Can the Game Last a Little Longer?
© 1987, Reprinted 2002, Steven L. Campbell
Today’s softball game wasn’t unusual from any other. We were losing. I had lost count of the runs the other team had scored against us. Standing in right field, I watched our pitcher Corky Johnson become frustrated and angry as he lost control of his pitches. The players of the opposing team were scoring runs without hitting the ball. The walk-after-walk repetition of batters moving around the diamond shaped infield brought on a déjà vu from my childhood.
Age was creeping up on Corky and the rest of us, and our conversations lately had become reflective of a time gone by, of a time when Corky’s underhanded fastball used to shoot from a high-powered cannon. We were a winning team during those days. But he had lost that fabulous arm and we no longer won championship games. And with time wearing us down, we no longer had a bullpen to relieve our old star. Besides, none of us had the heart to take him out. That would be his decision to make.
Personally, I didn’t care whether we won or lost. I loved playing the game and being a part of the action, just like when I was a kid, when the most important thing was putting on a uniform that announced to the world that I was good enough to be a ballplayer.
Because baseball was such a popular sport while I was growing up in my hometown, crowds of excited families would flock to the Little League ballpark every Saturday morning during the summer to watch the games. The bleachers would be bulging and buzzing with parents. Gleeful mothers waved at and cheered on their little sluggers, their printed dresses dancing like colorful flags in the summer breeze. Beer-bellied fathers in mustard and ketchup stained T-shirts swapped stories of little white whoppers about the great plays their future major leaguers had made. And this would go on throughout the game, the better teams winning and the losing teams feeling dejected but looking forward to next week and hoping for a win.
My team and I were often looking forward to the next week. On my team, I would stand in right field and watch our pitchers walk the other teams to victory. Eventually, I began wishing for instead of four bases to circle, winning teams were required to have six, or eight, or ten. It wouldn’t have stopped our pitchers from walking a lot of batters, but it would have slowed down the scoring and would have given us a little longer to play before forfeiting to the embarrassing ten-run rule.
But not all our pitchers were terrible at throwing strikes. Corky Johnson was our ace. When he pitched, we outfielders could practically lie down and stare at the clouds. When he didn’t pitch, he played catcher to the weaker pitchers. One memorial play that stands tall in my memory is of the time I won a game and gained the nickname Gunner. I prevented the tying runner from scoring from second base on a single by zipping a bullet of a throw to home plate and nailing the final out. Because Corky was the catcher who received my throw and assisted with the out, he talked long about that throw and we bonded for a lasting friendship.
When we graduated from Little League and Pony League and finally high school, we joined the county’s softball league and for twenty-six of the next twenty-nine years we had the best team in the county. I threw out many more runners at home plate and Corky fanned plenty of batters with his fastball. Those were wonderful times for us, but inevitable in life, we began losing our edge and slowing down. Aches and pains afflicted us, and teams of younger players began winning the trophies.
I’m no longer referred to as Gunner and Corky’s best games are talked about in the past tense. We who played together during the golden age of our youth look at each other now with smiles as we remember the way things used to be.
So it was with a mixture of pride and melancholy that I stood today in right field wishing the other team had more than four bases to circle. Anything to make the game last a little longer before we had to forfeit to the embarrassing ten-run rule.
