I love baseball

My high school experience in pitching baseball

Friends and Kin

It’s Sunday,

07/08/07

, and the Florida Suncoast is living up to its name.

I am a baseball fan, though I am not one of those who keep up with scores, players, etc. I just love to watch it. The local team I root for are the Rays, a team located in St. Pete, which is only about

45 miles

from here. I go to the games from time to time, and watch them on TV when I can.

I played baseball in high school, and though I weighed in at around 130 soaking wet, I was the only one who could throw several pitches accurately and was first string pitcher during my last two years of high school. Castor High country school about

50 miles

south of

Shreveport

,

Louisiana

.   There were other, bigger, boys, who could pitch as well, but not with as much accuracy and none could throw an “out-drop”, an “out” or a “drop” as well as I.  I fanned out 13 min during my last game against Coushatta in 1953.  This is how I learned.

I was a combination of Huckleberry Finn, living in the woods, fishing, hunting, hanging around outside, climbing trees, smoking, dipping, chewing, stealing watermelons and sugar cane, doing mischief on Halloween.  I loved to hunt. In the fall I could hardly wait until the opening day of squirrel season.  I don’t even kill a spider these days but I am different now, richer for the experience, but not a killer of any living thing these days unless it is something that can endanger me or really disgust me.

I always had a rubber ball to throw against a wall, and catch the rebound. I played catch with anyone who would play, and when I couldn’t find anyone I would find a wall and would do this for hours. I loved it. My reaction time was, and still is, pretty phenomenal and that made me a good ping pong player too.

One fall day I was hunting and heard a strange sound.  In that part of the country it was, and still is, pretty much nothing but woods. I think it is every moreso these days as people have moved out and the big timber oil companies bought up all the land leaving it in nothing but forests. It was a thunking sound, coming every minute or two. I followed it and came upon an old unpainted house with a separate outbuilding beneath a huge tree. The first thing I saw through a break in the trees was this old building, the tree, and a duffel bag hanging from a branch. There were dozens of baseballs lying around beneath the bag. Then I saw a ball smack the bag as I walked closer.

A lanky young man wound up, and threw another baseball with amazing speed at the bag. The ball smacked the bag and rolled to the ground among the many other balls. I showed myself, and he was surprised to see someone coming out of the woods with a shotgun.  He proved to be a minor league pitcher who wanted to keep in shape, and not having a catcher near his way back home he used the bag as his catcher.

He showed me how to grip the ball and the arm and wrist action to throw a bunch of pitches, and I tried them, but my 13 year old body at that time just couldn’t get nearly the velocity his pitches reached.  I hit the bag enough times, and he said I had promise, and that I should practice.  You bet I practiced. I didn’t have a glove or baseball, and talked daddy into getting them for me for my birthday. I got a bat, a glove and a ball. It was a red Louisville Slugger bat.  Now I needed someone to practice with.

Bobby Davis, age 12, lived down the hill from our house, and he had an old beat up glove and we played pitch every evening that summer. I remember playing until we couldn’t see and the lightning bugs were swarming in the bushes and the moon was coming up. I couldn’t get enough.

I practiced for years until I got my chance to pitch at my first game. I think I was in the 10^th grade, and was small for my age, but I could make that ball do tricks.  An “out-drop” was my specialty. As I got older and with a little more weight, I could make a right handed batter back off thinking I was about to hit him and the ball would curve left and go over the plate.  It would curve to the left and then drop. I would twist my wrist quickly to the right creating a left-forward spin. Holding the ball another way, and twisting my wrist another way, and the ball would curve in, or to the right just enough. To throw a fast ball that rises, I would grip it with my forefinger and middle finger across the two seams and throw downward, creating a top spin and the ball would go straight and rise. There was a knuckle ball, that you would grip by holding the ball with the thumb and little finger and the three middle fingers would be folded so the knuckles pressed down on the ball. The result would be no spin at all and with enough force the ball seemed to float, giving the impression of going slower than it really was traveling and the batter would strike too fast and miss.

Everything would disappear in my universe except the catcher’s mitt hovering just behind the plate, and even the batter was peripheral, external sounds were muffled, and I was that baseball and that space between me and that mitt and that plate.  I got the signal from Billy Ray, my friend the catcher, as he held down his two fingers indicating a curve ball, and then he placed his mitt at a position near the batter’s body just at the inside edge of the plate. I wound up, lifted my left leg and leaned back to get maximum generated power, and then flung myself forward with my pitch and released the ball into that tunnel of light leading to his mitt.  A swing. A smack in the mitt. The soaring sensation of having gotten my pitch past the batter and a strike.  I can now hear those peripheral sounds of the crowd, the smell of the dry dust beneath my spiked shoes, the heat of the afternoon sun on my back, the sweat, the cheering from my teammates, and the inexplicable joy of caressing the texture of the leather of that baseball and its hard red seams just before releasing it into that vortex that is the game.

Today, watching pitchers for the Sox, Braves, Rays, Yankees, etc., I see the pitcher puffing his cheeks with air and releasing it nervously before each pitch, anxious, tight, on the edge of explosion, then delivering a

92 mph

pitch that screams its way with all the steroidal muscle power that pitcher can generate.  It seems there is little pleasure there. Perhaps a $52,000,000 contract, or as I saw today on TV a player getting $750,000 per game, can spawn that kind of tension.  I guess so.

It is still baseball, though not as pure as it once was because of the size and power of those rhinos playing these days. I would be a damn midget out there.  I like to go to batting cages and hit those balls. Hitting an

80 mph

thrown ball with a metal bat nearly takes my shoulder off. I can’t imagine trying to hit a

95 mph

traveling ball much less knocking it anywhere.  So the game is now the game of behemoths, giants, monster humans who have taken it way beyond the class of the ordinary. It is like being played by robots.  But it still is baseball and I still love it.  What can they do with all that money?

Enough for now, and my friends, go out there and give a smile to someone, anyone, and see what happens.

LDSledge

Rantor