Sometimes, fact or fiction doesn’t matter
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- April 19, 2025
- 167
I’ve tried, I really have, to ascertain the veracity of a story that Mom once told me, but I’m afraid it’ll have to remain apocryphal.
With that caveat in mind, here’s the tale … judge for yourself.
Once upon a time, there lived a giant of a man. He stood well over six and a half feet tall, weighed more than 250 pounds and could hit a baseball with prodigious power, striking fear into pitchers.
He was a student at a large college in the Midwest and also excelled at basketball, making him a two-sport star at a time when such athletes were very uncommon. He also wore eyeglasses.
Known for his humility and gentle nature, he was an anomaly, a contradiction on two massive legs, a man whose strength and size often created in others a sense of fear and outright intimidation.
But he wasn’t like that, not at all, as anyone who knew him could attest. Still, he found it difficult to dissuade the public from believing that he was, at his core, a monster, not a decent, caring young man, a baseball player who simply enjoyed the game.
There came a spring day, right around Easter, and the team was practicing on the field adjacent to where actual games were played.
It was located in the heart of the college campus, meaning that many students used the sidewalk behind the outfield fence to get to their classes or their dormitories or their fraternities and sororities.
When it was his turn to take batting practice, the tall, imposing baseball player hit a ball with such force that it cleared the fence in a matter of seconds, a vicious line drive that struck a coed as she walked by, unaware of the projectile heading directly at her.
“If she’s hurt,” he said, shaken, “I’ll never pick up a bat again.”
History tells us that Frank Howard went on to play 16 seasons in the major leagues, hitting 383 home runs, making the All-Star team four times and winning a World Series title in 1963 with the Dodgers. He hit a home run in his final at-bat on Sept. 30, 1971.
“I’ll take it to the grave with me,” he said. “This was Utopia.”
He died on Oct. 30, 2023, at the age of 87.
Howard once remarked that he regretted not finishing college, joking that even in his 70s, he might go back to Ohio State, just to put a proper punctuation point on that period of his young life.
My mother, who did graduate cum laude from Ohio State, also earned her Master’s degree there, an accomplishment quite uncommon for women of her generation, not that she would ever wave those diplomas in anyone’s face, preferring to remain modest.
She never lost her love for baseball, though she drew the line at watching me play in Little League or Pony League, preferring to lend a hand at the concession stand, keeping busy, probably not wanting to see me do badly or, even worse, get seriously hurt.
Dad was different. He kept the scorebook and could usually be found either in the dugout or standing just outside, studying the game, puffing on his pipe, not saying much, focused on the action.
I remember one game in 1966. I was 11 and came up to bat in the bottom of the sixth inning with the bases loaded and two outs in a 2-2 tie. The pitcher was a big, burly guy with a fearsome fastball, and I hadn’t so much as fouled off a pitch in two previous tries.
I was tall and skinny, not a lot of meat on the bones, and sure enough, he came inside with the heater and hit me in the ribs.
I went down in the dirt, like Wile E. Coyote plummeting from a cliff, and had to be helped to first base as the winning run scored.
My father was the picture of composure as he drove to the emergency room, where I was checked out and released, both of us agreeing that it might be a good idea not to tell Mom too much.
“No sense worrying her,” dad said. “Just tell her that you won.”
If you were ever in our house on a spring evening, you’d probably see mom sitting at the kitchen table, a highball glass at her elbow, a Crime Club mystery before her, the Indians game on the radio.
“Who’s winning?” you might ask as you walked through, knowing that she wouldn’t know, just enjoying the ambience of Jimmy Dudley’s voice, the soothing soundtrack of another day in the life.
All those places still exist – the ball field, the hospital, the house itself – and sometimes, I’ll just drive past them, the radio playing the oldies station, the landscape so familiar, the past still present.
I haven’t picked up a bat in 25 years, since the turn of the century.
But there’s a part of me that wonders if I could still play the game.
It’s such a delicious temptation, imagining what it would be like to step into the batter’s box one more time, feeling the spring breeze, the sensation of digging in, taking a practice cut or two, waiting.
That’s where I leave the daydream and step on the accelerator, content that a backlog of memories is more than enough for me.
But hey, if you’re looking for a first baseman with great hands who can get you a key hit from time to time, I’m not that hard to find.
Mike Dewey can be reached at Carolinamiked@aol.com or 1317 Troy Road, Ashland, OH 44805. He invites you to join him on his Facebook page, where every pitcher tells a story.