Playing for Fun

Clarence Stone

English 325

 

I got my first baseball glove when I was seven. I don’t remember exactly how I got it, but I do remember that I started playing catch with my Dad that spring. Whenever the weather was good, we would go out in front of the house and play. As we threw the ball back and forth, I noticed two things: I could throw the ball long enough for my dad to not have to move to catch it, and that I caught almost everything that was thrown my way. We started close, but as I got older we started to move further apart. My arm grew stronger and my throws became more accurate. By the time I was nine, we were two wide, two-story town houses apart and I still was able throw and catch the ball without any issues. Even when I messed up, it was still fun, and my parents could tell I enjoyed playing. By this time, my Uncle Cedric began coaching a little league team.  The following year, I began my first season of baseball on his team.

 

Being on my uncle’s team was key in shaping my love for the sport; he was a great little league coach. A relatively short light skinned guy with really broad shoulders and salt and pepper hair, he always had a smile on his face. As a coach, Coach Ced was patient with all his players, and rarely ever raised his voice if we made a mistake. He was obviously more focused on making sure his players had fun instead of winning games. If I messed up, he calmly would pull me aside, and tell me what corrections I needed to make. Meanwhile on the field, I was able to play with his son, Chris. My cousin Chris looked a lot like me, as we both had curly black hair, light skin, big brown eyes and were relatively the same height. We were already close, due to having similar interests and being the only boys in our generation of our family.  Yet until baseball season started, we didn’t get to see each other that much because he lived on the other side of the city. However once we started playing together, we spent a lot more time with each other. Our friendship was not only strengthened by this, but also by the fact that we became two of the best players on the team. He was our short stop and I played second base; we batted behind each other in the line up. By the time the season came to an end, we were as close as brothers. Even though as a team we didn’t win every single game, we were at least competitive and played hard every game. I couldn’t have had a better experience.

 

In regards to the sport itself, baseball seemed like a match made in heaven for me. Instead of being a sport that larger players benefitted from like football or basketball, in baseball, what mattered most was hand eye coordination; one of my biggest strengths.  Defensively, anything that was hit my way I typically caught, and offensively I was pretty good at telling the difference between a strike and a ball so I was on base quite a lot. Not to mention, nothing felt better than getting a solid hit off of the bat. Each time I got a hit, I felt a rush that was more powerful than anything I had ever felt before. I was hooked.

During my first three seasons, I was able to let my talent carry me, which felt great, as baseball was the first sport I ever excelled at. Although I played other sports when I was younger, I always had to work much harder than the other kids to keep up. Baseball was different. When I would go up to bat, the ball would look like it was moving slowly. Even when I was going through a hitting slump at the plate, I knew I would get out of it eventually. By the time my fourth year of playing rolled around, I was cocky. I thought that with my hitting and fielding ability at age 13, I was on track to be one of the best players in the city. I was wrong.

 

****

 

For the uninitiated, sports leagues are split into different age groups. In the case of baseball, the ages are typically broken up by years of two until the player turns 14 i.e. 10 and under, 12 and under, and 14 and under. With each age group, the rules become more like the professional game. Bases and get further apart, and the pitcher’s mound is further back. Once you get to the 14 and under division, you play with the exact dimensions of pro league baseball – 90 feet between the bases and 60 feet between the pitchers mound and home plate. These adjustments are mainly for player safety and fairness. Younger players are naturally not as developed or skilled as older players, and some of their throws throws cannot reach the pro league distances. Each time a player moves up, the transition can be difficult depending on their age. For me, that happened when I joined the 14 and under league.

 

Thirteen was a difficult year for me as a player. I was 13 and smaller than the other players who were growing exponentially. That season I realized that size had an impact in baseball. No one on my team was that big, and when we played players that were bigger, we lost. That realization started to have an effect on me. Every time we would play a team with bigger players, I felt butterflies in my stomach. Defensively, this would sometime end up in a fumbled ground ball or an errant throw, but since I kept on playing the same position, muscle memory took over halfway through the season and my defense stopped becoming a problem. The real issue was in the batters box.  

 

Hitting was something I deeply enjoyed doing; it was the best part of playing baseball. Nothing could beat the rush I felt when I got a solid base hit off of a pitcher. Going into my first season of 14 and under, I had the confidence that I could hit any pitcher in the league.  In my first game that season, I got a double and played with no worries. I had played this team before, and their players were familiar to me. I knew I could hit them because I had done it before. Then the next game, we played a team that was new to the league, and their players were at least 3 inches taller than I was. As the game got started, I watched their pitcher warm up. I could barely follow the ball. The butterflies in my stomach started doing backflips. Once I got up to the batters box, I was praying he would walk me. I did not want to swing the bat. Honestly, I was just scared of getting hit by one of this kid’s pitches. He threw his first pitched and I barely saw it. “Strike one!” yelled the umpire. His second pitch was a tad slower, so I attempted to hit it and it bounced off the bat behind the plate. “Foul ball! Count is 0-2!” His last pitch was just as fast as the first one. I swung and missed completely. “Strike three! Batter’s out!”

 

Those two games would be a microcosm for the majority of that season for me. Every time we played a team that I had played against in the past, I ended up doing well. I would get extra base hits and score multiple runs. Yet when we played players that were naturally bigger or stronger than me, regardless of how comfortable I felt, I couldn’t hit the ball. If I made contact, it would be a weak ground ball or a pop up, never anything strong. Overall, I still had fun that season, but I was not nearly as good as I had been in previous years.

 

Meanwhile, Chris was still playing well. He was 6 months older than me, and a year ahead of me in school; he was therfore more comfortable playing with older players. While I was in 8th grade, he started high school, and made the varsity team. I didn’t want to fall any further behind him, so I needed a way to play more games against better teams.  I decided that I wanted to sign up for our neighborhood league, Rosedale Park. Rosedale Park baseball had a reputation for being some of the best local baseball in the city, and once you were 14 you started playing with high schoolers. If I wanted to get better, playing with older kids would be necessary.

 

My first season in Rosedale went well for the most part. It provided me with what I was looking for as for all of all of the spring, I played at least 3 extra games a week, and faced players who were as old as 17. By the time I finished my first season in Rosedale, the butterflies I got when I played bigger players had become nerves of steel. However as it turned out, that wasn’t enough. Although the nerves were gone, there was still the issue of not seeing the ball when I came up to bat. My hitting again was sporadic. Some days I would get a couple decent hits with a few Runs Batted In (RBIs), and others I would strike out three straight times. It was no longer an issue of nervousness, but an issue of skill.

 

****

 

The year before I started attending Renaissance High School, I found out that Coach Ced was going to be an assistant coach for the varsity baseball team. At 14, I completely understood the benefits of nepotism, and knew that I would at least have a chance at making the team because I was one of the coach’s relatives. Yet there is a difference between being the relative of the assistant coach, and the relative of the head coach. My head coach’s name was Leon McKissick and he was much more concerned with having good players on the varsity team and less with helping a coach’s family member. He made that painfully clear during our first baseball meeting that September.

 

“Hello everyone,” he said as he entered the door to the health room. “For those who are new, it’s nice to meet you, and for those who are returning, welcome back. This season we are looking to be a better team than last year, and I hope you all are ready to work.” He told us that conditioning was going to be at 6:45 in the morning on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and every Saturday we were to meet at Hitting Zone for batting practice. “Unless you are currently playing another sport, I expect anyone who seriously wants to have a spot on the team this season to show up to everything.”

 

Conditioning and hitting practice officially started in December, and I quickly learned that Coach McKissick was very different than Coach Ced. Physically he was much skinnier, taller and had a much darker skin tone, and when it came to coaching, instead of being a calm teacher, he was a hard ass. Conditioning was filled with sprints, weightlifting, and running laps while he was always constantly shouting. “This season we may not be the most talented team, but we dang sure will be the most in shape! Come on fellas! My mother can run faster than that!” If he thought you weren’t giving it one hundred percent he would call you out. “The heck do you think you’re doing. If you don’t want to be here now, you definitely won’t want to be here when the season starts!” Needless to say, I was at every single conditioning meeting.

 

Hitting practice was a completely different experience. For starters, instead of comfortable high school gym where conditioning took place, the batting cage where we would meet on Saturdays that winter was in a warehouse with no windows and very little ventilation. Yet it got the job done, as it had all the essentials for a batting cage: hitting nets, pitching machines, and hitting tees. However, I did not get to use all of these.

During our first practice, Coach McKissick had me warm up on one of the tees. When I tried to hit the ball, I couldn’t stop myself from hitting the tee. After 5 swings stopped me. “What the hell was that?” he asked sternly. I didn’t know how to respond at first. “I was trying to hit the ball…” I responded timidly.

 

“Wait that was seriously how you swing? Son that was terrible. You hit the tee every single time, and you were hitting high pop ups. When you swing, it shouldn’t be an upper cut, it should be a horizontal line. The baseball should fly straight off the tee. CJ, I can’t let you go into these cages yet, it would be a waste of time for other players and for you. Until I tell you otherwise, you are going to stay here on this tee every practice.” From then on, for 2 hours every Saturday for 3 straight months, I swung on the tee. Quite frankly, I hated it. I was embarrassed, because no one else was doing this. For weeks, I couldn’t avoid hitting that blasted piece of plastic. What made matters worse is that Chris would come to these practices, and he only needed to swing on the tee for warm up purposes. He had clearly become better than I was. It wasn’t until February was almost over however that I was even allowed to join the rest of the high school players. By the time the season started, I realized that playing on the varsity team was not going to happen.

 

That season I played on the JV team and, since no other Detroit Public Schools had a JV team, we only played 5 games against suburban teams before our season ended. I wasn’t that great either. This was mainly because in the suburbs, if there is a JV team, instead of having freshman or sophomores, teams are typically filled with juniors and some seniors. We didn’t win a single game and barely got any hits. Yet because I had done everything during the offseason, when the JV season ended, I was given choice of either joining the Varsity team or playing the whole season in Rosedale. I chose Rosedale, and Coach McKissick didn’t blame me as he thought it would be better for me to get more games under my belt instead of riding the bench on the Varsity team.

 

That season in Rosedale was completely different than the year before. Apparently, the time I spent hitting off the tee had helped. The difference between my hitting that year and the year before was like night and day. Instead of getting smaller singles and weak grounders, I was mashing the ball to the opposite field for RBI doubles.  When I knew I could hit a pitcher, there was no doubt in my mind I would do it. But just like in the past, there were always times when I struggled. There were 2 players that season that had cannons for arms and they made hitting difficult. I would sometimes struggle to make contact with the ball, and when I did, it would go directly to another player. Still, because I had such a good season, my coach recommended me for Rosedale’s tournament team: the Rosedale Raiders.

 

Rosedale’s tournament team was my first taste of travel baseball. It was honestly a different beast than anything I had played before. Practice was every day for 2 to 3 hours. Instead of teaching the mechanics to play, like Rosedale coaches did for the majority of the season, this team was focused on strategy. When we weren’t focusing on fielding, we were hitting. When we weren’t hitting, we were studying pitching and when to run while on base. The tournament team was also where I finally started to learn about baseball and sports as a social construct. Once the tournament finally came, I realized we were the only all black team, and we were playing in Taylor, Michigan, also known as Taylortuckey. Although our team was decent, we already had a disadvantage. Race is sometimes a contributor to outcome of tournament games, especially ours. As an all black team, if we had to rely on the umpires, we would not succeed. If a call could go either way, it went to the white team. It was so bad, that our coach was thrown out of the game for calling out an umpire who called a ball that bounced off the dirt a strike. We couldn’t get past it, and we were eliminated in 2 games. By this point, it was August, and baseball was essentially over. Winning wise, things didn’t go the way I had hoped; none of the teams I played for that season won any kind of championship. Yet, I had played for 6 straight months for the first time, and I played well. In my eyes, I could confidently call myself a baseball player.

 

****

 

Baseball, like any other sport, is as much a game of confidence as it is a game of talent. When I was confident, I felt unstoppable. I made improbable defensive plays, and could hit almost any pitch that was thrown. Yet when my confidence was down, I was terrible. And this was something that I don’t think any of my coaches realized. Going into my sophomore year, I had all the confidence in the world. That off-season I got a hitting coach to help prepare me for the season, and after altering my swing to the point where I thought it was finally better, I knew I would be great during the upcoming season. I played well in practice, and proved I deserved a spot on the varsity team.  However, since I moved to the outfield in high school, I simply didn’t have size or the speed that other players in my position did, so I didn’t actually start for the varsity team for weeks. By the time I did, I hadn’t actually played baseball in weeks. In my first game I played in, the pitcher had decent speed, but nothing too special. I thought I was going to easily get a base hit. Instead, I struck out for the first at bat. In the second, I grounded out. In the third, I struck out again. This continued into the next few games. During my sophomore season, I maybe got a hit every 3 games. Either way, I wasn’t good enough to start for the rest of the season.  

 

Even though Coach McKissick told me that by the end of the season I had easily become the most improved player from the year before, my confidence was shot. After all the work I had done, after how well I had hit the season before, I still wasn’t good enough. That whole year, it seemed like I was trying to reach the player I had become the season before, and kept missing him. Although I played well enough to make the Rosedale tournament team that year, I wasn’t a starter.  When I got to play, my nerves came back. I couldn’t concentrate and would end up swinging at pitches I knew were balls. Although as a team we were over all better, I couldn’t enjoy myself nearly as much due to my horrific play.

 

When the season was over, my mom and I talked about what happened. “What do you think happened CJ?” she asked, concerned. “You didn’t have nearly this much trouble last year. It’s almost looked like you were scared at the plate half the time you were there.”  That was it. I knew that fear was the reason I had played so terribly before, but I didn’t want to admit. “Mom,” I responded. “I don’t even know what I was afraid of.” I could hear the frustration coming out in my voice, and tears began to form in my eyes. “I just was so scared to mess up, that I couldn’t enjoy playing. I psyched myself out the whole time.” The tears were flowing by this point. “I just want to be good. I just want to play well. I never want to feel like this again.”

 

The next year I did everything I could to try to have a better junior year. I realized that I needed help, so I turned to Chris. He had become one of the best players in Detroit by this point, and I thought playing with him would help me improve. We played fall ball together, and we joined a hitting league during the winter to keep swinging once it got cold. I also got a new hitting coach to help improve my swing again. When the season began, I thought I was going to be better. I had become a much better hitter, and felt more confident. I was driving the ball every other at bat. Halfway through the season I was becoming one of the better hitters on the team. But I still had problems. This season the issue was defense, and I had trouble catching fly balls. Whenever a ball was hit to me, I always seemed to be playing too far back, and I didn’t have the speed to catch up. Regardless of what my coaches told me, I kept making this mistake, and never seemed to be able to get players out. My coaches were always worried that I would drop a ball that would be key to winning a game.

 

This eventually happened during the playoffs. We were playing Chris’s team, King High School, for a chance to play in the championship game at Comerica Park. It was the 5th inning and the score was tied. Our best pitcher was on the mound, and Chris had gotten a hit off of him. Before I knew it, he was third base. Our pitcher struck out the next two batters, and then the next batter hit a pop up in my direction. I was playing towards the outfield fence, and the ball that seemed like it was going to drop just past the infield. I tried but couldn’t catch it before it hit the ground. Chris took off. By the time I got to the ball, Chris had scored. King got a lead, and they ended up winning the game.

 

That was the last straw for Coach McKissick. He benched me for the next 3 games, including the consolation game at Comerica Park. Since my replacement wasn’t as good as I was, I eventually got my spot back, but the damage had been done. My biggest fear had come true, and all I could do face the consequences.

 

Playing sports is funny sometimes. I was so afraid of being benched, that the fear led to me playing terribly. In reality, being benched might have been the best thing that could have happened to me. The worst possible outcome had occurred, and life moved on. I got my spot back. It finally hit me that if I kept playing with nerves, I was going to continue to have problems. It was time to start having fun playing baseball again.

 

I attacked my senior year with new focus. I played travel ball with my fall ball team that year, and I focused on just enjoying the sport I loved. It ended up being exactly what I needed, as all of a sudden I was playing the way I was playing my freshman year. I hit the cover off the ball, and played great defense in the outfield. This trend continued in the fall, and by the time the winter and the offseason rolled around, I felt like a new player. My strength and speed increased dramatically. Not to mention my hitting coach finally found something to help me adjust to faster pitching. Instead of stepping into the pitch, he told me to shift my weight to my back leg while the pitcher was winding up, and shift it forward again during the swing. The thought this would give me an extra second to adjust. He was right. Once we started live hitting practice in the spring, fast pitching was no longer an issue.

 

****

 

In December of 2010, I got accepted to Michigan with a full tuition academic scholarship. I was elated because Michigan had been my dream school for years. I told everyone in my family, and we all had a huge celebration. But the next day, it hit me: this was going to be my final year of baseball.

Michigan is a Division 1 school in one of the top power 6 conferences. In order for me to play baseball there, I would have to grow 3 extra inches, hit for considerable power, and get at least 2 seconds off of my 60 yard dash. I knew this wasn’t possible. By choosing to go to Michigan, I was resigned to my fate that after June 2011, I was never going to play varsity baseball again.

 

Senior year was shaping out better than I could have imagined. By the time we reached the middle of the season, I was batting .737, and my fielding had vastly improved. By all intents and purposes, I was one of the best players on the team. My play kept up as the season kept going, and by the time May rolled around, we made it to the second round of the playoffs again. Even though Chris had graduated, this time, I wanted to make up for last time when we played King. I ended up going 2 for 3 with 3 RBIs, and played good defense. When everything was said and done, we won 7-5.  We were going to Comerica for the Championship Game.

 

The Championship game didn’t go nearly as well. We lost 8-0 against the reigning champs and their starting pitcher ended up throwing a perfect game. Not a single player on my team got a base hit. I ended up being the final out of that game, striking out on a curve ball. That game was the beginning of the end for us that season. We made it to the Regional round of the State tournament 2 games after that, but our bats were still cold. We ended up losing 1-0. Just like that, baseball was done.

 

I haven’t played baseball in 4 years.  Sometimes I will occasionally go to a batting cage, but I haven’t played a game in so long that I wonder if I were given another chance, could I even compete with kids 4 years younger than I.  Still, not a day goes by that I don’t think about my senior year and how it ended. If I had just been a tad bit better, could we have won our final games? If I had chosen somewhere else to attend for college, would I still be playing now? What about if I had just played for fun my whole time in high school instead of worry about messing up? I try to not to spend too much time on these questions as I know I’ll never have the answers, but sometimes I just can’t help but think about the game I loved so much.