When you put on a pair of stirrups, you feel like a baseball player.
The toe-less and heel-less socks make a loop underneath your foot. It’s not just a piece of stretchy fabric. That loop stretches through time and space to connect you with George Brett and Wade Boggs and Jackie Robinson and Mickey Mantle. These days, major leaguers consider them passé. How this hasn’t disrupted baseball’s space-time continuum, I can’t understand.
But in the summer of 1986 I wore those odd, sacred socks as I stood on-deck, bat on shoulder, waiting for my turn to face the pitcher. I was 11, it was the second-to-last game of the season, and the Kansas City Royals had just won the World Series. I had yet to record a hit that season. I knew George Brett expected better of me.
“Strikkkke.” The ump raises his hand. My unfortunate teammate at bat just got called out on a swing-and-uh-miss. He and I sit near the bottom of the batting order. It is not a place of honor.
I employ the holy sacraments of baseball: my hands move themselves higher up on the bat, I tap the solid pine on my helmet and left cleat for good luck, spit into the dirt, and step into the box. I get into my batting stance and rotate my wrists around and around. The business end of the bat dances in a small circle as I face the pitcher.
Children like to yell, “We want a pitcher, not a belly-itcher.” Allow me to retort: I’d prefer a belly-itcher. He would give me a better shot at glory. The ball hurtles toward me at about 55 miles per hour, the federally legislated speed limit for automobiles in the mid-1980s. For a millisecond, I wish I was in that car speeding down the highway toward anywhere else. But I lean back and finally face that ball like a goddamn baseball player should. My eyes follow the ball as my arms swing forward…
An elite sporting life as a youngster requires physical talent, perseverance and fearlessness. My father, an all-state linebacker for the Overbrook Gophers, provided me with half the talent I would need. The other half went missing during the formation of my zygote. Perseverance and fearlessness were in short supply. Thus, having half the necessary physical talent and little-to-none of the other two ingredients, math reveals that I only had one-sixth of the necessary qualifications to become an elite athlete. That would be a .167 batting average in baseball. Sounds about right for me.
My first foray into organized sports occurred as a 7-year-old. The Wichita Wings soccer team inspired me to play. On the first day of practice, the coach told us to start running laps. “Oh, and whoever gets last place has to run one more.” As I ran around the field, openly weeping, I vowed that never again would I run long distances for no purpose. At the beginning of the team’s second practice, I refused to leave my mom’s car. Thus ended phase one of my soccer career.
Over the next few years I discovered that for short distances, I could outpace just about every other kid in school. But why keep running after a hundred yards? The tedium! Plus, my legs were short: a trait I shared with the rest of my family. Years later, my brother’s explanation made the most sense: O’Bryhims were genetically disposed toward short distance running due to our storied history of running from bar tabs. No bartender was going to chase you for more than a block or two.
By age nine, I came back to soccer. The biggest test was a boy named Uzo. Playground sages whispered tales of his legend: his grandparents were Paul Bunyan and a block of granite. On a hot day half the team could keep cool in his shadow. He stood twice as tall as the average 11-year-old boy and his weight fluctuated between 600 and 650 lbs, depending on how many boys were stuck to his cleats. But his size belied his dexterity. When he barreled down the field, he did so with surprising grace.
As a midfielder, it was my job to stop him from penetrating into our defensive area. As he bore down on me, I realized he wasn’t quite as big as legend had it. Though he dwarfed me, he could be stopped. He was an upper-elementary aged kid just like me! All these thoughts faded away as I peeled myself off Uzo’s left cleat following his goal celebration.
After three years our team aged out of the league. By then I had become the starting goalkeeper, just like my hero Mike Dowler. I was recruited to a new squad in a more competitive league. Our first practice coincided with the first day of junior high: a day of stress and transition for any child. The coaches lined us up to run a 40-yard dash. I beat everyone. But a few minutes later, a couple players I didn’t know snickered at me. I looked at the shorter one quizzically.
“You won’t be needing those,” he snarled, pointing at my goalie gloves.
“I’m the goalkeeper on this team,” he continued.
I believed him.
At that moment, all the pressure of the first day of junior high welled up inside me. At the end of practice, I walked to my mom’s car, gave her my gloves and said, “I won’t be needing these.” And then I broke down crying. I never played organized soccer again.
Rewind a year or two. Propelled by the Royals World Series win in 1985, I asked my dad to find me a baseball team. Perhaps I should have asked him to find me a “good” team. We lost our first game. And then our second. After losing the first 15 games, I identified a trend: we stink. Thanks to my nimble feet and fielding skill, I am the starting shortstop. Since most kids bat right-handed, the average hit heads right where I’m standing. And, let-me-tell-ya, when you play shortstop for a team with bad pitching, you are pretty damn busy. My arm is barely adequate for the throw to first base, but my glove makes up for it.
I model my game after Buddy Biancalana. Anyone familiar with Biancalana might wonder why a young man might model himself after a player who hit a paltry .188 (the mean Major League batting average in 1985 was .257). It is because I can’t hit for shit. And THAT is because I am deathly afraid of the ball hurtling toward me.
It doesn’t help when we play a skilled team from the higher-level Catholic league. They feature an overgrown pitcher who hit puberty around age six. He beans the kid up at bat. I get in the on-deck circle. He beans the next kid too. We bury him behind the dugout. It’s an assembly line of pain. When it’s my turn the ball flies toward me as well. I turn around and get my medicine right in the small of my back. Three in a row. The bases are loaded with no outs and somehow we don’t score any runs. Miracles really do happen.
Our coaches are desperate for a win. I would prefer to win than lose, but it’s whatever. I am here for the joy of the game. But I have this idea. What if I were to try my hand at pitching a game? Google “nothing left to lose” and the first image is my assembled team watching me walk up to the mound for the first time. If my pitching velocity were a car, it would be a minivan. However, once I get up on the mound, I find that I am throwing strikes. And when they swing and make contact, they keep grounding out. I have no explanation for my success. At the end of the game, we’ve scored more runs than the other guys. I’m the winning pitcher.
There I stand, in the batter’s box during our second to last game of the season, with the ball flying toward me. But this time, something’s different. My dad spent several hours training me to get used to fast pitches. The balls came flying at me again and again, and like an alcoholic who can’t manage to get drunk, I am gaining immunity to fastballs.
The first time I successfully hit a 55 mph baseball, I become attuned to a unique vibration in the architecture of the universe. The bat is but an extension of my body and when it meets the ball, a crescendo of understanding crashes into my brain. I now understand. We lose the game, but I am a winner.
I hit a single, two doubles and a triple over those last two games. But at the end of the season, I decide to retire from baseball. I do not remember why I made this decision. It doesn’t make much sense to me now. But I think I looked at it like this: I learned how to hit a baseball in a game situation, I pitched a winning game (yes, we were 1-21, but a win’s a win), I successfully lived up to the legacy of Buddy Biancalana and if George Brett watched me, he’d have said, “Now there’s a goddamn baseball player.”
