Baseball: Meditations of a Pitcher

The pitcher looks in. Late afternoon or so. He can tell time here in his home ballpark by looking at the shadows of the crouched umpire, the batter, the flags in the stadium, his own private, misshapen sundial.

It’s around three; given the fatness of these shadows (they’d be skinnier if it were later in the day).

Like a caged cat he paces around the pitchers’ mound, confined by the auburn dirt, never straying into where that color becomes green, green grass. He is a man trapped on a desert island.

He looks in and sees the batter strut up to the batter’s box, showing or maybe feigning confidence, the batter digs in and like a bull expels dirt out from under his feet with a few menacing foot strokes backwards, and the pitcher can practically see the steam emit from the batter’s nostrils.

The batter’s a big hulking guy, the pitcher thinks, and this sends him right back to little league, before roids were the rage and before all this marketing crap. Back then they were both just skinny-legged kids awkwardly swinging these long sticks, hoping to some day make it to the majors.

Now they’re standing here, dressed and pressed in crisp big-league uniforms on a summer’s day in front of an excited crowd- every tee-ball player’s dream.

As he looks in to the catcher (who crouches and starts signaling) he registers the familiar boundary of the brim of his hat and thinks about the sheer number of days he’s spent looking out at the world from under this hat, or any hat, for that matter.

He meditates on the number of days the upper part of his universe- the sky, any tall trees, the very tops of the stadium- has been blocked by this sweat-stained piece of foam board covered in fabric.

Catcher crouches, gives two fingers. Pitcher shakes him off. Catcher gives six fingers. Pitcher shakes him off. Catcher gives four fingers. Pitcher shakes him off, looks at the ump and calls time, and then takes a little walk around the pitcher’s mound like a large cat pacing and getting fancy when it’s getting close to time to attack.

The pitcher can’t concentrate, can’t shake this image of his old high school baseball glove, so worn, so beautifully worn that the leather would sigh softly as it collapsed in upon itself. That glove had been oiled, cared for like a favorite pet, guarded like the most secret treasure for six years by the pitcher.

He knew intimately all its scars and could name most of the plays they came from, could name most of the dives for the ball (whether they were successful or not) that yielded this scratch or that one.

This pitcher played center field, too, through high school, but everyone- the coaches, scouts, parents of people on the team- told him to stick with pitching, and it’d take him far. This is what he did.

He still misses center field, though, he misses owning that wide expanse of grass (as opposed to being caged here in this dry desert of a patch of dirt) and tracking fly balls, but he’s a pitcher now and he’s got a job to do, so he takes one more quick walk around the emerald-ringed circle and then digs into that white strip of rubber and looks in, where the batter has stepped back in and where the catcher is flashing three fingers.

The pitcher nods and tips back into his well-worked windup and let the ball fly, a matador taunting the bull, who charges with a quick pivot, a tweak of the torso and flash of the bat.