I AM NOT A scientist.
And I’m not a poet or a bishop or a musician or an architect or a statesman or a television repairman.
Lots of things don’t make sense to me. The solar system, for one. God. Evolution, the piano and anyone who plays it, and the Red Sox not winning the World Series even one time since 1918.
These things are unexplainable.
Here’s another. A city where the people dislike each other so much that the court had to force the different kinds of kids to sit together in school. Where people throw rocks and try to tip over school buses. Where the mothers of some students show up on the news at night and they are screaming the most horrible things they can think of at the kids on the buses. And then one of those same mothers comes on the interview to say it’s not about hating anybody.
I’m fairly certain in that case that I do not understand what it is about. I’m not even close. And it hurts my head to try, so I don’t.
“You see this?” I say to Butchie, holding my baseball bat high in the air like Thor with his hammer. “I am going to take this, and I am going to hit that ball, out into that patch of bushes in left.”
It is that simple. And it is true. I know it and Butchie knows it. It is a beautiful, simple fact.
“Hard. Down the middle, Butch. That’s what I want.”
“Anybody can hit that, Richard. Big deal.”
“No, anybody cannot hit that. You, for example, can’t hit that.”
“Can.”
“Can’t. I’m talkin’ hard. Crank it up and let it go. You can start throwing me your junk in another week or two. I’m not gonna mess myself up trying to hit live balls two months before anybody even wants to play a real game. But you can throw it just as fast as you want. I only want to swing the bat and hit the ball. Hard, and hard. Simple.”
I love every bit of it. I love the sound. The sound of the ball approaching, whistling, if it’s thrown with the right snap. The sound of my bat whipping around, again, a sort of whistle in there. But above all... of course. Above all what I love is the sound of my bat hitting his ball. I can hit it. I can hit any one.
I don’t do a lot of bragging. But I do my share. It’s just part of the game. A fun part. Anything that adds fun to the game is okay anyway, and doesn’t do any harm as long as you’re not a jerk about it. So I can talk a little, when the opportunity arises.
It doesn’t arise all that often when I’m playing basketball. I’m okay at basketball, but just as okay as a zillion other guys. Or football, at which I am better than basketball, but not better than, say, a billion other guys. Or hockey or skeet shooting or Tae Kwan Do, all of which I have tried and none of which I have embarrassed myself at, but neither have I set the world on fire with.
But I can hit a baseball.
Can throw one too.
But I can hit a baseball. I understand hitting a baseball.
“Pitchers are always ahead of hitters in the first weeks, Butchie, so it won’t prove anything for you to snap a curve past me in February, will it?”
“Might not prove anything, but it’ll sure feel good.”
Butchie grins. He’s got a good, intimidating pitcher’s grin, to go with a very stretched-out body and great wing-span that both give him excellent leverage and the appearance of being even faster than he is. He’s tough enough too, in that desperate way pitchers need to be.
I stand in there, scratching hard into the frozen dirt of the petrified batter’s box with my spikes. Butchie keeps grinning, leans back, and back and back, then comes over the top, and over and over, and finally reaches his perfect release point and lets go of the first pitch of the 1975 baseball season.
It whistles. It is such a beautiful thing, the sound of it, the east-west spin—which I can pick up easily in the superior clarity of winter’s air—that I am almost too excited to react properly to the pitch until...
I drop to the ground, flopping hard on my back an instant before the ball nails me in the head.
“If you can’t stand the heat...” Butchie says, blowing warm steaming air through his pitching hand.
Could’ve told you he was going to do that.
I do love this game.