Right Field. A quiet place, where you can sit for long stretches and play with dandelions. Until suddenly you hear a clang and some shouting and immediately understand that life is about to get much, much harder.
Mark Phillipe Eskenazi, The Unathletic Camper's Baseball Glossary (The New Yorker, Aug. 4, 2014)
I never did go to camp (we were too poor) but I did play sandlot ball when I was a kid, in a vacant lot on a hill in my small town, where if the ball got past the outfielders it would roll down the hill for a home run. I wasn't a particularly good player -- I was often chosen last -- but I was left-handed and loved to play first base, cherishing my first baseman's glove. (Baseball Glove/Mitt. Something that you buy with your parents, oil up, place under your pillow, and carry around the house in the weeks before camp, never fully understanding how it works). When I was twelve I tried out for Little League and didn't make it and I lost interest in baseball for some time, only finding out much later that the tryouts were fixed: the sons of Elks Club members (they sponsored the league) were automatically accepted. Growing up in a small town where one was either a jock (many) or an intellectual (few) I went away to school and always chose, among the required sports, those that took the least time. Only after I finished college did I discover the geometric and strategic beauties of squash and tennis and took them up enthusiastically.
When I went to work at The Nation in 1983 I joined the softball team, which managed to play a few games a year, and soon took over a team that barely existed. At first we were not part of any league and played in Central Park between official fields; with no umpires there were no balls and strikes so the rule was that one was allowed three swings. This caused many problems, as pitchers wouldn't throw the ball over the plate and therefore batters wouldn't swing, but as I set up games with other publishers we were eventually invited into a publishers league, with umpires. The biggest problem I had was recruiting players, which had to include at least four women for each game, and then convincing the staff of The Nation that these games were for fun (I even had to ban some players who took the game too seriously).
"Oh Man! Maybe." Your polite refusal when asked "So, will you come to one of the company softball games this summer?" You're an adult now. It can't hurt you any more.
Recruiting men for the games was difficult enough -- they seemed afraid that they might look bad, making errors and striking out -- but it was even more difficult to recruit women, many of whom had stories: the father who spent all his time watching baseball and ignoring his daughter, the sibling who hit the ball hard and made his sister chase it, the gym teacher who made fun of the women for "throwing like a girl." etc. I usually spent most of the day when we had a game making calls to see who would be there; a "maybe" always meant no. Of course much of the staff had an excuse: we were a weekly magazine with a small staff and there were deadlines to meet. So each game I usually had to include a fair number of ringers, from former interns to friends and old acquaintances from my days as an art history graduate student, when we had regular games between pre- and post-1800.
Fly Ball When the sun drops a boulder into your eye.
When I was actually able to get people to come out for the games and show them that we were having fun (I encouraged them to come as spectators first, if they were uneasy) I found that most players had very little understanding of the game and were often afraid of the ball: a player told to play second base would go stand on the base, a left-handed batter hit the ball and ran to third (she was Canadian, which may have been a factor, and I told her that we usually run the bases counter-clockwise) and the catcher would stand behind the batter, jump out of the way when the ball went past the batter, wait for the ball to stop rolling, pick it up and then hand it to the umpire to throw it back to the pitcher! But running the bases turned out to be the biggest problem, especially when one was on base and a fly ball was hit to the outfield. After numerous problems caused by running on fewer than two outs and not running on two outs I started doing seminars on base running. After explaining what to do on a fly ball, including going halfway with no outs or one out, I asked the players (and there were both men and women), "okay, now what do you do if you're on base, there's one out, and a fly ball is hit to the outfield?" I got blank looks from everyone, until someone piped up with "could you please explain again what a fly ball is."
Baseball A dangerous sport characterized by long periods of daydreaming, punctuated by intense bursts of unmanageable violence, panic, and people screaming at you.
When I make the occasional trip home to the small town in which I grew up I seldom see any sandlot baseball. One can only hope the day will return when baseball is somewhat less serious and more fun.
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