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Sidelines Kalani Simpson |
Some time thinking
inside of the boxTHE thing about a box score is the stories it can tell.
There's something familiar, familial about reading a box score, something comforting, something "home." All the numbers, so tiny and true. The positions and names. The columns and tabs all perfect, all in a row.
The story is all there in every box score. Not only of the game it describes, but of every one that came before it, too. The story of baseball. The feeling, the ancestral memory, of poring over box scores so many times before.
Of the times when you looked over them every day, eagerly, to see who did what, when. To see how many hits the center fielder had. Of the summer when Jose Canseco -- yes, that Jose Canseco -- hit the ball like Roy Hobbs come to life. And every day you'd look, just what he'd done next.
Of being a kid with a baseball glove stuffed in the bottom of a backpack.
Box scores are like love letters that bring it all flooding back.
Not sure exactly what happened between me and baseball. Like all lost friendships it must have just faded, somewhere along the line.
But the memories are good.
And there are times, looking at that extended agate, when once again, for just a moment, I am young and in love.
LIKE MOST PEOPLE, for me, baseball can never be what it once was. I like it, yeah. But it just isn't the same. Maybe because nothing is so selective as the human memory, and reality just can't compare to a little boy's dreams. Maybe it's just part of getting older.
It just isn't the same. I like it. But the magic is gone.
We're just friends now, baseball and me.
But then, sometimes, proofreading a page or in a quiet moment with the paper at home, I'll fall into those box scores.
And maybe there really is poetry in baseball in these modern times. Even if only for a minute or two, even if only in my mind.
Because it really was great for those few years. Wasn't it?
A glove and a cap stuffed into a book bag, for an afternoon after school playing ball in the park.
And an old rotting, rusty grandstand that should have been condemned, should have fallen down on all of us. (That was the real reason for the backstop screen behind home plate.)
Catch in the front yard. Just back and forth, nothing but the sound of the ball settling in perfectly, in a rhythm that could solve all the problems of the world.
And looking in the paper, and learning how to follow those boxes, adopting favorite players and seeing who had how many hits each day.
Playing Little League in Toughskins jeans. At practice, not a pair of baseball pants in sight.
Just playing, and sliding in the cinders and the dirt.
We tried to come up with a name for our team. "We should be the Dirty Dozen," Kaui Young said, because the 12 of us went home dirty every day.
I can still see the smile on his face.
Chicken Pox swept through town that year, and you couldn't go to practice if you weren't allowed in school. And I was better but still in bed, under the Department of Education's official rules.
There was nothing in the world like returning to play baseball that first day, that first day of summer.
No backpack now. No books. Just the hat, and the glove, so broken in, so perfect.
I still have it. It seemed so big then. So small now. It doesn't fit anymore. I like baseball, I want to love it. But it just doesn't fit.
But then there are those boxes. The numbers, the names, the abbreviated positions that everyone played. And it does something, this old habit. For a minute I remember, and the imagination flows and maybe, just maybe, I could fall in love again.
It all comes back, for just a second or two.
Not a bad little miracle, for a piece of newsprint to deliver.
Kalani Simpson can be reached at ksimpson@starbulletin.com