Here is an essay about growing up and spending a life with baseball and softball. Enjoy!

VACANT LOTS TO CATHEDRALS TO SCHOOLYARDS


This is about dirt. That’s right, dirt! I’m not talking landscaped dirt, with flowers and walkways.

No, I’m talking plain, empty, scoured dirt. Not a pebble, a flower, a blade of grass, a weed. Nothing growing. Period.

This is also about simplicity and complexity, joy and despair, perseverance, and not judging a book by its cover.

They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and amazingly, having spent an inordinate amount of time in my life watering plain ol’ dirt . . . I can tell you without a doubt that freshly watered dirt is one of the prettiest visions I have ever seen . . . provided it has been properly prepared.

The first step is to get the right mixture of dirt. Then, you surround that empty palette with a brilliant green border of grass that stretches as far as the eye can see.

Next, add five sturdy pure white islands of various sizes and shapes, bordered by two transient white boxes, with lines springing from those rectangles and reaching out to eternity.

After all is in place, you add the finishing touch, water. It is, of course, a baseball or softball infield.

For a fleeting moment, before the players take the field, it is sheer perfection.

My picture of this serenity and beauty has morphed over time. I have seen the extremes of backyards, major league cathedrals, community ballparks, and high school fields.

All different, but at the heart of things . . . all the same.

As a 6-year-old, playing ball in my neighbor’s vacant back lot in Walnut Creek, nothing was perfect.

The empty space was roughly scraped out by hand and sculpted into an infield that only youngsters could love. Gone were the bigger rocks, the weeds . . . and the dirt clods . . . which we happily threw at each other.

The diamond, as a finished product, was dusty and soft in some areas, while hard in others. When the wind blew, dust would swirl and invade our young lungs, causing us to cough . . . and forcing us to learn how to spit like a real ballplayer.

The bases were gray and dirty, unless you were using brown paper grocery bags folded into the perfect base, or a stray piece of wood, an old shirt, a jacket, or a hat.

The neighbor’s yard backed up to endless walnut groves, and standing at home plate, which was a piece of wood driven into the ground with a couple of spikes, you thought the field went on forever.

Even though we didn’t have the white bases and chalk lines defining the infield, there was a simple and beautiful symmetry. It was then and there that I realized I had found my “happy place.”

The beauty of that infield, then, was in the game itself . . . and in your friends.

We strove hard every single day to learn from the older kids, in hopes of improving and reducing our “squirm” time . . . waiting to be picked for a team . . . and praying we wouldn’t be the last kid chosen.

We spent most of our summer days playing ball on that field, and the following spring, we had our own version of spring training as soon as the rain stopped.

Sadly, our lives were uprooted the next summer, and we moved an hour away to El Cerrito, where my big brother joined the local Little League team.

The move was tougher for me as I was too young for Little League, but with new friends and tagging along with my brother, I stayed connected to the game.

It was here that we first experienced the frills of real baseball, including genuine bases, home plate, the pitching rubber, foul lines, rules, and umpires.

This was our first inkling of the underappreciated and sublime complexity of the game.

That was the first time I ever saw a field without a footprint. I never knew, nor thought about, how they got that infield so unmarked and perfect.

We were also introduced to a field with grass . . if you could call it that. It was usually mowed weeds and bare dead spots, but we still called it . . . reverently . . . the “outfield grass.”

Another first was watching our dads grooming the fields, taking pains to get it right.

We also watched our moms, dressed in their house dresses, baking all day, and then wrapping scarves around their heads to preserve their precious hairdos, and hauling those goodies to the park to sell and support the league.

My biggest thrill of the year was being asked to be the bat boy in my brother’s last game.

The coach tossed me a well-worn team hat, and I bent to tighten the shoelaces on my trusty P.F. Flyers and raced to retrieve the bat after every at-bat. I was in heaven for a day, and then it was over for the year.

However, we had a big surprise in store, as the following year, our baseball world was rocked when the New York Giants relocated to San Francisco.

Suddenly, we were going to be exposed to Major League Baseball and stars like Willie Mays!

This was the first time that the major leagues had ever had a team west of the Mississippi River, and now we would have the Giants and the Los Angeles Dodgers.

San Francisco and the surrounding suburbs were overjoyed and welcomed the Giants with a parade through the city's streets. By the time the season started, everywhere you looked, you saw Giants hats on heads and transistor radios plastered to everyone’s ears.

In 1958, Seals Stadium in San Francisco was my first of many major league cathedrals to visit.

Having never seen a big league field, other than in grainy black-and-white photos, I was not prepared for my first stadium experience.

The grass was so green it almost hurt my eyes, as it stretched an impossibly long way to the distant outfield walls.

The infield dirt, a beautiful reddish-brown, had been watered and was drying unevenly, leaving a patchwork of earth tones that I couldn't take my eyes off.

The green grass, rusty dirt, crisp white borders, and the bright blue sky were my kaleidoscope.

But it wasn’t just the visuals. It was also the aromatic fragrance of popcorn, cotton candy, peanuts . . . as well as Gulden’s Brown Mustard, slathered on a steaming hot dog, nestled in a slightly soggy Langendorf bun, wafting through the air, and making me feel like I was home.

The sheer majesty of the scene took my breath away.

For years, that grand setting was my ideal of a place to spend a day until the realization hit that I had lost the thread that tied me to the game in the first place . . . dirt.

It was about that time, in my mid-40s, that I helped develop the most breathtaking fields I have ever seen for our local high school and community girls' softball programs.

It was during that time that I discovered the effort that went into preparing those fields for a practice or game, and it was then that I first realized I loved dirt!

The time I cherish now is the summer tournament we hosted to raise funds for both programs.

After the Friday and Saturday evening games ended, we dressed those diamonds in the near darkness.

Later, standing and hand-watering an infield, watching it go from dusty tan to that rich reddish-brown in the dark, always made me smile.

As I walked down the hill at 6:00 the next morning, without another soul in sight, I could see two of the fields side by side. They were flawless.

The dirt had dried overnight and was the perfect shade of that distinctive brick-colored infield mix, while the grass shimmered with misty morning dew.

The white chalk lines were sharp, not yet blurred by running feet, and the bases and home plate had nary a mark. There wasn’t a stray pebble or footprint to be seen, and I would pause and breathe deeply, inhaling the scent of the dirt and the freshly cut grass.

However, what was truly beautiful was the collective effort of everyone working hard to create a little bit of perfection for the kids and their families.

Like Baseball or Softball . . . Dirt's “book cover” . . . can look drab and boring. But if you look closely, you can see the beauty, the symmetry, the complexity, and the sheer joy of appreciating life’s simple pleasures.

There is a saying that Baseball (or Softball) is Life. It has all the thrills and anguish of competition . . . winning, losing, doing well . . . and doing not so well.

But no matter what happened yesterday, the next day, the next game . . . there it was again. The perfection of a pristine infield, waiting for you . . . to start fresh once again.