A Good Stretch.

When I was just seventeen, so many sad years ago, and playing my one long summer for the Seraperos de Saltillo in the Mexican Baseball League (AA), I didn't much think about Grantland Rice, or the one great Scorekeeper coming to pen my name. 

No one thinks about things like that when they're seventeen, even if they were, like me, born under a lugubrious sign. Even though I was born preternaturally old, I was still a young man, living only for my next at bat or next breast I could feel or next beer I could swallow. I wasn't thinking about much else.

Still, with my stern an Old Testament upbringing I heard Granny's words rung like Big Ben from the highest bell tower, ever reverberating, even though they pealed from quite a distance.

For when the One Great Scorer comes
To mark against your name,
He writes - not that you won or lost -
But How you played the Game.

I suppose as cornball as all that is, there's something in believing in a world, which I don't, presided over by the One Great Scorer. I suppose as cornball as all that is, it would be nice if it mattered How you played the game. I suppose it would be nice if your You were as important as your Do.

I suppose I'm as starry-eyed and stupid today as I was 50 years ago when I ran away from the deafening noise of an empty home where the only sound was hatred, frozen vegetables, dishes crashing when they were thrown, Miltown bottles being opened and gin being swilled.

I once was lost, but then I was found, by Hector Quetzacoatl Padilla, whom I dubbed Hector Quesadilla, just moments after he transmuted my el Norte moniker into Jorge Navidad--an improvement, I believe, to George Tannenbaum, especially given the mostly beered-up fans who would rain bottles down on any ballplayer, especially an American playing in their stadiums, in their cities, in their league.

During that long summer so long ago I had the longest stretch of good fortune in my already too long life. It was late in the season and late in a game of no-consequence when a pitch came in on my hands, a screw ball, maybe, that jammed me inside but that I was able to smack short over their second baseman and I found myself safe on first.

On the next pitch of this game of no-consequence I ran on their arm. He was not holding me on and I got a Bob Beaman jump and stole second, sliding in for the dust and drama rather than for the necessity.

Perez-Abreu was up and he text-booked an outside fastball down the right field line. I rounded third, and feigned stopping to draw the throw to the cut-off, then put my head down and charged home, while Perez-Abreu, alertly, took second on the dust up at the plate.

Next, Buentello also went to the opposite field and Perez-Abreu scored from second like I did. Then, seconds later, it happened again. Angel Diablo stroked a single to right and brought in Buentello. Now, instead of being down, we were up. Scratching runs with scratch hits and speed and playing ball like it should be played: heads up and aggressive. 

There are those, of course, who will always admire the long ball. But the best baseball is baseball like this. Where little things lead to big innings. In baseball, and yes, in life, it's the little things that make the big things happen.

We won that game that doesn't matter against it doesn't matter who, by doing the little things while playing the game that do matter. Like going with the pitch, like running with your head up, like outthinking the guys living by rote and doing all that at top-speed.

There was no pep-talk that inspired all that. Just, after a season where a hundred and two bad habits had taken over our days and nights, good habits emerged for a brief happenstance and seemed to take over, like a cloudy day, all at once and unexpectedly becoming clear.

Dowson wrote about it 150 years ago. In a poem, I knew even then, as a 17-year-old,

They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.

And that's what happen to us Los Seraperos de Saltillo late in the season, playing a stretch of games under the blister of the sun in El Estadio de Beisbol Francesco I. Madura. 

Our path emerged for a while and we won games like we had never won before. Playing smart, running fast and heads-up.

Our path emerged for a while and then closed. 

That's so many things. So many green lights that turn red just as you step on the accelerator.

Just as we as a team started doing everything right, we started again, doing everything wrong. The boneheadedness of mediocrity reinvigorated itself and had its way with us.

As a manager, three or thirteen things pissed Hector off. One was taking a called third strike--especially if there are men on. Second is missing a cut-off with a throw, or failing to back someone up on a play. And last was bunting one straight up so it would be an easy out.

Those things and a dozen more were back. And so was our griping and our grumbling and all the things bad teams do to make themselves worse.

In the forty-nine years since that summer when I had four games or five where my path emerged for a while before it closed, I'm not sure I ever had a longer skein of things going just right. That bad fortune wasn't for lack of effort or my bovine stupidity. It's just the cosmic law of entropy that rules what's left of a disordered, decaying and entropic universe.

There's a belief in history, that about 4000 years ago, the great ancient civilizations of Crete, Assyria, Knossos, Babylonia and one-hundred more were destroyed by the sudden and unexpected descent of an unknown people called the Sea People. 

Where they came from, how they came, and why they came, no one knows. But they did come, the theory goes, and they destroyed all civilization, society and progress in their way. And then, just as abruptly as they arrived, they vanished. Leaving not a shred of papyrus, a broken shard of pottery or the hull of an ancient ship.

For me, all those years ago, it might have been in Saltillo a season under the spell of the Sea People. Except for one week when, for no reason at all, they left the benighted land I had arrived in, and for that one week, the seas without the Sea People were flat and calm and the fish abundant and easy to spear.

Or as Porfirio Diaz, dictator/president of Mexico for nearly thirty years is said to have said, “Pobre México! Tan lejos de Dios y tan cerca de los Estados Unidos.” Poor Mexico. So far from God. So close to the United States.

Maybe the One Great Scorer sent the Sea People aweigh and away. Or maybe the Sea People and the Scorer are one and the same. 

Either way, that misty dream was all too short. And it all too easily slipped through my fingers.