Greensboro News & Record

BASEBALL, BOYHOOD AND TED WILLIAMS’S GLOVE

This essay is dedicated to my Yankees-loving friend, Jess Berman, whose gift fanned the flames; and to my father-in-law, Ken Sullivan, a college Hall-Of-Fame

pitcher who knows all about the cold throb of soaking the arm in the ice bucket.

Filmmaker Ken Burns began his TV documentary on the history of the game of baseball

by telling his audience that, simply and truly, “baseball is a beautiful thing”. I must tell

you that I am a fan of this opinion.

I also must tell you that my boyhood passion for the game has recently been fired anew.

Three things have fueled this fire of mine within: the Mark McGuire/Sammy Sosa

homerun derbies; receiving as a gift for the birth of my third child (my third girl!) a coffee-

table book, Baseball: A Treasury of Art and Literature; and the most potent fuel

source of all, my brother Rich letting me view for the first time in 20 years his own

personal baseball treasure: one of Ted Williams’s old gloves from the 1950 Boston Red

Sox, signed by all the members of the team.

Let me first say some things about the book. Portrayed on its pages is our national

pastime in wonderful pictures and writings; the latter I love the most – literary lodestones

by writers like Roger Angell (Baseball’s “poet laureate”) and John Updike. My favorite is

an Updike essay about the final game of Ted Williams’s 21-year career, in which

Baseball’s greatest hitter ever and the last one to bat “400” (batted .406 in 1941) hit a

homerun in his final at-bat – for a baseball slugger, the quintessential capstone of a

career.

My pleasure in reading this essay was enhanced by seeing Williams’s glove. My father

acquired the glove from a friend, a former Red Sox scout, and passed it down to Rich,

who has kept it in a safe deposit box since we were teenagers. He took the glove out so

I could see it again – the leather still soft and the signatures in ink of Ted and his

teammates still visible, though faded some from when I last gazed upon them in

boyhood wonder two decades ago.

The most famous name is Ted’s, of course, but along the edge of the glove’s pinky

finger is Dom DiMaggio’s, made famous by his more famous brother “Jolting Joe”, who

had a sublime celebrity dignity on and off the playing field, and who now roams that big

centerfield in the sky and in our immortal national memory.

The names, the worn and well oiled pocket, the smell of the old leather have all stirred

strong emotions and memories for me. In my mind’s eye I am a kid again, an American

kid playing the most beautiful game in the world.

My earliest baseball memories are of playing with Rich and his friends (four years older

than me) on the Cranbury Elementary School ball field in Connecticut. Then came

league play: first the 8 to 10 year-olds division, then the 11 to 13 year-olds, and finally

(finally for me, that is) high school ball. Rich played Division I college ball for Duke, and I

was on the same trajectory until a wrestling injury to my throwing arm dashed the dream.

As a fielder in the infield, I played 3rd base (“the hot corner”) and shortstop because I had

a strong throwing arm; in the outfield, I roamed “left” and “center”. These are lonely

positions, as are all positions in baseball except maybe catcher, where at least you can

banter with the batter and the home plate umpire.

As a batter, I remember hitting my first home run, and as is the case with most home

runs I hardly felt the bat hit the ball because of the magic of the bat’s “sweet spot”; also,

countless times having to hunker down in the batter’s box, behind on the count 0 balls

and 2 strikes and trying madly to stay alive and just get a piece of the ball if nothing

more. There aren’t many lonelier moments in baseball than being 0 and 2 against a

pitcher throwing “heat”, baseball parlance for smoking-fast fastballs.

Lastly, I remember going through baseball tryouts, we kids strutting around on the ball

field like colts on the grass in springtime, trying to impress the coaches who were picking

players for their teams; and Rich using his high school spring break to travel with a

buddy from Connecticut down to Florida to see the sacred rite of Spring Training, an

annual tryout of sorts where pro players in the pre-season try to convince their coaches

that they still have the stuff to play in “The Show” (the Major Leagues).

I often think of players like DiMaggio and Gehrig, Williams and Ripken – icons not just of

the game but also of the American mind (Williams by the way gave up five prime years

of his career to serve in World War II and Korea). It is the dignity of players like these,

as well as the poetic dignity of the game itself – its 200+ years of history – that make

Baseball uniquely our national pastime. Claims of NASCAR supplanting Baseball in that

regard are ludicrous and even obscene.

I’m not going to make the grandiose suggestion that baseball is some kind of metaphor

for life. Rather, baseball is about boys’ and girls’ burning love for a game, passed from

parent to child and played in its purest, most innocent form by kids on ball fields across

America. Its greatest, most complex and skillful form is played by the Griffeys, Gwynns

and Ripkens, and what they distill down to the sandlots is absorbed by the rest of us

when we are young. It is this essence, this love for a game in pure and exquisite

simplicity, that causes the game of baseball to arc immortal, as immortal as that aerial

arc caused by Ted Williams’s final swing.

Let me close with a scene from a ball field outside Portland, Oregon, during a cross-

country trip I took a dozen years ago. It was a summer sundown, and I stopped my car

on the side of the road to watch a father pitch baseballs to his daughter. The girl swung

and missed a few times, then swung and got a little piece. When her bat squarely

connected with the ball – the most difficult feat in sports, they say – I heard ring out in

the warm gathering dusk, “Thata girl, Annie!; way to hit ‘em!”