We All Had A Ball

I wish you wouldn't keep harping on that pop-up. To me, if I catch a pop-up that goes as high as the Washington Monument, that's news. Or if I hit a ball 350 feet. But to my critics and friends, the idea of me camped not quite under a pop-up, and tilting slightly to the left, and tilting slightly farther to the left, and then the ball coming down well beyond my grasp—that's their idea of something worthy of comment. What people usually say to me now, if I'm unable to start the conversation off on the right note, is "I hear that you missed a pop-up."

I'm sorry. There are so many other things I wanted to ask you. Like, how did you prepare for the Cubs?

For the first time in my life, I worked out. I hate to work out. You have an angel on one shoulder saying "Go, go, go" and a devil on the other saying "Stop, stop, stop," and there you are in between, bored to death with the whole argument and wallowing in sheer, but not pleasant, kinesthesia.

I like to play ball. A ball takes you out of yourself. Of course, if you miss a ball, you snap back into yourself pretty quick, but then you have a lot to talk over with yourself. Even while you are out of yourself, you can be narrating semiconsciously. "He can still hit," you can be saying, referring to yourself in the third person. "Ball was in on him but he got that bat head out in front...." The main reason I cover sports is so I can keep the vocabulary of my semiconscious narration up-to-date.

Now looming ahead of me was a shot at living that narration. I was there to write about it, sure, but it meant a lot more to me than that. So, do you know what I did? I lifted weights. Not only do I not like lifting weights, I deplore it. However, a person doesn't get many chances later on in life to whang a well-pitched baseball or to snag a well-hit one. A person doesn't want to come back from such a chance to report to his family, "I was overpowered."

My son has 10-pound dumbbells lying around the house. I started pumping them and swinging them and going through throwing and batting motions with them, and I didn't stop even when my daughter would collapse—her prerogative—in helpless laughter. I also split two cords of firewood down to the biggest pile of kindling in Massachusetts.

When you first encountered the wily hardball in Arizona, how did you feel?

Overpowered.

A hardball is a thing that, when you have not seen one with steam on it in many years, is upon you before you know it. And in the field I was lost in the complexity of hops. Grounders were like logarithms. Also, I didn't seem to hinge in the same places I used to. And my throwing was so zipless the first day that it moved me to compose a blues song:

I used to have a rifle,
I used to have a gun.
Lord, Lord.
I used to have a rifle,
I used to have a gun.
Now that ball floats over
Like a cinnamon bun.