Tag Archives: slo-pitch

Nine Lives

It’s always been held that cats have nine lives, but a friend of mine, affectionately known as the Cat, must be close to running out.  Just how much longer he’ll be around is beginning to worry me.

He’s been the Cat since well before we both retired, and almost no one calls him by his real name—if they even remember it.  The reasons for the nickname are long-forgotten, although he claims to remember.

“Just look at how I move,” he says.  “I’ve got the grace and power of a big cat.”

big cat

Sometimes he stumbles as he says this.

I was telling some new friends recently about my old pal, a guy who lurches through life’s little lessons, always landing on his feet.  At least, that’s how he sees it.  He’s always boasting of how he demonstrates the feline reflexes and agility that only the truly-gifted athletes have.

Such claims are usually accompanied by a sheepish grin, following, for example, a frantic scramble to retrieve the food he has just spilled off his plate at the buffet table.

My friends were fascinated by my tales of the Cat’s adventures, if somewhat disbelieving.  They asked if he were still alive, and enquired about the escapades he’s endured.  I obliged them by relating a few—all true, as sure as I’m sitting here now.

After deciding to spend winters in the south with his long-suffering wife, he began to participate again in many of the athletic endeavours he had previously given up.  With wanton disregard for the years that have passed, he threw himself recklessly into everything.

For example, there was the time a group of us were playing in an oldtimers’ slow-pitch tournament.  We were there, more for a good time than to win.  Hence, the Cat was batting fourth in our lineup, rather than last.

When he stepped up for his first turn at the plate, he swung so hard at the pitch lobbed by him that we thought he’d screw himself into the dirt.  But, the Cat wasn’t phased.

“What—a—ripple!” he declared admiringly, unwinding himself awkwardly from the bat.  “Did ya see the power behind that swing?  Panther-power, just like a cat!”  He struck out on the next two pitches, but with a mighty swing both times.

Later in the game, however, the Cat did make it to first base—after being hit by a pitch he couldn’t twist away from.  On his way down the line, he attempted to imitate the pigeon-toed run immortalized by Babe Ruth, but with mixed results.  It looked fine until he tripped on an untied shoelace and fell.

safe

“I was gonna try out my home-run trot,” he explained later, “except I remembered I don’t have one.  But, I hope you guys noticed how gracefully I slid into first base when y’all thought I had tripped.  Every move is planned!”

Following our final game of the day, we adjourned to the community pool for a swim, a few drinks, and a cook-out.  The Cat was thirsty, but he didn’t stay that way for long.  By the time we got around to eating, he had definitely been over-served.

Sitting fully erect on an aluminum lawn chair, the fold-up kind, he was holding a plateful of food in his hands.  With glazed eyes and a fixed smile, he stared straight ahead, lips moving wordlessly.  Then, ever so slowly, he toppled sideways, out of his overturning chair, and on to the grass.  Incredibly, he never tipped his plate!  Didn’t spill a morsel!

“I wish I’d been there to see that,” the Cat said later.  “I’m sure I handled it gracefully, just like a cat!”

His full day ended with a swim in the pool, something else he doesn’t really remember.  He was walking back and forth across the shallow end, bent over with his face in the water, wearing a face-mask and snorkel.  The Cat likes to take great risks like that.

Inevitably, he stepped into the area where the pool-floor slopes down to the deep end.  He sank like a stone.  When he bobbed back to the surface, still face down, he drew a huge, shuddering breath through the snorkel tube.

That marked the onset of a great thrashing and splashing, punctuated by whooping and coughing, and wild flapping of arms.  The tube, of course, had filled up with water.

snorkel

It took six of us to get the Cat out of the pool, still clutching the mask and snorkel when we deposited him on the grass.  After a few moments of laboured breathing, he grinned up at the crowd staring down at him.

“Notice how I managed to grab the snorkel before it sank?” he sputtered.  “Just like a cat-fish!”

On another occasion, when we all went roller-skating (some of us wearing inline skates), the Cat sailed onto the floor with great abandon.  He managed to remain upright as long as he was moving forward, but turning was another matter entirely.  Over the first few minutes, he became intimately acquainted with every corner of the skating arena.

His tour de force happened when he was resting for a few minutes, leaning on a railing that separated the main floor from the rest area.  Suddenly, the roller skates on both feet shot forward from under him, plunging him straight down.  His underarms and chin caught on the rail, and he hung there for a moment, legs outstretched, before dropping to the floor.

When he recovered enough to speak, he croaked, “Did ya see how I caught myself there, before I hit the floor?  Like a cat!”

Unbelievably, these were only some of the escapades from which he’s emerged relatively unscathed.  Several years ago, he went river-rafting with his son and a few other lunatics.  One of their favourite activities as they went careening through the white-water rapids, was to fill the bailing-buckets and toss water at each other.

As it was told to me, the Cat forgot to hold on to the bucket on one toss, and it hit another rafter squarely on the shoulder, toppling him out of the raft.  The Cat was quick, though.  With blinding speed, he lunged for his unfortunate victim, missed him by the slimmest of margins, and followed him over the side.

After much floundering and flailing, punctuated by surges of pure panic, the other rafters managed to pluck the two of them from the river.  The Cat was jubilant.

finishing-the-rafting-adventure

“Notice how I went right in after him?” he crowed.  “There was no time to lose!  Poor guy coulda drowned!  Instant response, no hesitation, quick as a cat!”

My favourite of his adventures, however, happened up north, on a winter weekend several years back.  A group of us had gathered at a friend’s farm to boot about on his snowmobiles.

I’m not sure the Cat had driven a snowmobile before, but he approached his designated machine with even more confidence than he usually shows.  Leaping aboard, perhaps assuming it had a neutral gear, he gunned the throttle.  The machine shot forward, the Cat’s head snapped back, and his helmet dropped down over his eyes.  Clawing at it to push it up, he realized he was headed directly for a parked car.

His car!

With his famed, cat-like reflexes, he yanked the handlebars hard to the right, missing the car by a whisker.  As he pulled, however, he fully depressed the throttle under his thumb, and that was his undoing.

Recalling it later, our host said, “He turned away from the car, alright, but then accelerated straight into a tree!  I never saw anything like it!”

snowmobile

The tree put a stop to the brief, wild ride.  The Cat kept moving after the snowmobile stopped, of course, smashing into the cowling and windshield.  Bruises on his chest and a couple of muscle strains were the lasting effects of his thirty-foot expedition.

“Guess I’ve bought a snowmobile,” he observed ruefully, surveying the wreckage later.  He lapsed into rueful silence for awhile, but then brightened considerably.

“Did you guys see how fast I reacted when everybody thought I was gonna hit my car?  I turned that sucker in the nick of time, cool as a big cat!  Every move is planned.”

The Cat’s friends, and they are many, figure he has maybe two of his nine lives left, if that.  We all hope they’re charmed.

Like them, I love the Cat.  But, given his predilection for tempting fate, I make a point of never standing too close to him.

Playing Catch

It’s been a long time since I’ve thrown a baseball around.  I used to do it all the time as a child, playing catch with anyone who would consent to chase after my wild throws.  Even as a younger man—into my mid-forties, actually—I tossed the ball back and forth with a myriad of teammates, all of us chasing visions of grace and glory.

My father was one of my earliest playmates, out on the back lawn.  Struggling to balance my oversized glove on my hand, I marvelled that he could catch the ball barehanded.  Whenever I tried that, it hurt my hands.  So instead, I’d make a stab at each toss with my glove, only to have the ball more often than not bounce off and hit me in the forehead.  That hurt, too, but I was determined to at least look like a ballplayer.

We spent a lot of hours playing catch, my dad and I, but never too long at any one time.  When he wanted to quit, he’d start throwing harder and harder until I suggested we take a rest.  After all, I only had one forehead.  My early school pictures show me with a round, red mark above my eyebrows.

ï÷

My neighbourhood pals were faithful playmates, too.  Two of us could while away a whole afternoon, just throwing and catching, often fantasizing that we were making remarkable plays on some distant major-league outfield.  If there were three or four of us, we’d play “running bases”, where the runners would attempt to steal from one base to the other without being tagged out.  It was not allowed to have two runners on one base, so when one guy took off, the other had to hotfoot it in the other direction.  Once in a while, there’d be a tremendous collision in the middle of the base-path.

If five or more of us were gathered, a favourite game was “500”, usually in a park or schoolyard.  One player would toss the ball in the air and strike it with his bat, while the rest of us would mill around in the outfield trying to catch it.  Fifty points were awarded for successfully fielding a grounder, seventy-five points for a one-hopper, and one hundred for catching a line-drive or fly ball.  The first guy to reach five hundred points would take over at bat.  The batter who didn’t want to yield his spot too quickly always tried to hit a lot of grounders.

Collisions in the outfield were a hazard, particularly on long flies.  For self-preservation we took to calling for the ball, as in “I’ve got it!  It’s mine!”  Anyone who called off the other players, but then missed the catch, lost the equivalent points.  I think that’s where I first learned the concept of negative numbers.

Younger kids could play this game with us, but only if we were shorthanded.  Generally, they just weren’t good enough.  I remember to this day the first time my younger brother played.  I patiently explained (as patiently as an older brother can) that he’d have to call for the ball so as to avoid potential injury.  When the first fly ball came his way, looming ever larger as it dropped out of the sky toward him, he settled under it, planted his feet…and then, to my horror, turned away from it.

“Yours!” he shouted.  The ball bounced to a stop on the grass.  And my brother decided he didn’t want to play anymore.

playing 500

Another game we played a lot was “Work-ups”.  When we got to school in the morning, we’d race for the ball diamond, grabbing our positions in the sequence we arrived.  The pecking-order ran from batter, four of them, all the way down to last-outfielder.  There could be as many as seven of those.  As each batter made an out, he’d trot to the outfield while everyone else moved up one position.  Third base was the first infield slot, followed by shortstop, second base, first base, pitcher, and catcher.  It often took a long time to become one of the batters.

 When the bell sounded to start classes, someone would instantly yell, “Same positions at recess!”  This was usually one of the guys who had worked his way into the infield, and didn’t want to risk losing his spot if he was late getting back to the diamond.

Although I was far from being a gifted athlete, I was good enough to play with guys a year or two older.  Guys who were bigger and faster.  Guys who got to the diamond to stake their positions before I did.  Consequently, I spent a lot of time patrolling the outfield in these schoolyard games, only rarely making it to the infield, and almost never to the batter’s box.

But I think that paid off for me in the long run.  As many of us began playing for real teams, both hardball and fastball—all the way to middle-age for many of us—I became a pretty good centre-fielder.  I was fast and could track a ball right off the bat.  I was never much of a hitter, though, so it was my defensive prowess that kept me in the line-up.  Secretly, I would have preferred to play second-base, mainly because I didn’t have a strong throwing arm.  If a fly ball got past me, the batter could scamper a good way around the bases before I got the ball back to the infield.

Nobody ever said about me, “Watch this kid’s arm!  He’s got a gun out there!”  Instead, I was known as a ball-hawking centerfielder with a second baseman’s arm.  I got fairly good at three-bouncing the ball to my cut-off man.  On one ignominious occasion, my throw actually rolled to a stop on the grass before it reached my guy.

But as I said earlier, it’s been a long time since I threw a baseball anywhere.  The teammates I once played with are boys no more.  My wife, who used to play shortstop for a women’s team, is into golf now.  The broken nose she suffered on a bad bounce those many years ago helped convince her to take up another sport.  My two daughters are grown and gone.  Four of my grandchildren are old enough to play with me, but their game is soccer.  They can do more with a ball using their feet than I can with my hands.

I miss it, though.  There’s something about the feel of a baseball, the smell of the leather glove, the satisfying thok! as the ball smacks into the webbed pocket.  It evokes wonderful memories of long-ago days.  Perhaps it’s just an older man’s yearning for his youth, but it’s real, nonetheless.  Watching baseball on television is no substitute; it’s the playing of the game that counts.

Recently I decided to get out there, even if by myself, and re-live the experiences I treasure.  Alone on the grass, I tossed the ball high in the air, over and over again.  Joyously at first, I settled under each ball as it came back down, deciding whether to try the basket-catch made famous by Willie Mays, an over-the-shoulder catch such as I used to make routinely, or even a behind-the-back catch.

But I had to quit when my forehead got too sore.