While digging among our sports gear to find my daughter a frisbee, I found a baseball that took me back in time, 31 years and 5 days, to a Thursday night little league game, when I was 11, at which it was given to me.
I was no stand-out as a little leaguer. I had my moments in the outfield, catching a pop-up here and there. But my greatest defensive contribution was probably my effective chatter (hey-batta-batta, schWING!), while on offense my Eddie Gaedel size strike zone put me on base with a walk much more often than my bat ever did.
But on this particular Thursday night, I had a fine sports moment. My team, the Orioles, had a one run lead going into the final inning. There were two outs and the Phillies had a runner on third. The batter hit a fast grounder that might have been an easy game-ender, had it not got past our first basemen. But it did, and it instead rolled to me in right field (the traditional position for the most skilled little leaguers, naturally).
It would have been understandable to hear a few sighs from our meager crowd of parents, looking at the prospect of extra innings should the runner on third score and tie the game (were there more runners on base? I don’t remember, let’s say there were and two runs would have meant a loss). The play was at home, and I made the throw to our catcher ‘Tank’, and it somehow got there in time and on target. The runner was out at home, game over, Orioles win 11-10.
In the dugout, the coach asked the team, “Who gets the game ball?”, to which they responded in unison, “Casey!”. In recent years I’ve re-discovered a love of baseball that I haven’t had since those days as a little leaguer. From my five or six years of little league baseball, there are only a few such memories. This was one of the best.