Baseball and Me

When it came to baseball, I had three strikes against me. I know that’s probably a strange way to open a book of baseball cartoons, but hear me out. I was a late bloomer, especially when it came to anything athletic. Still am actually. The odd thing is that I would play baseball with the kids on my street, but they were all quite a bit older than me and the only reason I was included was because they were, well, nice guys. They would let me go through the motions and cheer me on, but I really didn’t have a clue. [Fig 1] Strike one. Then when I was about nine or ten, my dad took me to an Indians game at the old Municipal Stadium. The stadium was cavernous and from our vantage point, the action was a long long long ways away. I pretty much had to take it on faith that the pitcher was actually throwing a ball to the catcher. Strike two. The pitcher that day for the Indians was Bob Feller. Although it’s probably redundant to say so, he was really good that day. I have no idea who the other pitcher was, but, on that day, he was really good too. The result was a game that went into the late innings with no runs being scored. To a young kid with only a marginal understanding of what was going on, and, for whom the action was pretty distant, all I remember happening that day was watching two guys play catch with a ball that I couldn’t even see, and… that was pretty much it. Nobody else moved. For the entire two hours, the only time they did move was when they ran off or back onto the field together. To the baseball fan, it was a dream pitching dual. To a clueless and bored young kid, well, I couldn’t locate the ice cream guy, the peanuts guy or the soft drink guy fast enough or often enough. If they’d had Crackerjacks that day I’d have been looking for that guy too. Strike three.

That being said, I get baseball. I get how it was always in the air on those endless summers growing up. Riding in the back seat as my dad drove us out to Stricklands for some ice cream and listening to Jimmy Dudley on the radio as he told us that the “string is out” and “A swing and a miss!-he struck him out!”. Or how the game was always on in the barber shop or at my grandparents’ house. I remember the fun of a family game with the neighbors in the evening and how I met my best friend in school when, as the new kid on the block, he came over and joined one of those games. I may not have been much of a player, but I got what it meant to play catch with my dad. I get

how my partner in cartooning on Crankshaft, Chuck Ayers, is a huge baseball fan how he enjoys playing in old time baseball games and the camaraderie that comes with that. It’s that love for the game that shines through in his depictions of these baseball tales.

I also get what the game means to Ed Crankshaft. How he played the game as a kid and even named his dog Homer after the way he would retrieve the long ball. How Ed played minor league ball for the Toledo Mud Hens and how, on a sultry summer night, he faced down some of baseball’s greats and showed what might have been had the fates only been kinder. Baseball provided me with a vehicle for exploring a man’s life and allowed me to examine how only getting his fingerprints on the brass ring shaped the remainder of Ed’s life and left him a little… cranky. But he didn’t let it diminish his love for the game, and he would even go on to build a replica ballpark in his backyard. A backyard ballpark that would draw the sports writer Skip Rawlings on a summer evening to a neighborhood game where he rediscovers baseball’s essence. The joy of just playing for the fun of it with friends and neighbors and the life long bonds and memories that experience would forge. It would lead him to write that, “Tonight I saw a baseball game that reminded me of what baseball once meant to me. The game embodied everything that baseball ought to be, and there wasn’t a million dollar player or owner in sight.” And that, Charlie Brown, is what baseball is all about.