A baseball memory

I was walking our dog Bandit the other day past Florence Field, a run-down Little League diamond near Dallin School in Arlington. As ratty as Florence is, it will always be a special place for me, as many of my son Ted’s Little League games were played there. For a few minutes, Bandit and I watched a pick-up game being played by some kids who had just gotten out of school, and I was hit be a wave of nostalgia. Ted turned 20 last month, so Little League is over for me (unless I decide to coach in retirement). I wrote the following piece in the summer of 2012, and reading it brought back some of the best memories that a father can have.

The Professor and the Baseball Team

I never understood baseball.  The energy, time, and money that people lavish on a game that for the most part they don’t even play has always left me mystified.  Of course, growing up in Cleveland, I only had the Indians, who were past their glory days by the time I was old enough to pay any attention.  As for youth sports, I was too short for basketball, too skinny for football, and in a baseball game, I was the kid with glasses standing in right field, fervently praying that nobody would hit a fly ball to me.  I did my time, and breathed a sigh of relief when I got too old for any of it. 

Chemistry, on the other hand, I get.  I am a good teacher and a fairly productive researcher, and I’ve enjoyed my twenty-three years as a professor of chemistry at Brandeis.   The pressures of teaching, research, getting grants and tenure combined to slow down the family process, but eventually my wife Sue and I ended up with two good kids, Lizzie and Teddy.  Lizzie is in high school, a cheerleader for the football team, and any problems that she has are so far outside the realm of my experience that I can only offer general advice on dealing with people and help with her algebra homework.  Teddy, on the other hand, reminds me of myself, with one major difference:  He is good in sports, particularly baseball.  He has played since T-ball, and has been a versatile player for every team he has been on.  I started coaching his teams, helping in small ways (collecting equipment, keeping score, and cleaning up the benches), just to have an excuse to watch him play.  It was fun to see the little guy hustle after fly balls, crack a single, or stand on the mound pitching in a real game.  But baseball was still foreign to me, with gruff coaches telling nine-year old kids to “go two”, “turn two” and “get that glove dirty”.  Baseball is religion in Arlington, where we live, and the Little League majors teams are drafted almost exclusively based on how well you hit during the February try-outs.  Teddy had an off day at try-outs, so he wasn’t drafted by a majors team this spring.  Neither was Dan, who had been on Ted’s team, the Dodgers, the year before.  Dan’s father Ryan had coached along with me on the Dodgers, so we offered to run a triple-A team together, with Dan and Teddy as the nucleus. Somewhat to my surprise, I was asked to manage.  To paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut, unusual requests are dancing lessons from God, so I said yes.  Come mid-March, I was e-mailed a roster and a list of phone numbers for the thirteen players on our new team, the Reds. 

The Reds’ first scheduled practice was a bright windy Sunday during Lent, and most of the team made it.  The gang included four guys from the Dodgers: Jesse, who had grown about a foot since last year, Evan, Teddy and Dan.   We knew all four were solid players, so Ryan and I had a place to start.  There were a lot of new faces, too, including three 12-year olds, Chris 1 (there were two Christophers on the roster) and the twins, Nathaniel and Sebastian.  The new players also included Charlie (who proudly informed me that he had put Ted out at third in a playoff game last season), Chris 2, Matt, whom I could only tell from Teddy for the first month by who was wearing glasses (that would be Ted), Eric, and the youngest members of the team, Ryan and Seiji.

I planned that first practice with as much care as I would any introductory chemistry lecture, but with one big difference.  In chemistry class, I can answer any question a student is likely to toss at me.  But baseball?  Fifty-seven years old, I had never actually done any of the things I was going to be asking of these kids.  However, it didn’t take me long to discover the secret of successful management.  I didn’t have to be an expert in baseball. I only had to have people around who were.   Besides coach Ryan, two other fathers showed up that first practice, (young) Ryan’s father Kelley and Tony, Chris 2’s dad.  Both fathers became regulars at practices and games, and their knowledge of the game (and ability to “fungo”, the art of throwing a ball up with one hand and hitting it with the bat in the other) saved me from having to demonstrate my minimal athletic skills very often. 

Really, the only athletic achievement I had attained over the years was a brown belt in shoto-kan karate. I like to think it was of some use.  I noticed that a good batter’s stance in the box is not all that different from what karatekas know as the horse stance, a basic earth-connected stance that gives speed and power to punches.  Then there was the push-up.  Upper arm strength, important when you are swinging a bat, is key.  My old Sensei Sugiyama was a real bear for pushups, making us do double our age in reps with closed fists, knuckles on the ground, sweating in the summer heat of his Chicago dojo. So I started that first practice by demonstrating a proper push-up, and asking the team to try to work their way up to twenty pushups a day.  I don’t know how many of the guys actually did them, but through the regular season, we outscored opposing teams on average better than 3 to 1, so something worked.  

The other thing I worried about was pitching.  I knew that both Teddy and Dan could pitch, but two arms do not make a rotation.  I had watched too many “walk-a-thons” in previous seasons that were humiliating for the pitcher, excruciating and boring for the fielders, and embarrassing for the coach.   Now fate, or luck, stepped in.  One of my graduate advisees at Brandeis, Drew, let on that he had been a Little League pitcher on a championship team and had been trained in the mechanics of pitching by a pro ball player.  Well, part of earning a Ph.D. is showing that you can teach.  So during the first few practices, I asked Drew to drill potential pitchers in the basics of form and mechanics.  By opening day, we had a six-pitcher rotation: Teddy, Dan, the twins (Nathaniel and Sebastian), Charlie and Jesse.  I added Chris 1 to the rotation at mid-season, so we had seven guys who were willing and able to pitch.  I am proud to report that the Reds did not host a single walk-a-thon all season with our regular rotation.

Of course, all of this lay in the future at those first practices.  I was only hoping (praying?) that I wouldn’t screw up too badly.  I remember the first time I felt a hint of optimism was at one of the last work-outs before opening day.  Coach Kelley was slapping high flies with the fungo bat, and the guys were competing to catch them in the outfield.  There was laughter with the competition, and it seemed to me that a bunch of boys, most of whom hardly knew each other two weeks earlier, were suddenly a team.

Nevertheless, on opening day, April 21^st, I was a wreck.   I didn’t eat any dinner, just in case my stomach got too knotted.  I figured that seeing the manager throw up would probably be demoralizing.  We were the visiting team, playing the Rays at Poets Field.  Ryan (the team member, not the coach) was just as nervous, and didn’t want to play, but I confided my own willies to him, and he eventually took the field.  My feeling, after we recorded a 5-1 win, was simple relief.  We could at least win a game, and I wouldn’t go down as the worst manager in Arlington Little League history.  

I will condense the rest of the regular season.  Suffice it to say that the Reds were successful.  I do remember, during our second game, after holding the opposing team to 3 runs while the Reds scored 11, Coach Ryan turning to me and saying, “We’ve created a monster!”  As April turned into May, the games became family affairs, with my daughter Lizzie keeping score, Sue cheering and Teddy’s dog Bandit, who occasionally sported a Reds shirt, barking on the sidelines.  The Reds developed a regular following, with the teams’ families, neighbors and friends showing up for the games.  We ended the season in first place with a 15-2 record, earning the bye in the first of a two-round elimination playoff series.   Our second-round opponents, the Royals, had won in the first round against the only team to beat us in the regular season (our old namesakes, the Dodgers). The Royals played well against us, but we were headed for the finals. 

Our opponents for the championship series were the Red Sox.  We had won all three times we played them during the regular season, but never by much.   If the Reds had the air of a traveling circus, the Red Sox were an army.  Every detail was organized by Ed, the manager, or by his daughter Sam, right down to nicknames for each of the boys on the team.  If the sun beamed too brightly on their dugout, magically a tarpaulin would appear to cover it.  On hot days, a cooler of drinks always stood at hand.  Ed had clearly done this before. 

The Sox also had a secret weapon, a tall lanky 12-year old pitcher named Brian who had an arm like a cannon and deadly accuracy.  Just his appearance on the mound sent shivers down the spines of young batters:  You didn’t hope for a hit when facing Brian, you only hoped to survive.  Ed pitched Brian judiciously, no more than three innings per game, so he could be used with only a day’s rest in between.  He was the obvious choice for pitching the first game of the championship, a best-of-three series to be held in the newly refurbished temple of Arlington Little League, Buck Field. 

Our starter was also obvious, if only because we were down to nine players due to various obligations and previously planned family trips, and I had pitched my other starter the night before in our playoff game against the Royals.  If all went well (which against the Red Sox meant we were up by a run or two), I could count on Teddy for four innings, and use Dan as closer.

Game 1, Wednesday evening.  The sun is setting, field lights come on, and over the public address system, the league rep starts calling out the names and positions of the players to line up on the first and third base lines.  We have home field advantage because of our record, so they call the Reds first; nine guys, no substitutes.  The Sox, meanwhile, have all fourteen players present and ready to go.  Ed and I shake hands, he wishes me luck and then admits that he doesn’t really mean it.  I wish him luck in the same spirit, the national anthem plays, and the game begins. 

From the start, the game is a pitchers’ duel.  Batter after batter on both teams go down on Ks, either backwards or forwards.  Matt bangs a beautiful triple, his best hit of the season, but is marooned at third in a sea of strikeouts.  We squeak out two runs after four innings, the first an RBI single by Jesse that scores Dan and the second a triple from Teddy, who then goes home on an overthrow, giving the Reds a 2-0 lead.  A reliever comes in for Brian after three innings, and Dan goes in for Ted after four.  Last ups for the Red Sox, they get a runner on, and score on a one-out single.  The tying run is at first, and the batter wallops a hit out to left field.   Matt, in center field, valiantly gets the ball to Teddy at short, who overthrows third in an attempt to tag the lead runner.  Meanwhile, Dan is off the mound and snags the overthrow as the runner makes the turn toward home.  Our catcher, Eric, is right where he should be, blocking home plate.  Dan makes a perfect throw to Eric, who tags high, but there is no slide.  We wait for a full second as the umpire makes up his mind… Out.  Pandemonium breaks out in the Reds dugout.  We have to wait for one more strike-out from Dan’s arm to finish, but the game ends, 2-1 Reds.

For game 2, the next night, we picked up two more players, Seiji having returned from visiting his grandparents in Japan, and Evan back from Florida.  The game is another grind, with pitchers on both teams throwing well.  After four innings, the game is tied 2-2, but we go ahead 3-2 in the top of the fifth on an RBI double from Dan, with our pitcher Charlie scoring from first.  In the dugout, the guys are getting excited, with loose talk of what would happen after we win.  I try to stem the tide, reminding them that we haven’t actually won the game yet, especially when Charlie tells me his arm is getting sore and he can’t close.  At this point I have two remaining pitchers, Chris and Jesse.  Only Jesse has been part of the pitching rotation at the start of the season, and Chris hadn’t pitched at all until mid-May.  Both of the boys have done well when tapped, but this is a different kind of pressure, closing in a tight championship contest.  Bottom of the sixth, Chris strikes out the first batter, and a caught fly ball gives out number two.  Only one out to go, and we are done.  The chatter and excitement gets louder in the Reds dugout.  Then, a walk and the Sox are at the top of their order.  I watch with lead in my stomach as their best hitter cranks a triple to drive the tying run home.  Chris strikes out the next batter, but we are into extra innings, and beautiful surety dissolves into a puddle of anxiety.  Jesse offers to relieve Chris, who gladly accepts, but with an unproductive top of the seventh for us, the end is predictable.  The Red Sox win in a walk-off, 4-3. 

The after-game huddle is a depressing affair.  Our usual boisterous hands-on shout of “Reds!” is barely a whisper, and there are a few tears.  To the team’s credit, there is no finger-pointing or muttering, at least not while I am listening.  Besides, we still have one more chance.           

The last game of the series is played the next day, a hot late June Friday afternoon.  For the first time since the playoffs began, we have a full roster, all thirteen players.  The twins, Nathaniel and Sebastian, are back from a week-long church trip.  I am counting on them to pitch, since of my regular rotation, they are the only ones I haven’t used in the series.  Otherwise, I have Dan for four innings, but that’s it.   The twins’ mother told me that they were incommunicado the whole week (no cell phones allowed), so the first they knew that we are even in the championship series was at noon on Friday.  I waited anxiously all afternoon for a last e-mail that Nate and Sebby couldn’t make it, but, now, at the field, there they are, a sight for sore eyes.   I have my pitchers, and could hold Dan in reserve if needed.

 I feared that, after the previous night, I would have to give an exceptional pep talk to get the team up, but I am wrong.  The guys are calm, focused and ready to go.  I pass out my end-of-the-season mementos, baseballs with “Remember the Reds!” in red magic marker, and thank them all for a great season.  And for the third time in three days, the teams line up, the national anthem plays, and the game begins.  We are home team again, and the Red Sox take a quick lead, 1-0, in their first at-bats, with the top of their order, “Mushroom”, scoring on a double from their fourth batter, with Nate striking out three to bring the Reds up.   Dan leads off with a single, and Teddy drives him in with an RBI double, 1-1 at the top of the second.  Then the grind resumes, with the Red Sox ace Brian allowing no more runs for first three innings and Nate good for four. I pull Nate, who is getting tired, after four innings, and his brother Sebastian takes over.  It takes a few batters for Sebby to settle in, and although all three outs are Ks, the Sox take a 2-1 lead on a set of singles.  There is no joy for either team in their next at bats, so we enter the bottom of the sixth behind by a run. 

The Reds didn’t have a “top of the order”, since we had enough productive hitters that I could scatter them through the line-up, and have them drive in runs.  I have since been told that this is called the “money-ball” strategy, and it was effective for us throughout the season.  Still, the wisdom of that arrangement doesn’t seem as clear to me at the bottom of the sixth in a winner-take-all championship game, since most of my younger players are up next.  Still, there is hope.   My three batters are Evan, Chris 2 on deck and Ryan in the hole.  Evan was a remarkably successful batter throughout the season.  He has an unorthodox, but pretty effective, swing.  I could usually count on him for a hit. Sure enough, Evan gets a single, so the tying run is on board.  Chris 2 strikes out (ouch!), and then it is Ryan’s turn.  

By now, it is clear that the Red Sox reliever is starting to tire.  Any number of pitches to Evan and Chris 2 are balls, and the umpire is calling clean.   So I gather Ryan and Seiji, now in the hole, for a quiet conference.  “We need you guys on base, or we will lose this game.  Right?”  Both heads nod.  “If you get a strike, over the plate, you swing.  Otherwise, don’t move.”  Ryan goes up to the plate, gets in a perfect batters stance, looking for all the world like he was going to swing for the fences, and gets walked in five pitches.     

Next up is Charlie.  When Charlie made contact, it could be a monster.  But he is also a little impatient and sometimes swings at bad pitches, making him a strikeout risk.  Not this time.  Charlie keeps his head, picks his pitch and smacks a clean double.  Evan comes home, tying the game.  Ryan is at third, and Charlie at second.  Now it is Seiji’s turn.  The picture of calm, his small form in perfect stance, Seiji draws another walk.  The bases are loaded, one out, and Nathaniel is up.  Lizzie yells to him “You better hit it!”  Nate smiles and says, “Don’t worry, I will.”  

There are real thrills in science.  In that moment of connecting a series of apparently unrelated observations into a sensible hypothesis, there is the rush of knowing that you are the only person in the world, maybe in the whole universe, with this vision.   But it is a solitary feeling, and communicating your joy to others is hard, often impossible.   Watching Nate’s well-hit ball going one foot over the top of the leaping right fielder’s glove and Ryan crossing home plate with Charlie hard at his heels, I am in perfect harmony with everybody on our side of the field.  The bench empties, a mob of screaming boys in red uniforms surrounds me, and gouts of water and Gatorade hit me from all sides.  And finally, I understand baseball.