An Ordinary Day #4

Summer weekends are not good times for me to go to Lighthouse Point. Way too crowded. Monday through Friday is fine. But Saturday and Sunday are days hordes of families show up with cook-out gear and loud talk.

If I can show up around 10 or 10:30 in the morning on weekends, I can squeeze in an hour under the black cherry tree or on the slope behind the windbreak. But later than that and the hordes arrive with dead animals and Frisbees and footballs and noisy and excited children.

The noisy and excited children are forgivable. The smell of charcoaled dead animals is not. So I tend to avoid weekends at Lighthouse during July and August.

The rest of the year is much more “mine.“ Nobody but me and a couple of other diehards show up on cool weekends in October and November or April and early-May. And nobody but me shows up in December or February. But late-June, July and August are weekend disasters.

So this past Sunday, I went in search of a nearby alternative. I drove to Fort Hale Park, located just north of Lighthouse. It was nice and leafy, with a distant overview of the New Haven Harbor. But you can’t really get close to the water, unless you head for the parking lot, which destroys the whole ‘natural’ feel of the place. So that is not an alternative for me.

But as I drove home up Woodward Avenue and into the Annex section of New Haven, I suddenly found myself passing a real-live baseball game. And not just one game but two on separate fields.

Serious baseball out in the open, in a local neighborhood, with the sun shining and kids playing and the ball being whipped around the infield and the pitcher throwing hard to home plate and the batter taking a full swing.

The separate fields were enclosed and carefully marked off. There were dugouts and baselines and a pitching rubber and home plate and the players and “managers” wore uniforms. This was the real McCoy.

I would later discover that the ballplayers were 12-years-old, with a few 11-year-olds mixed in. And they took the game very seriously.

I pulled off to the side, turned my car around and drove down the entrance to the fields and got out of the car and walked over to the field I’d spotted from the road.

It was the Hamden Yard Dogs versus the Hartford Hurricanes on F. McGowan Field.

Can you imagine: baseball on a Sunday morning! Live and in-person in a city neighborhood with a few relatives in the small stands and wandering around beyond the outfield fence !

I was smiling the whole time. It was like sliding through a time-warp into 1950. Only these guys had fancier uniforms than kids had back then. And dugouts, can you imagine? And an impeccable ball field. There was no scoreboard. So I didn’t know who was ahead.

But it didn’t matter to me, who was ahead. The fact that the game was happening at all was a miracle. In this day and age of virtual everything, with video screens defining much of American life and virtual reality replacing the dirt and grime of sliding into second base, this was a counter-revolution. This was real life taking a stand. This was the purity of baseball cleansing the polluted air of virtual nothingness.

I stayed for four innings.

Some of the kids were tall and strong. Some were short and thin. But they could all handle the glove pretty well, and they knew how to take a cut-off throw and how to steal a base. The pitchers, who you could tell were copying the style of Major Leaguers, were a little too fast for the hitters. I didn’t see many hits. But the kids’ commitment to the game was intense and the “managers” treated the players with respect and helpful guidance.

The point was that the game was taking place, the kids were seriously playing it, and the quality was pretty good for 12-year-olds.

My bleak view of the future took a breath. Maybe things are not as totally dark as I thought. Maybe neighborhood baseball games on Sunday mornings could point a way out of our cynical dead-end, out of our addiction to dispirited confusion.

Maybe the idea of a Field of Dreams still exists on a local, non-corporate, non-ideological, non-corrupted level. Instead of streaming reality through a sequence of Google filters or political hoops, maybe we should just sit down and watch a baseball game played by 12-year-olds.

Maybe it would help us see what innocence used to look like before the Devil invented virtual reality and the false prophets convinced us that false-everything is as good-as-it-gets.

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