What a stellar performance by the Jays this season!  All of us armchair shortstops were watching letting ‘em know just how to operate out there. So many of us are, in our hearts, still yearning to be out there to pull some clutch shit like they did off all season (until the end). I know baseball teams play eleventy-thousand games a season, but I remarked to a friend of mine as we watched their run that I’d like to play baseball professionally. Not for for the money but for the downtime. Bullshitting in the dugout. Spitting sunflower seeds or tobacco, ripping on teammates and giving hot-foots. What a riot. You see, I have a Masters in goofing off and I really do feel that professional baseball would be right in my wheelhouse, if only I had PUSHED myself. Geez if I only this or if I only that. My Rotten Kid is on a ball team right now. The laughter and camraderie emanating from the dugout is what I live to hear at her games. There aren’t many moments when I engage in the sport other than as a father/observer. I don’t rage at the coach or spit venom at umpires. I might be at a Thursday night practice and I’ll offer to toss the pill around if the attendance numbers aren’t even. If its a batting practice, I’ll sit on an upturned 5 gallon Home Depot bucket and let the pitchers do their best to nail me in the throat. 

I have “ball sense”. On field, I know where the ball is going the moment its released, be it by hand or foot. For 12 on 13 years of my young life I played soccer. I began at about 8 through high school until my senior year. I was a mid-fielder which, as anyone involved will tell you, means doing most of the hustling. SOCCER. There were times on a rainy Saturday morning moving up and down the field with anticipation and precious little game interaction, soaked bone wet, I’d ask my fellow mid fielder, “Don’t you just wanna go home? Like, why are we doing this?” It isn’t that I hated soccer. It was that at 9 o’clock on Saturday morning was fucking Prime Looney-Tunes time. At around 7 or 8 you’d get some periphery cartoons like “Thundaar” or “The Super-Friends”, but Looney Tunes BEGAN at 9AM, right when I’m out here doing stupid stretches under the expert and furiously English tutelage of Coach Otis. Meanwhile at home, Bugs Bunny was dodging shotgun blasts in a grass skirt strumming a ukulele. What am I doing here? What a maroon. I felt it all a colossal waste of time but there were boys who felt otherwise for sure. I remember a Spanish or South American kid we played against. Marco. I mean this kid was magic with the ball. He and another red headed kid combined for double digit goals against my Rangers on more than one occasion. Marco would pass out to the wing, sprint up the centre towards the goal yelling commands at his ginger counterpart. To this day, when we need to jaywalk or move with alacrity across some parking lot or a busy street, I’ll bark like Marco did at his guy to My Rotten Kid: “Crosse la!” CROSS IT. These boys, part of the Celtics’ crew, were budding champions. I once outmaneuvered one of their players, Kevin Holness, (later an International soccer player of some note) on his home pitch one morning. Its not a brag, I’m just letting you know that that was the high-watermark of my soccer prowess. I have mentioned “ball sense” but I only felt that (and still feel it) because my father, stalwart on the sidelines, mentioned it to Coach Otis one day while I sat benched… Despite my father’s insistence, I knew one thing for certain; I was in no way prepared, excited or interested in being a professional soccer player in any future past the half-time of this particular game. I wasn’t the only one who noticed. From my efforts, Coach Otis could see that my mind was far from what was happening on the pitch. I had Asteroids in my eyes. Otis was from England where they took soccer/football far more serious than we ever would or will on the barren Canadian prairies. Do you remember The Muppet Show? He wasn’t a commonly occurring character, but picture, if you will, Sam Eagle. 

That’s what Coach Otis looked like but with wilder, grey eyebrows and deep set eyes that lolling above bags that only a thousand Sunday League pints can elicit. Anyway, he could spot a champion with a competitor’s heart and eye for the beautiful game. He could also spot the dearth of that. He maybe felt that I might write the next ‘Odyssey’. Maybe I’ll solve homelessness or world hunger and in so doing, achieve World Peace. MAYBE. Not his concern. The only thing Otis gave a single shit about was winning games. I might one day rise, arms outstretched above the great and worrisome throngs of the poor and feed them all with a wave of the hand. But right now as a midfielder, this kid ain’t gonna win us any blllloooody games. He looked it as apathy, but what my performance should have shouted was that in the world of 1986, there was such a thing called VIDEO GAMES, and it was no secret to anyone that I’d rather be playing one right now. In fact, only hours ago my father had had to drag me from in front of the basement television that just weeks earlier had been hooked up to an ATARI. Moments later, that same ATARI console had accepted something called a ‘cartridge’. That cartridge housed various circuits and electronic connections that would allow this boy to play, AT HOME, the arcade game ASTEROIDS. Shit, I had been up since 6 AM playing it. Now, the HI-SCORE on Asteroids could only ever reach 100,000. That was all that the screen digits and computing power would allow. Surpassing that, the 6 digits would ‘flip’ back to zero. I’d been playing for 90 minutes and had flipped the score not once, but twice. There was no stopping me. I was in The Zone before they even had a name for it and, if I didn’t have to leave with Dad at 8, I might still be playing today. It was a heartbreak to leave the gaming console and I was thinking about how far I might have been right around halftime in the rain.

This brings me back to baseball or clutch shit. The money spread around in the world of professional sports is more than you and I will ever experience. Sure, ball players get to goof off and chew gum between at-bats. When the moment, and there MIGHT be a moment when all of the 90 minute early morning or late afternoon drives to a little league game, the 4:30 ice time and the hundreds of miles driven to tournaments… The wild tears from the wins and the hot ones from the losses… The skinned knees, black eyes and blown knees under ripped pants. The bus rides in the minors in and through shitty little towns and the equally shitty little sandwiches on the bus from some random diner… It all comes together when a bat is swung, a shot is slapped or a punch is thrown and the sharp report of it echoes throughout the stadium, living room or from a bar TV like a gunshot. That is when all of us fans, gamblers, bettors and bandwagoneers collectively hold our breath. That’s what these boys and girls are paid for. Not for the hit itself, but for their ability to give us all the hope that they can under the immense pressure that a contract, conditions or a country can put on any one team or individual.

I watched my lovely and wonderful child stand, click the dirt off’n her cleats and awkwardly slip from the base, for all the world like fawn in the trees. Just then her head swung to the pitcher and immediately after, home plate as she prepared for the play. CRACK as the ball was hit, pitcher snagged it out of the air and swivelled to rip it to Talia on third. In less than a heartbeat she became a predator. Double-play on the final play of her final game of the season. She was ready for it and I have to tell you, she got that awareness from her coach and a hundred practices and some celestial understanding that tells her ‘you know what to do’. It wasn’t hereditary ball-sense. It was just from playing the game. I’d love to think that my erstwhile birth father was some stellar athlete and that the brief flashes of prowess I show prove it. Her Mom’s no slouch either but I can’t take anything away from the work she’s done.

An inning or so earlier one of her teammates fouled a ball up over the backstop. You know the high angled part designed to stop errant balls just like this one? Well, it arced over it and fell towards the stands heading directly for a small boy. He sat hunched and oblivious, not quite far enough under his parents dual umbrellae. His tiny hands were claw-locked around a mini gaming console. I’d snuck a peek earlier to see what he was up to on it. Digital rhomboid characters moved about with definitive purpose around the small screen at the behest of his thumbs. Also, a spinning softball was now inbound ready to dash his young brains all over a cold, wet set of aluminum bleachers. I moved quickly, the ball-sense my father had verbally imbued upon me at 11 years old working overtime. I did not catch it (IT WAS WET. THE BALL WAS WET, DAD). I did however deflect it, mere inches from his soft, tiny skull. Play went on and his parents thanked me. He looked up a few seconds later, oblivious to the doom that had come so near. He smiled and I smiled back. I was all like… “Hey what game are you playing?”