The Lesson of the Curveball

Rodent or reptile? It was hard to tell. He peered at me with those beady black eyes, or rather sneered at me, from underneath the well-mangled bill of the dirty worn crimson baseball cap. He claimed to have played varsity at Harvard, and no one at the York School for Boys had any reason to dispute that. He did okay pitching batting practice to young teens, mostly. He had a particularly obvious distaste for me, I was convinced.

But standing out at the pitcher’s rubber on the practice field he was pretty silly looking. A gangly creature standing something over six feet, dark and wiry and all knees and elbows as they say. Greasy black hair stuffed under that tattered Harvard cap, looking like a scarecrow in the ugly old practice uniform, with those poorly leveled long sideburns we kids couldn’t have.

His shoes were practically worn through, and his feet were stupidly enormous, outsized on even his lanky body. He would wind up to throw, and all I could see was the bottom of his left shoe. I thought he threw it up there at my eye level to distract me and hide the delivery of the ball. What a creep.

Ichabod Crane came to my mind, but still I wondered if his hideously freakish face and misaligned teeth more resembled an emaciated mangy rodent or a desperately hungry reptile. Either way, he needed a shave and I knew from horrifyingly close contact he failed to trim his eyebrows and more importantly his nasal hairs. Even as a teen I knew males had to pay attention to such details as they reached puberty and got older. And he smelled of a vile mixture of tobacco, body sweat and Vitalis. The operative term was gross.

Through family connections we assumed he had landed the job teaching chemistry at York, and the student scuttlebutt was that he had knocked up his cute-ish girlfriend at Harvard and they married soon after graduation. Now she was working on her second baby rodent or reptile and tended to the apartment they shared attached to the rectory Father Thune inhabited. Teacher pay at a posh New England prep school like York was notoriously bad, but living expenses were minimal and the school kitchen food wasn’t half bad.

But Miles Land had taken it upon himself to cure my batting slump with a vengeance. My whole kid life I had been an exceptional ball player and baseball was all I loved to do. But then I encountered the dreaded curve ball as a varsity prospect at York and the fastballs suddenly got a whole lot faster. Confidence at the plate now broken, the rest of my game deteriorated significantly and I was demoted to JV, an ignominious insult to a senior.

And so Land felt it necessary to teach me how to hit the curve. Things had gotten so bad at the plate, I had resorted to bunting and taking enough pitches to gain a base on balls to reach first. I was good at both, so I got on base enough and though not particularly speedy was smart enough to steal regularly and score now and again to feel like I was actually part of the game.

But that was not nearly good enough for Miles Land and head coach Vito Calabrese. They wanted me to swing away and hit the baseball, hopefully a long, long way. And they maniacally wanted me to hit the curve. So batting practice after batting practice Land the rodent or reptile would throw me lazy curve after lazy curve that I rarely touched. Never seeing a fastball made those more impossible to hit, too.

Land was getting testy this particular day though, I could tell. He harrumphed repeatedly, prowled around and kicked the rubber; thankfully there was no mound to speak of on the practice field. I’d fowled off a few, and finally deftly laid down a perfect bunt just to piss the jerk off. He was not pleased at all and loudly instructed me to hit away. I dug in, crouched and awaited his next offering.

Well, at first it sure looked like a curve to me up high around my shoulder and as instructed I waited, and waited for it to arc and looked for the spin of the ball getting ever closer to my head and in a flash realized this was no curve at all but a rather brisk fast ball aimed menacingly at my noggin. I bailed late and took it in the back.

For years I described the Land pitching assault as if he had plugged me square between the shoulder blades with a sickening “thunk” as I turned away from the pitch and hit the dirt. That got a lot of sympathy from the girls. The truth is that the pitch nicked me lovingly on top of the shoulder and skittered blithely up to knock off the helmet just above my left ear. My pride was hurt but that was about it.

So, there I lay in the dirt as the catcher danced around hoping not to spike me in the face. I looked up toward the infield in hopes to see the apologetically chastised Land hurrying to the plate to see if I was okay. Not a chance.

He was behind the pitcher’s rubber, arms crossed and staring into centerfield, shaking his rodent or reptile head and seemed to me to chortling, or guffawing or snickering under his breath; I’m not sure exactly which as his cowardly rodent or reptile back was turned away. I imagined he was sneering and probably drooling a bit.

Perfect, I thought. Just flipping perfect.

(Original art by J.E. Hargate)