When I Played Baseball

When I Played Baseball(William Cline) When I Played Baseball

When I was the age my oldest son is now, my mother made the claim that I ate, drank, and slept baseball. The subtleties of my mother’s exaggerations aside, I know for certain that I did none of those things. I did play baseball every chance I got. I loved to play, like my son does now.

He is better at it than I ever was.

My mother goes to his games and watches him play just as she watched me play. Only now she sits in a fold-up lawn chair at the top of a slope beside the playing fields. When I played baseball she sat in the bleachers behind the backstop. From that position she was able to dispute the umpires calls - with uncanny accuracy, she claimed. Also from that position she found it impossible not to let every other parent at the park know exactly who her son was.

When I played left field, or center, I could still hear her hollering and yelling, and calling the umpires disparaging names, comparing them to unfortunates who had lost their ability to see.

At the top of the slope we sit and watch my son, her grandson, play. The fields are well manicured and fertilized to an emerald green. The pitcher's mound is a perfect elevated teardrop, and the infield grass has a checkerboard design mown into it by the parents who volunteer for such duty.

We can see the horizon from the top of that slope. We watch the clouds gathering from time to time, threatening to rainout the game. My mother complains about the rain, but I have become accustomed to it.

Games were never called because of rain when I played baseball. The grass in the outfield was always dry, its cut tips ragged and brown from the summer heat. The infield was hard baked clay with lumps of dirt and grass that made fielding grounders risky. The pitcher's mound sat in the middle, the white strip of the pitcher’s rubber undercut by erosion, lopsided and scuffed by pitchers' cleats.

Occasionally the games would have to be stopped while a summer dust devil whirled along the base-paths, kicking up dirt and candy wrappers, moving in a random path from first base to third, until it finally danced into foul territory and died.

The game would go on; we would all trot back to our positions, our baggy uniforms flapping around our ankles and armpits. Our hands would sweat inside the leather of our mitts. Our baseball caps flattened our hair in a circle around our heads. We mopped our faces with our forearms.

The sun was always behind the base umpire, watching the play closely when someone would try to stretch a double out of a single. The sun and the umpire watched the slide and the tag, leather and cleats in a short race for the white canvas of the base. Then there was apprehension and quiet as the two players looked up for the umpire’s call. Above them the umpire made his decision, but always there was the sun, above and behind everything, watching the play, never letting anything go unnoticed.


Today they play in polyester, very thin and cool. My mother always comments on how my son looks so sharp in his uniform.

These days I sit close enough to mom to benefit from her umbrella. I watch the clouds between innings, and wonder, only for the moment, where they were when I played.

The clouds are indifferent to the game, and to me. They and could care less about singles and doubles, leather and cleats, and the arbitrary calls of umpires. And when the rain quits, and mom puts her umbrella away, the one constant of the game returns, the one truth which will never be taken away from baseball by the sun, or by the gathering of clouds: my mother yelling at the umpires, making references to the blind.

I can hear her voice, echoing across the fields, and it makes me smile.