A Summer Tale That Ends With Smiles All Around

  • By Mike Dewey
  • August 19, 2014
  • 431
                        
SUMMARY: Baseball is the most difficult of all games to play well, because almost nothing prepares for what might happen next. Of course, as Mike Dewey relates this week, that's what makes it so much fun. In the summer of 1978, I was a year out of college and what I knew about imparting life lessons to teenagers wasn't much. I could teach them how to cheat at cards. I could share the agony of lost love. I could urge them to listen to the other Elvis, the one who was still alive. I could preach the gospel of great writers -- Updike and Hemingway and Poe and Fitzgerald and Vonnegut and Hunter S. Thompson -- and instill the idea that a library card was more valuable than a driver's license. And I could school them in the right way to play baseball. It was this last ability, curiously, that might have had the greatest impact on the 13- and 14-year-olds who found themselves on a team I had assembled, one that was not expected to be any kind of threat for the championship. "You do know," said a veteran manager who had gone to bat for me in getting the gig, "that these guys won only two games last year, right?" "So what?" I replied. "I can hardly do worse." "Well," he replied, "you could go 1-19, not to mention 0-20." "Bite me," I smiled. "Besides, we haven't even had a practice yet." It felt weird to be standing on the very field where, just 10 years earlier, I had been a player, but it was a good kind of weird. Deja vu with a sense of history ... something like that. Back when I was 14, I had been the third baseman on a team that lost its first and last games but won all 18 in between. That was the summer of 1969 and I still had that championship trophy somewhere in my first apartment. Back then, Pony League was a very big deal in my little town. THE OUTFIELD FENCE featured billboards, advertisements for local businesses, which was way big time. There was even one sign in dead center from a restaurant that promised free chicken dinners for the whole team if a guy hit a home run over it. But that wasn't all. There was a pressbox and a public address system over which the national anthem was played before every game as players stood at attention on the baselines, caps held over their hearts. Then, you'd get to hear your name announced very time you came to bat. There was also a concession stand, a squat red-brick building in which team Moms would tend to the hot dog carousel and the popcorn machine and the Mountain Dew and Hillbilly Joose in the coolers, not to mention ice cream sandwiches and candy bars and some gizmo that spun cotton candy. And the best part of the Pony League field were the lights. Night baseball! Beyond cool. Big time. Those stanchions stood for something much more important than illuminating all the young ladies, dressed in their cutoff jeans and tie-dyed halter tops, though the lights bathed them in an unearthly glow, something of a blend between celestial and essential. Those lights meant the game wasn't the be-all and end-all. They were part of something bigger, something sparkling and serious ... part of something worthy of remembering. Would I have liked the Barn Boys -- my moniker for the team that tried so hard -- to have gone 20-0 that summer? I'm not going to say a flat-out yes, but only because we lost our first game and then our second game and were very close to dropping our third straight when something occurred to me. So I gathered my players in the dugout, after we'd gone down something like 3-0 n the second inning, and I finally said something that made sense. I don't know where it came from, but those words of wisdom somehow sank in. "OK," I said. "I don't know much about life, but I do know that when someone's afraid to make a mistake, that's what's gonna happen. Understand?" Tentative nods all around. "This is a game," I said, "a game that should be fun. I know I must seem ancient to you, but I played it, too, right here on this field." My center fielder raised his glove. "Did you screw up?" he asked. I squeezed his shoulder. "All the time," I said. And I could feel a sense of relief in that subterranean place, as if I'd lifted some kind of heavy burden from their young souls. BECAUSE IT WAS TRUE. I'd been pushing too hard, being an idiot, just like folks in charge tend to sometimes do. The temptation is so great and the ego is so enhanced and bosses like to place blame, so it's never their fault. It's as old as Hamlet and as new as Obama. Fortunately, I can tell you that I was a pretty good manager after that dugout moment and, once the guys stopped worrying about being in trouble all the time, they played and they played well. I take zero credit for their performance, even though parents tried to assign it my way. "I can't believe how it's changed," they'd say. "He can't wait for the next game." "Thank you," I'd say. "We're all having fun." And it's not because we won twice a week that summer; in fact, the Barn Boys were 10-9 with one game left to play and anyone's who's played the game knows that there's a huge difference between finishing 11-9 as opposed to .500. Especially when you're trying to up the ante from 2-18. "OK," I said. "Last game before school starts." General ughs and caps tossed my way. "So, here's what we do," I continued. "Tonight, I want you to take a look around this field: the lights, the signs, the grass, the lines and yes, the girls in the stands. I want to you remember this because one of these days, it's going to matter." A lot of nodding heads. "You have made me proud all summer," I said, "but this is your team. Have some fun tonight." My second baseman, who couldn't have stood five feet tall but would have taken his hacks against Nolan Ryan, said, "You remember those mistakes you told us not to worry about?" I said, "Sure." "We don't even think about 'em any more," he said. "We know we're good." And that's it. My story ends with a team that finished with an 11-9 record. Not spectacular. But respectable. And, more important that cheating at euchre, surviving a broken heart, blasting Elvis Costello, savoring "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" and remembering the summer of '78 with something like love, I'd like to take this chance to thank the Barn Boys. The best thing about not being afraid to mess up is the relief of just being you, whichever way the ball bounces. I think I learned that from you. Smiles all around. Mike Dewey can be emailed at CarolinamikeD@aol.com. Find him on Facebook.


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