Pipe Ball.

As Yogi said, "If people don't want to come to the ballpark,
how are you going to stop them?"
.

Above the wooden bench that sat alongside the row of lockers in the Sarapero's dank locker room in Estadio de Beisbol Francesco I. Maduro, ran a hot-water pipe wrapped in insulating paper painted a gangrenous shade of hospital green.

My locker, which was the last one on the end, closest to the field exit, sat under the pipe where it joined another pipe, which veered off at a 90-degree angle. At the joint, the insulating paper was stained a dirty-toilet brown, and the seam where the pipes met, dropped a drip every few seconds or so, speeding up or slowing down depending on how many of my team-mates were washing off in the showers the dust and the sweat of another day under the unforgiving Saltillo high-desert summer sun.

Like Denver, Colorado, Saltillo, Coahuila, named by the Spaniards back in 1577 and raped by them and myriad others ever since, was a mile high. Despite the thin air, back fifty years ago when I played in the Mexican Baseball League, the league was a pitchers' league. In our band-box of a stadium, as a team we hit fewer than 100 homers. Salome Rojas, our first-sacker led our team with 22, while long-muscled Daniel Garibay, our left-fielder added an even 20. 

When the rains came to Saltillo, and we twenty-five boys in mens' bodies were in our locker-room crowded with too much man and too few brains, we had to find something to do until the rains stopped and the game could go on. 

The team didn't much like canceling games, knowing it would result in lost revenues. We would raucous in our locker-room, waiting for something the break--either the weather or someone's temper.

Some of my team-mates, like our reserve shortstop, Dr. Jesus Verduzco, could sleep virtually anywhere at virtually anytime. We'd find him sawing wood in his locker. Teolindo Acosta, a scrub infielder sometimes brought a small drum-set into the locker-room with him, with a cymbal and a snare and would play along with Angel Diablo, our shortstop who had a guitar and Tito Puente who exhaled into a harmonica. Others played endless card games which more often than not ended in mean looks and hard feelings.

Genaro Andrade, a back-up outfielder, he was all leather, no wood, sat two cubbies down from me. One night as the rain poured into the locker-room mixed with the spiked dirt from the dugout, Genaro walked over to me with a clean white baseball.

"Pipe ball," was all he said and he showed me how.

Parabola the ball up toward the overhead pipe. A miss was an out. One bounce, a single, all the way up to four bounces making a home run.

Andrade couldn't hit a grapefruit with a tennis racket but he had the quickest hands I had ever seen. If ever, in the dugout, on a long bus ride between the god-forsaken stadiums we played in, there was a fly about, Andrade could nab it with either hand, without hardly looking. He could do the same thing too with fly balls, curving away in the twilight. 

It sounds like a stupid thing to have noticed, but I must have seen Andrade kill two-hundred flies that summer. It's funny, I think how in baseball, as in life, most things happens while you're waiting for something else to happen.

As an old man now, so many years later, that seems truer even now than it was then.

While we were waiting for our ups, or to start a game, or for the rain to stop, or for our beers or women to arrive, other things happened, that even after fifty long and sad years, I remember like they happened last week. The things that were supposed to matter, it's almost like they never happened.

Andrade was good at pipe ball. 

Since we were playing nearest my locker, we called it my home-field. That gave him first ups and he had about four runs in before his half of the first ended. By that time our small game of pipe ball had attracted first four boys, then six, then ten, including two or three coaches.

I missed the pipe completely on my first up. Someone chipped in, "Jorge, arc the ball." Another, "you are too tall. Get low like Genaro." "Bend your knees," said someone else. 

I ignored their advice like I ignore most advice.

I knew even as a seventeen year old that most life is people you telling you what to do, and with conviction. I knew even as a seventeen year old that the less people know about something, the more apt they are to tell you how to do it.

My second throw bounced twice and my third once. Men on first and second, because there is only, in pipe ball, at least according to the Mexican League rules of 1975, no advancing of imaginary runners except when they're forced. While I didn't agree with that stricture, it made sense. 

When the rain stopped and Hector told us to lace up our spikes and warm up, Genaro was leading by something like 12-4 in the fourth inning. Whether it was his quick hands, some other skill or pure luck, Genaro might have gone something like twenty and oh that summer. I'm not sure anyone but Guilliermo Sisto, my best friend on the team, and our back-up whatever and assistant manager, ever came close to besting him.

Pipe ball caught on in the Saraperos' locker room and around the league and Genaro's rule probably spared us a knife-fight or three. Because games among boys in the bodies of men are heated affairs. We sweat as much over pipe ball as we did over beer and girls. They all mean so much in lives that so often mean so little. 

My best game, ever.

This all happened one summer long ago. A summer where so much happened. A summer where so much was forgotten and so much more I wanted to forget.

A summer where I ran away from all I knew hoping home could never find me. A summer where I hoped to find something I never had, a home. A summer long ago, where it took me fifty following summers to realize that maybe I had found what I had never had among the dirt, the sweat, the rusty pipes and a bouncing ball that meant so much.