I remember the lying about it most clearly.
Nothing horrible. Just your garden-variety seven-year-old embellishment; an excitable boy making the world seem more exciting by conflating fantasy with reality, believing it more and more with every telling.
This was in 1977, at the first major league baseball game I ever attended, at Yankee Stadium – the old Yankee Stadium, “The House that Ruth Built”, the “Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning …” Yankee stadium, with the white-columned frieze over the scoreboard and the 4 train visible as it passed the wall in left field and the giant statue of a bat (actually a 138ft subway system exhaust pipe disguised as a Louisville Slugger) that made for a common meeting place outside Gate 6.
My dad and I had come there with five our six of my second-grader friends and their dads; an excursion of our Indian Guides troop. (Indian Guides were a YMCA program designed to foster bonding experience between fathers and sons at a community level. We had Pinewood Derby races and went on campouts, but we made leather vests, too, and feathered headbands, and had “Indian” nicknames. I was “Little Lion”, my dad was “Big Lion”. A bit more racist in hindsight than it seemed at the time, like so much of America.)
I forget exactly who was there – Ted Trainor, Andy Mason, Matt Cheslock, I imagine. I feel surest about Matt Cheslock, because I remember his dad, who knew a lot about baseball, as opposed to my own dad, who didn’t, was the grownup telling us the names of the players. Reggie Jackson, Mickey Rivers, Thurman Munson, Bucky Dent, and a curly-haired third baseman, Graig Nettles, who would become one of the more important figures in my life, of my life, that day.
I don’t remember who they played. (The Orioles? Cleveland?) But I remember the seats – behind first base, not field level, mezzanine maybe, or second deck. I remember how manicured the field looked from there: the sharp cut of the border between the clay ochre infield and the green outfield grass, the ruler-straight baselines, glowing lime-powder white. And how vast it all seemed, how far away the fences.
Much of the actual game play was lost to me, though. Because I was so short (even for a seven-year-old; I was the shortest of all seven-year-olds) and people in the seats in front of me kept standing up for the most exciting parts. My dad lifted me up sometimes, but the timing was tough, and I often didn’t know where to look until after the play had ended. I hadn’t yet learned to follow the rhythm of the game and the trajectory of the ball. I remember being confused, and thinking it very unfair that a ball hit deep into the outfield, but caught before touching the ground, was “worse” than a squibbly little grounder that squeaked between the third baseman and the shortstop. Why did that count as a “hit” when the ball that was hit so much harder, better, more impressively, was an “out”? Baseball had some semantics issues. And who had made up these counterintuitive rules?
But I remember the buzz, the excitement, the sounds, the cheering. I loved it.
And I remember the home run.
Graig Nettles hit a home run. Early in the game, I don’t know how many base runners were on, and the bedlam that followed, the celebration, the marveling of the grownups around me, made a big impression. I didn’t even see it, I’m sure, until it replayed on the world’s first “telescreen” that had been installed in the scoreboard during the stadium’s renovation two years prior. And even then, I couldn’t have seen it very clearly. (The super-hi-tech video display featured “nine shades of gray”.) But as the game progressed, I developed a vision of the blast in my mind’s eye, its soaring, majestic arc, carrying over the wall to triumph, victory. (The Yankees went on to win the game.) Carrying Nettles to a new kind of heroism, in my eyes, for me, forever.
I talked about it the whole rest of the day, and on the way home, and in the subsequent days at school, telling anybody who would listen that I’d gone to a baseball game, and loved it, and about my favorite player and how far he’d hit the ball. The story changed, the details, the heroics, like folklore, like fantasy. The ball had left the stadium! The ball had smashed into the scoreboard! (No way. That scoreboard was well more than 500ft from home plate. Beyond and above an area of black tarp that very few players ever reached. It would have been the longest home run in baseball history but did not travel that far.) The ball had broken a light bulb in the scoreboard! The light bulb happened to be one of those that made up Nettles’ No 9!
Sparks flew and the number set to blinking, with a dark patch marking where the ball had hit of course, in a magical message from God or fate or the universe or whatever sent special to me and my seven-year-old eyes. (No one else had seen it? How could that be?!) Nettles was Superman, Paul Bunyan, Roy Hobbs. I had never heard of The Natural at that point, of course. It’s funny how the image of a smashing light bulb, of sparks raining down – explosions! fireworks! – echoed the end of that fairytale. And Roy Hobbs wore No 9, too. We’re obviously dealing with some Joseph-Campbell-style mythological archetypes here.
But that lying, again, really just innocent fantasizing – playing a video clip on the movie screen in my imagination – spoke to what this new love of mine, the sport of baseball, brought to my life: At its simplest, escapism. Baseball was there, at just the right stage in my mental development, to provide an arena for the same kind of make-believe play that Cowboys & Indians or Dungeons & Dragons does. But baseball was organized, and codified, and, most importantly, real. (As I got older, and came to understand the game and learn about and appreciate its history, I shed the need for such extravagant embellishment.) You could watch this drama, the tension, the heroic exploits and the heartbreaking failures, in real life. You could, in fact, pick up a bat, put on a glove, and be a part of it all.
From that first game on, Graig Nettles was my favorite player. I perfected his batting stance: right leg straight, bat held casually out in front of the chest; and his swing, a slight bend and uncoil, not too busy, nothing unorthodox, a quick swivel of the hips generating its torque; and drove my parents to distraction with obsessive, almost-Tourettic repetition. Getting ready for school, on line at a movie theater, on the way to the fridge to get a bottle of ketchup in the middle of dinner, I would slip into a fugue state and assume the position unconsciously, waving an invisible bat over my left shoulder.
My best friend through grade school, Chris Pack, had chosen Nettles as his hero, too. We shared our devotion and practiced it for countless hours in my backyard or his backyard or in the sand at the beach, mimicking the gold-glover’s crouch in the field as he prepared for a pitch, bouncing on the balls of his feet, ready to dive to his left or his right – like a soccer goalie, like a cat – and snare any line drive within reach. “Nettles dives!” I would say, sprawling for a ball Chris had thrown exactly a diving-body’s-length away from me. We would go back-and-forth like this – “Nettles dives! And … makes the play!” For hours and hours and days and days, summer after summer, for years and years.
When we were 12, Chris and I made a pact promising that we would go to Cooperstown to watch Graig Nettles’ induction into the Hall of Fame when we were grown up. We’d bring our kids, we said, if we ended up having any. We’re 44 now, Chris and I. We both have kids. But Nettles never made the Hall of Fame like we were so sure he would. His eligibility expired 10 years ago. And, if I’m honest with myself, as I try to be as an adult, I do not think he deserve to be there. Still, even now, as I sit thinking about him, remembering that first game I went to when he captured my imagination – through fireworks, through fantasy – I’m grateful for all the joy he brought to my life. I still remember that home run that he hit that I didn’t really see that day. I can still see it now.
