Personal Narrative: Why I Love Baseball

If you’re going to understand me, you need to understand about the baseball bat. See, when I worked in the dorm, which was every year for the past twenty-one up to this one, I used to roam the halls toting a 33-inch Mizuno hard maple with a thin handle. The Milliken freshmen were particularly dismayed by this habit. I guess the sight of an older man over six feet tall and sporting two-and-a-half bills wasn’t made any less intimidating to them by the addition of a two-pound piece of lumber designed to be swung as quickly as possible. I tried to tell them: “Do you really think, in any circumstance, that I would actually hit you? With a baseball bat? I’m a teacher, a father of four girls. I’m not going to assault you, with or without a bat.” They smiled and nodded, but I don’t think many of them

Huge Red Sox fan, which means I’m in a particularly bad mood lately, but really a fan of the game. I’ve been reading the box scores religiously every morning since I was six or seven years old. Learned arithmetic because of my obsession with batting averages. Kind of learned to read because at bedtime my mom would read me baseball cards (“Jim Rice is six-feet-two and was born in South Carolina . . .”) when I was even younger than that. I coached the sport for like eighteen years straight until Mr. Daly, our recently retired athletic director, talked me into taking over the girls’ basketball program. For Pete’s sake, I still PLAY the game. The Rebels, my team in the Pioneer Valley Over-Thirty Baseball League, won its second championship in four years a couple weeks ago, and I played shortstop and third base, pitched a little and batted cleanup most games. That might sound pathetic coming from a 43 year-old who’s supposed to be sort of professional and mature and what not, but there it is. That’s who I am, and pretty much who I have been since my dad stuck a glove on my hand and played catch with me for the first time back in