When We Played Softball

I have a cap over one of my front teeth, a fine piece of dentistry that has been replaced once or twice in my life, and one time it was because of softball. I didn’t see the ball coming that summer of my 13^th or so year, but it was there when somebody yelled my name and I looked up, and the next day we went to the dentist.

I met my wife playing softball, in Fresno in the hot summer of 1979, when games were followed by a Sunday tradition of beer and harder stuff such as tequila with a lime and salt at a restaurant and bar named Casa Canales. She was an infielder. I was an outfielder, but ocasionally played first base.  I spent the summer playing the Sunday games and watching her league team at night during the week.

Softball has always been there at important times of my life, a great democratic game that is soft instead of hard, good for inviting in strays, not so serious or organized as baseball and not blindingly fast but a game at the speed of life. I was playing softball when the first astronauts landed on the moon on July 20, 1969, standing on the field at a Sunday church picnic in Millersville, Ohio. The game pitted single men against married men, with the single men winning a close one, 11-10. In those years and earlier in the 1960s, we had family gatherings at my grandpa and grandma’s farm, where first cousins organized games between “farmers” and “city slickers.” Uncles would occasionally visit the game to pitch and umpire the close calls. Sometimes the games broke up early so “farmers” could go home and milk our cows.

Softball provided the very definition of “endless summer.” My little Woolworth's diary of 1968 chronicles my brother's 14^th birthday party on Sunday, June 11, at which his friends brought him two baseball bats, a penlight, a couple bucks and a Frisbee. But the defining memory of the big day is: “We played softball all afternoon.” At home we played as a family in the barnyard, brothers and sisters hitting each other flies and grounders until it was so dark we couldn’t see the ball. Sometimes when his work was done, our dad would step in and hit a few before sitting down in the lawn chairs with our mom to watch the sun set over the green fields.

He took us on occasion to Rodger Young park in the county seat of Fremont, where we would watch competitive men’s teams sponsored by bars and grocery stores play fast-pitch softball on a regulation field. It’s the kind of softball you see on television these days, where young college women whip in the ball with an underhand delivery so fast it’s a surprise anyone can knock out a hit. Fast pitch never took with us. We liked a big ball lobbed lazily into the air, where we could get a good long look and try to smack it a good one.

Living in the country where we lacked enough people for teams, we played a version of the game called “round town” that featured an endless rotation of batters and fielders with each hit and always, a chance to bat when we caught a fly ball. As we got older and stronger we lost softballs in the corn rows and soybean fields beyond the far fence. With three people we could eat up the hours playing “hot box,” a tense encounter also known as a "pickle" or a "rundown," with a runner trapped on the base path between fielders and the runner trying, almost always in vain, to escape being tagged out.

At a farm my dad rented for two or three industrious summers my brother and I played with the Halstead boys who lived in the farm house. They were nearly as intense as us about the game. We mowed base paths through the grass and mowed a line from the pitcher’s mound to home plate. It was beautiful like Tiger Stadium. I remember like it was yesterday.