Chapter 10: The Baseball Game

The sky was bright blue and cloudless. It stretched out over the baseball fields as if someone had painted it. The air was crisp but warm and if you closed your eyes and listened you could hear the pinging sound of a baseball being struck by the aluminum bats almost before it happened. The sound echoed out into the sky and traveled out beyond the baseball fields where the kids were playing. It was the beginning of summer and the fields had just begun to fill up on the weekdays with kids who were finally free of the tedium of school. There were four adjacent fields, each home plate acting as the corner of a giant square. On a rare occasion, a hitter might be able to hit a ball so far that it would find its way in between the outfielders from another game. That was usually on the weekends though, when the adults came out and there were enough people to fill up all four fields. Today, the game was just kids and there were only enough players to fill out one diamond. So they played, hemmed in by the high rise projects on one side, an old abandoned industrial factory on another and the East River, flowing between Red Hook and Manhattan until it flowed into the Atlantic Ocean near the Statute of Liberty on a third. 

Teams were picked the old fashioned way. The two best players were assigned the roles of captains and they got to pick their players, alternating picks until it got down to the last few stragglers. Darryl was almost always one of the last kids picked. It wasn't because he was bad. While nobody would call him an asset, he wasn't a liability either. He played second base and the outfield pretty well and, if called upon in a pinch, could manage an inning or two at shortstop without embarrassing himself. He was a bit of a slap hitter but rarely struck out and was fast enough that if a fielder bobbled the ball before throwing to first, Darryl was almost always safe. The reason why Darryl was usually one of the last kids picked was because he was one of the few black kids that came out to play and he didn't speak the Americanized Spanish that was the dominant language of the ball fields. Still, Darryl was always picked eventually and nobody complained about having Darryl on their team.

Darryl came out almost every day in the summer. Every day in the summer, Darryl's mom would give him some homework to do but, as long as he finished it before she got home from work, he had the rest of the day free. Most mornings, he would do his assignment as quickly as he could that way he wouldn't have any distractions when he was playing. His assignments were usually reading a chapter from a book and writing a short summary about what he had read or doing some math problems his mother copies out of an old school book. The summer was Darryl's favorite time. There were always games on those fields, even on the weekends in the Spring and the Fall. Darryl would come down for those games too, but he would mostly watch as the fathers of the kids he played with during the summer played a grown-up game of baseball that looked remarkably like the games on TV. He'd watch those games and grow jealous that his summertime teammates had fathers who could teach them how to throw a curveball or the proper way to pivot while turning a double play or how to shift your weight to generate more power in your bat. He was convinced that if he had that, if his dad had stayed around long enough to teach him instead of leaving him to try to pick up pointers by eavesdropping on the other kids as they spoke to each other in a language he rarely understood, he'd be one of the first kids picked instead of one of the last. Still, Darryl loved the game. He loved the pace. He loved how the speed of the game was disguised by its slowness. He loved how you could talk to your teammates and even talk your opponents between pitches. He loved the sounds, the bat on the ball, the ball in the glove, the chatter. He loved the fact that successes were fleeting. He found it comforting that even the really good players failed so often. It made each of his trials and errors more palatable. The word Failure never made it on to Darryl's list of fears. But even more than all of that, Darryl loved the sky and the wind and simply standing out in an open field. Nothing else that happened to him could change that. 

Only seventeen kids showed up to play that day so the two teams had to share a catcher. Darryl was happy that they didn't have full teams because it meant that he got to play in the field the whole game. He was playing second base and batting eighth. The two team captains pitched for their respective teams. Both were locked into the strike zone that day so the game was moving quickly. Batters got up and were quickly sent back to the dugout. Darryl batted with one out and runners on the corners in the second inning. He hit a ground ball to the third baseman and barely beat out the double play. His team scored a run on the play so his teammates cheered for him, cheering how he hustled to first base even though he didn't hit the ball very well. Darryl got up again in the fourth inning, this time with no one on base. He hit a weak ground ball to the short stop and this time wasn't able to beat out the throw to first. He knew he was going to be out as soon as he hit the ball and he tossed the bat dismissively to the ground in frustration before running. His teammates didn't say anything to him as he walked back to the dugout. Darryl just turned and began to cheer on Henry, their ninth hitter, from behind the dugout fence. Henry was two years younger than Darryl but Darryl knew that, if he kept hitting the way he did, Henry would soon move above him in the order too. 

Vintner had been sitting on the sidelines watching the whole game. Ever since he'd moved to Red Hook from his apartment in Manhattan, he started coming out to the ball fields whenever the weather was nice and he had nothing important that needed to be done. He enjoyed watching the kids play. They played pick-up games. There was no adult supervision. The kids picked their own teams. They settled their own arguments. Vintner had begun to believe that pick-up games didn't exist anymore. They didn't exist in the world Vintner'd come from anyway. And these kids could really play. There was a range of ages. The youngest were probably about ten, and they could only get into games if their older brothers were playing. The oldest were probably closer to sixteen or seventeen, already built like men, already playing like men too. The games were crisp and tight. Balls were hit hard, fielded cleanly and thrown straight. The first time Vintner watched the kids, he was amazed. Even though the kids hit and threw like adults, they still played like kids. There was a bounce in their steps and lightness to their laughter. There was so much joy in the games. Vintner had almost forgotten what that was like.

A set of old, rusted aluminum bleachers were set up behind first base and Vintner would sit there and watch the games. He was almost always alone. During the week the only other people who ever used the bleachers were younger siblings of kids in the game. Whenever Vintner sat down to watch a game, he scared those kids away. It wasn't that there was anything particularly scary about Vintner. He was an ordinary looking middle-aged white man. His hair was graying and it was beginning to thin in the back. He had a normal height and build. He sat quietly, doing all of his cheering internally, though his heart leapt at every success and broke with every failure, the two often happening to players on opposite teams on the very same play. Vintner enjoyed the games. He liked sitting in the sun and watching these kids play baseball like they didn't have a worry in the world other than their next at bat.

On that particular day, Vintner took special notice of Darryl. He noticed the kid's hustle during his first at bat and the kid's frustration during his second. He also saw the kid make two nice plays in the field, one a diving stop to his left where he got up in time to throw the runner out at first and one a smart flip to the short stop to start a double play. The diving catch came shortly after Darryl's weak ground ball out. Vintner felt something for the kid. He liked how the kid didn't let his frustration at his batting carry over into his fielding. Back when Vintner played, that was always one of his problems. He carried his errors into the batter's box and his strike outs into the field. It was a cascade as one bad at bat could sink Vintner's game for a whole day. So Vintner found himself rooting for Darryl when Darryl came up again to lead off the seventh inning. Darryl took the first pitch, a fastball that the pitcher threw right down the middle of the plate. Vintner could tell that the pitcher wasn't afraid of Darryl. The pitcher did the same thing on the second pitch, adding even more speed to the pitch. Vintner could hear the ball as it smacked into the catcher's glove. There being no official umpires, the catcher yelled out the word, "Strike!" Down in the count, Vintner watched as Darryl choked up a little bit on the bat, doing whatever he could to try to catch up to the pitcher's fastball. The pitcher must have noticed too because on the third pitch, the pitcher threw Darryl a nasty curve. Darryl was ahead of the pitch but was concentrating hard enough that he was able to get a small piece of the bat to hit the ball. The foul ball bounced in the dirt to Darryl's left and was picked up and returned to the pitcher by the third baseman. Darryl hunkered down for the next pitch. He kept his hands chocked up on the bat but was now uncertain what the pitcher might throw him-another fastball or another breaking ball. The pitcher came with the fastball, low and outside and Darryl lunged for it. His bat hit the ball and the ball took two easy bounces to the second baseman who easily threw Darryl out at first. Darryl didn't show any signs of frustration this time-he just jogged back to the dugout-but Vintner felt it. He may have felt it more than Darryl did. 

"Kid," Vintner yelled to Darryl. At first, no one looked up. Vintner jumped up and walked to the chain link fence dividing the stands and the field of play. He stuck the fingers of his right hand through the holes in the fence. "Hey, kid," Vintner yelled again, trying to get Darryl's attention. This time, Darryl looked at him, more than a little bit frightened.