I hit until my hands bled. It didn’t happen often enough to be a marker of fear or rage or grit, rivulets of blood running in the creases of my palms, but I would wait to see when a callous broke, knowing some work had been done. It would be a Saturday or Sunday, winter heavy outside, and I breathed in deep, waiting for the little red light to flick on. Once it was there, I had a vanishing beat to get ready, just enough time for my knees to bend, my fingers to tighten, and my left elbow to rise to the level of my ear, the weight of my teenage body drifting backward, into a gentle coil. The ball, bruised and dimpled, was all I needed. Here it came, exploding, seventy-five, eighty, eighty-five miles an hour, whatever the machine could produce. In my memory, I swing with violence, and smash the ball upward, its parabola broken by the netting of the cage. And here comes another, and another, and another. I was hitting for my life.
In my memory, there is nothing greater than that feeling, a ball struck square, the bat whipping through across my right shoulder. When the light shut off, I hunted in my pocket for the next golden token, each one the price of a round, at least twenty balls. A token was a dollar. This was the only exchange rate that mattered to me. I was fourteen years-old, and godhood was only so far away.
You see, I was going to be a famous ballplayer. What else would I be? Could I be? An adult career produces a narrative that others backfill for you—you write now, so you must have always cared about writing. You talk politics, so politics must have always been of great concern. You have ambition for this or that position, accolade, or trinket—therefore, didn’t the longing reach back to childhood, your little brain scheming for a great big professional class future? No, no, no. I will never want anything again like I wanted, at twelve or thirteen or fourteen, to be a professional baseball player, to ascend to the Major Leagues and prove, finally, this crumpled little life could give way to something enormous. If history is longing on a mass scale, baseball waits at its core, a game played across many thousands of square feet of grass and dirt encircled by the cathedrals of the industrial age. Baseball calls back to the empyrean ambitions of Rome; if it’s too plodding for you, so is prayer or The Birth of Venus. It is both the apotheosis of the team sport—truly, no single player can carry a baseball team to victory—and a contest of individuals, pitcher against batter, fielder against runner, talent and will and luck colliding, in single marvelous bursts, again and again and again. Football is violence condensed, organized in short eruptions over predictable geometry. Once, I cared about it a great deal. But I never wanted to be a football player. I wanted to hit long homeruns into the night. I wanted to race across the yawning expanse of center field, snatching flyballs out of the sky. Before I lost my nerve, I wanted to pitch, game seven of the World Series, blowing fastballs and curveballs by overwhelmed hitters.
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