America’s favorite pastime might not be the preferred recreational activity for everyone, like writer Jill Sisson Quinn. But then, her son fell in love with baseball. Because of his unwavering adulation, the joy of the sport might just have spread to his once indifferent parents.
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The summer he turns nine, my son Beau falls in love with baseball. Not really sports folk, my husband and I dig out our mitts from bins of childhood stuff. Other than having my initials on the back in black Sharpie in my adolescent script, mine looks almost brand new. My husband’s turns his hand black when he removes it, more from dodgy leather than dirt from overuse.
We sign up our son for Amherst Coach Pitch. I trudge to the store for the necessary equipment, shocked by the prices, ultimately settling for the cheapest bat — a $40 wooden one, the only wooden bat in the store. At the first practice, when he smacks a line drive into the outfield, I hear the dad at second exclaim, “He hit that with a wooden bat?!” I think about the little red wooden bat I used at church softball games in the ’80s. At home, I read that aluminum bats took over youth and amateur leagues in the late ’90s. They’re lighter, last longer, and hit farther. Who knew? Not the nature-loving bookworm that is me, of course.
My son enjoys the youth league, but the two games per week are not enough. So we set up a diamond in the back yard, using the plastic lids from our five-gallon maple-sugaring buckets as bases. My son spends an afternoon burying a cut section of two-by-four into the ground for a pitching rubber. All day long he begs me to play baseball. I dawdle through my chores, then meander outside, always stopping to examine the progress in my herb garden before joining him.
We set up some rules for our two-person games: one-out innings, no strikes unless you actually swing and miss, no getting out imaginary runners. We keep track of our scores on the outside wall of the barn. With no rain to wash them away, the chalked T-charts filled with hash marks completely cover the center section by mid-July. When my husband comes home from work each day he relieves me. Exhausted and sore from using muscles I haven’t used in a long time, or maybe never used, I watch them finish our game through the kitchen window.
In June on vacation, in a touristy souvenir shop, my son finds a trunk of baseball cards, 10 cents apiece. All $7 of the souvenir money he has left is spent there, so that his primary memory of our hiking trip in Acadia National Park is a Jim Gantner baseball card. In July we go camping. My son packs all of his baseball gear – three bats, batting helmet, seven balls; running low on space, we make him leave his cleats at home. And there we are, playing ball next to our camper in the ferny woods of Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest.
One Saturday, he watches “Rookie of the Year” and “The Sandlot.” Afterwards, he walks through the kitchen and out toward the ballfield in a homemade catchers’ outfit – complete with soccer shin guards, bicycling knee pads, a plastic chest plate from a nerf sword battle kit, a plastic Viking helmet sans horns, and the chin mask from my husband’s Hannibel Lector Halloween costume. It sounds odd, but it looks pretty darn good.
I might have preferred a summer spent hiking, rather than listening to John Fogerty’s “Centerfield” on repeat. But when my son makes us uniforms using white t-shirts and fabric pens, I soften a bit; he calls his team “The Red-Winged Blackbirds” and mine “The Earths.”
Some oft-cited research has found that it takes around 10 years or 10,000 hours of practice to reach the top in competitive fields. As the summer progresses, we all improve–catching each others’ pop-flies, hitting balls almost into the cornfield. But something more also grows: soon the punch of that ball in the pocket of my glove is as satisfying as the monarchs I see circling the milkweed near second base, the ping of the aluminum bat as enjoyable as the song of the house wren nesting in the box on the side of the barn, because even for us non-sports people, baseball, and a boy’s love of it, can get completely under our skin.