Talking baseball

I've never been terribly good at sports, which is probably the reason I have so little interest in them. In fact, the last year I played baseball (7th grade, maybe?), I had a batting average of .000 posted for the world to see. I can still remember checking the sheet of paper tacked up on the wall of the clubhouse and thinking to myself, "This is my clue to quit," which I did.

I had a zero batting average that year because I got scared of the ball, but I hadn't always been. I started playing Pee Wee League ball as an outfielder, and like most of my peers, I got bored and didn't pay attention very well while standing alone as the sun went down, waiting for something to happen. But some way or another, I eventually became backup catcher, and I not only made some good plays, I also hit three home runs in my brief career. As I recall, two of them were in-field, and the third was over the fence, but it may have been the other way around. I also threw a runner out at second and got a slider out at home by holding onto the ball even after being laid out flat by him. Proud moments.

Seeing games was something else. I went to see the Cincinnati Reds play many times at the old Riverfront Stadium, which seemed a lot more impressive as a kid than it was shortly before they tore it down, when blocks of cement reportedly would fall from the ceiling of the parking garage to land on cars. I loved how bright it was at night inside the stadium, and there were people moving around constantly. Every once in a while you'd catch "the wave", and the fireworks were always suitably impressive.

One night my older brother took me, and he gave me some money to buy a souvenir plastic helmet. I doubt I was even thirteen at the time, and I got stopped by a small group of black kids, one of whom stole the money I was foolishly carrying in my hand for the world to see. What I remember vividly about the incident is, another of the kids, who were all about my age, asked me if I wanted him to get it back. Crying, I said yes, and he took off running after the thief. Of course, I never saw either one of them again, but I wonder if he really did try to get the money back for me.

More than once, the game ran late enough that my dad and I would get home after midnight. We would stop at Frisch's Big Boy on the way home, since they were the only place still open at that hour, and get some ice cream fudge cake with whipped cream and a cherry on top, their specialty. I haven't had that in years. Remembering those nights when I was taking poetry in college, I wrote this:

Ball Game

Dad took me to see the Reds play
a few times when I was 10.
In the old, faded yellow pickup
his breath was the acrid smell
of cigarettes, ends burning.

The Reds sometimes won, sometimes lost,
but it was always late when we left, and bright
with streetlights and the headlights of speeding cars.
We stopped at Frisch's on the way home
to eat a fourth meal: Big Boys with milkshakes.

Whenever we got home-two or three in the morning-
we made our way silently out of the darkened garage,
my mother and sister already fast asleep.
When I inevitably knocked over the trashcan
the cat arched its back into a crescent moon.