‘Let’s play ball,’ the umpire invites — an invitation that umpires have been extending to Little League players for fifty years now — and Dan Bouchard, York’s catcher and leadoff hitter, steps into the box. Roger goes to the set position and prepares to throw the first pitch of the 1989 State Championship game.
Five days earlier:
Dave and I take the Bangor West pitching staff up to Old Town. Dave wants them all to know how the mound feels when they come up here to play for real. With Mike Pelkey gone, the staff consists of Matt Kinney (his triumph over Lewiston still four days in the future), Owen King, Roger Fisher, and Mike Arnold. We get off to a late start, and as the four boys take turns throwing,
Dave and I sit in the visitors’ dugout, watching the boys as the light slowly leaves the summer sky.
On the mound, Matt Kinney is throwing one hard curve after another to J. J. Fiddler. In the home dugout, across the diamond, the three other pitchers, their workouts finished, are sitting on the bench with a few teammates who have come along for the ride. Although the talk comes to me only in snatches, I can tell it’s mostly about school — a subject that comes up with greater and greater frequency during the last month of summer vacation. They talk about teachers past and teachers future, passing on the anecdotes that form an important part of their preadolescent mythology: the teacher who blew her cool during the last month of the school year because her oldest son was in a car accident; the crazy grammar-school coach (they make him sound like a
lethal combination of Jason, Freddy, and Leatherface); the science teacher who supposedly once threw a kid against his locker so hard the kid was knocked out; the home-room teacher who will give you lunch money if you forget, or if you just say you forgot. It is junior high apocrypha, powerful stuff, and they tell it with great relish as twilight closes in.
Between the two dugouts, the baseball is a white streak as Matt throws it again and again. His rhythm is a kind of hypnosis: Set, wind, and fire. Set, wind, and fire. Set, wind, and fire. J.J.’s mitt cracks with each reception.
‘What are they going to take with them?’ I ask Dave. ‘When this is all over, what are they going to take with them? What difference does it make for them, do you think?’
The look on Dave’s face is surprised and considering. Then he turns back to look at Matt and smiles. ‘They’re going to take each other,’ he says.
It is not the answer I have been expecting — far from it. There was an article about Little League in the paper today — one of those think pieces that usually run in the ad-littered wasteland between the obituaries and the horoscopes. This one summarized the findings of a sociologist who spent a season monitoring Little Leaguers, and then followed their progress for a short time thereafter. He wanted to find out if the game did what Little League boosters claim it does — that is, pass on such old-fashioned American values as fair play, hard work, and the virtue of team effort. The fellow who did the study reported that it did, sort of. But he also reported that Little League did little to change the individual lives of the players. School troublemakers were still school troublemakers when classes started again in September; good scholars were still good scholars; the class clown (read Fred Moore) who took June and July off to play some serious Little League ball was still the class clown after Labor Day. The sociologist found exceptions; exceptional play sometimes bred exceptional changes. But in the main this fellow found that the boys were about the same coming out as they were going in.
I suppose my confusion at Dave’s answer grows out of my knowledge of him — he is an almost fanatic booster of Little League. I’m sure he must have read the article, and I have been expecting him to refute the sociologist’s conclusions, using the question as a springboard.
Instead, he has delivered one of the hoariest chestnuts of the sports world.
On the mound, Matt continues to throw to J.J., harder than ever now. He has found that mystic place pitchers call ‘the groove,’ and even though this is only an informal practice session to familiarize the boys with the field, he is reluctant to quit.
I ask Dave if he can explain a little more fully, but I do so in a gingerly way, half expecting that I am on the verge of hitting a hitherto unsuspected jackpot of cliches: night owls never fly in the daytime; winners never quit and quitters never win; use it, don’t lose it. Maybe even, God save us, a little Hummm, baby.
‘Look at them,’ Dave says, still smiling. Something in that smile suggests he may be reading my mind. ‘Take a good look.’ I do. There are perhaps half a dozen of them on the bench, still laughing and telling junior high school war stories. One of them breaks out of the discussion long enough to ask Matt Kinney to throw the curve, and Matt does — one with a particularly nasty break. The boys on the bench all laugh and cheer.
‘Look at those two guys,’ Dave says, pointing. ‘One of them comes from a good home. The other one, not so good.’ He tosses some sunflower seeds into his mouth and then indicates another boy. ‘Or that one. He was born in one of the worst sections of Boston. Do you think he’d know a kid like Matt Kinney or Kevin Rochefort, if it wasn’t for Little League? They won’t be in the same classes at junior high, wouldn’t talk to each other in the halls, wouldn’t have the slightest idea the other one was alive.’ Matt throws another curve; this one so nasty J.J. can’t
handle it. It rolls all the way to the backstop, and as J.J. gets up and trots after it the boys on the bench cheer again.
‘But this changes all that,’ Dave says. ‘These boys have played together and won their district together. Some come from families that are well-to-do, and there’s a couple from families as poor as used dishwater, but when they put on the uniform and cross the chalk they leave all that on the other side. Your school grades can’t help you between the chalk, or what your parents do, or what they don’t do. Between the chalk, what happens is the kids’ business. They tend it, too, as well as they can. All the rest — ‘ Dave makes a shooing gesture with one hand. ‘All left behind.
And they know it, too. Just look at them if you don’t believe me, because the proof is right there.’
I look across the field and see my own kid and one of the boys Dave has mentioned sitting side-by-side, heads together, talking something over seriously. They look at each other in amazement, then break out laughing.
‘They played together,’ Dave repeats. ‘They practiced together, day after day, and that’s probably even more important than the games. Now they’re going into the State Tournament.
They’ve even got a chance to win it. I don’t think they will, but that doesn’t matter. They’re going to be there, and that’s enough. Even if Lewiston knocks them out in the first round, that’s enough.
Because it’s something they did together between those chalk lines. They’re going to remember that. They’re going to remember how that felt.’
‘Between the chalk,’ I say, and all at once I get it — the penny drops. Dave Mansfield believes this old chestnut. Not only that, he can afford to believe it. Such cliches may be hollow in the big leagues, where some player or other tests positive for drugs every week or two and the free agent is God, but this is not the big leagues. This is where Anita Bryant sings the national anthem over battered PA speakers that have been wired to the chain-link behind the dugouts. This is where, instead of paying admission , to watch the game, you put something in the hat when it comes around. If you want to, of course. None of these kids are going to spend the off-season playing fantasy baseball in Florida with overweight businessmen, or signing expensive baseball cards at memorabilia shows, or touring the chicken circuit at two thousand bucks a night. When it’s all free, Dave’s smile suggests, they have to give the cliches back and let you own them again, fair and square. You are once more allowed to believe in Red Barber, John Tunis, and the Kid from Tomkinsville. Dave Mansfield believes what he is saying about how the boys are equal between the chalk, and he has a right to believe, because he and Neil and Saint have patiently led these kids to a point where they believe it. They do believe it; I can see it on their faces as they sit in the dugout on the far side of the diamond. It could be why Dave Mansfield and all the other Dave Mansfields across the country keep on doing this, year after year. It’s a free pass. Not back into childhood — it doesn’t work that way — but back into the dream.