Baseball used to be so good that it hurt

posted by jakevest on 27th, 2010

Mr. Hoover, not his real name, could’ve been a power hitter.

I didn’t use his real name because somebody that mean and useless could not possibly have died yet. He must be sitting on a porch somewhere, shaking his fist at passing traffic, cussing the world and hoping against hope to find someway to make it a little worse before he leaves it. In other words, he would be the kind of man to sue.

Mr. H. was a teacher who did not see the role of educator as being friend, helpmate and encourager. He saw it more as concentration camp guard or gang enforcer. The enforcing was done with a chunk of board euphemistically known as a paddle. Paddle is a sissy word. This was not a sissy piece of wood — it was a bludgeon.

When you did wrong, were perceived to have done wrong, were accused of doing wrong, or, in many cases, just weren’t doing right enough, this fat waste of DNA would take you to the front of the room and paddle you until you cried. He loved those of us who would hold back the tears so he could do multiple forehand smashes.

And that brings us to baseball, where I meant to start.

I would say that baseball was a big part of my life at that time, but it would be woeful understatement. My life was made up of baseball and ballast, trivial stuff that filled in the time between baseball games. Every child who had any sort of claim to normality packed his glove before he packed his lunch, that being the priority. We would skip a meal in a heartbeat if it gave us a chance to play.

One game went for three years, with essentially the same players. We’d play ten minutes at a time at recess, charging onto the field in exactly the place we had been when the last session had been called off. Baseball meant more to the average boy than education (naturally), food, watching “Sky King” and Gene Autrey on Saturday mornings or even a “yeller dope and a Moon Pie.”

And that brings us back to the man we are calling Mr. Hoover today. I was under his supervision when the World Series was being played, back in a year when all the games were still played in the afternoon. My team had made the final two and there was no way I could miss a moment of it.

Those of you who are old enough to matter will recall the 6-transistor radio that came with an ear plug for secret listening. The radio itself was as big as the paperback Spanish-English dictionaries most teachers have in class these days and for some reason, there never seemed to be a position from which you could reliably count on receiving a signal. You had to hold it all sorts of different ways and turn it here and there to hear anything. The wire to the earplug was clumsy and too long and always twisted up.

This was not an instrument designed for surreptitious reception of a baseball game.

But still we tried. Kids are either dumb as heck, or hopeful — which can amount to the same thing. I would sit there in a small room, thinking the teacher would not notice that I was covering my ear with one hand that had a wire extruding from it while manipulating the other hand below the desktop and occasionally whispering “wait for yoru pitch, wait for your pitch.” I could just as easily have donned a clown suit and rode a tiny bicycle around the room without being noticed.

I did this in Mr. Hoover’s classroom, knowing I would be caught and would be beaten. Knowing further than if I figured out a way to steal my radio back I would do it again.

This is not meant to illustrate how stupid I was, but to give you an idea of how much baseball meant at that time.

Yesterday I was at a dance competition for one of the kids in my class and there was a long break between solos. I ran out to grab something to eat and there were several televisions out where the food was. There were also about 16,000,000 kids loafing around out there looking for something to do…a lot of them were boy siblings of the dancers, kids about the age I used to be in summer.

A bunch of them were watching World Cup. Another bunch was outside throwing a Frisbee around. Not a single ball glove in the crowd. In my day, the only place that would have happened would have been church and then somebody would have had a ball we could toss around barehanded, or we would have found a stick and hit some rocks with it.

Even stranger to me…way back in the corner was a TV tuned in to the Los Angeles Dodgers playing the New York Yankees in one of those inter-league competition games we once would have died to get a glimpse at. In a crowded hotel full of bored little brothers with hands jammed into their pockets and occasionally whining “I don’t have nothing to dooooo”, not a single person was watching the game.

No point to make here…no big finish. It was just odd and sad. Something we used to have isn’t around anymore and it seems to me that some of the general enjoyment of life went with it.

Mr. Hoover, if he is still around, would be pleased.