Softball shtick

  One of the odder phenomena of my middle age is that certain Yiddish expressions have started to come back to me. Or rather come to me --- since only about six words of Yiddish were ever spoken in the Goldblatt household, and only for emphasis rather than for meaning. It's a mystical thing to have artifacts of another language, a dying language, zoom into your head out of the collective unconscious of your race, or perhaps just out of the ether.

For example, I was playing softball in Flushing Meadow Park several summers ago, standing in the sunny isolation of center field, when a hard ground ball took two hops across the infield, struck a pebble and bounced straight up into our third baseman's groin.

I winced as he fell to the ground and thought: "Oy, right in de shvantz!"

Then, after five minutes, when his girlfriend came running back to the field with a plastic bag full of ice, from deep within the kishkes of my brain, what occurred to me was: "'Svet gornisht helfen."

I didn't even know what the expression meant until I tracked it down that night on the Internet. It seems to be a cross between "too little too late" and "it's not going to help one bit." How it came to me, or why it came to me, I've not a clue. But if it turns out that circumcision is more than a physical token, more than a little bit off the top, as we used to say in the 'hood, if indeed I'm haunted by the ghosts of shtetls past, well, then, so be it.

But to return to our stricken third baseman, whom I'll call Sheldon, since that is in fact his name, the aforementioned bad hop caught him in the final inning of a tied game against our archrivals, the Zoo.

Ah, the cursed Zoo! They were a nasty but well-named lot, culled from the lifetime subscription list for Easyriders magazine and the toxic end of Hulk Hogan's gene pool.

They were the Hatfields to our McCoys, the Montagues to our Capulets, the Philistines to our Israelites. Their game plan was elemental; their lumbering, pot-bellied, and occasionally inebriated batters strutted and belched their way into the batter's box, then swung from their heels with the pent-up rage that lurks beneath every Serenity prayer.

By contrast, our team was built on speed, defense, and an occasional Fresca; we ran down their long drives deep in the outfield, and we took extra bases whenever their fielders didn't hustle after the ball. The Zoo hated us for our first-to-third dashes, for our savvy situational hitting, for our copies of the New York Times Book Review tucked into our equipment bags, for our wives' and girlfriends' shaved legs and full sets of teeth, for our discernable necks and prehensile thumbs.

All of that was forgotten, however, as Sheldon went down. Both teams, within moments, had gathered around third-base. Sympathetic glances were exchanged. Hands were placed on rivals' shoulders.

As Sheldon lay writhing in the dirt, the Zoo catcher knelt down beside him and whispered tenderly, "You'll be all right, guy. Just stay still." Would a torn tendon have elicited such compassion from a ham-fisted brute whose nickname, sewn into the back of his jersey, was Hondo? Not likely. Would a separated shoulder have so stirred the australopithecine heart that beat beneath his team's block-lettered insignia? Again, no. The sight of a splintered, jagged femur jutting through the flesh of Sheldon's thigh…Hondo would've told him to rub dirt on it, then turned to the umpire and called, "Yo, Blue, can the dude play or not?"

But a shot to the groin is different, perhaps because all ballplayers have been there. It's part of the game, as much as cursing and spitting and patting your teammates on the butt. The ball, having been struck over and over by the bat, suddenly decides to take revenge on the bat's little brother. Even the aesthetics are painful to contemplate. The momentum-rich heft of the ball. The come-and-get-me posture of male genitalia. The winking eye. The ball-field euphemism for a shot to the groin is taking one in the family jewels. I rather like that expression, the pomp and circumstance of it, the sudden breach of protocol, the crest and scepter rattling with synecdoche.

  Notwithstanding the fact that I've played organized softball for the last three decades, that I've sustained two broken collarbones, six fractured fingers, thirty-seven pulled hamstrings, and one AstroTurf burn on my left calf that took nine months to heal, that I've sacrificed promising romances and glorious vacations abroad on the altar of the Goddess Clincher, truth be told, I've never been more than a run-of-the-mill player.

Indeed, I'd have long ago been relegated to the role of benchwarmer, or else chucked outright, save for the fact that I'm an unnaturally fast runner and thus have a continued canine value in the outfield. As my longtime teammate Sal once uncharitably observed, the only sport in which I could have gone pro was fetch.

Still, the end is nigh. To be nothing but fast is to be helpless as your speed goes into decline. There is no skill I can master at this stage of my softball life to compensate, no cagey veteran adjustments I can make. Strive though I might to take each season one game at a time, to beat back the idea of retirement by shutting my eyes and repeating to myself "la-la-la-la-la-la," cost-benefit analyses have begun to worm their way into my thoughts.

Even now, the ratio of time I spend preparing to play a game—stretching my hamstring and calf muscles, gulping down ibuprofens, wrapping my thighs to gangrene-defying pressures and smearing palmfuls of Bengay on whichever joints I can still reach—compared with the time I spend actually playing nears one to one.

Worse still is the game's aftermath. First comes the unraveling—a kind of reverse mummification that ends with streamers of beige and white ace bandages fluttering in the wind at my side. Next is the de-cleating. This is bad because it involves bending forward and making universal old-man noises: Urrrgh. Unnngh. Nummnh. Then comes the lingering blank stare as the inner adult silently engages the inner child. Their debate runs along predictable lines: "It's not worth it anymore." "Oh, come on, it's still fun!" "No one's paying you to do this." "But it's good exercise! It keeps you in shape!" "Are you an idiot? Look at yourself!" "Please, please, please, just five more minutes! I'll be good the rest of the week!"

Once I get home, further torments await. Underneath my uniform, I wear a skin-tight thermal shirt—which gets soaked with sweat. Pulling it off over my head entails a contortion act that would set Houdini's teeth on edge and often winds up with the thermal shirt inside out but still tight around my neck, and with me careening blindly around the apartment, knocking over floor lamps and tray tables. Then comes the ritual application of ice packs to shoulders and knees, followed a half hour later by a hot bath in which the ongoing challenge is to remain conscious; I cannot count the times I've awakened in the tub just as my chin and nose slid below the waterline, coughing up mouthfuls of Epsom salt.

The reader might be forgiven at this point for rolling his eyes at the kvetching of a middle-aged man who hit the circumstantial jackpot of being born in America, in decent health, and with enough wits about him to cobble together a life that has allowed him to play organized softball for three decades. So what if my moment in the sun is passing?

Except what I'm kvetching about, if the reader hasn't figured it out yet, isn't the transience of softball but the transience of existence. The dwindling of my playing days is a foreshadowing of the dwindling of my days, the petering out of the life force underneath the uniform, underneath the sun-creased skin, underneath the sinew and cartilage that fail with greater and greater frequency.

I am in ebb mode.

Here's a confession: I used to keep a guitar pick in my pocket. I told friends it was a good-luck charm, but in truth I kept it around just in case an Elvis Presley movie broke out, and I had to win back Ann-Margaret's heart with a song. That was how I thought of myself. Center stage. Spotlighted. Mic'd up. The audience hanging on my every sneer and glance. But that image is no longer sustainable. Pausing in front of a mirror, I'm confronted by the truth that if an Elvis Presley movie did break out, I'd be the old guy, the William Demarest character, who leans out the window and tells the kids to knock off the racket. I do not think they will sing to me.

How did it happen? One minute ago, or so it seemed, I was strutting and fretting, a poor player perhaps but a player nevertheless, and now, a minute later, I'm an attendant lord, noodging and kibitzing, swelling a progress in the Yiddish Theater. Now I stand at a podium in front of a college classroom and give lectures on the Old Testament, and bored coeds crane their necks at the sunlight streaming in through the windows. Spring is right up in their faces. It's quickening their blood. The temperature outside is seventy degrees, without a hint of humidity. There's a breeze they can hear but not feel. Why oh why, they are thinking, won't this geezer shut up about the Book of Job?

Then, too, there's the whole mortality thing. The sports heroes of my childhood, the baseball and football and basketball players whose posters once hung on my bedroom wall, are dying of natural causes. Even among my peers, my lifelong friends, Death has begun to nosh. He takes a breast, part of a lung, a hunk of kidney. So far, I've eluded his attention. But how much longer can that last?

Because the lineup is moving. Inexorably, the lineup is moving. From the shade of the dugout, I watched my father step to the plate against the Eternal Windmiller; I watched him take his hacks and go down swinging. Three quick risers, and he was done. Then I watched my mother's turn; she worked the count full, fouled off pitch after pitch, until in the end she looked at a called third strike on a nasty change-up. I don't remember moving to the on-deck circle while she was batting, but I must have, because now the umpire is pointing his finger straight at me, motioning me into the box. And I'm glancing around, listening to catcalls from the sparse crowd, helplessly and hopelessly farblondzhet.

I know I can't hit this guy.

JWR contributor Mark Goldblatt's latest book is Right Tool for the Job: A Memoir of Manly Concerns.