I used to imagine what it would be like, standing at home plate, wagging a Louisville Slugger over my shoulder, waiting, just waiting to nail that fat pitch I knew was coming my way and when it did, swinging away and feeling the bat go crack in my hands and then barreling down the baseline, my cap flying off even as the crowd stood and cheered and the first base coach flagged me on, on toward home.
But it was a kid’s fantasy. I knew the thrill of knocking it over the fence as I knew most things back then: I’d read about it. I’d read about it in the “Gil Thorp, All-American” comic strip, in broadcaster Bill Stern’s series of mostly mythical, inspirational sports anthologies. I could even read about baseball in the stories my sportswriter father wrote for the local newspaper. I was all about reading back then. But playing baseball? Not so much.
I hated playing baseball for a simple reason: I was no good at it. Near-sighted as Mister McGoo, I didn’t need the sun to lose a fly ball in the outfield. I lost it in the clouds. I never understood how anybody could catch a fly ball. Or hit one. Or how they could enjoy trying to do either, especially in public.
So it was a black day, in the early summer of my tenth year, when I was forced by parental decree to leave my bedroom and its books and go play ball in the parish’s newly established baseball league.
I approached home plate that day soaked with a sense of doom. Up on the mound was a kid two years my senior who I knew from down my street. Tommy Corcoran was one of a brood of red-haired, rambunctious brothers whose greatest wintertime pleasure was bombing me and my friends with snowballs as we hurried past their house. Now he had a baseball in his hand, harder than any snowball he’d ever flung. And he was about to throw it at me.
Tommy wasn’t alone on the mound though. For reasons I never understood, the umpire who traditionally stood behind the batter was stationed behind the pitcher. I knew the ump, too. His name was Mr. Lennox.
Mr. Lennox was scoutmaster of my Boy Scout troop. I liked him. Neither of us fit the image of the typical Boy Scout. He was as fat as I was skinny. Remembering him now, I think of Oliver Hardy—pear-shaped, with a shiny, going-bald head scored by three or four strands of combed-over dark hair.
Standing at the plate that day, trying to lift the bat off my shoulder, I heard a strange whistling sound, followed by a loud thwack behind me. Tommy’s first pitch. Aimed at my nose. I never saw it coming.
“Ball!” came the call from Mr. Lennox.
Tommy twisted out of his crouch in disbelief. Then he straightened up, leaned his angry face toward me, reared back and fired another rocket at my head.
“Ball!”
Though Tommy, like his rocket ball, was just a blur to me, I could see he was not pleased with the call.
When Mr. Lennox called Tommy’s next burner a ball, I knew where I was bound. One more pitch and it was over. I chucked my bat and took my base, relief battling surprise for control of my grinning face.
There’s a rule in baseball that’s so basic it’s rarely spoken of: you can’t steal first. It’s against all the rules. It’s impossible. You can look it up. But that afternoon, some 60 years ago, I stole first base, stole it right out of Tommy Corcoran’s mitt, stole it from my morose imaginings without ever taking the bat off my shoulder, stole it without asking for help but getting it just the same from the fat man on the mound who gave the skinny kid at the plate a taste of the pleasures found on the field, not on the page.