and other questions. I also think that, for the time being, we should all be extremely cautious when we leave our homes. Remember: “a Spotsylvania County snake” is out there somewhere.
Here I am performing the difficult “Walking the Dog” maneuver with the Lawn Rangers, a world-famous precision lawnmower-and-broom drill team to which I belong. We perform each year at the Areola, Illinois, Broom Corn Festival. Our membership ranks are strictly limited to anybody who shows up . (Photo by David H. Spencer)
OUR NATIONAL
PASTIME
A s I ponder the start of yet another baseball season, what is left of my mind drifts back to the fall of 1960, when I was a student at Harold C. Crittenden Junior High (“Where the Leaders of Tomorrow Are Developing the Acne of Today”).
The big baseball story that year was the World Series between the New York Yankees and the Pittsburgh Pirates. Today, for sound TV viewership reasons, all World Series games are played after most people, including many of the players, have gone to bed. But in 1960 the games had to be played in the daytime, because the electric light had not been invented yet. Also, back then the players and owners had not yet discovered the marketing benefits of sporadically canceling entire seasons.
The result was that in those days young people were actually interested in baseball, unlike today’s young people, who are much more interested in basketball, football, soccer, and downloading dirty pictures from the Internet. But in my youth, baseball ruled. Almost all of us boys played inLittle League, a character-building experience that helped me develop a personal relationship with God.
“God,” I would say, when I was standing in deep right field—the coach put me in right field only because it was against the rules to put me in Sweden, where I would have done less damage to the team—”please please PLEASE don’t let the ball come to me.”
But of course God enjoys a good prank as much as the next infallible deity, which is why, when He heard me pleading with Him, He always took time out from His busy schedule to make sure the next batter hit a towering blast that would, upon reentering the Earth’s atmosphere, come down directly where I would have been standing, if I had stood still, which I never did. I lunged around cluelessly in frantic, random circles, so that the ball always landed a minimum of forty feet from where I wound up standing, desperately thrusting out my glove, which was a Herb Score model that, on my coach’s recommendation, I had treated with neat’s-foot oil so it would be supple. Looking back, I feel bad that innocent neats had to sacrifice their feet for the sake of my glove. I would have been just as effective, as a fielder, if I’d been wearing a bowling shoe on my hand, or a small aquarium.
But even though I stunk at it, I was into baseball. My friends and I collected baseball cards, the kind that came in a little pack with a dusty, pale-pink rectangle of linoleum-textured World War II surplus bubble gum that was far less edible than the cards themselves. Like every other male my age who collected baseball cards as a boy, I now firmly believe that at one time I had the original rookie cards of Mickey Mantle, Jackie Robinson, Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Jim Thorpe, Daniel Boone, Goliath, etc., and that I’d be able tosell my collection for $163 million today except my mom threw it out.
My point is that we cared deeply about baseball back then, which meant that we were passionate about the 1960 Pirates-Yankees World Series matchup. My class was evenly divided between those who were Pirate fans and those who were complete morons. (I never have cared for the Yankees, and for a very sound reason: The Yankees are evil.)
We followed every pitch of every game. It wasn’t easy, because the weekday games started when we were still in school, which for some idiot reason was not called off for the World Series. This meant that certain students—I
Here I am performing the difficult “Walking the Dog” maneuver with the Lawn Rangers, a world-famous precision lawnmower-and-broom drill team to which I belong. We perform each year at the Areola, Illinois, Broom Corn Festival. Our membership ranks are strictly limited to anybody who shows up . (Photo by David H. Spencer)
OUR NATIONAL
PASTIME
A s I ponder the start of yet another baseball season, what is left of my mind drifts back to the fall of 1960, when I was a student at Harold C. Crittenden Junior High (“Where the Leaders of Tomorrow Are Developing the Acne of Today”).
The big baseball story that year was the World Series between the New York Yankees and the Pittsburgh Pirates. Today, for sound TV viewership reasons, all World Series games are played after most people, including many of the players, have gone to bed. But in 1960 the games had to be played in the daytime, because the electric light had not been invented yet. Also, back then the players and owners had not yet discovered the marketing benefits of sporadically canceling entire seasons.
The result was that in those days young people were actually interested in baseball, unlike today’s young people, who are much more interested in basketball, football, soccer, and downloading dirty pictures from the Internet. But in my youth, baseball ruled. Almost all of us boys played inLittle League, a character-building experience that helped me develop a personal relationship with God.
“God,” I would say, when I was standing in deep right field—the coach put me in right field only because it was against the rules to put me in Sweden, where I would have done less damage to the team—”please please PLEASE don’t let the ball come to me.”
But of course God enjoys a good prank as much as the next infallible deity, which is why, when He heard me pleading with Him, He always took time out from His busy schedule to make sure the next batter hit a towering blast that would, upon reentering the Earth’s atmosphere, come down directly where I would have been standing, if I had stood still, which I never did. I lunged around cluelessly in frantic, random circles, so that the ball always landed a minimum of forty feet from where I wound up standing, desperately thrusting out my glove, which was a Herb Score model that, on my coach’s recommendation, I had treated with neat’s-foot oil so it would be supple. Looking back, I feel bad that innocent neats had to sacrifice their feet for the sake of my glove. I would have been just as effective, as a fielder, if I’d been wearing a bowling shoe on my hand, or a small aquarium.
But even though I stunk at it, I was into baseball. My friends and I collected baseball cards, the kind that came in a little pack with a dusty, pale-pink rectangle of linoleum-textured World War II surplus bubble gum that was far less edible than the cards themselves. Like every other male my age who collected baseball cards as a boy, I now firmly believe that at one time I had the original rookie cards of Mickey Mantle, Jackie Robinson, Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Jim Thorpe, Daniel Boone, Goliath, etc., and that I’d be able tosell my collection for $163 million today except my mom threw it out.
My point is that we cared deeply about baseball back then, which meant that we were passionate about the 1960 Pirates-Yankees World Series matchup. My class was evenly divided between those who were Pirate fans and those who were complete morons. (I never have cared for the Yankees, and for a very sound reason: The Yankees are evil.)
We followed every pitch of every game. It wasn’t easy, because the weekday games started when we were still in school, which for some idiot reason was not called off for the World Series. This meant that certain students—I
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