this girl to like me just the way I am.’
‘No, money can’t do that. But it’ll buy a hell of a lot of ice cream, and pay your college tuition for a semester or two.’ His face broke into that grin that could charm a bone from a hungry dog.
‘It’s all a matter of distances,’ Roger said from inside the Caddy. The sun was about to rise. The oranges and pinks of the sky touched the shimmering surface of the white Cadillac. ‘Chicago to Memphis is 537 miles. I’ll have a late breakfast at Perkins’ Cake and Steak on Elvis Presley Boulevard.’
Roger smiled again, reached his right hand up and out the window to shake my hand.
‘Maybe we’ll run into each other again, Mike. Be cool. Life’s all a matter of distances. Make them work for you.’
The window purred up and the car eased away, gravel crunching under the wide tires.
My dad must have said it a thousand times. ‘For a lead-off batter, a walk is as good as a hit. A walk and a stolen base is as good as a double.’ I can still hear those words echoing in my eight-year-old ears. It didn’t matter that I was never a power hitter, as long as I learned the strike zone, which I did.
I learned to bunt, both for a base hit, and in order to sacrifice a runner along. The hardest thing, when I was a kid, was to hit the ball on the ground up the middle. The assumption was that just making contact would earn me a certain number of base hits, and I was so fast I was almost impossible to double up on a ground ball. But, oh how hard that was to do, for every kid has fantasies of blasting the ball out of the park, of hitting a blue darter like a lightning bolt off the outfield fence.
The only time I tried to hit the ball in the air was when a sacrifice fly was called for. I never tried for home runs or extra base hits, controlling my desire to be a hero in return for making a solid contribution.
In the evenings Dad and I would practice in the back yard. Dad would lay down a towel, white as a patch of snow, up the third-base line where a perfect bunt would come to rest, good not only for a sacrifice but often a base hit. Dad would pitch to me while I practiced bunting.
‘Pretend the towel is the mother and the ball is the baby, and it’s your job to reunite the two,’ Dad would shout.
Other times he’d yell, ‘Suicide squeeze!’ and drill in a high hard one that I was somehow supposed to lay down.
A hundred pitches minimum every evening, at ever-increasing speed, while I tried to get the ball down in the dirt so it would end up on the towel, while I pictured myself streaking safely across first, the runner in front of me perhaps taking an extra base when the hurried throw to first went wild.
Then there’d be another hundred pitches while I tried to rap the ball straight up the middle on the ground, controlling my urge to belt the ball about four hundred feet, because Dad’s pitches looked like white balloons floating toward me.
‘Take the sure thing,’ he’d say. ‘Don’t try to be a hero, hit the ball on the ground for a single. You’ve only got warning-track power at best, so don’t waste your life hitting routine flies to the outfield.’
Following that we’d take a break for orange juice or lemonade. Then there’d be another hundred pitches, which I practiced hitting to the right side, behind the runner, trying for a base hit, but willing to give myself up in order to advance the base runner.
‘The three-four-five men are the power hitters,’ Dad always said. ‘Let them do their job. Your only worry is to get on base or, if you can’t, at least advance the runners.’
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