If we’re lucky, we have a sport, maybe more than one. If we’re truly fortunate, no matter what our skill level, we get to play it. My dad was an eclectic fellow, an expert thoroughbred handicapper who actually made a nice side living playing the ponies. Up until his 70s, Pops was also a crackerjack tournament ping pong player. I spent decades getting creamed by the guy and I was a pretty decent player.
As I sneak up on middle age, I smile, remembering yester-jockyears, when I could stand under a basketball hoop, jump up and grab the rim with two hands. I played for Addidas for about five years. I’m a wretched golfer, pretty darn good horseman in both English and Western, a cultural disgrace to my homeland of Poland in that I can’t bowl. I was a so-so fencer, laughable boxer and a pretty darn good softball player.
Slo-pitch resulted in yet another death threat from my former boss, then-Signal Editor Ruth Newhall. I was sports editor here 50 years ago and times were different. Ruth was inarguably both the most intelligent and ferocious woman to stalk Planet Earth. You’d be wiser to mess with Darth Vader’s mom. This was also the period where employers, like Mongol emperors, could, with impunity, threaten underlings with Death.
I spent languid Sundays, competing in A-league slo-pitch. It was the last game of the season and we were playing this gang of mutant ex-college and ex-MLB players. They were undefeated, scoring about 5,003.2 runs per game. Our squad? We were as harmlessly inept as St. Bernard puppies, with holes in our pants for puppy tails. Our team name was fittingly borrowed from the Shakespearean jockstrap worn on the outside — The Codpiece.
Come Monday morning, I had to face the formidable Mrs. Newhall with the toughest question of my entire journalism career.
“Ruth?” I asked. “If someone threw a no-hitter in local SCV A-league slo-pitch softball, against a bunch of ex-pros and ex-college all-stars, would that be a legitimate sports story?”
More than See’s Candy, more than her Model T Ford, more than catching errors in dictionary or encyclopedia, Ruth loved threatening me. She didn’t come out and say, “If that isn’t the Blankety-Blank-damn dumbest question for a sports editor to ask,” her dagger-shooting eyes and actual punching me certainly drove the point home. In disgust for wasting her time, she offered, “Of course it is,” the “You Big Stupid-Stupid” silent but implied.
I took a deep breath. “And, Ruth? If the person who hurled this no-hitter in slo-pitch softball was (wince) me, Signal Sports Editor, is it (gulp) still a legitimate story?”
I’ve never met anyone who could staple a silent, “Damn you to hell” at the end of sentences like Ruth.
“Be,” she said, “careful.”
Please. All you readers, sing the chorus with me — “…damn you to hell just for you being you …”
In baseball or softball, sometimes, all the stars and planets line up perfectly. In 1902, a catcher for the minor league Corsicana Oil Citys hit eight home runs in one game against the Texarkana Casketmakers, a feat no one has come close to copying. Jay Clarke went up to the Bigs and played 15 seasons or 506 games during the Babe Ruth era where he hit — total — six home runs. Footnote? Clarke was the first catcher in the majors to wear shin guards.
I mentioned that my softball history-maker was the last game of the season and the mutants had first placed locked. It was the early game — 10 a.m. Pretty much everyone, both sides, was hung over. Greg Garrett, the former Hart High star hurler and major leaguer for the Angels and Reds, was playing. At that point, Greg was long retired and was literally one of the strongest senior citizens anywhere, setting 15 world powerlifting records. I saw the guy once hit a home run OUT of Santa Clarita Park, across the street, across the median and over the house about 10 million feet or kilometers away. The ball’s not come down yet.
A nothing game, Greg and his testosterone-rich buddies weren’t just aiming for the non-existent fence, but the “Welcome to Palmdale” sign. They kept popping up. WAY up. Around the fifth of seven innings, players started counting on their fingers. I had a no-hitter going. Greg & Co. had spent the entire game trying to down airliners, then, trying to stop the no-hitter, were just swinging girlish for a base hit. No one reached first. It wasn’t just a no-hitter. It was a perfect game.
I quickly typed up a short account of the epic contest, being careful to hide my insufferable smirk because Ruth sat across from me, a feeble bunt away. She’d read, chuckle, covering it with a “… you’re not funny, one bit, and, “you’re fired. Again.” I might have described the pitcher (me) as the, “… powerful Polish sun god of the mound, with curly golden locks bouncing playfully in the Santa Clarita morning summer sun.”
Ruth threatened that if I ever threw another no-hitter, I’d be covering it for another paper.
It is nothing less than a gift from God to play your sport. Darts in a pub. Ice hockey. Boxing. Karate. Kayaking. (Lawn darts?) Billiards. To sweat (or not). To feel your body express itself in glorious, physical expression. To run, jump, catch, even bump a nose or scrape a shin. I wonder if God Himself is laughing in joy through us, maybe even eavesdropping over our stories and ill-fitting softball uniforms with the inappropriate team names with the sexual innuendos.
We got to play ball.
Did you guys know that the Oakland A’s Hall of Famer, Jose Canseco, used to play slo-pitch out here, at Central Park? More batters up and softball stats — next Friday in Part II …
Pick up “Naked Came the Novelist,” John Boston’s long-awaited sequel to “Naked Came the Sasquatch,” at JohnBoston-Books.com. Also available are other fine books, including his two-part “SCV Monsters” series. A lifelong SCV resident with 119 major writing awards and nearly 12,000 columns, Boston is Earth history’s most prolific humorist and satirist.
