I’m in Avondale Park. I’m watching random kids play baseball. The kids pepper the field. Gloves on their knees.
“Hey, batta batta batta!” they all chant. They look like third graders. The third-baseman looks like he has to go pee.
They all look like dreamers. Because that’s what all kids are, really. Dreamers. Do you remember what it was like to be a kid? Do you remember what it was like to get lost in a daydream?
The sun is low. The crickets are out. The pitcher is maybe 8 years old. And I’m falling into a daydream myself.
It’s hard to watch baseball without remembering my old man. My father loved baseball. No. He worshiped baseball. To him, baseball was high art.
Look at Norman Rockwell. You never saw Rockwell painting soccer, or pickleball, or water polo, or the luge. Rockwell painted baseball players. There’s just something about baseball.
My dad was a ball player. As an adult, he never missed a chance to play with a guys his age in some municipal field
somewhere.
I used to go with him to games. My father would consult the cooler between every major play, cracking open an ice-cold can of Ovaltine. And whenever he pitched, I heard ladies in the stands say things like, “Oh, that’s John Dietrich. I think he once played triple-A ball.”
But it wasn’t true. Not entirely. My father tried out for a professional ball club, and lasted only a few days. He was a sidearm pitcher. His pitching was too wild, they said. They rejected him.
But then, my father was a man fraught with rejections. His whole life was rejection after rejection.
He came from an abusive home. He grew up poor. He wanted to be a navy pilot, but he was deaf in one ear, so the navy rejected him. Talk about dreams. His lifelong dream was shattered.
He wanted to be a…