TRUE BELIEVERS

TRUE BELIEVERS
By Dick Meister

The best season of the year is finally here. Baseball season. It's only a
game that's being played, of course -- but a game that can be very
serious business to the young people who play it.

I once was one of them, playing in the 1940s and 1950s on some of the many
semi-professional teams that once were common in San Francisco, as in many
other cities, as well as on teams in the Southwestern Oregon, Western
Canadian and other leagues.

We were true believers, all of us. For there are no heretics on a baseball
diamond. We accepted, without question, that the game must be governed by
the mystical number of three and its multiples. Three strikes and you're
out. Three outs per inning. Nine players per side. Nine innings per game.
Sixty feet, six inches from pitcher's mound to home plate. Ninety feet
between bases.

It was that way because there was no other possible way for it to be, the
way it had been since the 1800s, when mustachioed men wearing dark suits and
derby hats had laid down the rules.

There were unquestioned patterns of behavior as well as rules to guide us.
We glared threateningly at the pitcher as we stood in the batter's box
pawing at the ground, for instance. We glanced coolly down to the third base
coaching box where coaches and managers ran their fingers over the bills of
their caps, across the front of their uniform shirts, along the outside of
their thighs, pinched their noses, scratched their ears, passing us secret
orders we never dared challenge, telling us to hit, take a pitch, bunt.

In the field, we spat on the ground and into our gloves between pitches,
rubbing the saliva deep into the leather of the pocket as we earnestly
chattered, and chattered.

"Get him out, Mick ... humbabe ... you can do it ... YOU CAN DO IT! Easyout!
easyout!"

Standing out on the field we learned our importance. We were part of a
team, sure, but each of us stood apart, alone. Each of us had a unique role
to fill if we were to be a team, for there were nine of us and nine
different positions.

When the ball was hit, only one of us would reach it, and that player would
be the center of attention; everybody would be watching, the other players,
the spectators. What happened next in the game would be solely his doing.
He was in control of his destiny and the destiny of those around him.

It was the same when your team was at bat, in that tense, electric moment
before the ball was hit and attention shifted from batter to fielder. You
stood alone at home plate waiting for the pitch, the entire team relying
on what you would do.

There was no faking and no hiding. You did what you did in public. Your
performance, your past, was never forgotten. It was etched forever in cold,
hard statistics, facts that could never be challenged.

And those umpires we argued with -- the argument was just another part
of the ritual of baseball. We knew a pitch was not a strike or a ball
because it crossed or didn't cross home plate at a point delineated in the
rule book. It was a strike or a ball because the umpire said it was a strike
or a ball. A baserunner was not out because we tagged him before he reached
the base. He was out because the umpire said he was out.

We learned those things, and more. But we, of course, thought we were only
learning baseball.

Copyright © Dick Meister

Story ID:	2006
Written by:	Dick Meister (bio, link, contact, other stories)
Story type:	Musings, Essays and Such
Location:	San Francisco CA USA
Year:	1945
Person:	me