Bat Day, 1972.

 S.E. Schaible

I played Little League baseball on a team called the Eagles, a mix of second-grade kids I knew from the neighborhood and some from other parts of town. Livingston, New Jersey was a modest town of about 30,000 residents – it has about the same population today – but it felt huge to the eight-year-old me. A dozen or so elementary schools fed into two junior high schools, the final repository being Livingston High School. I watched Phillies and Mets games on television with my grandfather and collected and flipped baseball cards with friends, but I never took to playing the Great American Pastime like I later did with soccer. My lifetime baseball season tally was one and done. This team was a hodgepodge of dweebs, jocks, punks and random boys like me who had no idea their parents had signed them up until it was uniform day in April. I could picture the coach’s wife making a pitch at a Tupperware party to fill out a team roster, and my mother being double guilted into buying a set of plastic containers and volunteering me to play.

That summer my father took my friend Gerald and me to a Yankees game. It was bat day, and just inside the turnstiles I was handed a Bobby Murcer signature Hillerich & Bradsby Louisville bat that ten years later would become the lumber that remained in the trunk of my car for decades (think, ahem, Ray Donovan). I can’t remember whose bat Gerald received but I was happy with my Murcer, who played center field that day. The notion of handing out 10,000 bats to kids under sixteen – with four times that many general population adults, felons and lunatics among them in the house that Ruth built – seems borderline insane today; curiously, I found an NIH study that analyzed blunt trauma bat injuries in the weeks before and after bat day at Yankee Stadium in 1990, revealing no discernible rise in such reported crimes. Go figure. At least some medical professional validated my curiosity about bat day crime.

Riding an eastbound DeCamp bus from right across Northfield Road into Manhattan, followed by the D-train to 161st Street, was an adventure. A collective 100 minutes of graffiti, grime, loud voices and humid urine-stench passed, and we were sitting up in the nosebleed section near the right field turn in the old Yankee Stadium. My father bought us hot dogs and Sun Dew orange drinks and a cold beer for himself. At our seats a couple of mustard packs fell from the flimsy paper boat that held my dog, and I reflexively stomped on one of them. It made a muffled pop and when I lifted my sneaker the result looked like the guts of a cicada bug had gone for a few turns on a boardwalk spin-art machine. We laughed at my ugly mess, amidst these kids and drunks and fans from the Five Boroughs, aisles littered with empty glass flasks and cigar butts, older men holding their programs up to shield the sun or using them to fan themselves. I looked at Gerald and nodded down toward the remaining undetonated mustard packet. I jumped up from my seat and as I landed, all the pressure vacated from a tight pinhole, shooting a line of mustard six or more seats to our right like a blast of yellow Silly String, hovering suspended in the air and eventually painting the double-knit pant leg of a very unhappy man from a place where you just shouted at suburban kids without any concern about a parent intervening. “Freaking A! Hey, you punks, you did this!” My father had to get involved, assuring the man it was an accident without even asking what in God’s name I had done. He offered to buy him a cold Rheingold, and mercifully the man’s friends told him it was no big deal and diffused the situation. “Hey, it’s still better than being home with that wife of yours, right?” one of them quipped, the entire section laughing and slapping their thighs. The scene reminded me of eavesdropping at certain friend’s homes watching north Jersey mobsters playing poker and telling filthy jokes and scary stories. I was nervous for several innings, wondering if the guy might change his mind after enough beers and come after my father. Only after we were on the bus exiting the Lincoln Tunnel into New Jersey did I unwind enough to laugh about the mustard incident, figuring the coast was clear, clutching souvenir bats in our hands and singing Joy to the World by Three Dog Night over and over. We probably made my father completely mental; he earned whatever quantity of cocktails he’d consume once we arrived home.

One afternoon during baseball practice, I was fielding grounders at shortstop and a boy I didn’t know named James was playing second base. The coach would rotate the drills so the infielders had some downtime while the outfielders caught pop flies – the hits pinging a sharp metallic sound every ten seconds as the coach’s aluminum bat launched baseballs aloft – and the cutoff throws would bounce or roll vaguely toward the infield. With a few minutes to kill, James and I quizzed each other about the schools we attended, what television shows we liked and who some of our favorite baseball players were – just kids passing the time in the brutal humidity. I mentioned Pirates pitcher Doc Ellis – long before I’d learn the remarkable story of his throwing a no-hitter while tripping on LSD – and he said he liked Lou Piniella. I enjoyed Mission: Impossible and he watched The Brady Bunch. After a moment James nodded, “Check out that kid over there,” his hat too big for his head and listing off to one side. I saw a bunch of moms and kids in the stands, including my brother Drew, but nothing specific. “That one – him, in the yellow shirt,” he said pointing toward my brother. I cautiously acknowledged, wondering where this might be going and asked, “Yeah, what about him?” His reply, a disastrous effort at being funny, followed: “He’s, um, he’s a big fatso.” He immediately guffawed to himself and slapped his leather mitt like he had just crafted the most hysterical burn ever, oblivious that he’d just said the wrong thing to the wrong boy. On top of insulting my brother, his delivery was abysmal. Moments later, fielding a routine grounder that should have activated an automatic throw to first base, I pivoted and hurled the ball at James as if we were working the earlier double-play drill.

The ball went straight into his crotch from about 15 feet away – where his glove would have been had there been a runner on first when the batter made contact. He wasn’t looking, and he clearly wasn’t wearing a cup, and he dropped hard. His legs lifted off the bag like bowling pins scattered by a hard strike, landing in a clump and writhing in pain, red infield clay covering his uniform and sticking to the tears streaming down his cheeks. I stood there just staring at my mitt while a few boys slowly gathered, and the coach trotted over. He didn’t lace into me, and coach turned the episode into a teaching moment for the team while James was getting to his knees and struggling to breathe, gulping like the catfish pulled from the Passaic River by the old timers and tossed into empty buckets. “Listen up. All of you, you need to always watch the ball. This wouldn’t have happened if he was looking at the shortstop. Even if that was the wrong throw, you need to be ready for it. Never take your eyes off the ball.” The boys offered a tepid golf clap for our wounded teammate as he shambled toward the dugout, puffs of red dust dancing off him in the late afternoon sunshine. A couple of the boys tapped my mitt with theirs and said not to worry about it, thinking I must’ve felt bad about my errant throw. James came to one or two more practices and then we didn’t see him again. Sports are inherently risky, but the most dangerous thing James did that day was to assume I would think it was funny to make fat jokes about my brother – or anyone else. After practice Mom asked me what had happened out there; she had missed it while gabbing with the other moms. “Nothing really. Some kid took a ball to the nuts. He made a mistake, but he’ll be OK.”

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