Big Joe Torre lines out

Baseball!!  The greatest of all sports.  As a young lad, I remember rising up at the dawns early light, mounting my trusty banana bike, and spending most of the morning gathering the gang for a baseball game over at the Crescendoe Road sand lot across from my house.

I do want to clarify that the following series of events occurred back in the day when all of the baseball bats were wood, all the baseballs were covered with shit, all of the baseball gloves were hand me downs, and all of the bases amounted to a dirt spot with a nebulous perimeter.

I don't remember any involvement with organized baseball, little league, t-ball, baseball helmets, or mooshy baseballs that wouldn't dent your dome.  I do remember getting boinked with a baseball at least eleventy four times while I learned to catch it with a crappy hand me down leather mitt.  No one was eased into baseball with smiling coaches and plastic tees, it was a basic survival skill that we all learned.

One incident that stands out in my memory involved a near death experience.  I was pitching a game at the sandlot and Big Joe Torre was at the plate.  Now the word "Big" hardly describes Joe, as he was about the size of a small car. As the first pitch left my hand and headed towards the bat of Big Joe, I realized that I might be a leeeetle too close to big Joe.  This proved to be the fact as he connected and sent the ball back at my head at just below warp factor 3.  Now this is the most amazing thing, the big guy upstairs intervened and somehow placed my glove directly in the space between Big Joe's speeding ball and my head.  I caught the ball and was greeted by a roar of approval from my team mates.

I still have flashbacks to the moment, and realize that, but for the grace of God, I might not be typing these pithy comments and all would be lost.  I might have been stuck in a nursing home with a drool bucket, humming the theme to Captain Kangaroo.

All content copyright of Christopher Hammond

Say Hey!

Baseball was my thrill, my obsession, and my only darling. During the ever brief school summer vacation, I would spend every waking hour obsessing about baseball, circling the neighborhood, and pulling together a quorum of boys for a game at Crescendoe Field.  Our game was slow pitch hardball. This was mainly due to the fact that we had no equipment other than bats and gloves, as well as a low tolerance for pain.

Crescendoe field was a beautiful grass covered expanse, located across the street from my house.  The neighborhood gang of boys would spend hours there flying kites, hitting golf balls, flying model planes, launching rockets, and most importantly, playing baseball. Many great poets have written of this fabled place, which unfortunately no longer exists. In the interest of providing some review materials for the test that will be coming later, here are a few stories that took place in and around that field, to tuck away in your notebook

• Bully this Mofo


• Go Fly a Kite


• Big Joe Torres Lines Out


• The Shed Incident

That great green field is now the location for the town truck garage, an ugly cinder block building that is at least two football fields long. Looking at an aerial view in Google Maps today, I almost cried.

What is it about fields that make us nostalgic? I was recently reading an article about Willie Mays, making me think of the field I had played on. Willie is long gone, so we can only be nostalgic about him. The stories always seem bigger than the man, although in the case of Willie, I am not sure that is true. One story caught my eye. It was the story of his first hit. He had gone hitless in his first 12 at bats in the majors. Apparently 13 was his lucky number, as he hit a homer off of Warren Spahn of the Red Sox, a future Hall-of-Famer.  Spahn would later go on to say

"He was something like zero for twenty-one the first time I saw him. His first major league hit was a home run off me and I'll never forgive myself. We might have gotten rid of Willie (Mays) forever if I'd only struck him out."

Part of that statement might have been the prejudice of the day, but there is some truth in it for all of us. No life is a straight line through from cradle to grave. There are incidents along the way that mutate us into the wonderful human beings that we eventually become.  Each of those moments causes us to twist and wiggle our way through the rats maze that is life. As the saying goes "Pain is inevitable. suffering is optional."

All content copyright of Christopher Hammond