Baseball reached deeper than just ‘love of the game’

"Spring is the greatest season of all," a neighbor to the farm where I grew up often said. "It's the beginning of baseball season."

Not until an orange leaf flutters in the crisp air each autumn do I usually think of Carl's words, though he said them every April when exhibition season started. Being a kid of the television era, football is my sport. Yet amid homecomings and Monday night games, most of America, myself included, always turn one last time to the golden hopes of spring and those hot, dusty days of summer, for the World Series.

True baseball fans know game by game, sometimes inning by inning, how their team struggled for five months to reach the series. The rest of us just know we're watching the two best squads play, hoping for the excitement of a game that won't require us to sit through foul balls and long stretches of the pitcher getting around to deciding if he should throw the ball or not.

• • •

For Carl, something a little more than enjoyment of the game coursed threw him whenever he talked of baseball.

And though often busy with cattle or crops, Carl still found time to play in an amateur softball league. Once my family would watch him at the diamond next to the Lutheran country church and its cemetery.

While the teams wore matching thin-striped shirts and caps, there was nothing stuffy about the game. Some players donned tennis shoes, others boots. Being farmers, they all wore blue jeans. A cornfield served as the outfield wall. Score was kept on a large chalkboard rolled out of the church basement.

Carl never said how he came to like baseball, but I remember a framed photograph on his desk of a young man decked in the game's garb and holding a bat over his shoulder. A little boy, whose chin and eyes looked awfully similar to Carl's, leaned against the man's leg clutching a huge mitt.

• • •

When only about 22 or so, Carl had inherited the farm from his father. Carl was disking in the field when his wife, Gwen, sped out in the pickup truck to get him.

"'He was just heading out to the grain bins, he was just heading out to the grain bins,' that's all Carl's mother ever would say when anyone asked about what happened," my own mother once told me.

Gwen, who'd been in the house at the time, also was brief. "He just stopped, then reached for the wall and fell," she told people. "There was nothing anyone could have done."

A month after the heart attack, Carl's mother declared she no longer could stand living in the house that conjured so many memories of her dead husband. The following morning, as dew lay like arsenic sprinkled upon the lawn, they saw her off on a bus to live with her other son in Omaha.

• • •

As a kid at the church diamond, I watched the game with indifference, rooting for Carl to hit a homer only because I knew him.

These days, though, I recall Carl's time at bat with much thought. Staring down the pitcher, did he ever find the array of cracked and worn tombstones in the distance distracting?

Perhaps when that willowy voice of Gwen, her belly round with child, rose through all of the cheers, his eyes narrowed on the task at hand.

Maybe the crack of stick against ball threw his spirit into an epiphany, for she'd allowed him to overcome the horror of loss, allowed him to laugh in the face of emptiness. I wonder.

• • •

After the game, Carl's teammates slapped him on the back for the homerun, and the families enjoyed chicken and hamburgers grilled in the open air. He refused to drink beer because Gwen didn't, because of the pregnancy. The guys cajoled him to lighten up, but every woman there swooned at his chivalry.

Sometimes, though, as the sun shined like a glowing tangerine, I'd catch him gazing at the thin break in the grass marking the baseline heading into first. Perhaps he felt guilty about playing and laughing so near his father's grave.

Then, as Gwen wrapped an arm about Carl's broad shoulders, his face broke into a smile. He must have known that was the way his father would have wanted it.

(originally published Oct. 19, 2003)