One Season in the Sun. Joe Schuster

      TWO

       Loving Baseball

      When I was a boy, I wanted to be Dave Bakenhaster. I don’t mean I wanted to be him, specifically, but someone like him. I was eleven the summer he spent his brief moment in the major leagues, and I imagined myself some years into my future playing baseball for the St. Louis Cardinals, my favorite team. On most nights throughout the spring and summer, I listened to their games on a transistor radio hidden under my pillow. I kept the volume low so my parents would not know I was tuned in when I was supposed to be sleeping.

      I knew the names of the players in the starting lineup: Lou Brock, Bill White, Curt Flood, Julian Javier, and the others. My brother and I played wiffle ball in our backyard, alternating as pitcher and hitter. When I batted, I pretended to be one of the starting Cardinals, announcing to my brother who I imagined myself each time.

      Every week, my parents gave me an allowance of twenty-five cents. As soon as I had the money, I walked to a drug store near our house and spent it all on Topps baseball cards. A package cost a nickel and contained five cards and a stick of pink gum coated in fine, white, powdered sugar. Each card had the glossy color photograph of a major league player on one side and, on the other, his batting or pitching statistics. At first, I kept the cards stacked in a shoebox. As I collected more and more, the shoebox became too small to hold them all. Then I stored them in a Styrofoam ice chest.

      I spent hours reading those cards, the players’ numbers of home runs and strikeouts. I loved baseball so much, in fact, that my father taught me how to calculate percentages by showing me the formula for a player’s batting average: take the number of his base hits and divide it by the number of times he batted. Twenty-five hits in 100 at bats meant a .250 batting average. Thirty hits in 100 at bats meant a .300 batting average. I learned that even such a small difference in hits meant one player was great and another merely good. Or less than good. A player with a .300 batting average was great. A player with a .250 average was not. Subtract even a few more hits for every 100 times a player batted and he was fair or even poor.

      One night, I read through twenty or thirty cards, doing the math, checking to see if the statisticians at Topps had made errors in their calculations. They had not.

      While I coveted the baseball cards of the stars in the game then, the players who would eventually be in the Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, New York—Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle, Bob Gibson, Carl Yastrzemski, Sandy Koufax, Harmon Killebrew—the players who most intrigued me were the marginal ones. I was interested in the players who would never be in the Hall of Fame or earn a place on an All Star team.

      In 1964, The Topps Baseball Card Company produced 587 different baseball cards, numbering each in a tiny image of a baseball on the back in the upper left corner. The company honored the best players by giving them numbers ending in a zero. Number 50 was Mickey Mantle, who had been a member of his League’s All Star team in all twelve of the previous years. Willie Mays, an All Star for ten years, was card 150. Sandy Koufax, who was such a great left-handed pitcher his nickname was “The Left Hand of God,” appeared on card 200.

      The players who were not yet the stars (and who might never be stars) were shown on cards with numbers you couldn’t divide by ten. Bakenhaster was on card 479. Another player appears on card 561. Dave Bennett’s major league career was even shorter than Bakenhaster’s—one inning. Steve Hertz, who had no hits in the five times he batted in the major leagues, was on card 544.

      These were the players who fascinated me. The stars—Mays, Mantle, Koufax—all seemed beyond human, blessed by a divine miracle. The others, who never made an All Star team, who seemed to spend more time sitting on a bench during games than on the field, who lasted in the major leagues for only days or weeks—they seemed more like ordinary men whose bit of luck earned them a major league uniform.

      They were, I thought as I looked at their cards, more akin to me. As much as I loved baseball, as much as I spent hours memorizing the information on the backs of baseball cards and reading the statistics that the Sunday newspaper published in the sports section, as much as I learned the history of the game, I couldn’t play it. I was heavy, slow, and myopic.

      A few years after the season when Bakenhaster, Bennett, and Hertz all had their brief time in the major leagues, I would try out for the team at my high school. Because I couldn’t run and couldn’t hit, I decided I was a pitcher. But, on the first day of practice, when the coach gave me a chance to show him my ability on the mound, I couldn’t throw a strike. Every pitch was what they call a lollipop—a slow, high-arching throw to the catcher. The next day, when the coach posted the names of the players he was cutting after only a single practice, my name was on the list with one other boy. I have since come to see that the coach saved both of us time. No matter how much he loved the game, there is no point in a boy who can’t play at all taking time away from the boys who were faster, who could throw the ball with speed and accuracy, who could hit the ball to the deepest part of the field.

      That afternoon, however, seeing my name on the sheet of paper tacked to a bulletin board in the school hallway, telling me I couldn’t play and would most likely never be good enough to play, I was heartbroken.