Have Glove, Will Travel_ Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond - Bill Lee [77]
My six-year-old daughter Anna and I had been driving for hours around Landisburg, Pennsylvania, and its outskirts, searching for a baseball field. Anna wanted me to stop and request help, but I resisted. You have probably heard how many men loathe asking for directions; that’s a cliché, I know, but, it happens to be true. Asking betrays the code. Our genetic code.
Modern males have evolved from hunter-gatherers who eschewed maps, choosing instead to read the stars or observe which side moss grows on a tree to plot their courses. Honor demands that their descendants maintain this innate sense for where they are at all times. A real guy cannot betray his heritage, particularly in front of his youngest daughter, just because he made a wrong turn.
And I didn’t see any reason why a dedicated New Age backwoodsman like me should. Not at first. Whenever I am lost, primordial instinct spontaneously takes over. My nose turns wolfen to sniff out the tracks that will lead to our destination, while my eyes become an ancient radar ferreting out lost trails or hidden paths even in the dark.
However, after a decade of sinus abuse—can’t even begin to imagine what noxious powders are permanently impacted in those cavities—I found my nose could barely pick up the downwind scent of a manure spreader only a few yards up the road. We had to ask a passing postman to show us the way to Brad Shover’s Doubleday Field.
He pointed down a two-lane blacktop. “Less than two miles up this road,” he assured us in a scratchy, singsong voice. “It’s just past the Mennonite farm. You slow down and cross the bridge over the Sherman River. Shover’s farm is on the other side, tucked up against a ridge.”
We followed that road straight through Pennsylvania farm country: ceramic silos hiding under shadows, grain brushing against the wind, the sun glaring off injured chrome, men in coveralls riding tractors and mopping the sweat from their foreheads with speckled bandanas, the perfume of grain mingled with turpentine. Midway through our drive, Anna pointed out the car window. “Daddy,” she yelled, “see over there! It’s not morning anymore, but that horse is still sleeping in the field. Look how funny his legs look.” I slowed to find out what she was referring to and saw four brown legs, dappled white at the hooves, standing upright as poles in the middle of an uncut hayfield.
Horseflies near big as hummingbirds, the kind of flies that don’t merely bite but can actually rend bits of flesh from your arm, flitted around the animal’s haunches. I noticed a flicker of movement but no hard muscle behind it, just a light breeze gently shifting those limbs. Daddy had to explain that this critter was sleeping, all right, sleeping for an eternity. He appeared to be as dead as King Tut.
This struck me as a bad omen. Brad Shover had offered me $2,500 to pitch that weekend. I figured that after paying such a high fee, he just might feel entitled to work my arm the way someone had worked that stiffened nag.
About a mile further down, though, any apprehension I harbored disappeared. Just the sight of Brad’s diamond in the rough sold me. This gentleman obviously loved the game. He had plowed over a thriving corn field to build a dazzling mini-ballpark with old-fashioned klieg lighting on creosote basted telephone poles, two cozy wooden dugouts, and a backstop featuring a high screen topped by old fishing nets to contain foul pops.
Beyond the outfield fence loomed a hitting background that would delight any major leaguer—the Appalachian Mountains dense with lush, green maples the color of mint jelly. As a bonus, anyone retrieving a home run ball