Have Glove, Will Travel_ Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond - Bill Lee [101]
Funny. I can write those words easily enough. Perhaps one day I will find the courage to say them.
I have heard people describe baseball as a family game. The first pitch most children catch is thrown by their fathers, and boys and men can talk baseball when they have nothing else in common to speak of. However, the sport does not bring together families when the father pursues it professionally. The teams I played on trained in Florida for six weeks every spring while my children attended school in Massachusetts. I traveled another 90 days or so during the season. Add in the charity events and the promotional dinners and the golf outings and the television appearances, and I ended up spending less than half the year at home.
My children resented those encroachments on my time. I make up for that now by traveling to see them every chance I get. Katy is a veterinary technician in Memphis, Tennessee. We think of her as the patron saint of flawed dogs. She inherited her love of animals from me. Katy loves to save them; I love to eat them. But my daughter doesn’t hold that against me. Mike works as a graphic artist in Seattle, Washington. Andy, a former pitcher just out of the Boston Red Sox minor league organization, coaches baseball at Hines Junior College in Mississippi.
Since 2000, we have kept a date every November to gather—with my parents and Annabelle—in Scottsdale, Arizona, for the father-son baseball tournament. The event organizers invite thirty-two teams composed of fathers and sons from all over the country to compete against each other in a round-robin tournament.
The first year my sons and I participated, we played against a team from San Diego in the second playoff round. I came to the plate in the bottom of the ninth with two men out, our team behind 6–4, and runners on second and third. The San Diego manager brought in his left-handed closer, a large, slope-shouldered twenty-year-old who featured an intimidating running fastball clocked in the mid-eighties. His first two pitches missed the strike zone. He came back with two ferocious sliders that I barely fouled off for strikes. My weak swings made that pitcher cocky. He threw one more slider to finish me off, but this one hung in my eyes. I hit a line drive into centerfield to score the tying runs.
Earlier in the tournament, I had pulled a hamstring tripping over my birth certificate while running out a slow ground ball. Now my right leg dragged, but our team had no pinch runners left. I prayed for a long ball and took a healthy lead off first base. Mike came to the plate and hit the first pitch deep over the right fielder’s head. Home run, or so I thought when it first left his bat. But topspin curled the ball back into the park, and it landed at the foot of the outfield fence 345 feet from home plate.
I rounded second in good time and decided to score despite my barking hammy. Adrenaline rocked through my veins. I ran as fast as I could while taking slow, deep yoga breaths to prevent my leg from seizing. The hammy spoke to me rounding third: This feels good, Bill, time to pour it on! I opened the throttle and hit home plate with hands held high. The winning run.
I waited for the team to mob me at home plate. No one moved from our bench. They looked stunned. I turned around to see what they were gaping at and discovered that a relay throw had caught Mike at third base right before my foot touched home. The umpire ruled my run did not count.
Limping back to our bench, I noticed my father sitting behind the backstop. He wore a nautical cap pulled low over his eyes to protect him against catching skin cancer in the hot Arizona sun. I also saw that chaw of tobacco wedged in his cheek. A true Lee. That double-edged sword never stops dangling over our heads.
Suddenly my uniform grew too big. My shoes flopped around my feet. My shirt cuffs hid my hands and dangled to my knees.