Vacant Lot Baseball

Vacant Lot Baseball Today the brown eyed girl and I went to see John Patrick play baseball. J. P. is in the second grade, so this is still early in his baseball career and difficult to tell if he will make the big leagues or not. The little fellows were all dressed out in matching uniforms, with sporty equipment bags, special shoes, and batting helmets. Their names were printed on their backs and they looked like pros out there. Being as young as they are, the coach was doing the pitching and an umpire provided by the parks and recreation department, was ruling the roost. Looking around, there were nearly as many adult dads on the field as there were players and a few of them were doing that coach thing of pointing to their eyes with a couple of fingers and saying “on the ball.” As we sat on the aluminum fold out bleachers and shivered against a late spring north wind that brought temperatures in the mid 50s and falling, I thought how different this is from baseball as I remember it in the 1950s. The baseball field was the vacant lot that was nestled in a corner formed by the Borden’s Cheese Plant, and the Stock Sale Barn. (Which perhaps explains why it was vacant?) The first games I remember were played when I was too small to even be considered for playing but contented myself with shagging foul balls and crawling into the stock pens to get pop flies that went foul in a special sort of way. The players were most often the Upchurch boys, the big Upchurch boys, Ray and Bobby not Philip or Tommy as they were also too small, Tyrone Pointer, Edwin Pierce, Glen Pettross, and a host of others their age that constituted the “big boys” in our neighborhood. The first job of course was to find someone who could actually produce a baseball and a bat to start the game. The criteria for entry was having your own glove and to get the game in motion is was necessary to find some old paint can lids or like suitable objects to serve as the bases. No one had any thing that remotely looked like something a baseball player might wear unless he was going to visit his Aunt Maude on Labor Day. There were no tight stretchy pants, no special shoes, no jerseys with numbers and names, no hats that said much of anything but “Coop” or “Chevy” on the front and certainly no batting helmets. The very thought of wearing a helmet to face the opposing pitcher was beyond consideration. It just would not be done. I think however the thing that was the most obvious in its absence was adult supervision. There were no adults around, and we liked it that way. There were no dads looking over our shoulders telling us to keep our eye on the ball and no coaches pitching for us. No umpires were present and every contested call was simply argued out until it became clear that the biggest boys were going to win the argument and everyone quite contesting just in time to save the integrity of their own nose. No mothers yelled from the bleachers, “That a way to go, Levi” or alternately, “Hunter, you have got to watch what you are doing.” It was simply a vacant lot ballgame not intended to build character, prepare us for a scholarship to MTSU, teach us the rules of fair play, ingrain teamwork within us, build our self esteem, or any of the things people talk about today. It was just a chance to have fun – that was the only aim. The football field, now that was the backyards behind Kemper Hailey’s house and the biggest requirement was to be big, strong, and tough. No skill necessary. As for hockey, and soccer: we had never heard of them. Didn’t know what they were, didn’t want to know. Baseball we could see on the old black and white T.V. when the Yankees played the Dodgers in the World Series and Football we could witness every Friday night in the fall at the local high school. They were REAL sports. Now, I’m not saying the way we did it was better, or that these organized sports leagues for children don’t accomplish some of their stated goals. But sometimes when I watch a little fellow wandering around in right field with his mind clearly somewhere but in that ballgame, or listen to the rhetoric from some of the parents, or watch some of the dads on the field, I wonder who this is really for. Is it really for Anders, or is it for Anders’ dad? Is it really as much fun when dad says, “Well, when we get home we are going to practice getting those ground balls until you will never miss another one”, as it was when Ray and Bobby and Tyrone just happened by the vacant lot to play a game of baseball with how ever many players were available, or as much fun as it was when we gathered in Kemper Hailey’s back yard and Walter Booker showed us how he could cross the goal line with six of us still hanging on to various parts of his body and bits of his clothing. Sometime, we may just put to much rigor into things that should be simple. I wonder the same thing about worship sometimes when we find ourselves trying to choreograph every move of the “participants” rather than letting it be the simple kind of heartfelt expression of praise of our maker that Jesus involved himself in. I worry that in our minds we segregate the “participants” and the “audience” rather than recognizing that all of us are the participants and it is God that is the audience. As you may have figured out by now, I am better at questions than answers. A great philosopher once opined that “sometimes the answers are simple but the questions are complicated.” No, it wasn’t Voltaire, it was Dr. Seuss, Sam I Am. While you ponder these great questions, go watch your grandchildren play a sport, it will be good for them and great for you. bob.chaffin@maplehillchurch.org