Summit Wellness: Gratitude - Thank You, Alexander Cartwright
By Summit FM Contributor Matt Anthony
"People ask me what I do in the winter when there's no baseball. I'll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring."
- Rogers Hornsby
I had an innate confirmation, early in my youth, that it was the best game ever invented.
While standing in the outfield during a pick-up game (an event, sadly, that’s been replaced by soccer, video-games, and web-surfing), I experienced a sudden rush of warm certainty, where every nuance in the universe was rendered wonderfully in balance, simply by virtue of the sound that was produced when a wooden bat struck a ball, a glorious crack that pierced the humid air and set all things that were proper in to motion.
Baseball was perfect.
It was played at a perfect time of year. It had perfect sounds. It had perfect smells, the way a leather glove mixed with soil and sweat. (I lost count of the number of times I stood in the outfield or crouched behind the plate, between pitches, and covered my nose and mouth with my glove, just to inhale that glorious combination.)
And it had perfect rules. The fact that you could run past first base, and not be ‘out’, but you couldn’t do the same on second base or third base, was strange and extraordinary and…brilliant.
I’m grateful that my father, a catcher (who was actually ‘called up’ to the Pittsburgh Pirates twice, for weekend series’ against both the Dodgers and the Reds), groomed my twin, Mark, and me early. Soft toss, grounders, and, later, flyballs. (we called them ‘high-flies’.) He’d feed us whiffle-ball pitches in the backyard, and I can still recall his directives of ‘step into it’ and ‘turn your wrists’.
And that feeling. Nothing since then has replicated the transformative experience of moving a bat through the hitting-zone and meeting a baseball at full impact. To be able to simply watch that white projectile climb through the blue stratosphere while your forearms tingled under dirt and perspiration was sheer bliss. As a youth, that addiction kept me awake at night, where I would I would struggle to doze off while counting the minutes until we could ride our bicycles up to the dusty ballfield and do it again the next day.
"I am convinced that God wanted me to be a baseball player."
- Roberto Clemente
Sure, football and basketball were spectacular sports, filled with athletic displays of power and dexterity. (And later in life, I would profess a love-affair for tennis and racquetball.) However, to me, they resembled war and battle, teams of opposing forces crashing into each other, jostling for position under the hoop or in the end zone.
Baseball was a chess match, operating every pitch under the celestial, watchful eye of the storied legends who went before me, nudging me and, at the same time, taunting me to work on my craft so that I could one day approach the prolific numbers that they set as a barometer for all of us, used as both a mentor, and, yes, a target.
Sitting in my hunched position, calling for a pitch, with a suspicious eye on that runner at first, I tried to guess what he was thinking about me. Would I feign a throw to first while he took a lead? Would I call a pitch-out? Would I thrust myself out of my crouch as he raced for second, flip my mask towards the dugout, and unleash a laser to the bag, narrowly beating him as the umpire threw his thumb into the wind?
While at the plate, wagging my bat back and forth ensconced in testosterone, my gaze fixated on the mound, I’d wait for the pitcher’s choice, quickly stealing a glance far away at my father, sitting in his lawn-chair, a dot on the horizon hundreds of feet away from the action beyond the center-field fence, where he always sat, telling myself over and over to ‘step in to it’ and to ‘turn my wrists’.
To this day, I can still conjure up the memory of sending that pitch into the gap in left-center, sprinting towards first, my husky frame not moving nearly as quickly as I wanted it to. I can still hear my batting helmet jostling from side to side, its plastic interior bouncing off each side of my duct-taped eyeglasses while the first-base coach made wide, circular motions with his left hand, imploring me to increase my gait towards second base.
And it’s as clear as a bell, the memory of that triumphant stop at second, standing on the bag with both feet, hands on hips, huffing, puffing, surrounded by a dissipating cloud of brown dirt and the sounds of teammates clapping.
I remember this time as though it happened just yesterday. It’s why I sometimes drive over to that northwest end of Canton, Ohio, to what was once Mulheisen Field, to ‘Field #2’, the same field that served as a backdrop to the above photo. It’s the diamond where my twin brother, Mark, and I represented the Harrison Paints White Sox, proudly wearing the cotton white uniforms with the red trim, of the Canton Mighty-Mites League.
Home plate. 40*.49”27.0366’. 81*.22”10.1922’.
It’s also the exact latitude and longitude where I’ve designated my ashes to be spread.
"A hot dog at the game beats roast beef at the Ritz."
- Humphrey Bogart
Because ‘baseball’ has always been there for me. My father taught it to us. I followed it. I caressed it. I got angry with it, despondent with it, and beat up by it. When I left it briefly, it patiently waited for me to return. Ken Burns brought me back. And so did Jim Thome. And I even had the opportunity to celebrate it as the church for my wedding day, when Donna and I tied the knot at home plate at Thurman Munson Stadium, on August 13th, 1999.
Who invented it? Abner Doubleday? Alexander Cartwright? Doesn’t matter. Beyond the stats and the new stadiums and multi-million dollar contracts. Aside from the pitch-clocks and the ghost-runners and the incessant need to speed up the most natural pastime on the planet, baseball is still….perfect. Like, a ‘game-of-catch’ perfect.
