The Cleveland Indians were snowed out of the opening series with the Seattle Mariners, played three home games up in a domed stadium in Milwaukee, and then came back to Cleveland to play the evil White Sox in sub-freezing-point temperatures.
I'm reminded of the season opening baseball game my freshman year in college. Back then, it didn't matter that the temperature was in the mid-20's; we wanted to play the game. The coach told me that I wouldn't be catching and that the upper classman backstop was his choice. I would be starting in right field, he told me. I couldn't recall ever having played right field before that. I had never even thought about playing right field. So, I trotted out to right field, carrying my Wilson A-2000 fielder's glove.
Generally, a catcher doesn't originally don the tools of ignorance because he likes the stars generated when a 90-mile-an-hour foul tip smashes into his catcher's mask, because he likes the pain reaching into his throat and the hollow feeling rising into his abdomen while kneeling in the dirt after being hit in the nuts, protective cup or no, because he likes pain, pain from being hit in the bare hand, toes, thighs, forearms by thrown and batted balls, pain from being hit in the head by a bat swung or thrown by the batter, pain from being run over by a runner desperately trying to score.
Generally, a catcher never loses the desire to return to the original position in the field he chose when he was beginning to play the game. For me, that was third base, the hot corner. But I'd never get the chance to make the diving catch over the rail into the grandstand like the Kid from Tompkinsville at the zenith of his comeback.
And here, in my first college game, game one of a double-header, which wouldn't be completed, I wasn't settled in behind home plate or bent low at the hot corner in the top of the first inning, my parents and girlfriend huddled together with several others, sitting on wooden bleachers eight rows high and about twenty feet long. I was poking around in right field in the bitter cold, the stinging wind kicking up brown Autumn leaves still on the crunchy grass that sloped away from the infield toward the brown one-inch-wide slats of the wood snow fence behind me and arcing around the outfield in a semi-circle.
Whereas I was part of every play in the field as catcher, initiating the action, life in the outfield was boring, waiting around for something to happen.
While I was accustomed to yakking with the umpire who leaned into my back while catching, talking at the enemy batsman, moving fielders one way or another, calculating the probabilities and the possibilities, learning what particular pitch was moving, breaking, and controlled by my pitcher, recognizing how this particular umpire saw the strike zone this particular day, among the myriad other considerations, decisions, and duties besides simply being physically ready and able to catch each pitch, standing in the outfield trying to stay ready to run after a hit ball or a wildly thrown one took a different kind of force of will.
I don't remember the particulars of the game. I don't remember the other team. I don't remember if I got any hits, drove home any runs, or scored a run. There are those who define themselves by the re-telling of details of games in the distant past, especially their first game or league championship games or the World Series games; but I'm not one of them.
I don't recall the inning in which the low clouds, streaking east, wind numbing my face, finally started to dump their load of frozen precipitation on the participants of this baseball drama; but I do recollect incessant snow, blowing horizontally from west to east into my face, outfield grass slowly turning white before my watery eyes.
I recall standing unprotected from the elements in the vast expanse of open space known as the outfield, wondering what I could do if an off-white baseball was perchance hit toward right field. I would see it, or evidence of it, if the ball was hit on the ground, its course written in the new-snow-covered grass. But if the batter lifted a lazy fly ball or lined a pitch solidly to right, my struggle against embarrassment would begin. And I had little doubt that the winner of such a battle with Nature would not be me.
Then, through the blizzard, a darkened form, a man in dark blue, nearly a football field away, waved his arms above his head, crossing and uncrossing them; and I do recall nearly winning the foot race with the center fielder to his gold '68 Chevy Impala and sanctuary, joined there by three blanket-covered, but still frozen, fanatics.
Posted by Bill at April 19, 2007 12:56 AM