that jigs, reels, and strathspeys do, but I think about advice I give to new dancers who are frustrated because they don’t know whether to focus on their footwork or where they need to go in each dance. “Keep dancing,” I say, “One day it will all fall into place.” The same logic might be true for learning about baseball.

I return my attention to the infield. The hitter in the on-deck circle says “Heads up!” as a foul ball caroms off the backstop beyond the grandstand. A player lopes over to pick it up, stopping to talk to a friendly black lab on the way back to the dugout. I miss the rest of the at-bat because I’m watching the dog.

There are now about forty people here, mainly family and friends. The players are all seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds and—since they’re playing at the Midget Major level—some of the best baseball players in Southwestern Ontario. Many hope to go on to play college ball at some level or, at the very least, play on one of the strongly competitive local Senior Men’s teams. The calibre of play is much better than anything I ever saw growing up in rural Alberta, partially because of the population density and the longer playing season, but also because of sustained community interest in baseball in places like Tecumseh and Sarnia.

By seventeen I was trying to navigate my way through my first year of university. I was no longer living in the same town as my father and baseball wasn’t high on my list of priorities. I hadn’t played since I was fourteen—on a bantam team that played only against the nearest towns—bowing out when the sport became too serious. Not that I was ever very good anyway—a pitcher without great velocity, a catcher who let too many balls get past him, and a passable first baseman who couldn’t hit a lick. Organized baseball was, for me, never as much fun as the games of move-up we played at recess and after school, baseball that expanded and contracted as kids would come and go, ending when it was too dark to see the ball. By the time we were fourteen, few players took our organized games seriously, despite the best efforts of our coach, Charlie Chapman, who tried both yelling and cajoling to teach us about fundamentals and strategy. But none of us listened. To us, he was just this old crank rambling on about keeping our feet moving and watching out for the bunt.

A few days ago, I was talking to a colleague about this project and my work on the Chatham Coloured All-Stars. “You must really love baseball,” she said. When I said, “I do,” she pondered for a minute and then said, unapologetically, “I don’t know how you do it. Baseball is so boring. Nothing. Ever. Happens.” I didn’t know what to say other than, “I get that,” which I hope she didn’t interpret as “I think so too,” which I don’t.

As I left her office, I thought about what my mum always said to people who complained about how the prairies are so boring compared to the Rockies: “You just need a lesson in looking.” My mum never really trusted people who couldn’t see the beauty of the prairies. Our car trips were tutorials in looking and seeing the splendours of the open fields and vast skies. The prairies take work. You need to know to watch how the wind moves the wheat like waves, how the swaths of birds glide in the expanse of the sky, and how the sun and clouds cast shadows on the fields.

As Tecumseh come to bat in the second, I hear the Sarnia coaches joking about all the scouts here this afternoon, teasing their players about who might be watching. They have an easy rapport with their players and the players have a clear respect for their coaches that we never had for Charlie.

The first batter walks and, after two passed balls, ends up on third base with no outs. With no program to reference, I have no idea who stands on third or who is on the mound. Right now, they’re all anonymous, echoes of every young player I’ve ever watched, their actions creating a palimpsest over all the games that came before. As I watch, that anonymity seems to deepen not only my ambivalence about who wins, but my focus on the game itself.

The next batter hits a shallow fly ball, but the center fielder can’t make the catch, the ball ticking off his glove and falling to the grass. The run scores, putting a man on first with no outs. A stolen base and wild pitch move him up to third base. Still no outs and Sarnia’s pitcher seems more than a bit rattled by the way this inning has unfolded.

A slow walk by the coach to the mound. A few soft words to settle his young starter down. A glance around the infield, a single clap, a calm “Let’s go,” and the Sarnia coach is back in the dugout. The pitcher gathers himself, goes to work on the next batter. Swinging strikeout on a high fastball, followed immediately by a second strikeout. Two outs. After a walk and a steal, there are runners at second and third, but a fly ball to left field ends the inning.

Calm down. Don’t let what happened with those first two hitters get under your skin. Pitch like you can. I can’t know, but this is the mound conversation I imagine. 1-0 Tecumseh after two innings.

Boredom, with my mum, was never an option. If you found something—anything—dull she sent you back to look at it properly. Everything had a hidden value if you looked for it. If you watch baseball in this way, you’ll notice there is never a passing second in baseball that doesn’t contribute to the larger narrative of the game. It’s easy to see the significance of a walk-off home run but, more often than not, it’s the fraction of a second that makes the difference between a strike and a home run. Or a change in the wind or the position of the sun that makes the difference between a caught fly ball and a hit.

Sarnia is back up and the announcer continues in her way: “Now batting: Jack.” I hear the players hoot, like “Jack” is the funniest word they’ve ever heard. The inning is over quickly. The Sarnia coach instructs his pitcher, “Worry about the batter. Worry about the batter,” and then his wild pitch advances a runner on base. The center fielder drops a fly ball and the advanced runner scores. “Time, Blue,” says the coach, and he saunters to the mound. The next pitch is a strike. “Nice spot,” someone shouts.

I watch the hitters in the on-deck circle swinging at the pitches thrown to the batter as if they were at the plate. Where I’m sitting right now lets me see a perfect triangle between the pitcher, the batter, and the on-deck circle. I’m eight feet away. I’ve never had this sort of view at an MLB game.

In the top half of the third, Sarnia get a double and a single from the first two batters, putting runners on first and third with no one out. #17 strides to the plate to a chorus of encouragement from the bench. “Your time, 1-7. C’mon, kid”—but he watches as strike three whizzes by and there is one out. #5 up now and one of the Sarnia coaches has to yell from the bench to remind him to look to the third base coach for signs. Wild pitch and the run scores from third, while the other runner advances to second. Two walks then load the bases with one out.

#20 up to hit for Sarnia. Hawk. Hawkeye. Hawker. His nicknames become a kind of chant, the collective hope for a hit or wild pitch or error. Anything to give Sarnia the lead.

Hawk hits the ball to the left side of the infield, but it’s fielded by the shortstop on a tough, in-between hop, quickly flipped across his body to second, and then relayed to first, a throw the first baseman is able to dig out of the dirt. A 6-4-3 double play to end the inning and get Tecumseh out of a bases loaded jam. 1-1 going into the bottom of the third inning.

Six batters later the score is 5-1 for Tecumseh. End of the day for the Sarnia starter. The new pitcher, #23, is a tall, lanky right-hander who throws much harder than the starter did and with much better command. His first batter is a strikeout looking on a fastball on the low, outside corner of the strike zone. His fastball seems to get even better in the fourth inning, prompting the Sarnia coaches to shift the infielders towards third base with a left-handed hitter at the plate, yelling, “Do you think he’s going to pull it?” Not a chance.

A ball goes foul and when the player goes to retrieve it, he has to negotiate with the dog who found it. It’s the same black lab I watched before. Back on the field, Sarnia executes a nice double play—so nice that the grandparents and parents of the home team murmur their approval.

For the uninitiated, baseball can seem like a sport where nothing happens. Between innings, I consider whether my mind wanders because my colleague’s assessment of baseball is correct. Or does my mind wander because there are so many things to watch and so many pieces in play, both on and off the field, that it’s impossible to focus on just one? I head off my frustration with my wandering mind with the advice I give to new dancers: “Keep dancing. It will all come together eventually.”

The score is 6-2 Tecumseh and there’s a runner on second with two outs when Hawk comes to the plate for Sarnia in the top of the sixth inning. He digs in to the batter’s box, eager to get a hit and pass the baton to the next player in the lineup, to at least tie the score before the rains come. Instead of getting a hit, though, he gets struck on the hand with an inside fastball. Hawk swears loudly and, as he runs to first, throws the bat hard towards his own dugout. From the bench I hear, “Not necessary. Not necessary.” The tone is no longer teasing, but reproving. As much as they are trying to teach these young men how to play the game of baseball, they are also attempting to teach them how to carry themselves. How to be in the world. Hitting into a double play and getting hit with a pitch are just as much part of the game as getting a single or catching a fly ball in the field. I wonder if Hawk will see that, if he’ll listen to his coaches with more attention than we did with Charlie.

Just as a fly ball to right field ends the top half of the sixth inning, the rain starts to come down. The rumble of thunder can be heard in the distance.

Final Score: 6-2 Tecumseh, game called for rain.