April 2020

The gloves were ready. I had started oiling Nick’s a couple of months ago. After we bought Matt a new glove over winter break, we oiled it up, put it under a mattress and wrapped it in rubber bands. Just as I had done when I was playing baseball.

These rituals keep me connected to a game that I loved playing, that identified me, a diplomat’s kid growing up overseas, with being American. But for our boys, baseball is different. It’s more a break from the physicality of soccer and wrestling for Nick. For Matt, baseball is something he fell back into at St. Andrew’s. He had stopped playing after sixth grade and was talking about playing tennis when he went to St. Andrew’s. But somehow he found his way back to the diamond. And he found a home because he could catch a fly ball consistently.

They were talking more about the team as the season approached this year: how the young pitchers had been throwing all winter, the new catcher, and the lone senior’s last season. I had marked the schedule in our family calendar. Weekends were to be looked forward to. And there was always the hope that the Cardinals would put it all together, beat the odds and beat the good teams.

There’s something about baseball. The slower pace of the game. The sun warming both players and fans as the first pitch approaches. The field expanding from home plate through the infield to the grassy outfield that signals widening possibility and broader horizons. Like a ball rocketing off a bat into the outfield. We gasp, we wonder, we track the outfielder. Can he make the play? The possibility. I myself played centerfield at St. Andrew’s, then in college. I absolutely loved roaming centerfield to track down fly balls. I was in my element, free to race, dive, extend and grasp. I even broke through a fence or two. Both Matt and Nick are outfielders, and the zest for the chase seems to have passed down generationally.

But all that is gone now. Lost in the COVID-19 virus which has silenced St. Andrew’s this spring. No popping of mitts, cracking of bats nor infield chatter. For me, a disconnected fan who fell back in love with Major League Baseball with the Washington Nationals’ World Series win last fall, it’s a mourning. Now, grass outfields lie fallow, uncultivated by the zig-zagging of a boy chasing a ball. . . and the boys’ baseball gloves are tucked away somewhere until next season, which seems worlds away.

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