Hobart: Stay on Second by Lee Klein

Stay on Second:
Two Telling Moments in
One Woman’s Quarter Century of Playing Ball
Both Hard & Soft

Lee Klein

Roses and sorrows, the name Dolores meant; it seemed a nice fortune to give a girl. But there’d been not much sorrow, and fewer roses, in Dolores’ life by age twelve. She hadn’t yet kissed a boy, her chest and hips too boyish to attract the extroverts who courted (and conquered) her early-blooming peers. She had more than enough contact with boys, however. Something of an excellent athlete, she accompanied her brother Jamie to an empty lot where area kids played football deep into the winter. These boys wouldn’t consider kissing her––not in sweatshirt and jeans, her hair tucked under a stocking hat. No one kissed girls who ran post patterns so well, who lowered their shoulders into oncoming tacklers. No one kissed one of the first girls ever to play in the area Little League, let alone start at third base and advance to the all-star team that went to the regional tournament each summer. Her favorite memories were of mothers coming up after the games, amazed she was actually a girl. But Dolores knew that no boys would kiss a girl who their mothers had thought was someone’s son.

That summer, Dolores led her township’s Little League all-star team through the county tournament, going two-for-three with two doubles, four RBIs, and two runs scored against the perennially unbeatable squad from Chambersburg, a team of mustached twelve year olds beaming insults at her. Arguments erupted in the opposing team’s bleachers between those who shouted to get the girl off the field and those who said let her play. (After all, didn’t that give their side a better chance of winning, with a girl at the hot corner?) First two times up, the opposing pitcher seemed to take it easy on her, throwing meatballs down the middle that Dolores whacked into the right-center gap. Her third at bat, the umpire ejected the frustrated pitcher for throwing a fastball that glanced Dolores’ shoulder but was clearly intended to lodge itself in her helmet’s earhole. On her fourth at bat, she drilled the ball back up the middle, but the new pitcher made a nice play, got his glove between the ball and its target (his nose), and threw her out by a stride at first.

On the night after the game, Dolores and Jamie rode their bikes through the new neighborhoods: once cornfields and woods, now well-lit and freshly paved streets named for the Transcendentalists. Racing her brother down Thoreau Drive, Dolores’ foot slipped from the pedal, jammed into the front-wheel spokes, and she went over the handlebars. Jamie pulled his sister to the sidewalk, then raced home and got their mother, who spent the next few hours applying bandages and ice. By game time the next day, there was no chance Dolores would play in the final round of the county tournament. Her knees looked like the fat ends of rotting eggplants and her throwing arm was stiff. But a miraculous summer squall appeared as the teams arrived at the field for warm-ups; the game was postponed until the day after next. Conditions improved both on the field and with Dolores. She could force herself to run and throw and bear the pain. But she struck out three times, her bat speed slowed by over-the-counter painkillers. Her fourth time up, she walked, took second on a single. Then, with two outs in the final inning, down one run, the catcher bobbled a low pitch. Dolores took a few steps toward third base. She knew she wasn’t going anywhere, didn’t have the speed or the buoyancy to cover the distance. She got about as far as she’d go, just one-quarter of the way off second base, when the catcher, nearly from his knees, fired the ball over the pitcher’s head, all the way through to the second baseman who’d crept up and, as Dolores dove back to the base, applied the tag with a triumphant sweep.

Picked off second to end the game. The tying run. And oh my god was it painful. Diving back to the base, there was no way to twist her body so her swollen knees didn’t take the brunt. As the other team celebrated their victory, Dolores lay on her stomach, arms out, elbows scraped, knees sending insults through her body. She cursed and rolled over, her helmet fallen off, her bangs come loose from braids and clips. Coach Kozlowski ran over and helped her up: “We wouldn’t of made it this far without you, Lo.” But when she got to the dugout, still weeping, she could sense the hostility. If she hadn’t fallen off her bike. If she hadn’t led off the base. If the pitch had been higher and Bobby Colario had lifted it the 202 feet it needed to clear the outfield fence, she could have limped to home plate. But things happened as they did. Her teammates said nothing. No word of encouragement. No sympathy. Nothing. That summer Dolores couldn’t even watch the Phillies on TV.

A tall wall of oak trunks lining the softball fields stood out against an aluminum sky, thanks in part to a chartreuse fuzz along the uppermost branches. The grass was more gray than green. The infield dirt raked and ready. Everyone wore pale-blue MediMediaPolis T-shirts under long sleeves, but no one had a spare that would fit Dolores. It wasn’t a big deal, since the opponent (PolyMicro Labs) just tried to wear something red. Dolores stood ten strides beyond second base in her stone-washed jeans and two artifacts from college (pale-black hooded sweatshirt and Flyers cap), with a borrowed mitt intended to fit her left hand twisted over on her right. She ground the balls of her sneakers’ soles into the knuckled turf, with feet shoulder-width apart, arms loose, hands in the ready position above her knees, her instinct about to kick in.

But it was only warm-ups. Wilson, her official office crush, was taking batting practice. He lifted his front foot as the pitch arced slowly toward him, his whole torso dropping as the ball rose. His bat, like the lazy racquet of an elderly tennis player, swept around in sync with the ball’s polite delivery, sending high-flying shots that hovered a moment before they fell into the mitts of outfielders who hardly had to move, as though Wilson were too considerate to make anyone chase hard-hit liners. With each slow pitch offered to Wilson, Dolores let her instinct anticipate each shot, leaning in one direction or the other, restraining herself from taking off in a sprint. And as she swayed in the direction of each fly ball, two contradictory thoughts became clear to Dolores: first, that despite all appearances to the contrary, she really was a fast cat––maybe a jaguar, or a cheetah––and second, she knew that even if she ran her fastest, she didn’t stand a chance of tracking a ball down, not unless it were hit right to her.

Charlie the CEO took his cuts after Wilson. Unlike everyone else in their loose-fitting sweats and faded jeans, Charlie wore bleach-bright pinstriped baseball pants, complete with blue-nylon stirrups stretched to a thin ribbon from upper calf to cleat. He even applied caterpillar-like slurs of black grease to his cheeks to cut the late-afternoon glare. Charlie looked like a natural, asserting himself as the team’s undisputed leader on the softball diamond, no different than around the conference table. At the plate, his stance was squat and hunched: feet nearly together, knees too, his profile zigzagged, bouncing in homage to Pete Rose. Then he attacked the ball, chopping each pitch into the space between outfielders and infielders in all directions. Dolores was on guard, ready for one to come to her, standing within the range of every ball Charlie hit. But each one fell far to her left or right. It reminded her of swimming at the shore with the most ride-able waves breaking to either side of where she stood. Then he hit one right at her. She charged, then stopped, realizing she would need to jump, which she did: an inch off the turf at most, but enough for her glove to halt the ball’s flight––it hung above her just long enough to snag with her bare hand and trap in the glove. A general cheer. “Great grab!” she heard Charlie shout from home plate. Then Dolores nonchalantly tossed the ball on a line back to the pitcher. Everyone whooped again for her arm’s strength and accuracy. And it dawned on her fellow coworkers/teammates that Dolores, that pudgy mainstay of the editorial staff, was a bona fide baller.

Batting tenth in The MediMediaPolis Maulers’ lineup, Dolores stepped to the plate for the first time and cracked the ball over the head of the left fielder (who’d cheated up just beyond the infield dirt), then motored to second for an easy double as two runs scored. The congratulations came with such back-slapping ferocity that Dolores plotted an intentional strike out next time up. But she couldn’t help herself once the ball left the pitcher’s hand. Each time up, she hit to areas of the softball field where the opposing team’s players couldn’t reach at a full sprint, not even if they dove at the last possible moment with glove outstretched. Each hit sent Dolores rumbling along the base paths, and rather than attempting to risk an out for an extra base, Dolores opted to stand on a bag once she reached a reasonable stopping point. She stood there with two feet on the base as though the infield dirt were water and she couldn’t swim.

Wilson hadn’t done much beside hit sky-high pop-ups. Charlie coached him to swing down on the ball, but Wilson swooped into it with his whole body, his back foot floating as his weight shifted ahead, invariably sending the incoming pitch skyward.

“You’re embarrassing me out there, Dolores,” said Wilson, jogging out to centerfield, his glove curved toward his armpit like a deformed flipper.

“Right, right––‘hit it where they ain’t’ . . . Got any other secrets?”

Dolores wanted to respond with something like “that’s the least of them” but instead she just caught the incoming warm-up toss from the right fielder and sent a pop up that rose and fell and landed in the webbing of Wilson’s mitt without forcing him to alter his stride as he jogged into position.