Skeeter

John Updike's poem "Baseball" evokes a moment in my life that could come back to me tinged with mild humiliation, or at least blushing humility, but thankfully it just makes me smile. Recalling the skill and difficulty involved in the deceptively simple-seeming act of snagging a fly ball, Updike wrote:

...circle in the outfield
straining to get a bead
on a small black dot
a city block or more high,
a dark star that could fall
on your head like a leaden meteor.

It was an early summer Sunday, the Nashville Sounds were hosting an afternoon game at Hershel Greer Stadium, and I had just settled into my seat to watch batting and infield practice before the game's scheduled 2 pm start. (We don't do that very often anymore, to my regret. I was still a single guy on my own recognizance back then.) A Sounds staffer approached with an offer any sensible person of my general athletic competence would have declined. I accepted. So that's why, a few minutes before 2, I found myself in center field as another Sounds staffer pointed an up-ended pitching machine in my vicinity and proceeded to launch a succession of black-dotted baseballs into the high sky above me. A city block? Might as well have been a city away. I did manage to catch one of them, but all of my attempts were successful from the team's point of view: they elicited loud crowd reactions. Howls of derisive laughter. General merriment. And in spite of it all, I had a blast doing it. As Updike says later in the poem, it is our birthright as Americans to fail spectacularly.

I had not quite disgraced the player whose glove I borrowed for the contest: the one and only "Skeeter" Barnes, a very good career minor leaguer who had many cups of coffee in The Show with Cincinnati, St. Louis, Montreal, and Detroit. You could look it up.

But you'll have to take my word for what Skeeter said to me as I returned his glove to him and hustled back to my hiding place in the grandstand. "It's not as easy as it looks, is it?" No, sir. It's not.