Catching Hell

Call me a regular American guy if you want, but baseball season is kind of special to me. For one thing, it means ice hockey season will be over in just a few short months. But it also brings back a lot of memories, because I, like so many other regular American guys, was once a Little Leaguer. I was on a team called the “Indians,” although I was puny of chest, so if you saw me in my uniform you’d have thought my team was called the “NDIAN,” because the end letters got wrinkled up in my armpits. I had a “Herb Score” model glove, named for a player who went on to get hit in the eye by a baseball.

I remember particularly this one game: I was in deep right field, of course, and there were two out in the bottom of the last inning with the tying run on base, and Gerry Sinnott, who had a much larger chest, who already had to shave, was at bat. As I stood there waiting for the pitch, I dreamed a dream that millions of other kids had dreamed: that someday I would grow up, and I wouldn’t have to be in Little League anymore. In the interim, my feelings could best be summarized by the statement: “Oh please please PLEASE God don’t let Gerry Sinnott hit the ball to me.”

And so of course God, who as you know has a terrific sense of humor, had Gerry Sinnott hit the ball to me. Here is what happened in the next few seconds: Outside of my body, hundreds of spectators, thousands of spectators, arrived at the ball field at that very instant via chartered buses from distant cities to see if I would catch the ball. Inside my body, my brain cells hastily met and came up with a Plan of Action, which they announced to the rest of the body parts. “Listen up, everybody!” they shouted. “We’re going to MISS THE BALL! Let’s get cracking!!”

Instantly my entire body sprang into action, like a complex, sophisticated machine being operated by earthworms. The command flashed down from Motor Control to my legs: “GET READY TO RUN!” And soon the excited reply flashed back: “WHICH LEG FIRST?!” Before Motor Control could issue a ruling, an urgent message came in from Vision Central, reporting that the ball had already gone by, in fact was now a good 30 to 40 yards behind my body, rolling into the infield of the adjacent game. Motor Control, reacting quickly to this surprising new input, handled the pressure coolly and decisively, snapping out the command: “OK! We’re going to FALL DOWN!!” And my body lunged violently sideways, in the direction opposite the side where the ball had passed a full two seconds earlier, flopping onto the ground like some pathetic spawning salmon whose central nervous system had been destroyed by toxic waste, as Gerry Sinnott cruised toward home.

Those boyhood memories! I have them often, although I can control them pretty well with medication.

Actually, when I got older I continued to play organized baseball in the form of “league softball,” a game in which after work you put on a comical outfit and go to a public park to argue with strangers. For the first several years the team I was on had a nice, relaxed attitude, by which I mean we were fairly lenient if a player made a mental error. For example, if the ball was hit to the shortstop, and he threw it to first base, but the first baseman wasn’t there because he was rooting through the ice cooler looking for a non-”light” beer, we’d say to the person who brought the beer: “Hey! NEVER make the mental error of bringing ‘light’ beer to a softball game! It can cost a fielder valuable seconds!” But we wouldn’t fine him or anything.

In later years, however, we got more and more young guys on the team who really wanted to win; guys who wore cleats and batting gloves and held practices where they were always shrieking about the importance of “hitting” somebody called the “cutoff man”; guys who hated to let women play, apparently for fear that one of them might, during a crucial late-inning rally, go into labor; guys who (this was the last straw) drank Gatorade during the game. I had to quit.

But I’m getting back into it. I have a son of my own now, and, being an American guy, I’ve been teaching him the basics of the game. One recent bright sunny day I took him out in the yard with a Whiffle ball, and I gave him a few pointers. “Robert,” I said, “did you know that if we use a magnifying glass to focus sunlight on the Whiffle ball, we can actually cause it to melt?” So we did this, and soon we had advanced to complex experiments involving candy wrappers, Popsicle sticks, and those little stinging ants. Although I drew the line at toads. You have to teach sportsmanship, too.

Mrs. Beasley Froze For Our Sins

One of the issues that we professional newspaper columnists are required by union regulations to voice grave concern about is the federal budget deficit, which we refer to as the “mounting” deficit, because every extra word helps when you have to produce a certain number of gravely concerned newsprint inches. The point we try to get across in these columns is: “You readers may be out driving fast boats and having your fun, but we columnists are sitting in front of our word processors, worried half to death about the nation’s financial future.” Then we move on to South Africa.

So anyway, I have decided to fret briefly about the deficit, which according to recent reports continues to mount. A while back I proposed a very workable solution to the whole deficit problem, namely that the government should raise money by selling national assets we don’t really need: metric road signs, all the presidential libraries, the Snail Darter, the House of Representatives, North Dakota, etc. Unfortunately, the only concrete result of this proposal was that I got an angry letter from everybody in North Dakota, for a total of six letters, arguing that if we’re going to sell anything, we should sell New York City.

This probably wouldn’t work. There would be major cultural adjustment problems. Suppose, for example, that we sold New York to Switzerland. Now Switzerland is a very tidy, conservative nation, and the first thing it would do is pass a lot of laws designed to make New York more orderly, such as no public muttering, no lunging into the subway car as though it were the last helicopter out of Saigon, no driving taxis over handicapped pedestrians while they are in the crosswalk, no sharing loud confidences regarding intestinal matters to strangers attempting to eat breakfast. These laws would be very difficult for New Yorkers to adjust to. Switzerland would have to send in soldiers to enforce them, and this would inevitably lead to tragic headlines in the New York Times:

ENTIRE SWISS ARMY FOUND STABBED TO DEATH WITH OWN LITTLE FOLDING KNIVES Pedestrians Step Right over Rotting Corpses

So I’m afraid that, appealing as the idea may be, we can’t reduce the deficit by selling New York.

What the government desperately needs is an innovative new concept for getting money from people, and we can all be grateful that such a concept appears to be oozing over the fiscal horizon at this very moment: a national lottery game. A number of congresspersons have already proposed that we start one. It would be similar to the lotteries currently operating in the really advanced states. Here’s how they work:

1. First you pass strict laws that say it is totally illegal for private citizens to operate lotteries, because they encourage the poor and the stupid to gamble away their money against ludicrously bad odds. If you find private citizens operating such lotteries, you call them “numbers racketeers” and you throw them in prison.

2. Next you set up an official state lottery with even more ludicrous odds. You give it a perky name like the “Extremely Lucky Digits Game,” and you run cheerful upbeat ads right on television strongly suggesting that the poor and the stupid could make no wiser investment than to spend their insulin money on lottery tickets. A nice touch is to say you’re using the lottery proceeds to fund a popular program that the state would have to pay for anyway, such as senior citizens or baby deer. In Pennsylvania, for example, they drag an actual senior citizen in front of the camera to perform the ritual televised Daily Number drawing. The senior citizen usually looks kind of frightened, like a hostage being displayed by the Red Brigades. The clear implication is that if the viewers don’t purchase Daily Number tickets, Pennsylvania will have to throw old Mrs. Beasley out into the snow headfirst.