A warm welcome back to the diamond

This past Saturday, Neal and I played in an exhibition baseball game against a local traveling team that two of the student athletes from the Abbotsford/Colby baseball team are playing on this fall. The team they were supposed to play cancelled on them, so Ryan Bargender went through his list of contacts to try to assemble a ragtag team to at least give the kids some live pitching to look at. Judging by the fact that I somehow ended up on the field, he must have had to go to the very bottom of that list to scrounge up nine players. But we had nine, and that’s all we needed.

Neal and I had been throwing the ball around and hitting in the cages every once in awhile during the summer and, as much as I like to joke that the only reason I should be on the field nowadays is with a camera in my hand, I was starting to feel the itch to get back out there. However, I also recognized that it had been a long time since I had last played any sort of competitive baseball, and as such, I had no idea if what small modicum of skill I had possessed remained.

Which made the exhibition game a perfect trial run of sorts. Given our team’s rather thrown together nature, the expectations were largely nonexistent. Meaning that if my baseball skill was equally nonexistent, no one would really care all that much in the whole scheme of things.

Perhaps it was a bit of a stretch to say what happened on Saturday was a real game, but it was certainly closer to anything else that I’ve done in quite some time. The last time I had dug in at the plate in a competitive baseball game was a playoff game against Neillsville in 2013. I don’t remember the outcome of the at bat, though I had, with growing resignation as the years went by, come around to accepting that it had probably been my last.

And given how my first at-bat on Saturday ended, maybe it should have been.

The first pitch was going to be a take all the way; I had not seen velocity of an in game pitch for years and tosses in the batting cage were not going to prepare one for that. The fastball whizzed by, catching the corner high and away for strike one. No problem; I was never going to be able to do anything with that anyway and now I had a better idea of what I was working with.

The next pitch came in, skidding into the dirt for a ball. Easy take. Another high and away pitch that just catches the corner. That’s fine, not my pitch. Before the fourth pitch, I hear the opposing coach tell the catcher to switch it up, which of course probably means some sort of breaking pitch. I watch as it falls low and away, not close enough for me to even consider it.

The count is 2-2 and given that they are likely trying to work on things, I figure the next pitch is probably going to be another breaking pitch. The pitcher entered his wind-up and unleashed, the trajectory of the pitch headed for me. I realize far too late that this pitch is not going to break in the slightest and all I can do is lift my arm out of the way and turn my back slightly to take the brunt of the hit.

In my first at-bat in over a decade, of course I take an errant pitch to the side. I could only smirk and shake my head as I took my base.

Welcome back to the diamond, old man. Welcome back.

A C ertain Point of V iew