“You be Jason Varitek, and I’ll be Tim
Wakefield,” my daughter yells, grabbing her mitt and heading to the backyard
for some post-dinner pitching. At age 7, Rachel is already on her second
hand-me-down glove from big brother Jason, but she’s never asked me for a new
one. Looking at the ancient model I put on my own left hand, she knows better.
My glove is older than Rachel, older
than 11-year-old Jason, older in fact than my marriage to their mother – which
is moving into its 14th summer. The Wilson A2000 I’ve used to teach
both of them the game has been with me through more than two decades of
life-changing events. It’s worn, scuffed, and recently popped its first leak in
the form of a broken string, but it’s never disappointed me. That’s tough to
find in a human or horsehide.
It was once one of a pair – his-and-her
mitts bought in 1991 with my fiancée Sharon for our first season as coed
softball teammates. They were pricey for the time, I think about $70 each, but
friends assured me the A2000 was the Cadillac of gloves. Oiling them down and
wrapping them in bungee cords, we put them under the bed for a couple days to
break them in and then practiced with them diligently.
We got to the point where we felt sure
we’d be the terror of the Boston JCC League, but the day before our first game
I broke my ankle playing basketball and spent the summer in a cast covered with
the “Ws” and “Ls” of a dismal Red Sox season. Sharon was a trooper and played
the season without me, but my only memory of the campaign is almost getting
into a fistfight with a cocky jerk who yelled at her for dropping a ball at
second base.
A well-traveled friend.
The gloves made the drive with us to
Washington D.C. when Sharon got a job with the government out of grad school,
but they didn’t get out of the closet much for the next three years. We both
worked crazy hours, her in the office and me in the press boxes of college and
minor league ballparks across Maryland and Virginia. I saw plenty of action
covering games for The Washington Post, but my glove didn’t. When I had
time for a workout, it was usually at 10 a.m., and swimming or running were the
logical choices when everybody else was at work.
Try using a mitt before it’s well
broken-in and you wouldn’t have much success. So it is with relationships; Sharon
and I had started dating while we were both in school, and I was only 21. I
wasn’t nearly broken in, and even though we had met on a diamond – during a 1988
pick-up game with some high school buddies in the midst of Morgan Magic – our mutual
love for baseball wasn’t enough to get us through a dismal slump that started
not long after our May 1993 wedding. By the time Kevin Kennedy took over for
Butch Hobson two years later, we decided to call it quits.
She stayed in D.C. with her A2000, while
my glove headed back to Boston in the trunk of my old Accord. I found a
basement apartment in Coolidge Corner and started carving out a writing career
at the Herald, Globe, and anywhere else I could get published. Once
again, there was little time for games. That fall, I met Michelle -- who couldn’t
care less about baseball but was very well broken-in as a person. At this point
I was too, and we fit like a hard grounder to Pedroia in the hole. Sometimes
tough to handle, but smooth in the end. We married three years later, just
before Mo Vaughn defected for Anaheim.
From one glove to three.
The glove story didn’t end there,
however. Jason was born on the first day of spring training, 2001, and two years
later made his first pilgrimage to Yawkey Way for a Father’s Day game with the
Astros. He brought along a tiny plastic red-and-blue Red Sox mitt, and I took
my A2000 out of the closet and shook off the dust. It was the glove’s first
trip to Fenway too, and we all saw a great contest – a 3-2 Red Sox victory capped
by a Manny Ramirez single in the 14th inning.
The next summer our daughter was born on
Aug. 16, and the Sox celebrated by beating the Blue Jays a few blocks away at
Fenway and then winning 22 of their next 25. I dubbed this streak the Rachel
Effect, and the good luck carried into October and the curse-busting victories
over the Yankees and Cardinals. When the last grounder of the World Series went
from Foulke to Mientkiewicz, the four of us
were all watching together (with the glove just a few feet away).
Favorite throwing partners (for now).
Now the A2000 almost never goes more
than a day or two between outings to the backyard and beyond. I’ve given up
fulltime sportswriting for a job that has me home at nights and weekends, where
Jason and Rachel have both taken aim at the dark, cracking center of my mitt
thousands of times. Michelle remains a reluctant but supportive fan, and I’ve
even gotten back into playing ball myself with a casual men’s softball league.
It was in one of these games, just a
couple weeks ago, that I first noticed the broken string. One of my teammates,
a friend of nearly 30 years who had been playing with me the day I met Sharon,
and helped me pack up and leave Washington back in ’95, told me to borrow
someone else’s glove and “not take any chances.” But I couldn’t do it. I
figured the A2000 had come this far with me, it was good enough for a few more
innings.
Jason is 11 now, and is more into
hanging with his friends than playing catch with dad. I know Rachel will reach this
point soon enough as well. But whenever their buddies are busy or they perhaps
feel a bit sentimental and call on the old man, I’ll be waiting – and so will
the A2000.
Good gloves are hard to find.
No comments:
Post a Comment