Another Man's Cleats
Who were you pretending to be?
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Two things were practically guaranteed to interrupt any baseball game my cousins and I played in our grandparents’ side yard.
The first was as predictable as the sunrise. My cousins, Philip and Scott, brothers separated by three years, would get into a fight. The cause was irrelevant and varied from game to game. Scott, in his youth, was quick to take offense at any perceived slight, and Philip, the older brother, could be domineering and kind of a dick. Sometimes this led to fists being thrown, and other times Scott stormed off before it reached that point.
Regardless of who was to blame for any particular incident, I usually tried to remain an impartial, neutral party. True, I was more aligned with Scott by both age and temperament, but my top priority was the continuation of the game in progress. Playing the role of sympathetic diplomat to both sides, I was usually able to smooth things over and accomplish this goal after a brief delay.
The other interruption was more sporadic and dependent on my sister’s presence. But if she was there, eventually she would work up the nerve to ask to play. After we inevitably rejected her request, she would go to my mom or my aunt or our grandma, and they would force us to include her against our will.
The game would grind to a halt while one of us moved the mound forward and pitched underhanded meatballs to her until she got in enough swings to get bored and move on to something else, allowing us to resume the real game.
We didn’t always handle this in the most mature fashion, which wasn’t fair to my sister, though I did try to be a bit more sympathetic and patient the older I got. Our beef with her had nothing to do with her gender. But she was several years younger, and her skills weren’t at a comparable level, which basically meant we couldn’t play the way we wanted to. Plus, she didn’t know the first thing about Major League Baseball.
Maybe this shouldn’t have been a big deal, but it absolutely was. When we played with our friends and the extended collection of neighborhood kids at the schoolyard, we were just cutting loose as ourselves and playing baseball. Nobody had to know who was leading the AL West or the names of the California Angels’ starting rotation. All you had to know was how to play. Sure, someone might flex like they were Bo Jackson after launching a moonshot, or refer to themselves as Rickey Henderson after stealing a base with ease, but that was just goofing around.
Things were different at my grandparents’ house. We weren’t just playing baseball. We were vicariously living out our major league dreams by pretending to be the major league players we watched and worshipped. And we probably took it all way too seriously. I don’t know what that says about us, but that’s the way it was.
We were like that with all three major sports that we followed— baseball, basketball, and football. We bought preseason magazines to familiarize ourselves with each team’s rosters every year, and we backed this information up by writing out lineups in great detail in the stacks of steno pads my grandpa brought home from work.
For each game we played, we chose a real team, filled out a realistic lineup, and selected a starting pitcher from the rotation. Then we brought those teams to life for the next nine innings with Academy Award-worthy performances.
Long before there was a Batting Stance Guy on Twitter, we did our best to emulate each player at the plate. These impersonations became more and more nuanced as our skills developed. Soon, we were all switch hitters, and I became especially eager to show off my abilities on the left side of the plate. In fact, this led directly to one of my most memorable moments on the diamond.
But first, let me set the scene. The side yard at my grandparents’ house ran west to east at a slight incline. Home plate was at the bottom on the west end, and consisted of a patch of dirt carved out by the heels of our feet. This drove my grandpa crazy. He had reached that advanced age where lawncare becomes very important to a man, and he was constantly reseeding home plate in an effort to patch up his grass, though surely some part of him had to realize it would be a futile effort until we were all old enough to lose interest in playing there.
A chain link fence, roughly four feet high, ran the length of the yard a few feet behind home plate, acting as an inanimate catcher and backstop. It served this purpose well for several years, until it began to curl up at the bottom and wear out, causing larger gaps to form between the links. Toward the end of our playing days, it sometimes felt like more of a sieve than a fence, and it came back to bite us on at least two occasions.
The first incident was relatively harmless. The yard sloped down more dramatically on the other side of the fence before it reached the street, and one day a cop was parked directly below our game. I have no idea what he was doing just sitting there with his windows down— maybe he’d found a nice spot to eat his lunch— but when Scott bounced a pitch that went through the fence and landed in his passenger seat, I was still young enough to freak out.
My eyes went wide and I dropped the wooden bat we always used. Man, I loved that bat. It was the perfect weight and length, with blue electrical tape wrapped around the handle to provide a better grip and a distinctive chip knocked out of the nub. I tore it up with that bat. I just wished I could have used it in little league, but we had to make do with aluminum bats in that setting. But when Scott saw me drop it without hesitation, he immediately knew something was up.
Fearing arrest and a blemish on my permanent record, we shared a glance and took off running for the house. We ended up hiding in an upstairs closet. The only other time I remember hiding in there was when Scott accidentally threw me through a window during one of our many WWF matches on my grandparents’ king size bed. Actually, only my leg went through the window. I was luckily unhurt, but we were so scared of how our grandpa would react, we took refuge in the closet. To our surprise, he didn’t yell at us at all. He was more concerned that we were okay, though I’m sure he made our moms pay for the window.
Similarly, the cop incident resolved itself just as anticlimactically. The officer was completely cool and understanding about it. We feared the worst when he knocked on the front door, but he just returned the ball and had a good laugh with our grandpa over our reaction.
The second incident wasn’t as innocent. This time I was the pitcher, and my wild hurl hit the windshield of a passing truck. The truck’s taillights flashed, and I knew right away in my gut that we were in trouble. I won’t use the guy’s real name here, though he really doesn’t deserve any kind of protection, but he knocked on the front door and claimed that our ball had broken his windshield.
Here's the thing though. Because our field was right next to the house, our grandpa insisted that we use NERF baseballs (which were actually pretty good) or tennis balls to protect the windows. We never used real hardballs in that yard, and I doubted I threw hard enough to crack a windshield with a real baseball anyway. I damn sure couldn’t have done it with a tennis ball, especially after it had basically rolled down the hill. In other words, the guy was full of shit, and my grandpa basically told him so.
Unfortunately, the guy also had a reputation in town. He’d been arrested multiple times for beating his wife and altercations with other people. In fact, he’d recently been in the paper for pulling a gun on someone during an argument. That’s why his name was so familiar to our moms.
None of that mattered much to my grandpa. He was a WWII vet, and if it came down to guns, well, he had plenty of those himself. More than anything, my grandpa was cheap, and he didn’t take kindly to the idea of handing over cash for a bogus complaint. For better or worse, however, my mom and aunt implored him not to escalate the situation and pay the guy off, which he reluctantly did. (I’m sure he made them reimburse him.) My grandpa’s been dead for twenty years now, and I still feel guilty for putting him in that situation.
But I digress. Back to the field itself. A matching chain link fence ran the length of the opposite end of the field at the top of the yard, separating it from the alley that ran behind it. Foul territory in left was marked by my grandparents’ garden, and foul territory in right was the neighbor’s even bigger and more impressive garden. We lost a lot of balls in there, but it provided some nice scenery, and Paul was nice enough to return them whenever he stumbled across them during his cultivating.
A sort of reverse mound, in the form of a large dip in the earth, sat in the middle of the yard, separating the infield and the outfield. A rectangular stone set in the ground on the near side of the dip made for a perfect pitching rubber, and its slightly larger twin on the far side served as second base. The husk of a tree stump was first base, and the trunk of a maple tree was third.
Naturally, this was a lot of ground to cover for what was usually no more than three kids (and often only me and Scott), so we adopted a number of rules and shortcuts to make the gameplay as realistic as possible.
First, we used ghost runners. Not the fake Rob Manfred variety now used in extra innings, which should be called something else, but phantom baserunners to take our place after a base hit so we could head back to the plate. We also used phantom fielders when there were only two of us. That was a little bit more irregular.
On any ball hit to the outfield, we had to come to an agreement on how it likely would have been fielded if we’d had a full nine players. A screamer hit to the gap was obviously extra bases, and a bloop hit to no-man’s land between second and right field was a single. On the other hand, high fly balls were basically automatic outs. Line drives could be a bit controversial, depending on where they were hit. Anything near where an outfielder would regularly be standing was deemed an out, although there was always room for interpretation and disagreement in these instances. Surprisingly, we had very few arguments on such matters.
If Phil was playing and we could have a real outfielder, then everything was fair game, even if it meant one person had to cover the entirety of the outfield. To help them out, we used the criss-cross rule. With an actual outfielder, the batter was free to keep running until the ball was thrown back to the infield. The pitcher could cover a base and try to make a tag out, but the runner could also be thrown out if the outfielder managed to throw the ball between them and the base they were going to— hence, a criss-cross.
Fly balls in the infield were played normally. If the ball dropped, or if it was hit on the ground to any part of the field when we only had two players, the batter had to reach first base before the pitcher got possession of the ball or he was out. That was how we kept the gameplay semi-realistic with two to three players and prevented each contest from ending up with hundreds of runs on an equal amount of inside-the-park home runs.
The rest was more of a mental exercise. We called the game as we went, pretending to be the real announcers, though we weren’t sticklers about breaking character to talk to each other normally. I did this with every sport I played, even if I was playing by myself. One of my sister’s friends still makes fun of me for the running commentary of the NERF basketball games I played in my room that she would overhear every time she came over for a sleepover. Again, I don’t know what it says about me, but maybe it helps explain why I write a nostalgic baseball newsletter.
If we knew the announcers for one of the teams we were playing as, we would often pretend to be them and copy their unique style. Obviously, impersonating Harry Caray calling a Cubs game could get pretty ridiculous and over the top, but it was more fun than getting stuck as Steve Stone. When we didn’t know the local announcers, we generally copied the mannerisms of the national announcers. Anything to make it feel more like the real thing.
The key was getting the players right, of course. It was always a thrill to play as the Royals and do something good as one of our heroes— there was nothing like getting a big knock as George Brett or pitching a shutout as Bret Saberhagen— but none of us chose to be the Royals very often. There was too much at stake. Sure, to the rest of the world it was a meaningless backyard baseball game, but a poor performance as Kansas City was like letting our idols down.
Nevertheless, we all had our preferred teams and players to embody. By the late 80’s, the Oakland A’s were mine and Scott’s second favorite team. This backup position in our hearts meant that it wasn’t as big a deal if we sucked, but also provided a little something extra when we excelled. Thus it wasn’t uncommon for either of us to be swinging for the fences in the guise of Mark McGwire and Jose Canseco.
I don’t recall Philip having any personal favorites outside of the Cardinals (his favorite team), but he did memorably gaze up at an overcast sky one day in the persona of Dale Murphy and proclaim, “Look’s like it’s gonna rain, boys,” a split-second before the clouds opened up with a torrential downpour, sending us scrambling for the sanctuary of the porch. To this day, Scott and I still try to recreate that moment any time the sky looks threatening.
Talking to Scott as I prepped this post, he reminded me that Joe Carter was one of his favorite players to be. Both of us loved pitching as Charlie Hough, mostly because it gave us an excuse to break out our junk knuckleballs. Neither of us had a clue how to throw a real knuckler, but it didn’t matter. There was something about occupying that headspace that made the unthinkable realistic.
This didn’t just apply to Charlie Hough— it went for every star player. (Or, in Hough’s case, unique player.) Stepping to the plate as Cecil Fielder or Juan Gonzalez, we felt more powerful. It might have just been in our heads, but it showed in our performances. We were more likely to hit home runs as sluggers. We didn’t strike out when we were batting as Tony Gwynn. Playing as Rickey Henderson or Willie Wilson, we actually ran faster. Or at least that’s how it felt.
The same magic translated to pitching. Stepping on the mound as Nolan Ryan or Randy Johnson, we hurled fire. I never had as much pinpoint control as when I pretended to be Greg Maddux. And Hough’s knuckleball was the best proof I can offer. I recall throwing a no-hitter against Scott as Hough, and he nearly matched me later that summer when he chose to play as Hough. He had stifled me for eight innings when I stepped to the plate to lead off the ninth. I don’t remember who I was, but he hung a slow “knuckleball” over the outside corner and I lifted it over the right field fence for a weak left-handed home run to spoil his perfect game.
The left-handed homer is the part I remember most, and it brings me back to the memorable moment I teased earlier. Phil was being the all-time pitcher and I don’t recall what team Scott was playing as, but I was the Phillies that day. I had recently started experimenting as a left-handed batter, and while I had yet to see much in the way of results, I was growing more confident by the day. With that mindset, I stepped into the box as Tommy Herr.
Tommy Herr was by no means a legendary player, but he wasn’t too shabby either. He played for a number of teams, but I remember him mostly as a Cardinal and a Phillie. His best days came with St. Louis, where he won a World Series in 1982 and made the All-Star Game as a second baseman in 1985, the year the Cardinals lost to the Royals in the Fall Classic.
He was an elite defender. In fact, he retired after the 1991 season with the highest fielding percentage ever by a 2B, though he would be surpassed a few years later when Ryne Sandberg hung up his glove. He was a productive hitter, but never known for his power. In 1985, he became the last NL player to date to record over 100 RBI with less than 10 HR. He ended up with 110 RBI and 8 HR. He only hit 28 HR in his whole career.
Probably his most famous HR came against the Mets in 1988. On a day the Cardinals were giving away seat cushions, Herr hit a walk-off grand slam to win the game. Jack Buck provided one of his iconic calls as ecstatic St. Louis fans celebrated by throwing the seat cushions they’d received three hours earlier onto the field. They covered the artificial turf as Herr rounded the bases.
But this wasn’t his biggest home run. Not to me anyway. That came on what we sometimes called Murray Field (my grandparents’ name was Murray), which was subbing for Veteran’s Stadium on a warm summer day in 1989 or 1990, and it’s the reason I remember Herr for the Phillies as much as the Cardinals.
Phil went through his windup on the mound and fired a fastball straight down the plate. I saw it all the way in and got full extension on my swing, connecting with it cleanly against the barrel of my bat. It was one of the purest swings of my life, and I knew it was solid the minute I made contact. The ball soared through the air, easily clearing the right field fence and landing in the alley as my cousins could do nothing but watch.
I trotted around the bases with my chest puffed out. Herr and I are both six foot tall (though I was considerably shorter at that point in my life), but at that moment I felt ten feet at least. My first left-handed home run! More would follow, and I would have plenty of other big hits from both sides of the plate on that field and in more “official” little league games, but few would ever feel as good as that milestone. It was the most important home run Tommy Herr ever hit.
Too bad he has no idea.
Thanks for reading Powder Blue Nostalgia. It’s extremely gratifying whenever I hear kind words from the readers. So please, by all means, feel free to stroke my ego a bit in the comments. Or better yet, let me and the other readers know who you pretended to be as a kid. You might not have been as hardcore about it as me and my cousins, but every baseball fan grew up impersonating their heroes from time to time. So let’s hear all about it in the comments!
Dang now kids today, if they want to play like their idols can just load up the most recent MLB the Show and hop on diamond dynasty
Man how times have changed
(IDK why i just said "kids today" when I'm still only like 18)
A neighbor who will happily return balls hit into their yard is a great neighbor. And to answer the question, probably Steve Balboni, Jim Eisenreich, or Mike Macfarlane.