Dodgy elbows and baseball’s wastelands
The church bells from the nearby Russian Orthodox church rang incessantly through the clear blue morning and only the trash talk from the team of Dominicans could possibly compete.
When I say they were playing in a park, it would be more accurate to say this large expanse of concrete near one of the less glamorous parks New York has to offer.
There was an umpire and plenty of bats but not a lot else.
I chatted to one of the players clad in black. He told me a few of his team-mates had been brought over as big league prospects but it went nowhere and they opted for these New York wastelands rather than the ones back home.
Manhattan in the distance was deathly silent and the soft, fat ball unique to this variation on baseball was sent in an arc off to left field again and again by chunky right-handed hitters whose sudden swings belied their apparent lack of athleticism.
Mostly it was caught by a fielder and if not, the quick plays veering back towards the truncated diamond were cooly efficient.
Just to reiterate, this was low ranking Sunday morning softball on a decrepit melange of old basketball courts in Brooklyn. Soccer makes sense to most of us. Generally 22 people are directly involved while several more have a chance of getting in on the action. But when you see cricket, softball and baseball being enjoyed here, it’s a thing of wonder.
A mini-duel between ball thrower and ball hitter while everyone else mills around, hoping they’re not the one to make the next error. Why does this draw in so much passion and involvement? Some look at it and think ‘boring’, though they’d never refer to chess in the same way.
Chuck Ramkissoon is talking about South Asian immigrants and cricket to Hans van den Broek in Joseph O’Neill’s novel Netherland, but the chaos of immersion at all costs in their passion is the same: “They play at Dutch Kills playground, over by PS 112, they play in vacant lots, they play in schoolyards up and down Queens and Brooklyn. Just down the block from me at PS 139, you’ll see boys and girls with cricket bats, even in the snow. If I took you there now, I could show you the wicket they’ve drawn on the wall.”
There was an amazing story last week about a high school baseball player in the state of Washington who decided to pitch a game despite being an outfielder. It was his last chance ever to do so and his college prospects didn’t depend on that side of the game. He ended up throwing 194 pitches over the course of 14 gruelling innings, striking out 17 batters. You know when Premier League managers bemoan four games in 10 days due to the Christmas television schedule? Dylan Fosnacht was that and some when his coach left him on the mound for an appalling length of time, a mild form of child abuse which received national airplay.
The young fella himself did his best to calm the flurry of social media interest which came his way, clarifying that he’d never pitch again so the long term consequences wouldn’t matter, while also saying that he wanted to stay in as long as possible to make sure his team won.
In retrospect, admitted his coach, he should have protected the player from himself.
Forty years ago this month, another much more famous pitcher who threw a pitch too many underwent revolutionary surgery that would change the game and bear his name — Tommy John — forever more.
Already this season, Major League Baseball has seen 19 top-ranking starting pitchers go in for Tommy John surgery, a career-saving procedure in which a tendon is removed from another part of the player’s body and woven into the pitching elbow.
It means at least a year of rehabilitation and it has gotten to the point where it is almost freakish if a bright young thing hasn’t fallen victim to the unnatural force placed upon that part of the body.
Jose Fernandez of the Miami Marlins recently joined the soul-crushing list of next-big-things put out to pasture for a season or more.
I couldn’t help but think of the many also-rans of the game on Sunday morning, the ones who didn’t quite have access to a drastic restructuring of the body. It’s an endlessly cruel, endlessly fascinating sport and maybe that’s the reason why summer Sundays send echoes of clunking bats around barely playable wastelands.
* johnwriordan@gmail.com Twitter: JohnWriordan
