Have Glove, Will Travel_ Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond - Bill Lee [35]
Instead of pulling inside pitches, even the burliest Regina hitters took everything to the opposite field, a good approach against someone like me, who at the time did not throw hard enough to jam batters. Took me a few innings to analyze them. These men only played once a week, so they were overeager and prone to swing at balls outside the strike zone. But by the time I started working them off the edges of the plate, my opponents had already scored five runs.
A tall right-hander started for Regina. His cutting slider complemented a mid-eighties fastball, but he did not display a curve or change of any kind. He did not need them. His pitches moved so much, you could not hit them squarely if you made contact with them at all. But we did finally score after he tired, and Regina carried only a one-run lead into the bottom of the ninth.
While I searched for my batting glove—there was a chance I might get up that inning—this noise swept down over me, a rumbling percussion that could have passed for thunder, but no, it was the ballpark crowd chattering among themselves.
The sky had suddenly turned overcast.
Our first two batters quickly made outs, but a pair of base hits brought me to the plate in a position to win the game with a long ball. I reminded myself not to commit my swing too early, to stay back and wait for a pitch I could drive over the outfielders’ heads. With the count one ball, two strikes, the pitcher chose that moment to throw his first breaking ball of the day. It hung in the middle of the plate, just begging to be nailed.
I whacked that pitch on a high arc deep to centerfield, and, swear to god, just as it leaped over the fence for a game-winning home run, lightning zigzagged overhead and the clouds overflowed.
I dashed double-time around the bases, laughing my ass off, eager to reach shelter from the wet. That movie The Natural played in my head with me as Roy Hobbs rounding those bags in slow motion while Randy Newman’s majestic soundtrack swelled in the background.
Now you know. Young boys all over the world dream about becoming ballplayers. But once you’ve grown up to play in the major leagues, you must look elsewhere for the fantasies to keep you hopeful and young. So I pretend to be Robert Redford.
It rained in Lumsden for the next three days, a downpour that saved the wheat crop and the goslings. A few townspeople connected the cloudburst with the home run, but no one made a big deal over it. Sad. There are no miracles in today’s society. Technology has robbed us of our wonder. But a thousand years ago, had I hit that sky-splitting bolt in a stadium in some Aztec village, the natives would have declared me the wheat god and the chief would have rewarded me with my own grain concession behind the bleachers.
Does this mean I think my homer broke open those clouds? A numerologist might say so, what with the perfect symmetry of a three-day downpour following a three-run blast. If this truly counted as cause and effect, those farmers should consider themselves fortunate I did not hit a grand slam, or it might have rained for four days. The rivers would have overflowed, flooding their fields and sweeping away their crops.
Instead, they got just the right amount of water, so maybe I was in touch with the elements. On the other hand, it was probably going to rain no matter what, and I just happened to be there. Woody Allen had it right—half of life is just showing up.
P.S.: Almost forgot. The duck race. Big disappointment. Turned out there were no rodent jockeys on miniature saddles. The ducks were made out of plastic, so they just floated downriver, and the meandering current reduced the race to little more than a crawl. Never did find out who won.
7
TO RUSSIA WITH GLOVE
Nothing of consequence occurred during my 1988 trip to Moscow. All right, there were the three incidents with the police, but those could have happened to anyone. Besides, the cops would never have confronted