LONG POST ALERT: This year my teammate Mike Kane requested that I write a post like I used to back in the olden times. It was a Pirates thing, you might not understand. What follows is the fulfillment of that promise. Feel free to ignore it.

This year marks my first season back playing hardball after 7-8 years away from the Capital District Senior Mens Baseball League. Where previously I played in the 38-up Division, I'm now in the 55-and-still-counting Division. It's been great meeting up with old friends, teammates and rivals, to experience again that familiar fellowship of men. A few observations:

* Team Pictures. Guys, dont. Just dont. Trust me on this. Or if you are that giddy after winning a championship, here's one piece of advice. Tell the photographer to step back. Way, waaaaay back. The middle-distance is your friend.

* We've got a guy on our team who is back playing after hip replacement surgery. For the uninitiated, that's when they take your old hip and throw it away like a worn-out distributor cap from your father's Chevrolet. As a matter fact, it seems like there's several men of our vintage in similar predicaments. There's even talk of putting together an all-hip-replacement team and taking it out on the road. Traveling by Segway scooters, I presume. The gent on my team, given the cruelly ironic name of Blaise (he is anything but blazing), hobbles and flops and drags himself across the field every game, an aging man with the heart of a 16-year-old. And every time I see him lace a line drive into the gap, willing himself into second base with a headfirst slide, I think: Wow. Big respect. I think of Dylan Thomas: "Old age should burn and rave at close of day;/Rage, rage against the dying of the light." And I stand and cheer. This guy inspires me. I want to be like him when I grow up.

* In the old days, as a kid, I kept the bat bag stocked with chewing gum and sunflower seeds. Now Ive got a fully-charged defibrillator in there. Times change.

* I chatted with a guy after a game recently who was standing, albeit unsteadily, on two new titanium knees, his legs and kneepads stuffed into baseball pants like ten-pound sausages in five-pound wrappers. After watching him hobble around, I wanted to suggest that he sue to get his money back. But all I could see was a guy who simply wanted to play ball again. Another game, another season, another cold one with the boys. So again, I tip my hat. Burn and rave, burn and rave.

* In this game, the legs go first. Then the arm. Then the eyes. Not to mention the stomach muscles, the hair follicles, the hearing. But the guys who can hit, it seems like they can always hit. I think of Freddy Pidgeon with the Giants, a gimpy Twilight League legend, who can still hit frozen ropes in his sleep. I imagine Freddy in his coffin one day, still clutching a bat, still ready to pounce on that fastball low and away. I sure hope that somebody, when the day comes, sticks a bat in there.

* The beer after the game, a circle of guys shooting the breeze, laughing and talking nonsense. It's still the best part.

* Most old guys hate to stretch. Hate. It. That stuff's for dancers in periwinkle leotards, prancing before full-length mirrors. But they know they should. So they give it a go, sort of, in a concession to age. It's funny to sit back and watch them during pre-game rituals. The arms stretch out like the wings of California condors. They yawn, bored already. They bend half-heartedly sideways, do a little twist. They might glance down at their toes, calculating the distance - alas, so far away - and decide there's really no damned point trying to touch your toes anyway. Whats the value of it? The laces are already tied. So they grab a bat and are ready to go. In baseball, the good Lord intended men to stretch in the 7th inning, and well be damned if we do it an inning sooner.

* Coming back to the league, I get to see guys who I used to play with 15 years ago. The truth is, some of these dudes, I thought they looked old back at the turn of the century. Now I'll see a guy playing third base and could swear that I read his obituary in the Times-Union five years ago. I'm standing there, mouth agape, half-wondering if this is some kind of bizarre Lazarus situation. What the hell? Has he risen again? Once I recover my equilibrium, I tell him how good he looks - we all tell each other how good we look - and joke about needing to check his birth certificate. Every other game, somebody of my team announces his retirement. Or they start talking about the darned cute thing one of the grandkids did. And yet still they play, these blessed codgers, clinging to it - as if the game itself was a lifeline, a way of telling the world that the old man ain't dead yet, thank you very much.

* When I was debating over whether to come back and play again, my friend put it to me simply: "If you can play, you should. Because theres going to come a time when its no longer an option."

* Umpires are still terrible. Umpires will always be terrible, that's the nature of the game. We're the Montagues and they are the crappy Capulets. Star-crossed, we are born to hate one another. Same as it ever was. It seems to ballplayers that umpires are always trying to ruin an otherwise fine day on the diamond. Strike three? Everybody knows that pitch was a foot outside! That part of the game hasn't changed a lick.

* Every contest brings something new. The other day, a guy struck out to end the game. Our catcher caught the ball, and dropped it on the transfer (he was going to throw it down to third, then thought better of it, the game being over). The batter sees the ball on the ground; a chorus of voices rises up - "Run! Go! Run!" - so he flings his bat and, arms akimbo, knees creaking, gears grinding, steams toward first like an engine leaving the yard. The catcher, more annoyed than anything, grumblingly retrieves the ball. "Throw it! Throw it!" we cry. Blong, clang! He nails the runner in the back of the helmet. The runner pauses, dazed and confused, looks around, then continues on his ponderous journey, zigzagging along the 90-foot basepath. I pick up the ball and bowl it to first in a glorious underhanded arc. Out by a step, game over. At the end of the play, I check the runner's vital signs, see that he's relatively cogent and alert (for a man of his years). We laugh and I tell him, "Well, now we cant say weve never seen that before." An unremarkable event, truly, but things like that happen all the time. The game retains its capacity to surprise and delight us anew.

* I saw one of our slower players mightily swat the ball deep into the outfield and, a good while later, chug earnestly into second base with a double. A player on the bench quips, "The most exciting two minutes in sports."

* Some pitchers in the 55-and-still-counting league are slow. The rest are slower. After one of our guys swung and missed at a dying quail, hurled harmlessly toward the plate by an overly-optimistic twirler, a bench jockey roared: "Swing again, theres still time!" And there almost was.

* Sometimes a wife shows up. She brings something to read, a light snack, perhaps some knitting. Her attitude is the same as when she watched her small children play 3-on-3 over at the SoccerPlex. She's glad to be there, and every once in a while looks up, half-interested, and claps unconvincingly. We usually tell these women, "You dont really have to come, you know." And they do know, but they still come anyway, sometimes. It's nice when that happens. In this weird twist of time, we have become again their sweet boys of summer, lolling in the green grass.

* To quote the writer T.C. Boyle, "People never rest in peace; they just die." But not us, not yet. We've got a game today. And man, when that ball hits the sweet spot and pow, it just goes: what a feeling. Theres nothing else exactly like it. Maybe that's part of the lure. We keep desiring to experience it one more time, to know once more that one good true thing, when the bat hits the ball and lifts off screaming over the shortstop's head. Some days, when everything's right, it feels like that ball might go on forever, rolling into the beyond. Just like us. Burning and raving. Its good to be back. Thank you, gents.

Jimmy Preller, Whiz Kid


-- Edited by JimmyP on Tuesday 12th of July 2016 05:29:16 PM

-- Edited by JimmyP on Tuesday 12th of July 2016 05:34:50 PM