Béisbol!

In the mid 1970's, my job gave me the opportunity to transfer from upstate New York to Puerto Rico in the Caribbean. That might sound somewhat regular to us living in the "oughts," but for me and my family it was an adventure. Although a Bronx boy by birth, a college graduate and working for a large pharmaceutical company, my trip to visit our manufacturing plant in Barceloneta, PR and look for housing was the first time I had been in an airplane. That first trip was an eye opener for me. Palm trees and sugar cane for as far as I (eye) could see. Tropical beaches and staying at a resort hotel nestled between golf courses and the Caribbean Sea, there was nothing not to like.

The initial drive out to our company's manufacturing plant at Barceloneta, seemed endless, with sugar cane growing on both sides of the small highway. When we reached the main road, there were small stores and businesses and even some sleepy towns. The landscape changed as we neared the plant. The sugar cane fields were now replaced by pineapple fields, or at least that was what I was told. I had no idea how pineapples grew and always wondered how they fit them into the cans. But lo and behold, in the middle of acres and acres of pineapples was the Winthrop Laboratories pharmaceutical plant.

A couple of months later on New Year's Day, the family was on an Eastern Airline jet headed for Dorado, Puerto Rico about half way between San Juan and Barceloneta. We rented a home in a golf community just outside of Dorado, a small town with very few stores and maybe one traffic light. Our belongings including Christmas gifts for our young daughters were coming by sea. They arrived about two months later primarily due to a port strike that affected the entire island. We had a week for sightseeing. In Puerto Rico many businesses close the week before Christmas and do not reopen until after Three King's Day, January 6^th. We visited El Yunque, Fajardo and San Juan. Brilliant sun filled days. For our first two months we only experienced rain overnight. We were in paradise.

Living was easy, as long as you could accept you were not in New York or Delaware, but in Puerto Rico. The water was good and plentiful (not always the case in the Caribbean), electricity worked (most of the time), telephone service was good and with a short car ride, shopping was OK. At the plant, the management team in place before I arrived had transformed local pineapple field workers and stay-at home moms to be stellar chemical and pharmaceutical workers. Things were great except for one small faùx-pas. In those two months before we left New York, I do not know how many people we told, "You have to come down and visit us." They all did! It was hard to explain to them that I had a job and needed to go to work each day.

I have done it again. This post is titled béisbol and I have not mentioned it once. Winthrop Laboratories had a softball team in the Arecibo Industrial League. We actually built our home field on the edge of our property – we had pineapples cultivated both inside and outside our property line fences. Just beyond our right field fence there were rows and rows of pineapples. Each year the two divisions of the Arecibo Industrial League held a ceremonial all star game. The game was held under the lights in Arecibo and drew quite a crowd. I was the sole "gringo" on the field. I felt quite honored. Baseball (béisbol) is quite respected in Puerto Rico. It is almost as popular as soccer (fùtbol) and dominos.

All aspects of the game are played to their fullest. During this game we had a thirty minute delay due to the pondit just being the pondit. Playing shortstop with a runner on first base, I moved to my left to field a low line drive. Rather than simply catching the ball and recording the out, I let the ball hit my open glove, picked the ball up after it hit the ground, stepped on second base for a force out and threw to first for a double play. This seemed like a good idea to me. Immediately there was a gaggle of base runners, managers, coaches, umpires and I suspect several spectators milling around second base arguing and gesturing in very rapid and animated español about what had just taken place and citing nonexistent rule books as well as moral and ethical codes. Does Abner Doubleday or a supreme being permit someone to purposely drop a fly ball to their or the team's singular advantage. After twenty minutes, it was decided that one should not be allowed to purposely drop the ball. They then spent the next ten minutes debating whether the drop was on purpose or just happened. Finally there was a philosophical discussion on how to distinguish when a ball was simply missed or maliciously dropped. This was all for a game that had no bearing on anything. [By the way, I believe the decision was correct. A fielder cannot intentionally drop a ball to gain advantage.]

Béisbol was fun in Puerto Rico. Even the arguments were entertaining and civil. We spent three very good years in Dorado and learned lessons being away from "home" that stayed with us the rest of our lives.

Baseball on the Tarmac

It is the beginning of April in the Catskill Mountains. Why are there twenty boys and a baseball coach on the high school tennis courts with no tennis nets or tennis rackets? Well the Yankees and Red Sox go to Florida for spring training, the Onteora Central School baseball team heads to the tarmac. In the spring of 1962 there was no baseball field at the high school. So our team's initial infield practice was held on two tennis courts. I was trying out for the team and was placed at second base, a spot near but not actually adjacent to one of the metal posts that supported one side of the tennis net for most of the late spring, summer and fall. The paved surface of the courts with its dark colors was perfect for an early snow melt. The outdoor temperature was in the mid forties, perfect baseball weather. The coach would hit ground balls with a fungo bat working his way from first base to second, to short and third, then back again.

The hard surface of the tarmac made the use of a rubberized baseball a necessity. As hit by the coach the ball would spin and each subsequent bounce of the ball would be either abnormally high or low depending on the spin imparted by the tennis court surface. But even the low bounces were almost knee high. I mentioned I was placed at second base. In my sophomore year in high school I possibly was five feet five inches and weighed one hundred and twenty-five pounds. I looked natural for a second baseman. As practice wore on, I was eventually moved over to third base. In his wisdom, the coach decided it would be better for the team if the third baseman was able to catch a ground ball and throw it all the way to the first baseman. Now throwing ball after ball from third base to first base – let's see the infield is a diamond but a truly a square with ninety feet between bases and that make the throw 90 feet times 2 or 127 feet – for a one hundred and twenty-five pound teenager in forty-five degree weather is not good for the arm muscles. By the time the season started, I was praying that the ball would be hit anywhere but third base!

Those of you who have baseball in your veins realize that the beginning of April is a late start for spring training. Our first two weeks of training were in the gym! We would exercise and warm up our throwing arms, as much as our small gym would allow. Most memorable was practicing our base running which included sliding into base. This was done by laying potato sacks on the floor and running as fast as you could then flinging out your feet hoping beyond all hope that your thigh and hip would land on the potato sack and not the dry, hard gym floor. This was cruel. This was not baseball.

Time for our first game, and we were fortunate to be starting with a home game. So at 2:00 PM we head for the bus – home game? Remember, Onteora Central School did not have a baseball field. We all rode the bus to Kingston which was nineteen miles away for our home games. I forget what team was our opponent that game. Little wonder since most games were the same for us. We were the antithesis of undefeated. It was not the bus trip that put us at our biggest disadvantage. It was trying to catch ground balls that were not taking tarmac hops and the fact that we have had no batting practice at all. It was a long season. I missed one game with a dental emergency. We were playing a powerful Marlboro team. I learned the next day that we had lost 43 - 2 and that they called the game due to darkness in the third inning. My replacement at third base had made six errors in the first inning. It was bad.

The next year the school district added a baseball field on the huge terraced hill behind the gym that was home to our a track oval and a football field. What did not get put in was a right field! The base path from first base to second base was parallel to the backstretch for the track and the distance between the second baseman and right fielder allowed for intimate conversations. A rocky slope was directly behind the right fielder then there was the woods leading up the mountainside. There was a stake in right center field that designated any ball into the woods was considered a double whether it was a four hundred foot blast or a two hundred foot pop up. Oddly left field went on forever. A foul pop fly to the right of the third baseman was an adventure. If you crossed the running track to catch it, you ran the risk of running off the side of the terrace. I will say that the stake in our right field was a step up from the manure pile used to indicate ground rule doubles at the home field for the Pine Bush team.

We actually won a couple of games the year we had our own home field. Being able to practice on a real field including hitting pitched balls prior to the start of the season is a plus. I enjoyed playing ball and the teams that we played were overjoyed to have us on the schedule. It isn't often you can be that happy and at the same time make those around you feel the same.

Now baseball at Onteora has improved. My brother-in-law eventually became the coach and did a wonderful job with the program. My nephew played ball on the team and went on to college with a baseball scholarship. The school has a real baseball field now and it doesn't share real estate with the track team and football team. As I think back I do not remember us winning any football games that year either. But our high school band won state awards. Perhaps the reason for the terraced field was for the marching band. The football field was added so they would have a reason to mark up the field to aid the band in perfecting their routines.

My only regret is that if we had started the game against Marlboro earlier in the day, I wonder if we could have come back to win? It only takes a few walks and well placed hits to score forty-one runs.

'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.