VI. The Circle Changes
At the far edge of the west pasture, just beside the place where the fence row ran parallel to the hard top oil road leading down to Highway 19 and off into town, a large oak tree marked the corner of the Davidson land. When I was ten, maybe eleven years old, it was the place I’d go when things weren’t going well back at the house. It being the farthest point away from the kitchen table without actually stepping off the property most likely had something to do with it, but there’s also something about the great leafy stretch of shade that a giant oak tree gives in the middle of a long summer.
I still remember running there – full out panting and breathing hard, lungs aching, tears streaming from the side of my face – the day we heard that dad was killed in action in Iraq. By the time I got to the oak tree, I was all out of tears and angry at the cruelness of a world that could take a father away from his son for such a paltry thing as oil stuck in the sand some place I’d never heard of until Operation Desert Storm. Later, many years later, I learned about things like ideological differences and the politics of a global economy and it still did nothing to assuage the burning rage I felt in that moment.
In a sense, baseball saved me that summer. I spent days, weeks actually going through dad’s things in the house, in the loft in the barn, in his workspace out in the garage and I collected all of the things that seemed most dear to him, or at least most personal to me: an old safety razor, a pocket knife, a cane fishing pole, his tackle box with the last swimsuit edition folded inside, a brand new set of socket wrenches, his favorite flannel shirt, an old pea coat – far too big for me, but worth saving for whenever I grew into it, a stack of Robert Parker detective novels – tattered and yellowed, but obviously read and re-read, a coffee mug, with the fading logo for Kramer Tool & Dye fading on the outside and a permanent ring of deep brown coffee stains inside and three shoe boxes filled with baseball cards, mostly from the late 1960s through the mid-1970s.
I kept all of these things in the loft of the barn, visiting them regularly throughout the winter of 1991 and on into the spring of 1992. Obviously, the baseball cards held my attention longest and when the season started in the spring of ’92, I was dedicated to the notion of honoring my dad’s memory with the best little league performance I could deliver. Over the course of that season, I listened to every suggestion the coaches offered, choking up on the bat when they said, knowing and hitting my cut-off man when the situation called for it and practicing a little bit, every day.
At the end of that season, I gathered up all of the loose balls around the house and spent hours working with them that winter, bouncing grounders off the side of the barn wall, taking swings out in the hay meadow, long-tossing balls up onto the roof of the house and “getting under them” to catch them like fly-balls hit deep to center. The following year, I was so far ahead of my peers that the coaches let me work with some of the other players as sort of a surrogate instructor; and by the time I was a freshman in high school, I was striking out seniors from other towns, getting clutch hits in big games and daydreaming about which college program would get me the exposure needed to make it to “The Bigs”.
It was certainly a promising beginning to my baseball career, but on Memorial Day in 1997, I sat under that same old oak tree, knowing that win or lose, the state playoff game that Thursday night would be my last baseball game. I was only seventeen years old, a junior in high school, and yet in a lot of ways, I was already washed-up and done. And it sounds strange to say it now, but when the shadow of a man walked up from behind me out in the pasture and sat down next to me in the shade of that tree, I thought it was the ghost of Mickey Mantle again. I’d certainly seen a lot of that guy and his pal, Gehrig over the course of the spring.
“You know these are probably worth something by now,” the stranger said, handing me a stack of baseball cards held together by a rubber band. I looked up and saw the man that looked like me, but wasn’t. I recognized the sharp nose, the intense blue eyes and the short Army haircut.
“Dad!” I hugged him and simultaneously felt the solid nature of his chest and arms, back and shoulders, but I also sensed the fluid untenable motion of it all. It was real in one sense, but also a thing that couldn’t be fixed and held onto for very long without concentrating. Years later, I realized that the feeling, the emotion connected to that embrace was real, but the physical structure of it wasn’t.
“What are you doing here?”
“Well,” he smiled my smile, a sort of nodding half grin that I knew I did, but didn’t know where I’d learned it. “That’s a long story, but it’s not the one I came to tell you today.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I know,” he nodded “But I need you to pay attention to what all I am going to tell you.” He removed the rubber band from the stack of baseball cards and began sorting through them. I watched as he ran his thumbs through the stack, sliding each card past the next: a 1953 Mickey Mantle, a Lou Gehrig from 1933, a couple of Clementes, a ’61 of Mantle, a Campanella, a Bob Gibson, a Sandy Koufax and several more. They were all there, the greatest to ever play the game, and nearly all of the ones who had passed on had signed their cards.
“Some of these cards aren’t in great shape,” he said, “But hopefully, the autographs will make up for that. They were your granddad’s and mine and now I’m telling you to take them to Dallas and sell them all. Get what you can for them and save the farm for you and your mother.”
“But dad,” I said, confused and wondering what he must know that I didn’t.
“Listen son,” he showed me the cards again. “These are worth a lot of money, enough to change some things, some very important things.”
“Dad, what is it?” I pleaded with him now. “What is it you’re not telling me?”
“I can’t,” he said. “It would ruin everything if I told you. Hold on to these.”
He pressed them into my hands.
“You’ll know what to do with them,” he said and then mused to himself a minute before repeating the phrase. “When the time comes, you’ll know what to do with them.”
“Is it mom?”
He shook his head.
“The car? The tractor?”
Dad didn’t answer, but he hugged me again, and harder the second time, longer, as if it was going to have to last him a while. It was the last and only time I saw his ghost that summer.
In 1940, a guy named John Tunis published a book called, The Kid from Tomkinsville. It is a bittersweet tale about a kid name Roy Tucker who is in many ways, a true baseball prodigy. At a young age, he finds himself pitching for the Brooklyn Dodgers, but suffers an unfortunate accident after a big game and never pitches again. I’d never even heard of the book when I took the mound that Thursday in the state playoffs against the Westlake Vipers, but it’s fair to say that I’ve read it a few times since.
Everything was going so well that night. The fastballs were getting the calls, the curve was getting the swings and the slider was practically untouchable. Still, it’s worth noting here that my short career was unusual in that I never really developed what insiders like to call an “off-speed” pitch. The most common is probably the “circle change”, a pitch thrown like a fastball, but where much more of the hand makes contact with the ball, increasing the friction at the point of release and taking momentum off the ball once it’s thrown. I had two good, hard fastballs, a four-seamer and a two-seamer. I threw a mean curve and a decent slider. The coaches never thought to encourage me to develop a slower pitch that would add some variety into my repertoire. I guess they all got caught up in the excitement of having a hard-throwing righty like me on their team.
Against Westlake, I first noticed the pain after a hard curve in the third inning. It was everywhere inside my arm, everywhere all at once, the muscle, the joint, the bone. The pain stabbed and throbbed, both at the same time, but it flashed and went away. The pitch produced a good hard swing for strike three to end the inning, and I went back to the dugout, rubbing my elbow a little, but not really concerned. I’d gotten over too far on my curve a few times before and winced in pain as a result. A little ice after the game usually did the trick, but Mr. Peterson noticed the look on my face as I walked off the mound and mouthed the words, “Everything okay?”
Nodding, I released the arm and went and sat down next to Jefferies, my catcher.
“Let’s stay away from the curve in the fourth,” I mumbled, “If we can.”
He shrugged in agreement and that was all that was said about it.
These days, they don’t even recommend introducing the curve ball to kids younger than fourteen years old. Their arms aren’t developed, their mental toughness and discipline aren’t ready. My curve was always an erratic pitch for me, one that worked perfectly sometimes and not so much on other occasions. That being said, I had the mechanics of it down by the time I was twelve and was using it regularly by the time I was a freshman. Still, I probably forced it too much on the days when it wasn’t working and when the science teacher is the baseball coach, well who’s going to say “Knock it off kid, you’ll blow out your arm.”
Fourth inning, second batter, the count was two balls, one strike. Jefferies called for the curve and I started to shake my head, but decided to try the pitch again. It had been several minutes and most of the pain had subsided. I came to a set position, ball in my glove, both tucked neatly at the center of my chest. My eyes locked on the batter at the plate and I started my throwing motion.
This time, the pain flashed like a bright light in my eyes. It was a clear night, but I seriously thought I saw lightning blink on the horizon. Then I registered the ripping sound and became aware of the dull numbing sensation in my lower arm. It felt like my forearm had separated from the rest of my body and was this unreal appendage hanging dead and limp at my side. I pulled it in against my torso and the ache was so intense that the grey fog of a faint passed over the corners of my vision.
By the time Jefferies and Mr. Peterson arrived, I was kneeling at the base of the pitcher’s mound, holding my arm and shaking my head, saying “No, no, no” over and over again.
CONTINUED...
At the far edge of the west pasture, just beside the place where the fence row ran parallel to the hard top oil road leading down to Highway 19 and off into town, a large oak tree marked the corner of the Davidson land. When I was ten, maybe eleven years old, it was the place I’d go when things weren’t going well back at the house. It being the farthest point away from the kitchen table without actually stepping off the property most likely had something to do with it, but there’s also something about the great leafy stretch of shade that a giant oak tree gives in the middle of a long summer.
I still remember running there – full out panting and breathing hard, lungs aching, tears streaming from the side of my face – the day we heard that dad was killed in action in Iraq. By the time I got to the oak tree, I was all out of tears and angry at the cruelness of a world that could take a father away from his son for such a paltry thing as oil stuck in the sand some place I’d never heard of until Operation Desert Storm. Later, many years later, I learned about things like ideological differences and the politics of a global economy and it still did nothing to assuage the burning rage I felt in that moment.
In a sense, baseball saved me that summer. I spent days, weeks actually going through dad’s things in the house, in the loft in the barn, in his workspace out in the garage and I collected all of the things that seemed most dear to him, or at least most personal to me: an old safety razor, a pocket knife, a cane fishing pole, his tackle box with the last swimsuit edition folded inside, a brand new set of socket wrenches, his favorite flannel shirt, an old pea coat – far too big for me, but worth saving for whenever I grew into it, a stack of Robert Parker detective novels – tattered and yellowed, but obviously read and re-read, a coffee mug, with the fading logo for Kramer Tool & Dye fading on the outside and a permanent ring of deep brown coffee stains inside and three shoe boxes filled with baseball cards, mostly from the late 1960s through the mid-1970s.
I kept all of these things in the loft of the barn, visiting them regularly throughout the winter of 1991 and on into the spring of 1992. Obviously, the baseball cards held my attention longest and when the season started in the spring of ’92, I was dedicated to the notion of honoring my dad’s memory with the best little league performance I could deliver. Over the course of that season, I listened to every suggestion the coaches offered, choking up on the bat when they said, knowing and hitting my cut-off man when the situation called for it and practicing a little bit, every day.
At the end of that season, I gathered up all of the loose balls around the house and spent hours working with them that winter, bouncing grounders off the side of the barn wall, taking swings out in the hay meadow, long-tossing balls up onto the roof of the house and “getting under them” to catch them like fly-balls hit deep to center. The following year, I was so far ahead of my peers that the coaches let me work with some of the other players as sort of a surrogate instructor; and by the time I was a freshman in high school, I was striking out seniors from other towns, getting clutch hits in big games and daydreaming about which college program would get me the exposure needed to make it to “The Bigs”.
It was certainly a promising beginning to my baseball career, but on Memorial Day in 1997, I sat under that same old oak tree, knowing that win or lose, the state playoff game that Thursday night would be my last baseball game. I was only seventeen years old, a junior in high school, and yet in a lot of ways, I was already washed-up and done. And it sounds strange to say it now, but when the shadow of a man walked up from behind me out in the pasture and sat down next to me in the shade of that tree, I thought it was the ghost of Mickey Mantle again. I’d certainly seen a lot of that guy and his pal, Gehrig over the course of the spring.
“You know these are probably worth something by now,” the stranger said, handing me a stack of baseball cards held together by a rubber band. I looked up and saw the man that looked like me, but wasn’t. I recognized the sharp nose, the intense blue eyes and the short Army haircut.
“Dad!” I hugged him and simultaneously felt the solid nature of his chest and arms, back and shoulders, but I also sensed the fluid untenable motion of it all. It was real in one sense, but also a thing that couldn’t be fixed and held onto for very long without concentrating. Years later, I realized that the feeling, the emotion connected to that embrace was real, but the physical structure of it wasn’t.
“What are you doing here?”
“Well,” he smiled my smile, a sort of nodding half grin that I knew I did, but didn’t know where I’d learned it. “That’s a long story, but it’s not the one I came to tell you today.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I know,” he nodded “But I need you to pay attention to what all I am going to tell you.” He removed the rubber band from the stack of baseball cards and began sorting through them. I watched as he ran his thumbs through the stack, sliding each card past the next: a 1953 Mickey Mantle, a Lou Gehrig from 1933, a couple of Clementes, a ’61 of Mantle, a Campanella, a Bob Gibson, a Sandy Koufax and several more. They were all there, the greatest to ever play the game, and nearly all of the ones who had passed on had signed their cards.
“Some of these cards aren’t in great shape,” he said, “But hopefully, the autographs will make up for that. They were your granddad’s and mine and now I’m telling you to take them to Dallas and sell them all. Get what you can for them and save the farm for you and your mother.”
“But dad,” I said, confused and wondering what he must know that I didn’t.
“Listen son,” he showed me the cards again. “These are worth a lot of money, enough to change some things, some very important things.”
“Dad, what is it?” I pleaded with him now. “What is it you’re not telling me?”
“I can’t,” he said. “It would ruin everything if I told you. Hold on to these.”
He pressed them into my hands.
“You’ll know what to do with them,” he said and then mused to himself a minute before repeating the phrase. “When the time comes, you’ll know what to do with them.”
“Is it mom?”
He shook his head.
“The car? The tractor?”
Dad didn’t answer, but he hugged me again, and harder the second time, longer, as if it was going to have to last him a while. It was the last and only time I saw his ghost that summer.
In 1940, a guy named John Tunis published a book called, The Kid from Tomkinsville. It is a bittersweet tale about a kid name Roy Tucker who is in many ways, a true baseball prodigy. At a young age, he finds himself pitching for the Brooklyn Dodgers, but suffers an unfortunate accident after a big game and never pitches again. I’d never even heard of the book when I took the mound that Thursday in the state playoffs against the Westlake Vipers, but it’s fair to say that I’ve read it a few times since.
Everything was going so well that night. The fastballs were getting the calls, the curve was getting the swings and the slider was practically untouchable. Still, it’s worth noting here that my short career was unusual in that I never really developed what insiders like to call an “off-speed” pitch. The most common is probably the “circle change”, a pitch thrown like a fastball, but where much more of the hand makes contact with the ball, increasing the friction at the point of release and taking momentum off the ball once it’s thrown. I had two good, hard fastballs, a four-seamer and a two-seamer. I threw a mean curve and a decent slider. The coaches never thought to encourage me to develop a slower pitch that would add some variety into my repertoire. I guess they all got caught up in the excitement of having a hard-throwing righty like me on their team.
Against Westlake, I first noticed the pain after a hard curve in the third inning. It was everywhere inside my arm, everywhere all at once, the muscle, the joint, the bone. The pain stabbed and throbbed, both at the same time, but it flashed and went away. The pitch produced a good hard swing for strike three to end the inning, and I went back to the dugout, rubbing my elbow a little, but not really concerned. I’d gotten over too far on my curve a few times before and winced in pain as a result. A little ice after the game usually did the trick, but Mr. Peterson noticed the look on my face as I walked off the mound and mouthed the words, “Everything okay?”
Nodding, I released the arm and went and sat down next to Jefferies, my catcher.
“Let’s stay away from the curve in the fourth,” I mumbled, “If we can.”
He shrugged in agreement and that was all that was said about it.
These days, they don’t even recommend introducing the curve ball to kids younger than fourteen years old. Their arms aren’t developed, their mental toughness and discipline aren’t ready. My curve was always an erratic pitch for me, one that worked perfectly sometimes and not so much on other occasions. That being said, I had the mechanics of it down by the time I was twelve and was using it regularly by the time I was a freshman. Still, I probably forced it too much on the days when it wasn’t working and when the science teacher is the baseball coach, well who’s going to say “Knock it off kid, you’ll blow out your arm.”
Fourth inning, second batter, the count was two balls, one strike. Jefferies called for the curve and I started to shake my head, but decided to try the pitch again. It had been several minutes and most of the pain had subsided. I came to a set position, ball in my glove, both tucked neatly at the center of my chest. My eyes locked on the batter at the plate and I started my throwing motion.
This time, the pain flashed like a bright light in my eyes. It was a clear night, but I seriously thought I saw lightning blink on the horizon. Then I registered the ripping sound and became aware of the dull numbing sensation in my lower arm. It felt like my forearm had separated from the rest of my body and was this unreal appendage hanging dead and limp at my side. I pulled it in against my torso and the ache was so intense that the grey fog of a faint passed over the corners of my vision.
By the time Jefferies and Mr. Peterson arrived, I was kneeling at the base of the pitcher’s mound, holding my arm and shaking my head, saying “No, no, no” over and over again.
CONTINUED...
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