World Series!

On the morning after the New York Yankees won their first pennant in fifteen years, I was playing softball in Brooklyn’s Dyker Park. Sunday morning softball is, for me, a mostly nonnegotiable ritual that runs from the beginning of April into November, whenever fall playoffs end. The two Sunday games always begin at nine. I play with joy and a fury that, even with age, hasn’t leaked away. I take hitting only a little less seriously than writing, and I draw no money from it, nor any acclaim. I think, sometimes, I began to earnestly pursue writing because I was never going to be a professional baseball player—one dream, by my teenage years, was clearly gone, and another would have to take its place. But all I ever wanted, from the age of six to fifteen or so, was to play for the New York Yankees, to crack long, parabolic home runs into the night. What else was there? It was difficult to know, as hard as I worked—as much as I willed my body to do more and more in the batting cage—there were limits I could never exceed, that I was not in possession of the hand-eye alchemy to hit a fastball traveling at more than ninety miles an hour. I was, on the balance, above average in whatever local and travel leagues I played in, but that, in relation to the Major Leagues, was like the commuting distance between Earth and Alpha Centauri. I didn’t have it. I was not going to be a star.