SOFTBALL ON SUNDAYS

I usually get to the field early and walk barefoot in the dew, performing little housekeeping chores, smoothing out the dirt around home plate, filling in the divots on the pitcher’s mound. Then a light jog around the outfield where the warning track should be and never was. Not much has changed over the last four decades. The wooden fence is now metal and filled with local adverts. A batting cage has been erected for Little Leaguers just outside the field. And the left field foul pole is now the Gordon Pole, named for the dear departed catcher who hit a grand slam by grazing that tall slender post.

Sitting alone in the dugout, lacing up my cleats, there is always one paranoid moment when I fear no one else will show up,  that I’ll be left with high hopes and a satchel of evocations. I am always wrong. Nature abhors an empty ball field on a Sunday morning in the summertime whether the thermometer hits 90 or the grey skies cry. Pitchers pray the wind is blowing in, batters out. Around nine, cars start pulling up and guys meander onto the field, one by one, groggy and disheveled, animated by caffeine and muscle memory; they soft toss and take BP and let the weight of the week rise into the morning mist. There are no worldly worries here, no hungry kids, no elections, no stocks to purchase or houses to sell, no therapists, no Gaza, no isms. Only the game. Sunday softball.   

If Duke Ellington could put stained glass windows in a funky gymnasium with only two measures, two swings of an aluminum bat in the old ball field can produce 30,000 apparitions in the bleachers and angels in the outfield. One of them is Carl Yastrzemski. He patrolled this very turf as a high schooler, alongside his brother, almost seventy years ago. Everyone knew young Yaz would be a great hitter, maybe win the Triple Crown someday, but he did it for the dreaded Boston Red Sox and has never returned to his home town. In turn, Bridgehampton has never honored him with a statue or a street. Sure, they dedicated a modest plaque at the high school a few years back, but Yaz didn’t attend the ceremony. And no one recalled what the Hall of Famer said about the game: “I think about baseball when I wake up in the morning and I think about it all day and I dream about it at night. The only time I don’t think about baseball is when I’m playing.” 

Me, I don’t play anymore. Stopped when I turned 70. The fence was suddenly too far to reach and the next generation too close to deny. I volunteered to be the permanent umpire instead of various players filling in, rotating every inning or two, raising questions of competency and bias that resulted in continual conflict and urgings to visit a good optometrist. Umping, I still get to rise on Sunday mornings with a hop in my step and a couple butterflies in my gut. I get to catch up with old friends and jaw with everyone who steps into the batter’s box, needling the veterans and indoctrinating the newbies--those migrants from leagues that have collapsed and the speedy college kids with tats and swag. I get to explain the infield fly rule (Rule #1,f, page 7) and decide if the runner interfered with the fielder or vice versa. I get to watch majestic home runs from a unique angle and get to call a third strike on Boomer Esiason (who said I called the third strike just so I could write about it someday.) (I take the fifth.)

We play nine innings. I call about 250 balls or strikes. And 52 outs. And a dozen bang-bang plays at first. And a half dozen close plays at second or third. Some calls could go either way. Disagreements are inevitable. Lawyers love to argue. Salesmen live to inveigle. Entitled young dudes just can’t be wrong. Many eyes will roll, but the disputations are brief and skin-deep. Most players appreciate the ruthless decisiveness of an umpire; others miss the spirited brouhahas that once punctuated the game. An umpire helps the flow of the game, but I worry he also steals some thunder, tamps down emotions, and puts the kibosh on good clean squabbling.

Trash talk remains undiminished. While the zingers of the elders have taken on an unmistakable ring of empathy, the influx of youngbloods has added a new kind of beef, a hip-hoppy hubris where well-targeted barbs are appreciated before avenged. One cannot envision Gen Z fisticuffs. Their exchanges are more like pickle ball games than sword fights, as if wisely reserving their fury for the more deadly threats of climate change and AI.

The players range in age from 17 to 67, and in talent from Mark McGwire’s college teammate to a noted film critic who preferred reviewing a fly ball to catching one. We have a pitcher from Penn and a bulldog third baseman from University of Georgia. A father and a son hit back-to-back home runs this summer, a la the Griffey’s. And two professional stand-up comedians are frequent players, one a former minor league shortstop and the other a major force at a vegan hot dog eating contest. (No joke.) Oh, and Neil deGrasse Tyson caught a few games; he was delighted by the parabola of the eephus pitch that he missed by a mile.

We remember every player--the good, the bad, and the farmer caught on video by the feds mislabeling his outgoing boxes of Long Island potatoes with the word IDAHO. A speedy centerfielder became a lawyer for the mob and a boney second baseman landed a meaty role in a major motion picture. We have lived through weddings and divorces, births and funerals, ticket-happy cops and a medivac helicopter that landed in centerfield during the seventh inning of a close game; an emergency is an emergency. Some guys bring their parents to the game, others children. Wives and lovers sit in the low creaky bleachers trying to figure out what is so damn addictive about the game. While a few close friendships have been born in the cauldron of competition, we are, by and large, warm weather teammates who reconvene every winter at a noisy Italian restaurant to gossip, compare health updates, and drink too much grappa. Unspoken is the deep belief that we know each other well, and not just by temperament and talent; we have seen each other in the clutch and in crisis, we know how each other deals with slumps and successes, how we handle bad calls or broken bones, and how everyone reacts to that one freakish moment that inevitably occurs in each game.  

Last Sunday, that freak thing happened in the bottom of the ninth inning of a tie game with one out and the bases loaded when the centerfielder caught a fly ball at the fence and the runner on third tagged up and the fielder launched a perfect peg to home plate that the catcher caught chest-high and tagged the runner just as he…just before he…just after he…it all happened so spectacularly simultaneously that everyone waited with bated breath for the umpire’s call and the umpire inhaled and glanced into the old wooden bleachers and saw someone wearing a Red Sox cap who bore an uncanny resemblance to Carl Yastrzemski and Yaz was marveling at the skills of these twenty guys who play softball but once a week for a few months a year and are still able to make diving catches in the hole and pinpoint throws across the diamond and smack line drives the opposite way and hook slide into second base and Yaz remembered his high school days and pure jubilation of the game and nodded in my direction and encouraged me to make the impossible call that would either end this contest or send it into extra innings.     

Next week, we start all over again, 0-0, clean slate, top of the first, game on.

Softball on Sundays.