A-Rod and the Boys of Autumn

“You see, you spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball, and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.” ~Jim Bouton, Ball Four, 1970

The field is green but we are mostly gray. Still, every February as the big league pitchers and catchers are reporting to spring training, we gather on high school fields across Texas and the southern tier of states. As spring eases its way northward past the Mason-Dixon, even more us grab our stiff gloves and bottles of Motrin and head for the baseball diamond.

We are the boys of autumn. There are tens of thousands of us playing in Men’s Senior Baseball Leagues across America. The little leaguers inside of us will not surrender to time nor acknowledge our faltering skills. Even at our age, baseball still has redemptive power and the spring is rich with prospects for success, a big win, a fine catch, or the clutch hit.

“I thought about not playing this year,” one of the guys said as we waited for the skipper’s instructions. “But it’s like giving up on something. I can’t seem to do it. I oughta grow up.”

“Don’t do it, fool,” the right fielder said. “There’s nothin’ but TV and beer left, if you do.”

Before we began to toss the ball and warm up at our first practice of the year, the skipper called us over to talk near the pitcher’s mound. Our workouts are conducted on a high school field that had the day before lost its 63 year-old football coach to a heart attack.

“Look, y’all.” The skipper got quiet and looked off at teenagers playing baseball on a nearby field. A stout former Marine, public emotion was not his style. “Coach was my friend. I hated to lose him. Worked with him for years. I just want to make sure y’all are all healthy. Go get check ups. See a cardiologist.”

Not exactly the pep talk they were hearing down in Lakeland or over in the Cactus League, I suspect.

“You new guys,” one of the other outfielders said, “Who don’t know me. I’m an EMT and work on Lifeflight. Anything happens, I know what to do, and I’ll have a defibrillator in my truck.”

I wondered if this meant we were going to skip the wind sprints. If it weren’t so serious, I would have laughed at a pre-practice talk about heart problems but I looked around at my teammates and more than a few of us looked better equipped and practiced at beer and chips in front of the TV than we did at shagging fly balls. Turning the channel looked more likely than turning a double play.

The other topic of conversation as we played catch was A-Rod. His cheating had been a personal insult to the creaking athletes waiting for the muscles to loosen and the kick in of the ibuprofen.

“I’m not even a Yankees fan, any more,” our catcher said. “I’ve been with them since I grew up in Yonkers. To hell with them and A-Rod.”

“Hey, man, he didn’t do anything other than what everybody else does,” our ace pitcher argued. “You wanna compete, you gotta juice.”

“Screw him. He pissed on the game.”

The game was what mattered out here under a warm February sun on a Texas Sunday afternoon. A-Rod had assaulted our vision of baseball’s purity as if he had stolen a virginal innocence. Maybe all the Yankee’s superstar had lost were a few of us over 45 ballplayers that had been fans and had managed to hang onto our naiveté for far too many years.

“I don’t think he gets it,” the shortstop explained as he started long toss. “How can he not know what the game means to people like us and even little leaguers? If a guy like him cheats, what’s the point? He had it all and it still wasn’t enough. Screw him.”

“It’s the culture, pal. The culture. He’s no different than the rest of ‘em.”

“To hell with that. That’s an excuse. You’d bust your own kid’s ass if they gave you that as an excuse for anything. He’s a cheater.”

“Yeah, I reckon.”

There was not one of us who would not have given a ransom of gold to trade places with A-Rod, just for a game, to see what he saw, feel what he felt. The heft of the bat must be nothing in his hands and his eyes have to perceive the spin of the 95 mile per hour ball. The beauty of what he does, regardless of how he does it, intoxicates all baseball lovers.

“Like I said,” the catcher repeated. “Screw him.”

The gloves started to pop as our arms loosened. Grumpy old guys were smiling and stretching hamstrings, getting ready for batting practice and taking infield. The game was still untouched and eternal. Nothing A-Rod or McGuire or Tejada or anyone else did was going to change the feelings of the boys of autumn. We had work to do.

Our first game was in six weeks.

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