Choosing Sides

Players assemble. Sides are chosen. Game on.

Once upon a time we played sand-lot softball behind the schoolhouse gym on Sunday afternoons.  

The Olympic stadium it was not. Bases could be anything—rocks, tin cans, sticks. The pitcher’s mound was flat and there were no referees. Who needed referees, we handled our own calls? 

The playing field was barren. It resembled Mars, an ignored, weed-choked, clay-encrusted plot of desiccated earth, leftover, unkempt and forgotten. No maintenance required, just a patch of dusty clay or a slick mire of mud after a rain But we made do.

Life was simple then, more fun. We made our own games, our own rules. Nothing preplanned, nothing organized. Everything spur-of-the-moment pickups.  It still required choosing sides.

Choosing sides in softball or baseball was easy. No coin flip, just two boys choking up on a bat with their fists. The last fist that grabbed the nub end of the bat and could hold it got first pick.

Sides were chosen. There was no secret as to who the best players were, and the worst. Sides were chosen in that order. Since RBI’s were important, the big hitters got chosen first. Then the rest.

And there was Clarence. There’s always a Clarence, the last man standing, head held high, smiling, ready to play. He had no clue. But he was chosen. Nobody left out.  Everybody played, even Clarence, standing out there grinning in left field, which didn’t have the same connotation then as today.

Our Clarence was a lefty, and he tried hard. Mostly he got soft pitches. If his bat even touched the ball and it rolled an inch, it was an over-the-fence homer. He’d run the bases backwards, slide into home plate to wild cheers. Yeaaaa, Clarence.  Life was like that then.       

Nobody walked, only hits counted. The pitches came till the batter hit. We kept score, but it was not a typical zero-sum game. So, maybe you won that Sunday. Big deal. Or maybe you lost. Nobody remembered, or even cared.

Sandlot softball was not about winning or losing, because next week new sides were chosen. It was all about playing the game while Time’s millstone slowly ground away the halcyon hours and days of our youth.

Softball wasn’t the only game we played there. It was a good place to settle silly, long-seething scores over girls or wrestle for bragging-right status of becoming the reigning weekly ‘king-of-the-mountain’ stud. Many games, many memories. The field is likely a parking lot now.   

But those were our young-boy days. Things are different now. We’ve put away childish things, but we’re still playing games. We grew up, got old. The games, the rules, the players changed. The games got serious; consequences became real. Somehow fun escaped from playing. Yet, we still find ourselves on some field, choosing sides.

We don’t have to go far today to find sides being chosen for big-boy games. The sleeping Bear is waking up, growling, ravenous, mad with hunger, hungry for more territory to pillage. Meanwhile, the world waits expectantly for the Eagle to again soar overhead, its yellow eyes, ominous and piercing, an omen, revealing the opposing side of this new game.

The sides are chosen. Batter up. Play ball.

Once upon a time we played sand-lot softball behind the schoolhouse gym. But that was then, this is now. Who’ll be this week’s king of the mountain?

 

Bud Hearn

February 21, 2022  

 

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