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Mitts Are for Sissies
| Article
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14901 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1988 |
791 Words |
| Author
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Carl Peterson
Carl Peterson is an award-winning columnist, feature writer,
and photographer, who is now news editor of The Daily Mining
Gazette in Houghton, Michigan. |
It's surprising that one of our hometown gang made it into the major leagues.
We were home-run hitters, one and all, base players beyond compare. The fielders picked flies out of the air like leaping frogs. The shortstops snatched up bouncing ground balls like swooping hawks.
And all of this, mind you, was performed under the most adverse conditions imaginable. There were no sandlots in our neighborhood, no cleared and leveled playing fields with perfectly laid out diamonds.
Many spring and summer evening pickup games were impromptu events played on a stretch of gravel scarcely one lane wide.
We were all a little crazy, sliding into the big rocks we used for bases. Skinned knees, bruised buttocks, and torn jeans were a part of our uniforms.
Whenever anyone smacked the ball beyond second rock, the fielders had to jump over bushes and race up and down an old railroad bed in mad pursuit. The road was sloped, so for the hitter it was all downhill to second rock, but an exhausting uphill climb to reach home.
A wide dip up in deep center field--the middle of the road--held water for days after a heavy rain. It took a dedicated infielder to want to catch a ball that had just been fished out of a puddle of muddy water. We were dedicated.
Gloves? Few of us ever owned one. In fact, the general feeling was that anyone wearing a baseball mitt was putting on airs… and was maybe even a bit sissified. So what's a little sting from a line drive? Our team's major skill was letting our arms ride with the catch. Anyway, when you caught a ball in a baseball mitt, it seemed you always had to look to make sure it was there. Not so with bare hands. You knew you had it!
On evenings when we were slightly more organized, we'd head for the north end of the cow pasture--after the cows had gone home. It was a larger area and almost level. Because it was near the water trough, the cows tended to congregate there during the day and keep our diamond, which was approximately regulation size, closely cropped.
For the bases we used squares of cardboard or an old throw pillow dug up
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