Once, while playing a pickup baseball game in the park behind our house, I raced back to snare a long fly ball, turning my head to track it in flight. Unfortunately for me this particular field had some picnic tables in the “outfield”, tables I had forgotten were there. I ran smack into them, and the next thing I knew I was staring up at the sky with the other players looking down upon my lifeless body. They told me that when I hit the tables at full speed I stopped, stood up and then fell over on my back, apparently with the wind knocked out of me. This event was scary, but it didn’t lessen my obsession with baseball.
I immersed myself in the game but it wasn’t until much later that I began to appreciate the finer points, the game within the game, the subtle strategies that can make the difference between winning and losing. As a kid all this was beyond me because it was hard enough to hit a round ball with a round bat or of chase down a long fly ball to left center, picnic tables be damned.
My hero in those days was Mickey Mantle, and since the Mick played center-field, I did too. The Mick was a switch hitter so I was too. At some point the coaches realized that I didn’t have the strong throwing arm or other athletic tools needed to play the outfield, so I got put at first base, the position most favored by tall, clumsy players who can hit.
I think it was around this time that I started to move away from the game, at least as a participant. Playing the infield brings you much closer to the action and it penalizes those people who have a tendency to drift away and think about other things. In the outfield it’s possible to contemplate the workings of the universe between pitches, and you are so far away you might as well be a spectator. Oh look, a squirrel!
whoisfenton 