Five Ounces of Hide and Red Stitches

I sit on the front porch this evening, looking across the street at the Hispanic family building a shed in their back yard. Currently, it is 91 degrees and the sun is going down. The man is wearing long green work pants and heavy boots and a long sleeved shirt. Yeah, in this heat. That’s what I thought, too. The woman working alongside him, holding up pieces of tan vinyl siding as he tacks them into place, is also wearing long pants and a long shirt, and I haven’t heard her speak at all in the time I have been out here. As I type this right now I’m wondering if it is a shed or a small house they are building.

A car goes by, silver with tinted windows, a heavy THUMP THUMP coming from the speakers and fading away as it heads to the stop sign. It makes a right turn and is gone, taking its base thumping with it.

I look back to the Hispanic couple and just beyond them. Three kids are playing on a mattress on the ground. When I was a kid we called that a poor kid’s trampoline. Been there, kiddos. Been there. The kids are two girls and a boy. I believe the boy is the middle kid.

It’s the boy who holds my attention for a moment. He jumps on the mattress with the two girls, but unlike them, he is not laughing and smiling and having a good time. He looks like he would rather be doing anything else, but playing on the poor kid’s trampoline.

I get it, little dude. I get it.

I guess the reason the boy holds my attention is because in my hand I hold a baseball. It is a Wilson brand. When it was new it was white and unscuffed and the cursive Wilson was a deep black. It weighed all of five ounces. The red laces—all 108 double stitches (that’s 216 single stitches if you’re counting)—were still perfect, and still holding the white rawhide tightly together.

Now the ball is somewhat brownish/orange with very few white spots remaining. It had been struck by a lawn mower at some point. This much is obvious. There is a gash near one train track stretch of stitches. An inch or so away and right on the red seam is an inch and a half long tear in the rawhide. The stitches are still in place, undamaged by the mower. The Wilson is faded and there are nicks and scrapes and smudges throughout.

Though the ball is battered and scarred and will probably never be used in another game, it is still perfect. Perfect, like 27 batters up and 27 batters down. Perfect.

I roll the ball over in my hands, no longer looking at the Hispanic couple working on the shed. I’m no longer watching the kids jumping and laughing (well, at least the girls are laughing) on the mattress in the middle of the yard.  I’m interested in the baseball, in who might have used it, or if it was used in a game or just in practice. How did it come to be run over by a lawnmower?

How did I come across it?

That one is easy. I was walking the track at the baseball park with my son. It was crazy hot and we had only made one full lap. We cut between two fields on the dirt track that led to the parking lot. There is a drainage ditch that runs the length of the outfield of Field Number Two. It had rained the day before, so there was water in the ditch. And sitting on the edge of the ditch, just in the water, was the baseball. I picked it up and wiped it off. It dripped a bit of water from the gash in its hide. I rubbed it as we walked to the car, trying to dry it out some. Over the next couple of days it did dry out, and now I hold it in my hands

And I can’t help but daydream. I can’t help but believe that a kid, probably around eleven years old, had held it in his hand, rolling it around on his palm before coming set and then slinging it toward home plate. The ball never reached the catcher’s mitt, but was connected by a bat held by the opponent. There is nothing like the sound of aluminum on ball. And the ball soared high in the air, landing somewhere on the grass beyond the fence. That is where it stayed until a lawn mower blade hit it and tossed it into the ditch, where I would later find it.

The ball had been hit. Do you see the glory of that? The ball I hold in my hand had once been thrown and hit and caught and hit again. It was used in the game many little boys (and girls) love, in the game I love. To me, even now, many years after I last put down a bat, find the baseball to be the most perfect of spheres. The way it is constructed. The white hide, the red stitches, the mile’s worth of string encased in it and wrapped around a cork center. It tumbles when you throw it, it makes a beautiful sound when it hits a glove. It’s the diamond of the sports world, which is somewhat appropriate.

As I look at the ball, I become aware that the Hispanics have gone inside. The sun is almost down. I think of the little boy who looked like he would rather be somewhere else. I wonder if he ever played baseball, or if he ever dreamed of playing like I once did. I roll the ball in my hands one more time and stand. I stretch my back and walk inside. Iowa is playing Kentucky in the Little League World Series. I think I’ll sit and watch the game and listen to the sounds I still love.

Until we meet again my friends, be kind to one another.