A baseball Story?

                       

Another baseball season is upon us, so I thought I would tell you a sort of baseball story.  It goes back to when I was seventeen and if the first part of the story seems a little heavy on the braggadocio, don’t worry, debauchery, degradation and humiliation are soon to follow.

When I was seventeen, I was pitching for Green Bay West, one of two American Legion teams in the city.  American Legion baseball was for 16 through 18 year olds.  As the season wore on, I began a series of games where I would give up two to three hits while striking out 15-16-17 batters over 9 innings.  During these games I was able to throw all of my pitches for strikes, something I struggledwith at times, and felt as strong in the 9th inning as I did in the 1^st.  Later I would hear athletes, who were performing at peak levels, talk about being in the “zone.”  It is a somewhat mysterious state of being that will show up for a period of time and then, just as inexplicably, disappear.  While you are in the “zone” everything is easier and you get teased with a small dose of your full potential.  Looking back at it now, I think I was in the “zone” for the last weeks of that season and our post-season tournament run.

Our tournament almost ended in our first game.  I had pitched another “in the zone” type game, striking out 16 and giving up 3 hits over nine innings.  Unfortunately, the other team bunched two of the hits, along with a walk and an error to score 2 runs in the third inning and went into the bottom of the ninth leading 2 to 0.  The opposing pitcher had thrown a no hitter at us through 8 innings, when I lead off the bottom of the ninth.

The first pitch was low and outside for a ball.  The next pitch was on the inside corner and I lined it over second base for our first hit of the game and a breath of hope.  Our shortstop smashed the first pitch he saw over the left field wall and the game was tied at 2.  Our first baseman drove the next pitch over the right field wall and we won the game and advanced to the next round of the tournament.  I remember empathizing with the other pitcher who had gone into the ninth with a no hitter and four pitches later had lost his no hitter, his team had lost the game, and they had been eliminated from the tournament.  What a difference four pitches can make.  We won our next two games and earned a spot in the eight-team state tournament.

The tournament was held in Wausau, Wisconsin.  Wausau is a town of about 30 thousand located on the Wisconsin River in north central Wisconsin.  We were scheduled to play the opening game of the tournament.  The game was to start at noon so the plan was to travel to Wausau the night before the game and stay at a motel.  All went well the first night and we woke up the next morning ready to go.  Unfortunately, it began to rain at 10:00am and eventually all the opening day games were postponed till the following day.  Suddenly, we had time to kill and kill it we did.

Not long after the game was officially postponed, decks of cards, cigars and beer magically appeared in several of the player’s motel rooms.  Our coach was a very nice guy who devoted a whole lot of time to the team but was either incredibly naïve or chose to turn a blind eye to how his group of stellar young men was spending their downtime.  Although the night’s activities were probably not what the various advocates of youth sports had in mind, the night was relatively quiet, nobody got hurt and the motel rooms went undamaged.

Actual team photo.  I'm the one with the ace under the table.

The next day the rain continued and all the games were called off by 1:00pm. Once again we found ourselves looking at several hours of down time.  Once again, our coach decided to pursue his own course and left us to find our own way to pass the time.  Hindsight is 20/20, but this was probably a mistake.

By mid afternoon the card games were reconstituted and my teammates fake ID’s did their magic.  The older brother of one of our players bought his way into one of the card games with a bottle of Wild Turkey.

As early evening approached things got a little out of control.  Our center fielder, one of the nicest people you would ever want to meet, and under usual circumstances, pretty much a teetotaler, pranced out of a bathroom with shaving cream piled on the top of his head about 15 inches high.  He was singing a then popular commercial jingle the chorus of which went, “smells so good you won’t want to shave it off.”  At some point in his dance he lowered his head and plowed right into our second baseman’s belly resulting in a shaving cream explosion that covered card players, spectators and the room.  This stunt was met with widespread approval and a couple of more shaving cream experiments were attempted.  In another room someone threw a baseball through a mirror.

Around 9:00pm the rain stopped.  A couple of our advance scouts discovered that the Marathon County Fair was in town and all the pent up energy and consumed alcohol demanded we check it out.

Once we got to the fair, we split up and wandered the fair grounds in groups of two and three.  As time went on, I began to get bored and began to think about arranging a ride back to the motel.  At this point in time, if you put aside the drinking, gambling, smoking, and cussing, I was an innocent as the driven snow.  I was unaware that just a few minutes before one of our outfielders had gotten into a fight and knocked a local guy to the ground with a well-placed uppercut.  More importantly, a rumor had gone through the carnival workers that two guys had either assaulted or tried to assault a co-worker’s daughter, sister, or wife.  So it was in this heated atmosphere I found myself talking with our right fielder about calling it a night.

Suddenly, I heard a commotion around us and I saw what I believed to be other fair goers pointing at the two of us.  Just as I began to become aware that we had become people of interest, I looked down the midway to see about a half of dozen carnies running full steam toward us with blood in their eyes.  Somehow, the rumored assault was communicated and with the posse about 25 yards away our minds chose the flee option, and we took off down the midway.  Was I scared?  Let’s put it this way.  The situation I found myself in scared the beer out of me, both figuratively and literally (oof, that was a hard line to write).

Soon we ran out of midway and headed into the woods at the end of the fairgrounds.  The combination of fear and the fact we were 17 years old, kept us in front of our pursuers.  Once we were in the woods, we soon came to a fork in the path we were on, and our right fielder went to the left and I went to the right.  By then some of our pursuers were running out of gas.  Of the three that were keeping up with us, two went to the left and the other one came after me.

As I was running deeper into the woods, it occurred to me that I might escape but then find myself hopelessly lost in the pitch-black woods.  I noticed that only one carnie was coming after me, and I made the decision to engage this fine fellow in a reasonable discussion of the situation.  As he ran up to me, he initially showed little interest in discussing the matter.  He wound up and took a roundhouse punch aimed at my head.  I jumped back just in time and threw out a half-hearted punch that grazed his forehead.  This slowed him down for an instant, and I held up my hands, palms up and told the guy, that I didn’t do anything and I didn’t want to fight.  When he hesitated a bit more, I told him that I would let him take me back to the fair where he could turn me into cops, who maintained a presence on the fairgrounds.  As I was talking with him, I noticed he wasn’t much older than I was, and I thought he wasn’t all that interested in an all out fistfight.  So he agreed to my suggestion and we started back the way we had come.

When we reached the spot where I had split up with our right fielder, we heard a commotion off in the direction he had gone and my carnie insisted we go find out what was happening.  I later found out, that when we split up, the path my friend took lead right into the area where the fair workers had set up their camp for the duration of the fair.  Finding himself in the middle of the enemy camp, he had run into the first open tent he found and in the darkness of the tent found a cot and sat down.  Unfortunately, the cot he sat down on was occupied by a fellow that didn’t take kindly to being sat upon.  They had piled outside and were in the middle of a ring of spectators, squaring off getting ready to come to blows, as we approached the scene.  Just then a burly cop burst through the ring of spectators and threw himself on my teammate's back and they went down in the dust.  Once the cop had nabbed my friend, my carnie brought me to the cop and he took custody of the two of us.

As we walked back to the fairgrounds cop shop, we took the opportunity to profess our innocence, or at least our innocence with respect to any assault that may have taken place.  The police were using a trailer as a temporary headquarters and we were taken inside the trailer and told to sit down as they arranged for us to get a ride down to the real headquarters in downtown Wausau.  In addition to my relief from escaping any vigilante justice, I somehow was able to somehow surmise the police didn’t believe anything had really happened or at the very least, if something had happened, we were not the guilty parties.  So my concern went to the things we were guilty of and how to explain being in the police station at two in the morning the day before the opening game of the State Tournament.

Once we got to the station, we were brought before the desk sergeant, who was looking over our driver’s licenses, which had been confiscated by the cop at the fairgrounds.  The sergeant looked at the two of us, and noting we were from Green Bay, growled, “What the hell are you doing here?”  My friend, who was tougher than me and taking this situation a little more in stride, pointed at me and said, “He’s pitching the opening game of the State Tournament tomorrow.”  The sergeant shook his head and asked if our parents were in town.  We told him they wouldn’t be in Wausau until shortly before game time and humbly suggested he call our coach.  Seeing little alternative, he agreed and called the motel and summoned our coach to the station to pick up a couple of his players.

When the coach arrived and saw us sitting there, he gave us a disgusted look and went into a room to talk with an officer about our fate.  After a while, he emerged and signaled for us to follow him out to his car.  Nobody said anything the first few minutes of the ride back to the motel when the coach turned to us and said, “I won’t tell anybody about this if you don’t.”  A great wave of relief rolled over me as we readily agreed to the terms of the deal.  The coach had wisely decided that nobody was going to come out of this smelling like a rose and choose the route of least pain.

The next day we finally played the opening game at noon.   I pitched poorly; the “zone” had moved on to someone who wasn’t taking it for granted, and we lost.

What did I learn from the experience, beside the obvious fact that drinking and carousing for two days before the big game probably isn’t such a hot idea?  I did get a little dose of what terror feels like when I looked up and saw those carnies coming full speed, looking to put a big hurt on us.  Over the years I have told this story a few times almost always for its comic effect, and it does have some funny twists.  But when I sat down to write it, I found there was just a tinge of regret that has always been there, I guess, that I hadn’t been smart enough to just go to bed and get a good night’s rest the night before the big game.