Pitchers and Catchers, Part I

By the end of February, you can hear the thwack of horsehide on leather in your sleep, you can smell freshly cut-grass in the manicured field of your mind, you can sense that it has been built and they are coming. It’s baseball season, baby.

Unfortunately for me, I am a Mets fan, and my skin has grown so thick these last few years that nothing you can say will hurt me. The Wilpons have taken care of that for you. But this isn’t about fandom, today. This is about putting the bat on the ball (or, to be more accurate, as journalists should be, putting the bat near the ball).

I thought I had quit baseball in eighth grade, the day after the nightmare of — how can I say — “batting" against Jim Donahoe. Small was I of stature, and not so he. And when I was in eighth grade, rec baseball in my town pitted combined eighth/ninth grade teams against one another. As a ninth grader, Jim was about 6’2, 180 lbs. I was about the size of the noun that begins this sentence in both height and bulk.

It wasn’t just the size difference that scared me on that fateful May day. I’d always been small, but thanks to my bunting skills, I was a good leadoff hitter. One time, in fourth grade, I’d even hit a foul ball to the outfield off Demaree Barnes. So, yeah, I had had some success.

But the day we played Jim’s team, he said to me, “McAteer, I’m gonna hit ya.” Now, our mothers were pals from church, where he and I had played CYO basketball together and Jim was a good guy, so I knew he didn’t mean it. Or did he?

Regardless of his intent, I knew when I stepped up to that plate that I couldn’t look scared, that I had to put up a fight. So when he let go of that first fastball, I closed my eyes and swung as hard as I could. The only problem was that my front foot, instead of stepping toward the pitcher’s mound, swung to a point almost directly behind me, and I stepped so far from the plate that, if I had been physically mature enough to have had a groin, I surely would have snapped it in half.

Two similar swings followed — Jim could have thrown the ball over the backstop and I would still have been swinging, because my eyes were shut so tight. Message delivered, message received: farewell, baseball. I hardly knew ye.

Years passed. John Stearns gave way to Gary Carter, Willie Montanez to Keith Hernandez, Bruce Boisclair to Darryl Strawberry and Mookie Wilson’s grounder dribbled between Bill Buckner’s legs. Maybe, if that miracle could happen, a miracle could happen for me. Maybe, just maybe, I could hit a baseball again.

Don’t fret: in Part Dos of Pitchers and Catchers, you’ll almost find resolution to this thriller cliffhanger ending.