Teaching the Pig to Dance: A Memoir by Fred Thompson Page B

good guy simply has nothing to do with it. We learn that “winning is not the most important thing, it’s the only thing,” and other foolish sayings. The discerning parent looks on somewhat sadly and is reminded that God seems to distribute talent, oftentimes, to the most undeserving—meaning anybody’s kid but yours. As we play the game and watch the pros, a lot of it just doesn’t make any sense. Often a skinny little guy can throw the ball harder than the bigger, more muscular guy. Baseball reminds me of those mysterious ancient monuments that we see on the Discovery Channel that are perfectly aligned with heavenly bodies so as to produce sundials and perfect patterns that can only be seen from great heights, fostering speculation that the world was visited many years ago by aliens from another planet. In baseball, the bases are spaced so that countless plays involving runners of different speeds are decided by a fraction of a second.
    A batter can hit the ball hard—in fact, perfectly—but right at a fielder, making an out. Another batter can hit a weak pop-up, but perfectly placed by accident, and gets a hit, raising his all-important batting average. We assume that the gods of baseball have it all worked out and that there’s a rough justice to it all that we aren’t meant to understand. So, on second thought, in many respects the metaphor-mongers are right: Baseball is a lot like life.
    The photographs in the weekly
Democrat Union
, Lawrenceburg’sonly newspaper, displayed the first organized Little League baseball teams to ever take the field in Lawrenceburg. There I was, a proud, somewhat chubby, twelve-year-old member of the Lions in my own ill-fitting uniform. The “Roaring Lions” we were christened by “The Baldheaded Brothers,” the photography shop in town. (Talk about marketing savvy. I still remember what they called themselves over fifty years later. Somewhat wasted, I suppose, since as I said, they were the only photographers in town.) The Roaring Lions roared to victory twice that season. Weak at the plate, we offset it by total incompetence in the field. Not exactly deep in talent to begin with, we lost our best player by far early in the year. After our tryouts for team selection, it seemed that our manager had used most of his allotted points on “draft day” on a real potential all-star named Everette, leaving him with fewer points to select the rest of the team. But Everette, perhaps the best hitter in the league and one of the best pitchers, could do it all. However, the coach, having put all his eggs in one basket, ran afoul of a common country code. You don’t fuss on another man’s kid—especially in public, which is what our manager did one night when Everette made a baserunning error and was called out. I suppose the manager was especially disappointed because he realized that Everette was probably the only kid on the team who had a real chance of getting on base. The criticism wasn’t really a big deal except to Everette’s family. Everette’s dad came out onto the field, got his boy, and left,leaving us to stew in our own mediocrity. The result: two wins, and many, many more losses.
    The manager assigned me to third base—for no apparent reason, I suppose, other than I probably looked like I could throw the ball across the diamond to first base. The coach was partially correct. I could throw the ball in the
general direction
of first base. Just about any position would have been fine with me; I’d gotten over my disappointment of missing out on my first choice of position. At the tryouts, when the guy in charge hollered at all of us to identify ourselves by position, he started out by saying, “All right, how many pitchers do we have here?” Of the sixty to seventy boys present, probably fifty of us raised our hand. My choice didn’t survive the first tryout.
    The sad fact is that after Everette left, very few of us could—as Dad delicately put it one time when