Hopefully this is the start of my comeback tour, more stuff to come:
The summers of my youth were filled with the scent of fresh cut grass and baseball diamond dirt; with a glove in one hand and a picked dandelion in the other, I stood proudly at my position in right field. The red and blue uniform that marked my team affiliation was loose on my lanky frame; with the gap in my front teeth and my copper hair, I looked like a baseball playing Alfred E. Neuman.
The little league field in my hometown was a slice of the nostalgic American life you only see on TV Land. There were two bite-sized fields, complete with a massive scoreboard which was never used, but was left standing for aesthetic reasons. All of this was so the pint-sized players could experience America’s pastime from the ages of 5 to 15. As soon as I was eligible to play, my parents signed me up. For all of my 8 seasons as a Point Pleasant Recreation Center Little Leaguer, my father was my coach.
In order to understand why this is significant, let me take you back to July 10th, 1989; the day I was born. My father, Thomas Long is with my mother, staring at me- their first born son. They name me Brian and my father bestows upon me the middle name Carl after Carl Yastrzemski, his favorite player on the Boston Red Sox, his favorite baseball team. And Mr. Yastrzemski was no slouch either, he was an 18-time all-star, the winner of seven golden gloves, a member of the 3000 hit club, and the first American League player in that club to accumulate over 400 homeruns. In my room still hangs a newspaper photo, yellowed with age, of Yastrzemski as he watched one of the many baseballs to fall victim to his bat soar over the Green Monster in Fenway Park. Beneath the photo was the caption: “The Greatest Hitter to Play the Game.”
I can only imagine how my father felt watching me chase down a fly ball as it would soar over my head and out of the reach of my barely used glove.
In 1999, I played on the Texas Rangers. I was entering this season after my back-to-back retirement from little league basketball, where I laid more bricks than a masonry worker, and little league soccer after the game where I was hit in the stomach by a stray corner kick and subsequently sat in the middle of the field for the remainder of the game as the two teams played around me. Before the baseball season started, my dad sat me down in my room.
“You don’t have to play this year if you don’t want to,” he told me. The Carl Yastrzemski photo hung over his head, like a grim specter of baseball’s past.
“No, I’ll play, it’s alright,” I said. Quitting from basketball or soccer was one thing, but baseball was sacred to my father. I couldn’t give up on that without feeling like I had taken something away from him.
During our first practice I looked around at my fellow teammates; Anthony Zambito, Nick Cambell; my dad had organized an unstoppable little league squad. The Texas Rangers were a force to be reckoned with, and somehow I was a part of this team; I was like Christian Laettner on the 1992 Olympic Dream Team- never heard of him? No one has.
Although the league organizers had the “everybody wins, everybody gets a trophy” mentality, there was a sense school yard of pride in being a part of a championship team, plus you got a slightly larger trophy. My father would run team practices with the same intensity and knowledge of the game that made him the team captain of the Seton Hall Pirates baseball team in college despite being the team’s manager, not an actual player. That’s how much my dad loved baseball.
Our first game of the season was against James Peak; the Moriarty to my dad’s Holmes. Peak coached the Trenton Thunder, the only team in the rec. league that wasn’t named after a major league team. There’s no doubt in my mind Peak intentionally made this choice so his team would inherently have the home field advantage. The man was a powerhouse in the world of little league baseball; parents killed to have their sons on his team. Peak even pulled some strings so his daughter could be on his team, a shocking development because girls were expected to play on the rec. league softball teams after the formative tee-ball years. Every time we played Peak’s Thunder team my father switched into full-on coach mode, from the pre-game breakfast at home to the post-game car ride. I think my father saw a little bit of every person who ever doubted him in Peak; from his mother-in-law, to every kid who made fun of his weight in high school. Peak was all of them in one convenient mustached package.
“Okay, batting order,” my father cried in what I now know as the “it’s go time” voice “Derek, Bill, and Brian.”
I nervously shoved more strips of Big League chew into my mouth. For me, having to bat was like being put against the wall for execution. When “batter up” was called, I put on my helmet, tied a white blindfold around my eyes and placed a cigarette in my mouth, then stood in the batter’s box like a little league Che Guevara while the pitcher aimed and fired.
WHAM!
With a circular sore in my back, I slowly walked towards first base. Last time I checked, I still hold the Point Pleasant Little League record for most ball pegs in a career. I stood with one foot prepared to run in the dirt, the other was waiting on the base, ready to launch my body forward when the time was right.
“Honey, do you want some ice?” my mother asked through the fence behind first base.
“No mom,” I cried “Mo Vaughn’s mom doesn’t ask him if he wants ice!”
Mo Vaughn was my favorite player on the Red Sox growing up; he was also the only player who’s name I could remember so he kind of won by default.
Our first game ended with a victory, and the rest of the season followed a similar pattern of wins. I carried the team morally by leading chants of psychological torment from the dugout such as “pitcher’s got a big butt,” and writing funny words like “poop” on the thin layer of dirt that covered the dugout’s concrete floor. I believe it was because of my insistence that the whole team sang a chorus of “We Are the Champions” at the end of each game that we reached the championship game. We would play against (in a twist worthy of any Hollywood sports film) the Trenton Thunder. The strong humidity in the air that day seemed to stem from the boiling tension between my dad and Peak. I stood ready in my outfield position. If I was ever going to make a difference during a game, I felt as though this would be it.
With the start of the seventh inning, I experienced the peak of my athleticism, which to this day has still been unmatched. With a man on third, the batter made a clutch hit that flew over the third-base man’s head and plopped into the open space right in front of me. I bolted forward as soon as the ball and bat made contact, scooped up the ball; grass brushing against my knuckles, and flung it home with all the force I could muster. I threw the ball so hard that my hat fell over my eyes. Blinded, I could hear the jubilant cries of the crowd; I lifted my hat and saw the umpire had thrown the runner out at home. My teammates came running toward me as though I had just won us the game, when in reality there was still plenty of time to blow the lead. It didn’t matter though. I was Rudy, I was Tony Danza in “Angels in the Outfield.” I somehow made a half decent play after going five-years without showing a lick of athletic talent. My dad jumped up and down along the first base line like a school girl.
The honeymoon soon ended and the game resumed. With one inning left of play, a runner on first and second and two outs Peak’s daughter walked out of the dugout with the fate of the entire game resting on her shoulders. I started to wonder just how much of playing was her choice and how much was her father’s. This girl was the do-or-die deciding factor for her team at this moment. Did Cal Ripken Jr. ever feel the way she felt with Cal Ripken Sr. standing on the sidelines? The first pitch flew in.
CRACK
It was sharp line drive towards left field; the third baseman jumped up and snagged the ball with ease. The Texas Rangers had won. I looked at over at Peak as soon as the ball had been caught, he lifted the clipboard to cover his face and stormed off the field to the dugout. I spent the last, and extremely uneventful, final season of my baseball career with the image of Coach Peak with his face behind the clipboard at the front of my mind. What was behind that thin piece of wood? Anger? Sadness? Shame? Whatever it was, I couldn’t stop myself from imagining my own dad, face behind a clipboard, as a result of my own shortcoming.
The next year, as my dad was driving me to tryouts for the new season, I finally made my choice.
“Dad,” I said “I don’t think I want to play this year.”
My dad was silent for a minute; I braced myself, expecting him to drive his Ford off the bridge like a vehicular lemming.
“That’s okay,” he finally said “you want to get some pizza?”
***
My dad continues to coach the teams of my younger siblings. His latest project has been instructing my youngest brother on how to bat left-handed
“I’m going to make this kid a slugger if it kills me,” he always says.
In my room, I still have my photo of Carl Yastrzemski hanging on my wall. Directly under it was where I used to keep my championship trophy from the year of the Rangers, which I have recently packed away in my attic. As I was packing it away, I thought about that smell of grass and dirt. Of all the fly balls I missed, all the pitches I was hit by, and every strike out I got. In spite of all that my dad always looked me straight in the eye as I slouched back to the dugout and said:
“Good job,” with his clipboard firmly tucked under his arm.
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