Lessons In Old Fashioned Baseball

You Don’t Need a Pitcher’s Mound to Hit a Guy: Lessons in Old Fashioned Baseball

Er?

This message arrived by snail mail the other day, sealed shut with a messy splotch of chewing tobacco. Nobody wanted to touch it for awhile, but eventually we just made one of the interns read it out loud.

I haven’t watched a baseball game in 27 years. But I have a lot of time to read. Mostly I stick to nonfiction. I just finished this “Hunger Games” series and boy. Kudos to the government for covering that whole mess up. Move over, Vietnam. We’ve got a new darkest chapter in American history.

My reading has led me to stories about modern day baseball, and I wasn’t surprised to find myself vomiting with rage over some of these stories. “Relief pitchers?” “Batting gloves?” “BABIP?!” I don’t even understand what most of this crap is, but I found myself forced to comment on a recent story that reeked of utter bullshit.

It was this fair-haired Cole Hamels and and this dumb-faced Bryce Harper. Why they’ve chosen themselves as protectors of the game is beyond me. Harper, with his magazine covers and his blowing kisses, and Hamels, with his claims that he knows what “old fashioned” baseball is.

You players today, with your airplanes and your catchers masks and your “concussions.” You know what they called the disabled list in my day? The starting lineup. I once watched a guy start a game in left field with only one eye. And he had the eye in his pocket. And it wasn’t his. It made sense at the time.

Here’s a thought: A “bean ball” is aimed at the head. Not the spine. Or the ankle. A baby could take a fastball to the

spine. I watched it happen once. Then he toddled to second on a wild pitch. Got picked off, though, when he got totally mesmerized by two birds sitting next to each other. Helluva player. What Hamels through at Harper we used to call a “spine-kisser.” And it was a sign of respect.

And how about the guy he hit, with all the makeup. Harper. Think we used to lather our faces in beauty products to

shield ourselves from the sun? Hell no. “Sunlight increases vitality,” the trainers told us. “Absorb it through any orifice you can.” And we did it, unquestioningly, despite not knowing what “vitality” or an “orifice” was.

You’re all so blown away by a 19-year-old playing in the Major Leagues. By 19, I’d fought in six wars and fathered 27 kids. My wife looked an exhausted Cheerio.

Don’t get me wrong, I have some respect for a guy willing to put his head in serious danger for the sake of venting an everyday frustration. But in my day, if we got hit in the head with a bat, which occurred frequently, we had the decency to go into a coma for three or four years. When I awoke, several important parts of my brain were “not even close to intact.” We did our bleeding privately; we didn’t bash our skulls open and then go gallivanting around the field, waiting for everybody to notice how much blood we had and how much of it was no longer necessary.

Don’t try to define “old fashioned baseball.” Because to some people, it’s just racism and knee high socks. To others, it’s running out a walk for some reason. And to others, it’s having umpires instead of robots, or playing solely out of a wild, intoxicating love of the game, and maybe in exchange for trolley fare.

No one in the current era can represent it in its ambiguity well enough to earn the label. It’s an entirely different game being played out there. A genuine representation of “old fashioned” is nonexistent outside of novelty, so don’t act like you can embody it, Cole Hamels. Or you, Mike Rizzo; I don’t know what a “general manager” is, but the only one I ever met was ordering me to “take the hill” amidst pops of gunfire. If you pansies want to have an argument like men, you could always do it without newspaper headlines and just have at each other until there’s blood in somebody’s piss. That’s how we settled on-field disputes in my day. Come to think of it, that’s how we dealt with long bus rides.

“Old fashioned” is an unattainable term, because you’re all so far removed from the eras you’re trying to represent, even if you’re successful, all you get is a glimpse of a long forgotten time. But, mostly, it just makes you all look like a bunch of misinformed tools.

Unlike me. I know exactly what’s going on, all the time. Some of the people around here don’t take their meds, but I swallow them all. They’re making me super intelligent and strong, and one of these days I’m going to hurl that orderly with the red hair through the front window and make my escape.

Miles “Spit Barrel” Barnaby was the bat boy/prostitute negotiator for the West Missouri Horseless Carriages until his 45th birthday. The staff at his assisted living facility lists him as so crotchety he is “…basically a crotch.” He claims to have pictures from a one night stand with Abner Doubleday. He can be reached via the can tied to a string dangling from his window.

Justin Klugh is a freelance writer orbiting the city of Phildelphia and monitoring its every activity. He is the senior editor of FanSided’s Phillies site, That Ball’s Outta Here, and a contributor on Call to the Pen. If you meet him he’ll probably try to tell you about his screenplay. It’s about the Phillies.