‘Safe at home’ - new meaning and old

Bill Knight column for Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday, 4-20, 21 or 22, 2020

As this is written, Major League Baseball is sheltering at home as it celebrates Jackie Robinson Day, and forecasts call for snow in Illinois. It’s been five weeks since the season was postponed, and there’s speculation of all 30 teams playing in empty Arizona stadiums with athletes tested and quarantined before games that could be shortened to seven innings with frequent double-headers.

The National Pastime is missed, in many ways, mostly memories of watching and playing for decades.

After all, as Lawrence Ritter, author of “The Glory of Their Times,” wrote, “The strongest thing that baseball has going for it today are its yesterdays.”

Indeed, I saw Jackie Robinson play at old Sportsmen’s Park in St. Louis in May of 1956, when the World Champion Brooklyn Dodgers lost to the Cardinals 10-3, and Robinson went 2 for 4, including a double, plus an RBI (although this six-year-old country boy was mostly impressed by city buses belching dark diesel smoke, guys shouting “Beer man!” to ballpark vendors, and Dad leaning over and saying, “Jackie Robinson hit that!” when a foul ball careened off a girder overhead).

For generations, baseball’s been family. For me, Grandpa and his brothers played as young men in Moberly, Mo.; townspeople for years reminded me of my Dad’s over-the-shoulder, centerfield catch of a deep fly at a fast-pitch league game; and after a family-reunion lunch of fried chicken, potato salad and pie, I remember catching an adult uncle throwing sliders that hit my glove hand like hot hornets.

I still picture pitching behind the family garage to Dad, who taught me a curve, and years later playing catch in our backyard with my son, who had the best instincts and softest hands of any first-baseman I knew.

My own little league experience pitching and playing first base were fun summers of contrasts: hitting the 11-year-old league’s only over-the-fence homer until I gave up a round-tripper the last week of the season, and the next year sitting out the season’s start with the mumps. Pony League summers are a blur except for one 19-4 season, playing in t-shirts and jeans, and riding on rural roads in coach’s car listening to Chuck Berry on the radio.

In high school, I relied on my knuckleball, an “old man’s pitch” that got me a lot of innings in relief to our schools’ two fireballers. In college, we played Chicago-style 16-inch “kitten ball,” and after graduation there were great years of 9-inch park-district slow-pitch in western and central Illinois for teams sponsored by Schlocky’s, Underdogs, Co-op Tapes & Records, Five Star Vending, and the Prairie SUN. The only time my visiting parents saw me play I hit a home run at a bandbox field on Peoria’s south side – but as tiny as it was, no one else hit one out that afternoon. (Just sayin’).

I played hardball again when I celebrated turning 40 by spending a great week in Arizona playing with Ron Santo, Glenn Beckert and Billy Williams, plus Randy Hundley, Jimmy Piersall and other big-leaguers.

I took a break from playing to help coach my kid’s youth-league teams, treasured time on small-town sandlots. Later, there were a few more years of slow-pitch in a Seniors League, until I pulled a hamstring and then an Achilles tendon.

Now in retirement, I reminisce and wait, longing for the sounds of horsehide smacked off wood bats, the smell of leather and mowed grass and sweat, and the sights of a 6-4-3 double play or a clean cutoff throw headed to a play at the plate.

Memories can be melancholy, too, but not as sad as a dangerous virus. I crave the game but know public-health takes priority over playtime, much less profits.

Writing in Sports Illustrated the year I saw Jackie Robinson, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer William Saroyan perhaps put it best, saying, “Baseball is caring. Player and fan alike must care, or there is no game. If there's no game, there's no pennant race and no World Series. And for all any of us know there might soon be no nation at all.  Is it a game? Is that all it is? ... What good does that do the nation? What good does that do the world?

“A little good. Quite a little.”