"This is a very simple game. You throw the ball, you catch the ball, you hit the ball."

In the Hubley league, I was a homerun hitter, mostly due to the fact
that I was older than most of the kids in the neighborhood.

This didn't translate so well into other leagues.

For example, when I tried out for the Junior High baseball team the first year, I was in the first round of cuts. The first thing we did was warm up by throwing the ball back and forth. All around me was the smack of the ball hitting leather gloves, and I suddenly felt the pressure to throw the ball hard and make a similar smack on my partner's glove. I wasn't used to this kind of throwing. There was very little of it in the Hubley league. If you didn't catch the ball in the outfield, there was a good chance that all the runners would go home. And if you got the ball in the infield, there was no one to throw it to. By the end of the "warm up" my arm was numb.

The second and third years I tried out weren't much better, but the third year was the heartbreaker. Students in grade nine got priority over the other students because it was their last year in Jr. High. I had designed my own weight system. Practiced ground balls by bouncing a tennis ball off the side of the house for hours and played as much as I could in the Hubley league. And even though I thought I did better, I still didn't make the team.

I tried out one year in High School. I switched strategies a little. I chose second base as my position because I figured fewer people would try out for that position. I was and am most comfortable in the outfield, but it was already crowded there. After the arm killing "warm up" we took infield practice. The coach hit ground balls to us to field. Everyone else was like a well-oiled machine, and I felt like a cracked gear messing things up.

You see, I understand now that no matter where the ball is hit, every fielder should do something. If the ball is hit to the left side of the infield, the second baseman covers second base. If it's to the right side, and the first baseman gets the ball, the second baseman runs over to cover first. If it's hit to right field or right-centre, the second baseman goes halfway between the infield and outfield to act as a cutoff man (an in-between guy because the outfielder isn't likely to make an accurate throw from far out). And if it's hit to left field or left-centre, the second baseman covers second while the short stop acts as the cutoff.

I know that now. But then, I stood bewildered while everyone moved around me. No one told me this stuff. How was I supposed to know?

A few years ago, I bought Wilma a book called Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend: Women Writers on Baseball. It was a selection of writings about baseball by female authors. The deal was she would watch baseball with me if she could read the book. At the time, I was trying to interest her in baseball. It didn't work, but I did come across some interesting articles.

In her introduction, Elinor Nauen says that women can enjoy baseball more than men because they don’t have the looming sense of failure related to sports that men have. Men feel as if they are watching professional baseball because they are unable to play it, where as women don’t feel the pressure, and can therefore simply enjoy the spectacle.

While I’m not sure that women don’t feel the pressure to perform at a sport they enjoy (or, instead, feel a certain amount of resentment that few of their gender participate at in the sport at a professional level) I do know that I personally feel that sense of failure. Even though I love baseball, watch games, follow players and teams, collect cards and figures, play fantasy baseball online, computer baseball games, and on a beer league slo-pitch team, I still feel that nagging sense that, in some way, I have fallen short. Not only did I fail to make it to professional baseball, I couldn’t even make my junior high softball team.

The Hubley Baseball League

I did like baseball before the elementary heartbreak.

Me, my brother (Short-Fuze), my cousin (Daffy Duck) and a few other people in the neighborhood played baseball almost everyday. Two to three people were on each team.

At our field (the backyard/driveway/road), if you hit a ball into the nearest ditch, it was a double, and if it was into the furthest ditch, it was a homerun. The distance to the far ditch was probably just past second base on a regular field. We played so often that there are still dirt patches where we had the batter’s box and pitcher’s mound.

The other field was the road outside of Cousin Daffy’s place. We stretched out the bases on the gravel-covered road, and made the ditches on either side the foul lines. It forced us to learn to hit up the middle. It also taught us to keep our eyes on the ball and not guess where a groundball was going to go. Inevitably, it would hit a rock and change direction.

I wanted to play all the time, but it was like pulling teeth sometimes. Daffy, especially, was a bit of a whiner when it came to playing. The games had to be on his terms, had to fit into his schedule, and he wouldn’t play if someone he decided he didn’t like that week was playing. He also often quit if he was losing too bad or got a little hurt.

There were sometimes he stayed when he seemed hurt. I say seemed because Daffy was very good at being over dramatic when he fouled a ball off his leg or skinned his knee or something. He laid on the ground and rolled around like he was in severe pain, and then said he was going home. We had to plead and beg to get him to stay.

I’m not sure how it started, but somehow, chanting “Jesse Barfield” encouraged him to regain his strength and desire to play. For those who don’t follow baseball, Jesse Barfield was a former outfielder for the Toronto Blue Jays On more than one occasion, Daffy would say his foot hurt too much, forcing us to plead and beg and finally begin the chant. Then, he would start to jump up and down, pounding his feet on the ground and gritting his teeth as hard as he could. Apparently, this silenced the pain and gave him the ability to continue playing. It was like something straight out of the WWF.

After my elementary heartbreak, I not only became obsessed with reading the sports everyday, but I also wanted to be as close to a professional ball player as possible. This included the way they chewed gum (I stuffed my mouth with as much black licorice gum as possible, made a ball in my cheek, and spit out the black saliva it made on a regular basis… I didn’t understand the ballplayers chewed tobacco…) the clothes I wore (I bought wrist bands, tried to make my own baseball pants, and pulled my socks up over my jogging pants) and what I did while I was getting ready (I scratched my crotch when it wasn’t itchy, fixed my hat when it didn’t need fixing and whipped sweat from my forehead where there wasn’t any).

Things in the Hubley Baseball League sort of fell apart when two of its members joined real ball teams and the fields got too small. There wasn’t enough people to play on the field at the High School up the road, so we made up games to play that were as close to baseball as we could get with two to three people.

I Love… Sports

Remember how I said I had a string of bad luck with relationships?

It started back in elementary school. My girlfriend was my cousin’s best friend. I did the elementary school thing and asked my cousin to ask Lady to go out with me. Lady said yes, on one condition: I couldn’t tell anyone at school.

So my first “relationship” had to be kept a secret. We talked on the phone, I delivered Valentine ’s Day gifts to her house, and when she stayed over at my cousin’s place, we hung a bit together. We never kissed or anything like that. But it was still important to me.

But the secrecy was killing me. I didn’t have much self-confidence in elementary school. I felt like everybody ganged up on me all the time, so I used to try and defend myself by exaggerating, which, by the way, never worked.

One clear example I remember was in the playground, a group of kids making fun of the way I smelled. I put gel in my hair back then, and I knew that’s what they smelled, but I didn’t want to admit this for some reason. They said I had stinky shampoo, and I responded that no, it couldn’t be that because I hadn’t washed my hair in a week.

As you can imagine, this only escalated things.

I don’t remember the circumstances, but I was trying to defend myself one time and I bragged about Lady being my girlfriend. It spread throughout the class, and got back to Lady. She was embarrassed and broke up with me a little later.

I remember the phone conversation. I didn’t have a phone in my room, so the only place I could go for privacy was my parent’s bedroom. She broke up with me over the phone, an d as soon as I hung up, I went out to the living room and decided sports would fill up my time. I got out the paper and read the sports pages for the first time in my life.

Now, I had been interested in sports for as long as I could remember, but I didn’t really follow it. I picked up names from friends and relatives, but I didn’t know anything. That afternoon was the beginning of the change.

It was also the beginning of my obsession with Major League Baseball.