Double Play

Bobby

I played first base on the junior high school team and hit .303 that year, though the averages were sometimes suspect because the fifth-grade teacher was our scorekeeper and she gave everyone a hit who reached base. No one ever reached on an error. The school supplied the uniforms, grayish woolens with blue numbers. They had to be worn by a new player after you left, so they were of a generic size, and tended to bag. The school also issued the catcher’s mitt and the first baseman’s mitt. It was a claw, a three-fingered glove with the fingers laced together.

While I listened to the Dodgers games, I usually kept a scorecard, and, when my father came home from work, I would share it with him. It never occurred to me that he would be less interested than I, and, in fact, if he was, he never said.

If I missed a game, I could listen, usually with my father on the screened front porch, at seven in the evening, to a fifteen-minute recreation of the game, complete with sound effects and an announcer, it might have been Ward Wilson, simulating play by play. If I hadn’t listened to the real game I tried not to know the score when I listened to the re-creation. If the Dodgers had lost, and I knew it, I didn’t listen. The knowledge was painful enough without having it dramatized.

Other things were taking place in the world. I knew that there was a civil war in China, something with the Communists. I knew there was something going on in Greece. I knew Truman was president and George Marshall was secretary of state. I now knew the facts of life. I knew that it was thought dangerous to swim in the summer because you might get infantile paralysis. I knew a lot. But I didn’t care. What I cared about was sex and the Brooklyn Dodgers.