Baseball shenanigans, part 1
Baseball shenanigans will be an ongoing theme on this blog, where I’ll share some of the ridiculous, ritualistic, and superstition-driven things that we did as young ballplayers. Part 1 takes us back to 1993, my senior year of high school. Me and my two best friends, Alex and Matt, were riding toward the end of our senior year, and we all had chosen colleges where we would also play baseball. Our senior baseball season had been successful, but most of all, full of a great vibe all throughout the team. We were loose, laughed, and had fun, but we got down to business on the field.
As we began the first of two weekends of playoffs, Matt, Alex and I were only a couple of weeks away from graduating, and we were definitely a bit more prankish by that point. We’d exhausted the usual senior rites of passage like cutting out for lunch (though not fully unscathed), showing up late whenever the waves were good, napping in class before games… Stuff like that. The way our athletic conference formatted the playoffs, no team was to have a home-field advantage in the first round. So we were going on the road, while two other teams would play at our field. We were tasked with prepping our field, which our coach instructed me, Matt and Alex to take care of. The final step was lining the foul lines, home plate area, and putting down the on-deck circles in chalk. The usual dares were raised to make the third base line zig-zag all over the place, or maybe veer several degrees into foul territory, but we put the lines down correctly so as not to incur the wrath of coach. Then we moved on to the batters box, and finally the on-deck circles, when Matt had a bright idea. It was perfect.
We knew that a team we didn’t particularly like would be playing at our field, and Matt brought up one player in particular who he had jawed with earlier in the season. The kid was a cocky, skinny punk who we’ll call Burke, and he did his best to get under our skin, but Matt made sure to never let that happen; he was always good like that. Instead, Matt would up the volume and the intensity of the verbal barbs, and it would become a veritable wisecrack battle right on the field, which Matt would win handily. Then the entire team would laugh as the kid became unraveled, usually on the mound.
Well, Matt decided that he wasn’t finished with good old Burke, and even though we weren’t playing his team and wouldn’t even see them, he’d get in one final blow. He grabbed the line chalker and used a template we had to lay a perfectly round circle in the on-deck area, but the glint in his eye told us that he wasn’t done. Hey then drew a crude x and a dash, then a wobbly half-circle, and what appeared to be two chiclets. He stepped back to admire his work and we realized he had drawn a face in the on-deck circle. We were already losing it when he then decided to write something below his masterpiece. It read: “BURKE”.
If you are thinking oh, how awful, how cruel, etc, hold one for one second because this story ends with a twist. While coach wasn’t thrilled with Matt’s display of creativity on the field, we heard through the grapevine that Burke thought it was hilarious, he wasn’t upset at all. And to top it off, he and Matt ended up playing on the same college baseball team, and somehow they got along. But I think he knew deep down he’d never get one over on Matt quite like being memorialized in our on-deck circle.
