'Take paradise and put up a parking lot' ... Joni Mitchell

As I get older I find myself searching for those experiences that weave the essence of my being. Baseball is a skein of yarn that shows up in my amazing multicolored dream coat over and over again. Where do I begin? Several years after the end of World War II – oh by the way I am an early on certified baby boomer – our family left The Bronx for the wilds of Long Island. We were home owners with a bedroom for each of us and a front and back yard. Actually, our house bordered on a large open lot and the opposite side of the lot was in Queens. But to friends and relatives, we might as well have moved to Bora Bora. It is here that baseball entered my bloodstream.

It started with a Spalding ball (a.k.a "spaldeen") and our back roof. It took some imagination and hours of idle time. It would always be an important game, usually the Giants vs. the Dodgers but occasionally the Giant versus the Yankees. I would start a nine inning game by tossing the spaldeen as high as I could up onto the roof of our Cape Cod style house. I would record an out if I caught the ball without it bouncing on the ground, it was a single for one bounce, and a double for two and four or more bounces was a home run. If Hodges, Pee Wee or the fearful Duke Snyder were "up to bat" my eyes would be riveted on every bounce on the roof. There would be no errors. When my Giants were up, I was slightly more lax for Davey Williams, Monte or the great Willie Mays. The beauty of this game is it had only one participant. No friend to get bored and no arguing over calls.

But that was not my only "solitary" game. Right behind the row of poplars separating our back yard from the lot, were thousands of beach shore rounded stones. Whether they were left from construction or just natural for Long Island I did not know or care. With those stones and a make shift bat, most likely a fat dowel left from home construction, I would toss up stone after stone and try to hit them as far as I could into the lot. Once again, I cycled through Giant and Dodger line-ups and used my warped judgment on whether the swing produced an out or a hit. I do believe the Giants had a perfect season in 1955 while playing the Dodgers in my back yard, that in spite of them winning the National League pennant elsewhere.

By the time I was nine, I graduated to the make shift ball field near the center of the lot where the big kids from Queens played their games. Most of the time it was "flies up". One player would bat, tossing the ball up with one hand, then trying best he could to knock the ball over the heads of several fielders standing where they thought they had the best chance of catching the hit. If you caught it on a fly, you became the batter. If you caught it on a bounce or a roll, you could take the ball and throw it in toward the batter who was obliged to place the bat on the ground perpendicular to the thrower. If your toss hit the bat and the current batter did not catch the carom before it hit the ground, you again became the batter. This would go on for hours. Being nine years old and short, many fly balls headed my way were intercepted by older fielders.

If enough players were in the lot, we started a game. Enough was ten people! You needed a pitcher, first baseman, shortstop and left fielder. The hitting team was required to provide the catcher. More times than not the baseball was wrapped in electrical or friction tape to keep it from losing its cover. Any ball hit to the first base side of second base was an "automatic" out. There was no set number of innings. We just played on. I was ill suited for this game. From the time I was five years old my uncle taught me to be a left hand batter, not a coveted switch hitter, but merely a left hand batter. His thought process was that this would enhance my chances to make the major leagues. My potential major league status did not impress the boys from Queens. When it was my turn to bat, almost always the solitary left hand batter, there was no consideration for the short stop and left fielder moving to second base and right field. It became my responsibility to hit the ball to the opposite field. This lack of concern ultimately ruined my chances for a successful major league and even college baseball career. Was there ever a left hand batter who could not pull the ball to right field besides me?

Now the boys from Queens were mostly from families that were Italian and Greek. These were my role models and some of the language skills I was able to learn were well accepted by my non-lot friends but seemed to cause some anguish to my parents. One adjective (gerund) I brought home caused me much more anguish than it did my parents. How could so common a word, it was part of almost every sentence spoken in the lot, be worth that much punishment for me for a single use at the dinner table?

I loved being a kid! By the way, check out this link to see what today' generation has for entertainment rather than my "lot"! (use this address and select the satellite view - 45 kalda avenue, new hyde park NY) Joni Mitchell, I share your pain.